If your consulting practice feels like organized chaos, where you're holding everything in your head, having the same conversations on repeat, and making decisions on gut feel alone, this episode will show you exactly how to fix it. In this episode, host AJ Riedel talks to Kendra Whitney, Founder of Perigo Partners, a small business operations consultancy. Kendra is a former Fortune 500 project, process, and change management leader who spent 25 years mastering large-scale corporate methodologies, and now translates those best practices into lean, practical systems that help small businesses run smarter. Why You Should Listen to This EpisodeIf you left corporate to build something of your own and now find yourself buried in the day-to-day without systems to show for it Kendra's story will feel uncomfortably familiar. She walked out of a 25-year corporate career after a layoff, spent time genuinely noodling on what was next, and made a deliberate decision to do something different: take the best of Fortune 500 project management, process improvement, and change management and bring it to the small businesses that need it most. In this conversation, Kendra gets real about the challenges of learning a new language (translating corporate jargon for small business owners), overcoming a deep fear of sales, surviving the isolation of solo work, and building a stacked offer suite instead of a menu of disconnected services. She also shares the gardening analogy that every early-stage consultant needs to hear, and the single reframe that finally made sales feel natural for her. What You'll Learn in This Episode• [Translating Corporate Expertise] How to stop speaking corporate jargon and start talking to small business owners in the language they actually understand — and why this single shift is the foundation for landing clients.• [Building a Peer Support System] Why networking events aren't just for lead generation and how Kendra deliberately built a team-like community of fellow solopreneurs to combat isolation and loneliness.• [Overcoming Fear of Sales] The reframe that finally made discovery conversations feel natural — and how framing sales as problem-solving (not pitching) transforms your confidence in selling.• [Stacking Your Offers] Why building discrete, stackable service offerings instead of custom proposals for every client makes your business more scalable and gives you the data to know what's actually working.• [Structure Creates Freedom] How implementing the right systems and processes actually gives you more mental capacity, reduces decision fatigue, and lets you make data-driven decisions instead of gut-feel guesses.• [Choosing the Right Coach] What Kendra learned — sometimes the hard way — about how to evaluate coaching investments so you actually get a return, including the two non-negotiables she looks for now. About Kendra Whitney Kendra Whitney is the founder of Perigo Partners, a small business operations consultancy based in the Raleigh-Durham, NC area. With 25 years of experience leading IT and operations teams at Fortune 500 companies, Kendra specialized in project management, process improvement, and change management — overseeing multi-year technology implementations that impacted tens of thousands of employees. After a corporate layoff, she made the deliberate decision to bring those enterprise-level best practices to small business owners, helping them build the systems, processes, and structures they need to run efficiently, make data-driven decisions, and scale — without the bureaucracy. She is currently in her first year of running Perigo Partners as her sole focus, and is building toward a team-based model that can serve more small businesses at scale. Connect with Kendra on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kendrawhitney
