Navigating Value Crises: Strategic Insights with Katie Burkhart
January 2026 | On Data Planet
Katie Burkhart appeared on Data Planet for a conversation with host Emma Davis. Do you face a crisis of value? Not sure what to measure at a strategic level? Wondering how to move past static plans?
Listen to the episode below.
read the transcript
excuse any typos as we tried to capture the conversation as it happened.
Emma: Hello and welcome to Data Planet, the show where we talk with industry leaders about the triumphs and challenges of growing a business and the role data plays along the way. I'm Emma Davis and today's guest is Katie Burkhart, founder of Point Value. Welcome, Katie. Thank you so much for having me, Emma. I'm very excited to be here. So I'm so excited to have you. I want to start by asking about Point Value. So what is it that you do and who do you do it for?
Katie: Great question. So I work with membership subscription and other recurring relationship organizations, both for-profits and non-profits, to stay valuable so that they keep their members, subscribers, customers, people, and grow sustainably. Because very simply, when value gets stale, those people leave.
Emma: Nice. Awesome. And so what does a relationship look like with your customers?
Katie: Our relationship is pretty fantastic. Step one is really working together to gather insights. You know, we don't want to jump thinking we know what the problem is, you know, or worse, thinking we know what the solution is. We really want to make sure we do phase one, which is listen. Let's go out and listen and gather information and then use that information to draw out some insights so that we know that we're asking the right questions because questions frame the answers. If we're asking the wrong question, we're looking in the wrong place. So we wanna make sure we know what those are and can figure out what the next moves are. And then we will partner with clients to execute those next moves, which generally deal with value evolution and really getting clear on what our lens is, potentially evolving value delivery. How do we go about delivering that value as an organization? Creating the conditions for smart, strategic, and value-centric decision-making, which we work to build that adaptive practice within the team, and in some cases can bleed into even getting into some of the shared cultural practices. What are the standards and ways we go about communicating, meeting, sharing information, as well as our kind of rituals and rhythms that shape this organization.
Emma: Gotcha. And so there are a lot of elements there that you might touch on that at any given time, any organization may have some growing pains around or there may be some neglected aspects of their culture or their strategy. What does it sound like when someone is in need of point value? Like what is the acute situation or the trigger that leads them to really need help, let me talk to Katie and her team.
Katie: So usually they're experiencing a crisis of value. And what that looks like to them, what that's going to sound like in symptoms is we don't have the member engagement we used to. We're starting to see people aren't renewing. We're having a hard time bringing in new members, subscribers, or clients. We're finding that we're doing a lot of stuff in a lot of different directions. And I'm not sure that that's really working for us all the way to, and our team is starting to get extremely frustrated with one another and it's actually fighting each other. It can also sound like we have a new leader who is recognizing that their previous leader was here 20 years and they are entering in a new era of that organization and what comes next. And in rare cases, we also get, we were extremely successful. We achieved our founding mission and goals and vision. What do we do now?
Emma: Nice. Wow. Those are big questions and challenges. So one of the things I've liked most about our conversations is that we're really aligned but on different planes. In my world, data is used to help understand what's driving profitable results for clients, where they should be investing, what are the strategies that we should put in place from a marketing perspective to help drive customer acquisition, and help achieve those growth goals for the clients. When you and I talk about KPIs and metrics, we're on the same page, but we're talking about different sets of KPIs and metrics. While you're not a marketing expert, you're also passionate and interested in using data and KPIs for business growth. How do you define or how do you help your clients define what matters and how they should measure it?
Katie: The first place that I always like to start is with my favorite question, which is, what's the point? And even though that seems like, well, duh, we all know what that is. In most cases, we don't. In a lot of cases within a team, we're all defining success really differently. And in a lot of cases, how we've come to understand success as a culture is misplaced. So for example, in your work, a lot of people see success as, we got a lot of people to our website, or our social media posts went viral.
The truth is that's not actually the point of those efforts. The point of these efforts is to drive revenue, preferably profitable revenue, right? So if we're just measuring the likes, we are measuring the wrong thing, which becomes very dangerous for what we're doing as an organization, because we can be putting our focus towards the wrong things. The same is true at the strategic level. In a lot of cases, people put their focus on the money where they really need to put their focus on the value. And understanding if we're here to deliver value, are we doing so effectively, right? That's really important. But also, do we know what's valuable now? Do we know what's going to be valuable next? Do we understand how our value is evolving and how are we monitoring that so that we can adjust delivery and what we're doing over time? Because that's going to happen in any business. For different businesses, it will change at a different rate. But particularly for recurring relationship organizations, the value that your member or subscriber experienced in month one or year one is not in most cases the same value they're experiencing in year two or year five or year 10. So understanding what's happening over time, as well as the fact that the world is changing. So what people are looking for is not the same. So the person that you sold to five years ago was coming to you for one reason. The person coming to you today is coming for a different reason or with a different understanding. So thinking those things through is really important and how you are, tend to use the word assessing. How are you assessing that? Because sometimes it can be measured in really hard ways. In some cases, it can't be. It can only really be assessed. And what we're encouraging our clients to look for are patterns. Where are you seeing patterns that you want to go and pursue and explore to see if, hey, I'm listening. Right, I'm gathering qualitative, sometimes quantitative data, I'm seeing this pattern emerge, let's go out and act upon that pattern and see if the real world responds back that we've actually found a good pattern here, or if behavior comes back that says actually didn't find anything, or what you found was not a good pattern, right?
So that you start to get into this process of testing out theories that you identify through the insights you bring in in a combination of qualitative and quantitative, but probably leaning a little towards qualitative because you can get it faster in your interactions with your different stakeholders. em And then moving towards measuring how you're actually testing your actions. You know, we want to do this because we think it's going to do this. Did that work? You know, or we're going to go out and run this experiment. This is what we want to learn from it. How are we going to measure that? And setting that up from the beginning is generally going to make the actions more successful.
Emma: Very interesting. And so when you arrive on the scene, is there generally already some sort of either qualitative or quantitative consensus of what the issues are? Or is there a lot of, you know, hands up in the air, I don't know what's going on or finger pointing? Like, what does it sound like when you get there? I imagine people don't typically start with just like, something's wrong, I need help. There's usually some hypothesis or some, yeah, some... some ideas floating around. What does that usually sound like?
Katie: In some cases, it depends on, know, what it's varies widely from organization to organization. But in a lot of cases, we're getting some mix of like, I know we need to change. I'm very fortunate to work with a lot of very sharp leaders, you know, who are saying, I know we need to change, but I don't want to just do that willy nilly. This needs to be done very thoughtfully, very strategically. Because I need to bring, you know, I'm a recurring relationship organization, I can't afford to piss off half my member base in this transition. I need to figure out how to do that in a way that yes, may risk some attrition as we recognize that we're going in this direction now and not everybody is gonna come on that journey with us. But a lot of people probably can and should come on that journey with us. So how do we do that in a smart way?
They're really coming with that sort of, if they're looking at this as a growth opportunity, if they're saying, I'm in pain, I have a problem, typically what we're seeing is we're very unfocused and we know we're unfocused and this is leading to territorialism. know, everybody's kind of guarding their own fiefdom. This is leading to people are very frustrated internally in how we're working. This maybe we have a frustration between staff and leadership as far as how we're going and getting things done. This may be we're trying to talk about ourselves to the world and I'm noticing that we're not, it's come, like we are creating confusion, right? Like this is not landing, people are not getting it and I'm not sure why that's happening. But these are all things that will pop up for us. For some people, they will just say, particularly my nonprofits, it's our strategic planning time. And we need to do strategic planning and the problems don't come up until a little later. But there is inevitably some sense of, know, here's what I see from my position and therefore this is what I think the problem is. And our goal is to engage all of those different perspectives so that by bringing in all of that information, we can start to get a sense of where the actual problems really lie versus where the symptoms might be.
Emma: In your work, can imagine once you've done all this work of defining the problem, identifying, you know, what are the KPIs or, you know, whether it's assessment or analysis of the situation and come up with a strategy, you're really dealing with the stakeholders mainly. So that may be, you know, the senior decision makers. I imagine the big challenge, especially if what you're suggesting to them is a significant change, is then alignment within the organization. So do you provide any support to help them with the implementation piece or to make sure that things are going to plan after you've sort of delivered here's the game plan? Like how do you help them then enact those changes?
Katie: So great question. So one of the things that we do is try to help them get, not move away from the fact that you kind of want to have a sense of where you're going. This is, we all, need to have some level of plan, as it were. But what we're really working to help them to do is to say, you're going to be constantly learning and adapting. So how do we determine what those rhythms are, which may be at this cadence for a startup organization, may have a longer timeline for a different type of organization that doesn't move as fast, that makes sense for your value delivery cycle so that you are able to take those learnings and apply them in a timeframe that makes sense. Because sometimes applying learnings too fast means that we didn't let it bake long enough, so we were judging based on a half-baked cake. Well, that's not a very good dessert. But if we also, if we wait too long, now we have our kitchen on fire because we didn't take the burning cake out of the oven in enough time. So there's a little bit of subjectivity as to how we figure that out.
But as far as implementation, what we really work to do in our case is less about metrics. It's more about design from the beginning and by having the team, the leadership, the customer involved in the process of actually gathering the insights and then making decisions about what we're going to do. They are making those choices together so that when you go out to start to implement as it were, we go back to doing the work.
It's not just the CEO announcing that these are things that we're now gonna go do. There were people at all levels of that organization who were part of that process and can say, yeah, we're doing this because, and this is why it's a good reason. Or, yeah, we considered that, Beth, but here's why we're not doing that and why we're going in this direction instead, because that was all part of the decision-making process. And by doing that, we're also modeling what that should look like in the future.
Sort of following the Grey's Anatomy, see one, teach one, do one, we want the team to move to a point of, okay, great, you've kind of taken us through our first calibration cycle. We often will support them through the next couple of cycles so that they have a co-pilot there through that process. But as they get more comfortable bringing in that information, understanding, you know, asking the questions to see what it means and setting themselves up for, here's what's next for this period of time in our cycle, they can start to do that on their own and we actually fade away.
Emma: Nice. Wow. It's quite the transformation that you lead them on. How do you know that you're successful? how do they know that it was successful?
Katie: That's a great question because it takes time. But the first win that we like to get is the insight. Almost all of our clients do not have the clarity that they want to have. So the first win, and we try to get it within the first six weeks, is here's clarity on your situation. This is what's happening. This is what it means. And this is what your next moves look like. And if we can do that within six weeks, that's a fast win. And then we can move very quickly to, do we actually have a lens and the skills that we need to make strategic decisions as a team? And that's no matter how we do it.
If we can walk away with people having those types of conversations, being able to articulate whether it's delivering value, whether it's falling within the limits m and being able to explain their reasoning for that and have those conversations, we immediately see that as a huge win.
And then after that, what we're looking at varies from client to client. What specifically did they feel they were struggling with when they came in and are they struggling with it when we leave? Our goal is that by the time we leave, those issues are not there anymore or there's a very clear path to their resolution. Like it will take more time, but we've seen the gains and we know if we just stick with it, it will go away.
Emma: Yeah. You have a specific strength in storytelling strength. So you have to be able to keep track of the story and keep track of the plot in order to be able to see how does all this stuff fit together and how does it change over time. And I know that you have a background in storytelling, which I think is a really interesting sort of part of your past. Would you mind talking for just a minute about, know, how did you get to point value and how does storytelling play into your past and your path here?
Katie: Great question. So I actually went to school for my degrees or some of my degrees are in creative writing, literature, and then creative writing for children. I absolutely love the power of storytelling and to sort of take a big step back when you really think about strategy. The way most people understand strategy is this is how I get from here to there. That's not wrong, but it's not accurate. Insofar as strategy is actually about the shaping of coherence, right? How do we actually get coherence, the golden thread that takes chaos and turns it into something that makes sense?
And if you understand strategy that way, to be human is to be strategic. And story is actually one of the most fundamental ways that we shape coherence, right? What's the story that we tell ourselves about us, about our history, about how the pieces of those stories go together, what that means for how we look at the world and understand our place in it, that all is ultimately storytelling. And it's why it's one of the best ways to communicate and share information because it makes sense. It's also why if you're sitting out and you're like, that person just cut me off, you know, or whatever, your immediate reaction is like, well, I wonder why they did that because you want it to make sense. It is a piece of chaos and your otherwise cohesive understanding of the world around you. So the story is huge. And one of the things I love to do is I think about a lot of our work in value as being very much systems two thinking. It's very much the rational piece of how do I make a case for this? How do I put out a theory that says this is the value people are looking for and this is why I think what we're doing is going to deliver it effectively and here's how I'm going to know if that actually happens or not, which is where the measurement piece comes in. But once you have that, that connects with nobody, like nobody at all, right? Like the same way that a lawyer can build a great case.
You then have to be able to get it to connect. And in order to get it to make sense and connect, you need a really good story. That's the system one thinking. And it's hugely powerful and it is not uncommon for my team to bring in someone who will collaborate very closely with us, either on storytelling or storytelling and brand, to make sure that what we put together can come to life in a way that is human and makes sense and it's a lot of fun, and I'd like to spend more of my time talking about strategy through the length of, you know, fantasy stories, because I actually, writing for children meant I got to study like Harry Potter and Tolkien and others that you don't always get to study in school because they're kids' books. But I like, but they're great stories. So to be seen, I hope, in the future.
Emma: Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. That's awesome. Thank you so much for delving into that a little bit with us. Let's go ahead and call that the final data point for this episode. If people want to learn more about Katie and point value, information will be in the show notes. Otherwise, Katie, thank you so much for joining us on Data Planet. And listeners, go forth and make your numbers make sense.