Nobody comes to Katie Mares because they lack a plan. They come because the plan keeps collapsing.
Katie Mares has built a two-decade career inside that exact gap, first as a customer experience strategist working with organizations like Toyota and Celebrity Cruises, then as an executive coach who takes overwhelmed founders and stalled leadership teams and turns them into people who actually execute.
“I have never met an individual or an organization that doesn’t already have the strategy they need,” Mares says. “With AI, you can build a strategy for your business, your health, your relationships, in minutes. Information has never been the issue.”
She has the credentials to back the claim. Mares holds a master’s degree in adult training and development, has delivered a TEDx talk, and helped bring the Forbes five-star rating to the cruise industry through her work with Celebrity Cruises. Her reach shows up in real numbers too, her LinkedIn content alone has generated more than 249,000 impressions in the last 90 days. None of it is theory. It is two decades of watching the same gap play out in boardroom after boardroom, and figuring out exactly how to close it.
What she has learned, from Toyota boardrooms to one-on-one coaching calls, is that a strategy only works if the state behind it works first. Mares calls the framework State, Story, Strategy, and she has built her entire business, and now her upcoming book, around it. In her own words, State is how you identify, who you identify as and how you feel about your identity, Story is what you tell yourself because of it, and Strategy is the plan that only works once the first two are actually true.
When someone’s state is off, it produces a story, usually a well-dressed excuse for why now isn’t the time. During the excuse loop, people get stuck retelling the story instead of executing the strategy already sitting in front of them.
“Your emotional and mental state, when it’s not aligned with the result you want, leads to stories that are mostly excuses,” Mares says. “You get stuck in that loop, and the strategy stops getting executed.”
Getting someone out of that loop is where Mares built her real advantage. She calls it the alignment formula: intention, who you decide to be, plus attention, what you actually focus on, equals action that finally matches the strategy. It sounds simple. In practice, it is the difference between a plan that sits in a folder and one that changes a business.
Every client Mares works with hits what she calls a mirror moment, the point where they realize they are tolerating far less than they are capable of. Getting them there does not take a gimmick. It takes listening.
“I create a safe enough space where they finally start to unravel their true identity,” Mares says. “Nobody actually sits there and doesn’t say a word and doesn’t judge you anymore. I do.”
One client, who runs a multimillion-dollar business, ends nearly every session in tears and a breathing exercise, not because he is falling apart, but because he has never felt safe enough to say what he is actually thinking. His business has grown since. So has his marriage.
That is the result Mares is after every time, proof, not platitudes. It shows up at scale too. Her 90 Day CX Intensive kicked off its latest cohort on September 2nd with 71 people on the call, every one of them staying the full session. She is not just talking about State, Story, Strategy. She is running rooms full of executives through it, watching the results move, and already planning to roll the next cohort out in the new year.
Mares repeats a few lines to clients often enough that they have become her signature.
“You don’t get what you want, you get what you tolerate,” she says. “Ninety percent of your thoughts today are repeated from yesterday, so you’re on the hamster wheel until you start thinking about what you think about. And you don’t attract what you want, you attract who you are.”
That same framework is now the backbone of her next book, More Women, More Money, expected before the end of the year. The book itself is the strategy, the how-to. But Mares opens it the same way she opens every client relationship, by inviting the reader to confront the state and story underneath their own ambition first.
“You have to decide it’s something you actually want,” Mares says. “That’s the state, and the story you’re telling yourself about whether you can execute it, or whether you even want to.”
The business case underneath the book is not soft either. A Peterson Institute for International Economics study of nearly 22,000 firms found that moving from zero to 30 percent women in the C-suite, boardroom and CEO seat was tied to a 15 percent increase in profitability for a typical firm. Separate research cited by Forbes shows women influence 85 percent of all consumer purchases. Mares built a career proving that the internal shift always precedes the external result. More Women, More Money, her upcoming book, is that same proof, aimed at any industry still leaving that value on the table.
It is a fitting next chapter for someone who has never separated the personal from the professional, because in her experience, they were never separate to begin with. Every client, every executive, every reader gets the same starting point.
Fix the state. Rewrite the story. Then, and only then, does the strategy finally do what it was always capable of doing.
That shift has one starting point, and it’s always today. Mares built her entire philosophy around that single word: NOW.
Those who want early access before the book’s release can join the waitlist now, where early signups receive the introduction chapter first.
