Beyond the Bank

There’s a saying, especially in the marketing world, that “people follow people, not companies,” This is especially true now, with the power of connections through social media becoming a vital part of both our social and business lives. No one grasps this concept quite like Kati LeBreton. LeBreton is the director of the Fidelity Bank Power Program. She coaches others on the art of social media and recently found success on TikTok, leading to a new podcast she now hosts with her brother.

Q: How did you get to where you are today?

I am from Ponchatoula, born and raised, and I was a scholarship student athlete at Southeastern. I was on the softball team and played softball there for four years, and I got my undergrad degree in broadcast journalism. So the first part of my professional career, I was a sideline reporter for ESPN all through grad school. I got my graduate degree in communications from Southeastern as well. During that time, I was traveling the country, sideline reporting for the Southland Conference, and then the American Athletic Conference, the Sun Belt Conference, and I met Willie Fritz, who was then the new head coach of Tulane University’s football team. I met him on the sidelines one day, and the three or four days after he got hired at Tulane, he called me and he said, “Look, I want somebody to do our social media, but also to help us with recruiting and event planning, kind of like be the team mom, almost.” That was very smart on his part, because recruiting for Tulane is a very unique challenge. There’s the New Orleans element, there’s the academic element, and him not being from Louisiana, especially not from New Orleans, you need somebody in your corner that knows their way around. I took the job immediately over the phone, no questions asked, and it was some of the best years ever. Then, of course, in 2020 COVID hit, and football suddenly was not a thing anymore. I moved back to Tangipahoa Parish and started working for the City of Hammond and their Downtown Development department, and then bounced around, went back to Southeastern for a little while, and a couple of roles in their fundraising and alumni department, and then got a call from Fidelity Bank about two and a half years ago. Now I am at Fidelity Bank as the VP and the Director of the Power Program. That has been such a godsend. Not only do I love my work at Fidelity Bank and believe in it, and it just comes very easy to me, but I work for a boss and a company that lets me grow other areas of my life, which is really important to me. I don’t think a lot of employers would let me be in the public eye so much for different reasons, and they allow that, and it’s, I think it’s really helped my day job, so to speak with power, because it’s allowed me to have that creative outlet and be better at my day job.

Q: What is the Fidelity Bank Power Program

The easiest way to explain what the Power Program is that it is a professional business development program through Fidelity Bank for for-profit, women-owned businesses. You can think of it as part Chamber of Commerce, part women’s professional development group, part higher education professional development. The idea behind it is that over the last 10 to 15 years, women have been opening businesses at double the rate of men, and almost three times as much since COVID. So about eight or nine years ago, Fidelity Bank recognized this trend and decided to dedicate an entire section of the bank’s financial products to female-owned businesses. What I do is, first and foremost, go out into the wild, as I call it, and recruit new businesses to come bank with us. I am the one designing and executing all of the programming. Every month we have professional development events that are designed to give female business owners the skills they need to do better at what they do. It’s also designed to give them financial support. We’ve introduced a new piece of programming called Power University, which has been really cool, but the networking is also a huge part of it. It’s been a lot of fun, and I think I’m specifically poised for this position because I own two businesses myself, the podcast and “The Redhead Method.” I understand that women have to juggle 1,000 different things every day, and being a business owner is just one of the 15 hats women wear.

Q: Tell us more about The Redhead Method?

The idea for it first started when I was a student athlete myself. It was a very different landscape, and social media was kind of just starting. I’ve always had a pretty large following, and I always knew it was important in some way. Fast forward, when I started working at Tulane and I was now essentially a coach for 100 18- to 21-year old boys. I was noticing they had professional help in every aspect of their life, except for being online. Part of my role with the team was to monitor what they put out online because when you represent a university or a job or a company, you can’t just say whatever the heck you want on the internet, right? I got this idea that, why is there not an education for this? So it started in the college athletic sphere, and at its very beginning, it was more about reputation management. It was more about, ‘Hey, don’t do anything stupid, so you don’t get fired,’ kind of thing. But it has evolved over time, as I have evolved and matured, and realized it’s so much more than that. It’s about mental health and conflict resolution and emotional intelligence and bad digital habits. I came up with the term “digital habits” to encompass all of those elements of life. If you have bad digital habits, it’s going to bleed into every other aspect of your life. I go into all of these different facets, and it’s really tailored to the audience and the age that I’m talking to. It’s really expanded into a holistic approach to being online, and how being on the internet can be a tool to make our life easier if we have good digital habits. But if we have bad habits, it’s not going to be a fun place to be. I’m not anti-internet at all. I know a lot of digital educators are very much “don’t let kids on the internet till they’re 18,” and our world’s not going that way. Unfortunately, part of me I wish we could just throw our phones out the window and never need them again. But our world is digital, and this is a crucial piece of education that our kids do not get.

Q: How did “The Big Bad Boot” podcast come about?

We have always been told we needed our own show. And you know, people would say that, and we’d roll our eyes. We’re like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ We are six years apart, so [my brother and I] do have a very different relationship. Most siblings who are six years apart are not as close as we are, but it’s because my parents forced us to be friends. Now we’re like, you asked for this! We were at a tennis tournament watching my mom, and we had been there all day. We were so over it and so hot and tired. I was scrolling and I saw [some] “couple’s dictionary” videos [featuring funny inside slang couples use to communicate], and I said, we need to do one, but for siblings. So, for two minutes, we separated, and we were like, go write down every inside joke you can think of. It was not scripted. Once [those videos] took off, we were approached by Lettuce Media. I’ve worked with them, doing marketing materials for my other business, The Redhead Method. I know Jonah really well, and he texted me out of nowhere, and said, you need a podcast. So we thought, let’s do a podcast that’s comedy and it’s us riffing and telling each other stories, but it’s about Louisiana. It’s anything about Louisiana that we find interesting. Without that first TikTok video, I don’t think we would have had the confidence to just go out and put something like this out into the world, because it kind of reinforced like, oh, complete strangers do think we’re funny, yeah, and okay, this might be a thing, and now it is a full blown thing, and it’s been so much fun.

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