Exploring Life & Business with Katherine Metres Akbar of Your Edge for Success YES, aka YES Career Coaching & Resume Writing Services

Today we’d like to introduce you to Katherine Metres Akbar.

Hi Katherine Metres, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
In my 30s, after two jobs in a row ended suddenly and I got divorced, I began and discarded three different lines of work in three years, as I struggled to regain my self-esteem and figure out what to do for a career. I felt like a failure. I thought, All I want is to be a success. And if I feel like that, there must be a lot of other people who feel like that too. If I can use my writing and teaching gifts to help enough of them get what they want, I will achieve my success too.

And one day in the shower in 2009, it came to me: the name Your Edge for Success, with the perfect acronym YES to reflect the delight you feel when you succeed. Over the next four years, my tutoring and writing business morphed into a career success business with the help of my now-husband, who, besides being everything I was looking for in a husband, was also a small business coach! Today, I oversee a team of 13 that writes cover letters and resumes and coaches our clients to shine in interviews and become the inside candidate through networking. One of my clients wrote, “As a result [of my work with Katherine and Michael], I am currently in a job that I absolutely love, and my confidence is at an all-time high.”

In recent years, we’ve added two business-to-business services: outplacement and talent optimization. Outplacement helps companies and their staff when they need to let people go. They engage us at any time to improve their ability to recruit top talent by offering outplacement as a benefit in case it’s ever needed, and there’s no cost until the services are used. Then we help their separated staff get new positions three times as fast as the national average.

As Certified Talent Optimization Consultants, my partner and I evaluate the personality types of our clients’ team members against the team’s business goals and check for alignment. If something is missing, we help them identify the personality type they need to hire to better orient the team for goal attainment. We also provide workshops to help teams understand each other and work more effectively together.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It has by no means been a smooth road. There have been very lean years that made me feel like a failure. There have been years where growth was so rapid, I nearly lost my mind (along with a lot of sleep). I’ve changed bookkeepers more times than I can count and struggled to do incredibly complicated business and personal tax returns until I finally determined that just because I can do something doesn’t mean I should do it just to save the money.

I had to learn how to train both staff and clients and overcome high staff turnover at our midpoint. I had to learn to mitigate risks by taking total responsibility for client outcomes and intervene with clients who weren’t doing what they needed to do to achieve success. I had to learn to bite my tongue and respond from compassion when people blamed me unfairly, and now we have to learn to compete effectively against and intelligently integrate artificial intelligence.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We are one of the nation’s top-rated career success companies. Our mission is to help job seekers, business owners, and employees determine what kind of work will light them up and to give them the strategies, marketing tools, inner game, and accountability they need to build a career or business they will love. We do that by providing cover letter, resume, and LinkedIn profile writing; job search, interview, career advancement/executive, and business coaching; outplacement; talent optimization; and workshops on all of the above.

Outplacement helps companies and their staff when they need to let people go. They engage us at any time to improve their ability to recruit top talent by offering outplacement as a benefit in case it’s ever needed, and there’s no cost until the services are used. Then we help their separated staff get new positions three times as fast as the national average.

As Certified Talent Optimization Consultants, my partner and I evaluate the personality types of our clients’ team members against the team’s business goals and check for alignment. If something is missing, we help them identify the personality type they need to hire to orient the team better for goal attainment. We also provide workshops to help teams understand each other and work more effectively together.

One of the things we are most known for and proud of is Interview AikidoTM, our proprietary interview coaching technique that my partner and I developed. Interview AikidoTM is a spiritual and interrogative approach to conducting career conversations that land job offers and other advancement opportunities. People get so intimidated by interviewing, but that’s because the ego gets in the way. By orienting ourselves toward wanting what’s best for the other person, we can interview with our best social and emotional intelligence.

I’m also really proud of the results of our 5,600 clients. Of those we’ve been able to interview, we’ve found that our median/average client …
· interviews with 5 organizations
· gets contacted by 7 recruiters if they get our LinkedIn
· gets a new job in 2 months from resume finalization
· earns 18% more at the new job
· gets 2 offers to choose from

Our typical client gets a new job three times as fast as the national average.

If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
Our success has ridden on two complementary virtues: excellence and empathy. First, you have to provide a service that is far better than what the client could do on their own or with the help of AI. And second, you have to have the empathy to deal with clients who are feeling insecure, worried about being ripped off, looking for someone to blame for the difficulty of job search, etc. Excellence without empathy would lead to more negative reviews, and empathy without excellence would lead to poor client results. But put them both together, and you have a recipe for business success.

Pricing:

• Coaching $288 per hour, $144 per half hour, or on retainer
• Career Accelerator* (Resume, Cover Letter, LinkedIn Profile, and Interview Coaching) $1887
• Career Catapult* (Resume, Cover Letter, LinkedIn Profile, Career Strategy and Salary Negotiation Sessions, and Interview Coaching) $1887
• Power Move* (Done-for-You Job Search) $4500 a month or $13,500 for three months
• *Most common investment. Investments may vary down or up, depending on client level.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://success-YES.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yescareerresume/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/YEScareerresume
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2199760/admin/dashboard/
• Twitter: https://x.com/YESCareerResume
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@yescareercoachingresumewri2042
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/yes-career-coaching-and-resume-writing-services-alexandria
• Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherineakbar/

Image Credits
I am not sure if credits should be by name or company, so I’ll give you both for you to decide.

Photos 1, 2, 6, and 8 — Katherine Metres Akbar, Your Edge for Success YES LLC
Photo 3 — Kathy Strauss, ImageWerks
Photos 4 and 5 — Peggy Leonard-Konrath, Konrath Photography