#88 - From Steno Machine to CEO: How Two Court Reporters Built a 200-Reporter Agency from a Parking Lot

#88 - From Steno Machine to CEO: How Two Court Reporters Built a 200-Reporter Agency from a Parking Lot

From The Court Reporter Podcast by Brynn Reynolds Seymour

May 1, 2026 · 29 min · Season 3 · Episode 88

About this episode

Whitney Kumar and Kamryn Villegas share their journey of building a successful court reporting agency from scratch.

Most court reporters don't go to school thinking they're going to become entrepreneurs. But that's exactly what happens — and nobody teaches you how. Whitney Kumar and Kamryn Villegas did it anyway. The identical twins — one minute apart — spent 13 years building KW Court Reporting from the ground up: a $350-a-month office, note cards with their names on them as business cards, and their parents following them in a separate car to law firm parking lots to watch the babies while they knocked on doors with a tin of their mom's famous chocolate chip cookies. In this episode, they walk us through exactly how they built one of Southern California's most respected court reporting agencies — a roster of 200 reporters, a reputation for treating reporters like partners, and a client base built entirely on loyalty and love for the profession. We get into: The no-backup-plan mindset that Kamryn says separates the people who make it from the people who don't How they ran their agency as the only two reporters on staff — and attorneys didn't even know there were two of them The real challenge of being a freelancer and managing your time when you also want to build something bigger What it…

People in this episode

Host: Brynn Reynolds Seymour

Guests: Whitney Kumar, Kamryn Villegas

Topics covered

  • entrepreneurship
  • court reporting
  • business growth
  • team building
  • freelancing
  • agency management

Keywords

  • court reporters
  • entrepreneurship
  • business agency
  • team building
  • freelancing
  • Southern California

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: KW Court Reporting, Veritext

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