High energy on Mondays. Low on Fridays. Repeat forever?
Benjamin Hyneck found an unsatiable fire inside.
You can find Ben on LinkedIn, Twitter or check out his website if you are interested in his coaching services.
Now, let’s get started!
Going full-time fuelled his love for coaching.
Kenny: Before going full-time, you were doing coaching on the side. It gave you a lot of energy, and you loved it. Now that you are doing it full-time, has anything changed for you? How do you feel about doing it full-time?
Ben: Let me dial back a bit, my whole adult life, work was always something where on Monday morning I would start with an energy level, like 70, 80, or maybe 100%. And then, by Friday evening, I was done. I assumed work was just like that. You start with energy, and you're exhausted at the end of the week. You need the weekend to recover, and then you start again on Monday. With the pandemic and a lot of the stress that came together with that, I noticed my battery depleted much quicker. Sometimes, I was already done and finished on Monday, which was strange.
But when I was coaching on the side, I would have a full day of working at my day job, like Google or some of the bigger companies I used to work at, and by the time 6 PM came around, I was pretty much done with my energy levels. But I still had a coaching call because I typically did it after hours. I quickly realized that I feel more energized after an hour of coaching than during my full-time job. So, by 7 PM, 8 PM, 9 PM, I'll be like, “Oh, my God, I feel awake again. What is happening?”
That made me think, “What? It's not dependent on the time I spend. It's dependent on the type of work I do.” If the work is meaningful, important and deep to me, then it energizes me. That's when I realized it gives me energy. It helps people. They're figuring out their stuff with it, and they're willing to pay me for it. What? That's a real thing that exists? That's what I found in coaching for myself.
Obviously, I got a bunch of education, and I did a bunch of supervised coaching, and I got a coach myself. As I started doing this full-time, I already knew. This is something that nourishes me. It's not something that takes away from me. It's something that fires me on. I feel this fire, this energy still, as if it were day one. When I onboard a new client or meet a new person, I'm burning for this. It's making me feel alive, man. Like, for real. And I feel so grateful that I was able to find that. I know many people don't find that in their lives easily. They're looking forever, or they're trudging through careers that are shitty and not enjoyable. I feel so lucky that I was able to find this for myself. Short answer. I'm in heaven in this.
Of course, there are downsides. There are things when you run your own business full-time. I have a family, two kids and a wife. I have a house, a mortgage and bills to pay right now. There are downsides. Money used to come in like clockwork every month on the 30th. In Europe, you get paid once a month. Boom. The money would just come in. Now, some months are incredible, and some months are just crickets. That's one of the challenges to deal with. “Oh, wow, how does that work?” I have to be smarter about how I save money and when I spend money. Is there seasonality in my business? I'm still in my first year. I'm coming to the end of that right now. I didn't know there was seasonality. November and December were very low times. I didn't know that. I know that now. But not everything is awesome and gold and fantastic. There are plenty of challenges, but all in all, I'm feeling alive.
Kenny: This is awesome! It's fair to say that even spending more time, having more clients, and spending your whole day helping people hasn't changed how you feel about it. You’re still super energized and happy about coaching clients.
Ben: Yes, because now I have even more examples of people that have seen benefits from my coaching. There's more recency bias in a way where I can immediately think of a few examples where people really benefited from working with me. That feels fantastic. It feels fulfilling.
A crap experience is a growth opportunity
Kenny: You wrote about falling from your scooter. On the day itself, it's upsetting. But a few days later, it's a funny anecdote. After going solo in the past year, what's a time when you had a very raw moment for you and you felt wrapped in the moment, but then after a bit, you thought, “Oh, it's actually a funny thing that happened to me”?
Ben: Oh, my God. There are plenty of those. The most ironic one that comes to my mind that threw me for a loop for a while was when I started out. I felt, “Now it's like heads down time. There is no time for vacations. There is no time for splurging. Ben, get this business on its legs, make it sustainable, and then we'll figure this out in two years or something.”
But the first six months were really good. Every month was better in terms of revenue. Catch was coming in. “Oh, my God, it's a corporate client.” Things were buzzing. This is amazing. I'm rolling. It’s awesome.
I'm talking to my wife and the kids. “How about we just go to London for a week? We'll rent a fancy hotel, spend a week in London and celebrate that things are going so awesome and great. Let's go!” We drove from Berlin. We went to France, went on a ship. We did the whole thing. We're in London in this hotel for a week. A nice and fancy hotel.
About halfway through the week, I get an email from my utilities provider. There was something last year that they didn't calculate correctly, and I had to pay some extra. Basically, pay them for some fees that I didn't pay last year. It sounded very unthreatening.
But when I opened the PDF, it was a few thousand bucks out of nowhere. Suddenly, there's a few thousand bucks I didn't expect to pay. That was basically the money we spent on London. It threw me for a loop, man. I'd be very honest. I went from one moment to enjoying myself and having a great time, eating great food, seeing Big Ben, taking selfies with the fam to OH SHIT!
Kenny: Oh, man.
Ben: How am I going to recover? I got to find another client. I got to do this. I immediately went from a great mood to a shit mood that night. I didn't sleep much. The family was asleep. I was sitting in the living room grinding. What can I do? How can I recover this? It wasn't the end of the world, but it was a big bill. Let's put it that way. It haunted me for two or three days.
Eventually, I realized this was not healthy. If I stay grumpy, it's not going to help anybody. It's not going to make me a better coach. It's not going to make me find more business. It's not going to make me find another corporate client. It's not going to help with anything. It's just going to keep me down, make my family feel crap. There is no point in that. What does it mean if a curveball comes out of nowhere? How do I react to this? I could feel, “Oh, shit, I'm reacting badly.”
The big lesson was about letting go. Just letting this go and be like, “You know what? There's the big bill. I'm going to pay it because I have to. I'm going to figure it out somehow, and I'm going to trust life and the universe and God, and something is going to figure itself out.” That's what happened, right? We enjoyed the rest of the vacation. We came back, the world didn't end, and we found ways to recover that. It sounds a bit traumatic, but in hindsight, it was stupid even to be so affected by it.
Kenny: Everything is so much bigger whenever you experience something for the first time. I'm sure that if it were to happen to you today, you'd think, “I've gone through it once.” It won’t affect you that much.
Ben: I want to add to this, Kenny, because the big difference here is it was about money. Money means sustenance. Money means Runway. If you run your own business, every thousand dollars, every $5,000, every $10,000 means runway for the business. Here's this fundamental thing that I need to continue the business that is being attacked. For me, it was less about it being new and more about my elemental fear around money. This deep-seated fear. The moment it's about money, I get really worried. I've been pampered for a long time working in big tech where salaries are really good, and packages are really good. Suddenly, when you're starting your own business, you don't earn as much anymore at the start. At the beginning, it's a bit slower. It was really about that.
Kenny: Would you say it was about your created freedom, and that bill was threatening that, or was it something different?
Ben: It was me saying I made it prematurely. We had a great couple of months. Everything is awesome. Let's go and enjoy ourselves. And right in that moment of enjoyment, life comes around and kicks me in the face. No, fuck you, Ben. No enjoyment. Here's a big bill that you didn't expect.
Kenny: The timing is crazy. Wow.
Ben: At that moment, I got too ambitious too quickly, and the universe took care of it. It sent me a clear message, dude: stay on the ground. Do your work. Get too ambitious? Just keep working, buddy.
Kenny: This is such a great lesson. I'm glad you're laughing about it today.
Ben: It's funny now, right? I'm glad I learned it early. It's good to learn that at this moment. We can stomach it. We can work with that.
As a solopreneur, the responsibility lies with you.
Kenny: I want to reflect back one of the questions you wrote about: how have I been complacent in creating the conditions I say I don't want? Today, are there conditions in your business you're not happy with? How are you complicit in creating those?
Ben: The credit goes to somebody else for that question. Jerry Colonna, who's a famous leadership coach in the state. This is one of his hallmark and marquee questions he asks his clients. I could think of a million things. Whenever there's some outcome that is not ideal, it's rarely just fate. It's rare that something went wrong and was totally outside my control. I usually have some part in it. For example, I wanted to build 50% of my business to be a B2B-based revenue.
I work with a lot of 1:1 private coaching clients. I call that B2C. I've been in sales and sales leadership for a long time, so I want to use some of those skills. And it’s bigger deals, plus I work with larger teams that fit my background.
My revenue last year was 90% B2C. Why didn't it work out? Why did I have so much B2C and not enough B2B? It's pretty simple because I didn't do any outreach to B2B companies. I didn't do the work required for it. I'm complicit in creating this condition by not doing the inputs required for that.
Usually, when the question is, “Why isn't this working? Why isn't this working?” That's usually the question that bounces around in my head. The moment I ask myself that question, “Why isn't it working?” I already know it's because I haven't done the work. I haven't done the right type of work, or I wasn't honest with myself about the work that needs to be done. That happened with B2B clients. It happens with how the business grows regarding how many clients I get each month. It happens in the ways I progress as a coach. How am I learning? How am I developing? How am I evolving? So there are plenty of those lessons.
Kenny: It sounds like it starts with being unsatisfied with the situation. You're asking why. But what the question forces you to see is, what did I do or did not do that led me to that situation, and where can I tweak to get to a better place?
Ben: As you're saying this, something else comes to me, which is when you're working in a larger corporation when we don't do the things that need to be done, the effects might not be that visible. The larger company usually keeps going because there are teams and plenty of people who can carry the slack or do something about it. In a bigger company, it's hard to directly attribute your contribution to the outcome.
When you're a solo business owner, you own the outcome 100%. There is no other person to point at or system to point to. It's you. You created it. In the beginning, it's something to get used to. “Oh, no, this is me now. I got to make it happen. I can't blame anybody else.”
Kenny: You can't hide. The responsibility lies with you 100%.
Ben: On the flip side of that coin, when something is working and when something works out and when you find yourself in a space where you're thriving and loving it. If things are going well, you can pat yourself on the shoulder and be like, I made that happen. Is it always 100%? It's not 100%. There are always some external circumstances, and there are other people helping. But it's a much larger portion than it would be if you're working in a team in a large corporation.
Kenny: I've never thought about that. But you indeed enjoy more of the rewards, but also the downsides of it.
Ben: It's funny when friends ask me what the first year in business has been like for you. The story I like to tell is that there have been moments when I've been doing somersaults. I'm an adult man. I'm 41 years old. I've done somersaults in the garden, in the grass, when something worked out. I jumped around, and my neighbours must have thought, “What's wrong with this guy?”
But there have also been moments when I've physically cried at my desk. I might have had an idea, and I had a plan. I tried something out. I worked on it for a week, and nothing happened. That feels so frustrating. But what happens is the emotional range of the experience I'm having now in my business is extended.
I'm looking at this as a good thing because I'm experiencing life much fuller, to much bigger extents, in a way that slows down time. It's not like Monday, Friday, Monday, Friday, Monday, Friday anymore for me. It's Monday. And then Tuesday. So I feel time is more present and it's richer. That's already worth it because life doesn't slip away like that anymore. Right now, at least, it's much more palpable. It's real. It's here with all its ups and downs and everything in between.
Kenny: It is fascinating how the whole 9-5 oozes the life out of you. I see that in my experience, too. Some days are amazing. Some days are crap. I see that for many people I’ve been talking to or researching. The ranges are way wider. But it's also a lifestyle to practice. Being nimble, going around, being resourceful and figuring it out is fun. But it is also way more intense.
Ben: I can feel how I'm building resiliency to problems. I'm living in a house. It's like an older house. Stuff breaks. For example, last summer, we had some roof tiles break, and it was a rainy period, and the roof tiles were broken. You know what? The old me would have been flustered with this. But now, I’m taking it differently, “What can I do? I can climb up there. Somehow, I'm probably going to fall. So I'm not going to do that. I can pick up the phone and call some companies and see what happens.” I called the first companies. They were all fully booked. Eventually, you figure something out, and a couple of days later, some roofers came around and fixed the two roof tiles, which wasn't a big deal. I believe that resiliency is only built when you have challenges happening. You can't theorize it, and you can't read it in a book. It's something you have to experience. You have to be like, “Oh, shit, I don't know what to do.” Then you do it, and after that, you're like, “Well, that wasn't that hard.”
Kenny: Resourcefulness and your problem-solving are through the roof (pun not intended). If you don’t exercise that muscle, it atrophies.
What did you think of Ben’s story? Did anything inspire you in particular?
Great interview!
My favorite quote: [When you're a solo business owner, you own the outcome 100%. There is no other person to point at or system to point to. It's you. You created it. In the beginning, it's something to get used to. “Oh, no, this is me now. I got to make it happen. I can't blame anybody else.”]
Thanks so much for chatting with me, Kenny. I appreciate your great questions, thorough preparation and lovely conversation overall. I've had a ton of fun and have a feeling that you did too :)