Unlock Your Inner Entrepreneur with Kevin Ball

Never Been Promoted Podcast with Thomas Helfrich

This episode is dedicated to anyone at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, looking to glean insights from the experiences of others. Kevin, known professionally as K Ball due to a mix-up with Hollywood stars, shares his comprehensive career in technology and entrepreneurship. From starting in startups to pivoting towards a more fulfilling path aligning personal goals with professional aspirations, Kevin embodies the spirit of adaptive innovation.


About Kevin Ball:

Kevin's career spans various roles within the technology and startup space, eventually leading to his own coaching business, K Ball LLC. His journey is marked by a series of adaptive strategies, transitioning from high-growth startups to more lifestyle-oriented ventures as personal priorities evolved, particularly around his family.


In this episode, Thomas and Kevin Ball discuss:

• Entrepreneurial Dynamics: Insights into the startup ecosystem and the transition to personal business ventures.
• Career Adaptability: How personal developments, such as parenthood, influence professional decisions.
• Coaching as a Business: The motivations behind starting a coaching business and the specific challenges faced in this niche.

Key Takeaways:

• Adaptability in Career

Kevin’s journey emphasizes the importance of flexibility in one’s career path, adapting not just to market demands but personal life changes.

• Insights on Entrepreneurship

From tech startups to coaching, Kevin discusses the lessons learned across different phases of business development.

• Strategic Personal Development

How personal development and professional growth go hand-in-hand, particularly in entrepreneurial settings.


"Embracing change, whether in your career or personal life, is not just necessary but beneficial. It's about finding what truly motivates you and aligns with your values." — Kevin Ball


CONNECT WITH KEVIN BALL:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kbal11/

Website: https://www.kball.llc/

CONNECT WITH THOMAS:

X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/thelfrich | https://twitter.com/nevbeenpromoted 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hovienko | https://www.facebook.com/neverbeenpromoted 

Website: https://www.neverbeenpromoted.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neverbeenpromoted/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@neverbeenpromoted

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomashelfrich/

Email: t@instantlyrelevant.com

InstantlyRelevant.com

Transcript

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Welcome to another episode of Never Been Promoted. Why is it named that? Because I've never been promoted in my career. Hi. I'm Thomas Helfrich. I am your host, and, this podcast is really about helping entrepreneurs be better at entrepreneurship and life. And if this is your first time visiting, I do hope it's the first time of many. And if you're coming back again to torture yourself through an amazing no. I'm just kidding. Thank you for returning. We, you know, we do interviews of other entrepreneurs along their journey, and we do this because we wanna learn from their, you know, successes, failures, mistakes, and how they're preparing for the future. So no matter where you are on your journey, you can learn something from somebody else's. And today, we're going to learn from Kevin Ball. I love his name. It's like almost like a Hollywood name. K Ball LLC is the founder. He's he's got a great story of of tons of things he's tried. He's trying something new. So let's meet our guest, Kevin.
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Hello. Let me start off actually with the with the name because it's funny you led me up to this. Kevin Ball. If you search for it, you actually find somebody from Hollywood. You don't find me. And you find 2 you find a professional actor and you find a find a professional soccer player, which is why k ball is actually the moniker that I go by professionally in a lot of context. Anywhere I need to be public, I'm K Ball. Because you search for Kevin Ball, you find these super famous celebrity type people. You search for K Ball, you find me.
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I I thought I was actually interviewing a famous person today, so I'm a little disappointed in no. I'm kidding. We we had talked. Listen. We're working on it. Thank you, by the way, for joining. You're, I think you're in California if I remember correctly. And so it's early for you. So thank you for joining, jumping on. I want you to maybe set up just give us just a little brief history of who you are. You know, like, you know, you're kind of, I won't say career path, your journey so far. Yeah. So I am
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a historically technologist. I I sort of grew up in the tech industry. I've been in sort of this startup and entrepreneurship space pretty much my whole career either as a an employee or as a founder. So I started off working at a startup, worked there for a while, went went through a couple startups, then started my own technology startup, high growth startup, went through that process for 3 ish years, ultimately failed, spun some technology from that into a new startup, went through that for a while, ended up, stopping or stepping out of that one because my kids were born, moved into I actually started a consulting business much more kind of fun and lifestyle oriented, got back into working for other people for a while, and then most recently started a small coaching business, which is K Ball LLC. It's a self branded coaching business, which I can talk about. And I'm I'm actually I I got the itch to work with the team, so I'm running that right now while I'm also director of technology for another startup. So I've kind of lived in this early stage entrepreneurship business quite a bit, both
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in the high-tech space and then a couple of different services businesses. Alright. So I'm gonna go on a small tangent just and if if we do we abandon this, we abandon this. Here we go. Did you ever play the game SimCity? Okay. Absolutely. And if you if you don't know, it means you just you either dated yourself to be very old or very young. But, anyway, so SimCity is a game that Gen Xers, millennials love, and it hasn't been updated in years. And it's basically you you start with a blank canvas in a in a fine square and you can build it and you gotta make it run operationally. Are you a person who would build a city and then do things maybe to intentionally sabotage it once it was running or try stuff, or did you let it run and you were beautiful and you let it and you let it be forever and ever?
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I would usually build it and then get bored with it and move on. No doubt. That's why you're in the early phase of startups.
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And I and I say that because I think if you've played that game, there's people who love the operations of it, who hate the building part. And it's it's really it's a great almost like a psychology test. It's for me, I'm the same way. I love to build it, but then I would, like, go to another city and try to build it and I'd forget about the other one. I come back, like, toxic waste. Everyone might, oh, I forgot about that one that was doing so well, and maybe I shouldn't have added gambling. Anyway, so if you know the game. No. There's absolutely something there, and it's something that I actually I look for when I'm building teams is I look for somebody who
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well, once a company gets to a certain stage, I look for somebody who enjoys that operational No. Absolutely. And and so,
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this is why I started my companies because I I could do the selling. I could do the interactions, the the the the, you know, the solutioning and and advisory and the coaching, so to speak, and all that kind of stuff and think through the strategies. The execution of it, I got no chance, 0, of doing. So if I don't have a team, forget it. I mean, it's over. Right? I mean, so anyway, I wanted to take a small tangent there because I have a feeling you were going to be a me on that. Yeah. Absolutely. Not not one who just lets it run and fine tunes it. Alright. Let's dive into some. So you've, you've done enough you you've been around the space, and you've decided to do a self branded coaching business, which, I mean, a lot of people that's a lot of ways people get started into entrepreneurship. They're they have knowledge. Yeah. They want to get it out. They want to work for themselves. They don't know how to do it, and you're in the middle of it. So you're you want to describe what you're, you know, who you're helping and what some of the startup challenges you've you've already faced, even though you've been through a few.
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Yeah. So K Ball LLC was really started, for a couple of different reasons. But the the main thing that I'm targeting is, you know, I've been in the tech industry for a really long time. And over that time, I've started to see a very common pattern, particularly in technical people, which is for a variety of reasons, cultural, personal, whatever, technical people tend to over focus on technical people. Do that. I mean, they're tech. And that is great. Right. I know. Well and the sort of key gap lie that we tell ourselves, what have you, is that that's all you need, and it's not. That gets you great through the early stages of a career. And then at some point in your advancement, whether you stay in conversation, but they are not what drive my influence and my ability to They get me to the conversation, but they are not what drive my influence and my ability to succeed. And I have seen this among people who never wanna start a company. I've seen this among people who wanna be entrepreneurs, and then they get out there and they realize, wait. I have to talk to people to to sell my thing,
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which speaking of lessons learned, the value of talking to people. Oh my gosh. We can go down that road. I mean, there's a generation that's missing that if you go to any, like, high school, middle school thing. They're it's like broke neck. It's like it's actually generation broke neck because they're just head down. Head down. Yeah. Head down. It's I mean,
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even not being in that generation, it took me years of pain to discover how incredibly valuable and important it is to just get in a conversation with somebody in your target audience or even, like, close to your target audience. But yeah. So with this business, I'm aiming at those mid to senior level technical type of folks, who have discovered that there's a whole swath of skills out there involving managing themselves, managing relationships, stakeholders, sales, marketing, all of the different human skills that that go into driving success outside of the narrow implementation of technical solutions, and they wanna learn and grow. Yeah. And so I offer coaching for them. I'm mostly working with senior and staff level software engineers. I have, a couple sort of management and start up executive types that I work with. And so that's the business today. Now as discovered, once you start talking to people and the beauty of starting with a coaching business is you get these deep relationships where you start to uncover patterns. You start to see the challenges that everybody faces. And in fact, one of the top patterns that I've seen showing up with my engineers, I was recently at a a workshop related to, essentially marketing and and advertising. And I started talking with this guy who's a high powered marketing exec, and he has the same bloody problem. And so the next evolution of this business is actually aiming less at that pure target audience and having pinned down one of those core problem domains, crafting an an offering specifically around that. But that is that is a work in progress we can talk about, but I have it's not represented anywhere that Yeah. It will. And I wanna I would just kinda extrapolate.
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If you're thinking of being a coach business and one of the things you did there was and and, listen, I I've I was born out of the dotcom, so I was a developer coming out of college. Technically proficient. Could certainly do it. Did not have a passion for it after a few years. And in any role that you get in, it's some people just want to say, technically, love it behind the scenes, and and they're gonna make a great career and and and awesome, good for them. It's when you find that you're getting bored or you wanna do something different or you see peers making more money or they're they're they see you you see this influence as you describe that you can't do, but you're super technical and it becomes like you you just developing a larger and larger chip on your shoulder. I knew quickly myself that I was like, I spoke way better about technology than I did code it, and I didn't have the passion for coding and had the passion for the explanation piece. So I went the consulting route. I I made that. I know that conscious decision. I know I remember when it happened. A lot of people who get stuck, this is who you benefit because if you extrapolate that further, there's a lot of people just stuck in a career who want to go do something different. The idea is you have to recognize in a self reflective way that you have a shortcoming and you got to do something about it. And you can get a coach. You can read. You can do whatever. But I will tell you from personal experience, is you know as well. When you work with somebody who knows, you get there faster, you get there with more confidence, and, you know, you may have invested, but you just invested in yourself. You'd be willing to take a course in college. You get an MBA. But I will tell you, you usually get a coach that helps you get the next part of what your shortcoming in your career is is way cheaper and way faster. So anyway, I I love what you're doing there. And I think that's probably and I think you described it. You had that exact pain point that you somehow solved yourself. And when you did, you're like, this is a problem since therefore identifying a marketplace for yourself.
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Yes. And I think that points to something, you know, on the lessons learned about entrepreneurship is the closer you get to a pain point that you actually feel, the easier your
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No doubt. Because you you you're not guessing. You're like, how would I solve it for myself? What do I need to make happen? It's also how you become a thought leader, by the way, too. That's But this is Like, what's the pain? How do I solve it? And that's it. Oh, totally. But I feel like we we,
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I don't know where this comes from, but, like, the the entrepreneurship mystique is, oh, you have this brilliant idea out there in the world, and you're going to implement it. And people spend all this time being, like, what's my brilliant idea? How am I gonna find this thing? You know, how am I gonna do all these things? And, like, if if I were to point at 1, probably the largest evolution of my take on entrepreneurship over time, it's been find the pain first. And usually, that's a pain that you yourself are feeling. And if you're feeling it, validate that some other people are feeling it, great. Because sometimes we really are that special snowflake that nobody else is feeling our pain. But most of the time, if if we're feeling that pain, someone else is feeling it, figure out who that is, figure out how you can fix it for you and for them. You you you do. I did a short more magic than that. Exact thing I said.
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If you wanna get started as an entrepreneur, and you have an idea, go find a 100 people on social media, pick your platform that should have that same problem, interact with them some, warm them up a little bit, send them a DM that says, hey. I solved this problem. Do you wanna have a discussion? If any bite, you've got it. Now you gotta go figure how to deliver it and how much you're gonna charge, but at least you've done these. That's all it takes. That's an afternoon. That's an afternoon of work. And and you described something, the pain. Sometimes, by the way, people are looking for this moment because they see so much about, oh, these exited. They had this great idea. This don't chase that. That's a that that's that's, like, that's like becoming a Hollywood actor. Like, you're it's the chances you're gonna make it in the NFL or you're gonna that's but you know what? You could be really good at other levels. You you can find pain on something you do every day without realizing it's pain. You just do it because you said you always had to. That's usually where the solving problem is. It's the smaller nuance things that you everyone in the world has accepted as something they do. And if you can solve that or improve that and that ties to 1st revenue creation and second costs reduction or time savings, same thing, you got it. It's not much more complicated than that. It just has to be self reflective and noticing your own space.
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Absolutely. And I will take a well validated pain point over a solution any day because you Mhmm. Solutions will change. You're gonna try something. It's not gonna work quite right. You'll try something else. Or the thing that you're working you're doing that works will stop working sometime later
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because situations change. But if you have a consistent pain point that people are feeling, you can keep iterating on your solution, and you are We're gonna transition gears here now. Something serious. It's January 21, 2024 when we recruited this. Now it could be, like, 9 years before I get it out. We got a lot of podcast ahead of you, but that's not the point. What we're getting to in the following is how bad your LinkedIn looks as of today. And what I'm alluding to is you've built this very bare bones. And And by if you're listening to this in the future, he's a beautiful LinkedIn. That means he hired instantenrollment.com. I stuck a plug in there. Yes. I did. Shamelessly. I shoved it in there. He's going to hire us once he gets going. But here's what the thing you've done it bare bones is the point of my humorous introduction to that. And the most bare bones, as you said, told me off camera like that you've ever done. Tell me how and why and where you think maybe the leakage comes when you see people start businesses? Because now that you've done this a few times, you're building it super bare bones. What's that mean, and and how do you help an entrepreneur do that?
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Yeah. So there's a couple different pieces of that. And, honestly, I I feel like in some ways I could've gotten even bear more bare bones than I did. But I think, you know, it comes down to the thing that matters is understanding whose pain are you solving and what pain are you solving for them and finding a way to talk to them. And it could be that the way you get to talk to them is via LinkedIn, and y'all are really good at that, and that is not my fault. Gonna outsource it to us later. And it's not something that I've invested a huge amount in. But that is that is one way to get in front of talking to people. Honestly, the way that I ended up getting all of my initial clients was I spoke to an audience I already had. Right? I've been on a technical podcast for the last 5 years as a reasonably solid audience. A good slice of those are in my target audience, and I advertised to them. I said, hey. Here's a problem that a lot of you probably have. I'm trying to solve that. I'm a coach. I know about that. I've been through it. I've helped people through it. If you're interested, come talk to me. That was it. And
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it was Exactly. And and you're, you're describing a bigger problem that entrepreneurs have, and and you'll start with this way, but don't stay this way. So there's a thing, as you'll see in in and you know this, I think in if you're in your fearlessness and you're an entrepreneur, you'll know that there's a sawtooth that happens every month. If you have one general source of where you get your leads from, your revenue goes up, down, up, down, up, down, and it looks like a giant saw. And it can be pretty sharp based on what you're doing and something. And and that is probably the most horrific, horrifying thing when, like, a spouse or your, like, someone goes, hey. How much are you going to make this year? And you're like, I don't know. Can we go week by week? Right. And like, if you can't predict it because it's like this and you don't know where it's coming from all the time. So what you're describing, though, in a bare bones thing is you had an audience, you do it. If you don't get the multiple ones of those going, meaning, like, you have some type of capital machine built for ads or you don't have an email campaign that produces onesies, twosies, and you don't have something else, fill in the blank, you're going to always have a sawtooth, and you're always gonna be hunting, killing, hunting, eating, you know, like, all this stuff. I would what's your take on that on on on that
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early stage versus You're absolutely right. I yeah. Well, so there's a couple different pieces on that. So one of it one piece of it depends on what you're selling and and the sort of package size and things like that. Right. So, one of the consulting businesses
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I made, I think I made 3 sales that supported me for 2 and a half years. I think you should have stayed with that business. Selling. Like a great business, by the way.
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It was it it was in some ways, and I occasionally think about going back to that business. We can talk about that. I was essentially what would now be called a fractional studio. So I would work engagements with companies where there were companies that had a technical product but no technical leader. And to the point on the coaching front, right, there was a translation gap. There was an inability for the technical people to communicate with the nontechnical and vice versa. And so by going in, I could fill that. And you can have long standing engagements. They pay well. You don't need that many sales to make it work. And so with something like that, if you have a channel that works, that's probably good enough most of the time, and your sawtooth you you still have the danger of irregular income because if you're dependent on a whale client and that whale client bails, now you have a gap. But so long as you build in some surplus and you have a reasonable funnel, you're okay. Coaching is smaller packages, and so I absolutely see the sawtooth there. And I was taking this as, oh, I'm gonna build a new channel around this, build it slowly. You know, I've been publishing I mentioned I like podcasts, so I've been publishing interviews with folks focused on this human skills and technology. I actually ended up just publishing it to YouTube and Substack, slowly building an audience there. But it is slow, and I haven't pushed too hard on other paid channels. And so, yeah, the Sawtooth is But you're just but you don't have a Sawtooth because you have a steady job revenue stream. I do. Yes. So that is that is the other thing, which is that I ended up deciding, that there were some aspects that I I like about work that that particular business was not going to satisfy. And I debated whether I wanted to shift the business. I really like the business. I wanna keep the business, but I looked for a job as well to satisfy some of those other actions. And it wasn't the revenue, though that is a nice it is definitely nice to have a steady income to support building the business. For me, it was actually more about having a team of peers, which, yeah, we can get into the loneliness of being an entrepreneur. I wrote about that. Challenges there. Yeah, it's a thing. And I, you know, pros and cons, pros and cons, and there's decisions to be made. But it there is a,
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there is a piece of that, and that was why I ended up getting the job. But it does Yeah. No. It does. And so what I'm what I'm describing there and he when he has here is a side hustle. And if you can build it correctly slowly now, you you can become your full time hustle. And if you don't depend on the side hustle must meaning so, you know, if you're listening here and you wanna advise, I will tell you, if you can have a full time job that is enjoyable, like, you're not miserable, you have a good work environment, keep it because there's benefits and other things that you could do there. And if you could build the side hustle thing where it's making enough revenue where you can be selecting your clients, it adds value to your day. But you could take all the money you make from that and reinvest into it to build personal brand so you can really take it to next level and your employer is cool with it, you're setting yourself up for I can choose to go whenever I want. I can turn this engine on. And if you think of it that way as multiple channels of revenue, your sawtooth gets, you know, negated. Now, for example, you know, here in 2024, there's I always think I think it's kind of a triangle. Instantly relevant for me is our main source income. There's a book that's coming out that should have some revenue. It's more of a branding marketing play, but there's also this this podcast and YouTube channel I'm investing heavily in. And, you know, and that is truly an investment. It costs money, but I will have a strong belief in a community of entrepreneurs that come together. And I think if you think of yours how you're doing it, you have that as well. You have this thing that it's steady money. You have the strong because you've been through it. You have this pain. My question then is, what's gonna be? Is it the podcast? Is that the third thing for you? Or because that seems connected a little bit. So what's what's your what's your next one? It's a good question.
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What's my next one? So there's a couple of different things, that I have in mind. So, and this gets a little bit into how I'm seeing the business evolve over time. So the thread actually, let me step back. I have an ebook that I it's I've been sitting on for a while, close to publishing. It put got put on hold when I went to the business. But at some point, I'm gonna pull the last thirds of that together and publish it. So that's that's the next thing to go out, and that's actually focused on the value of networking once again at this target audience of people who are perhaps a little more interpersonally awkward. So the name on that is slime free professional networking because there's this perspective of networking as being slimed. And it's really about the fact that conversations are the most valuable thing you can have, whether it's for a career, for an entrepreneurship opportunity, what have you. Getting out and having those conversations about things that you care about and are interested with or interested about with people who are also interested in those things, that's networking, and it's incredibly powerful. So I've it's funny because I've I've shared it with a couple of coaching clients and peers, and they're like, oh my gosh. This is amazing, the Select Journey. So that's the next thing I need to finish, polishing that and publish it. Connected to that, where I'm seeing the business go, this thread that I've been pulling on that I've encountered, it's probably the number one topic area that comes up with coaching clients and that I see being applicable beyond my current core target audience is kind of this idea of designing your own career. If you are a high performer, whether you wanna go out and be an entrepreneur, which I have that itch, you have that itch, we're constantly, looking for business ideas. Not everybody has that itch. Itch. But if you're a high performer, you can still do a great deal to design the job that you want. You know, you could say, here's the things I wanna do. Here's the things I don't, and go have a negotiation with your boss or with your next employer and make that happen. I've seen it for myself. I've worked with clients to to make that happen, but there's a couple things that you need. You need clarity about what is the thing that you want. You need clarity about how you deliver value and how being able to cut out these things you don't want is going to let you create more value. And this is the thing where I I found myself having this conversation with people in wildly different industries and discovered it was kind of, universal. So I think there's a coaching package first there that I need to evolve. There's from that, I think there's a book most likely, and there's a workshop. And I'm envisioning it as essentially around narrative, around understanding how because what the way this ends up showing up for a lot of my clients is they have some stories that they have been telling themselves about what it looks like to be successful in their job, and that includes a lot of things that they hate doing. But they do them because somebody somewhere says that's what this job looks like. And you know what? That's baloney. If you start to understand where those stories are coming from, what are the stories that are driving you to to act in this way, and you recraft a narrative for what your impact could look like. You can take control of that, and you can you know, a lot of these folks, they don't want a new job. They don't wanna start a business. That's a lot lot more headache. They want something that lets them focus on the 70% of things that they kick ass on and are really good at and drop the 30% of things that Absolutely. Feel like shit. No. I you're
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a 100% with that. And I think, you did mention about if you're a high performer. I actually believe anyone can be an entrepreneur. So some people and I do mean this because I think some people really like the stability. They like and they but that I think that's a lie. I think, you know, this this the community have cut the tie that I'm building. I think you cut the idea of what a career path is. You cut the cut the tie to the idea of what a normal job is. I think a normal job out of I still think you should go to college, get educated, learn some things, develop networks, do the things you need to do. Come out without debt would be my first advice. But high performer or not, when you come out, I think your normal job should be, how do I work for myself? How do I add value by and others can work for you. But the idea that I want them to go work, be their own people as well. But even if you're a low performer, it's only because you've never found the motivation of what makes you motivated. And that's the piece that everybody has it somewhere. Unfortunately, some people never discover it. Sometimes some people just get in a spot where, like, hey, I'm really happy. Don't mess that up. Most people just aren't happy when they work for others. Most people aren't happy in the jobs and things they do. It's a job by the nature versus I get up every day. I'm doing things, but I love it. And so I think anybody what's your take on that? Do you think anyone could be or do you think they have to be the high performer?
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Honestly well and well so I think if you're not a high performer now, you're in a much rougher negotiation. Well, I agree with that. The first step 100%. Figure out what it's gonna take to get you there. And I think that's a whole another set of offerings. And I'm actually up in the air whether I want to to target that as well in the business or focus on people who are already there. Now to your broader question, I think that's an example of what I'm talking about here of the way that we let other people's narratives put us into terrible positions. We have this narrative of what a career looks like. I go to college. I go out. I get a job. I work my way up, and it is boring as sin. And most people probably don't enjoy it. And so I think, you know, this mindset, even if you are working a job starting from an entrepreneurial mindset of, wait a minute. This isn't a set of things dictated down to me from above. This is a set of pain points and requirements a customer has, and I'm innovating around this to figure out how I can not only solve those, but create more and more value. Now you're in a place where you're taking control. You're taking, authorship of your own path in a way that will get you those opportunities and get you to have But you do describe. So high perform or not,
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you're on you're on the path you're on. You've gotten there. And and then when you're part of a machine, college, debt, whatever it is, you're working for somebody. It's not like you can just typically, you just can't yank yourself out of it. You're gonna have to set some stuff up. I have found when I did this working for somebody, I and I and as I met others too, it's just not my own autobiography here, but I is just the idea that I wanted to go do something else and was setting something else up made my enjoyment of that job way better because I stopped caring less and less about that career and all the impact and more so what it was it was my angel investor to become something else. Now better would be where you are where someone's like, hey, I know you have that side thing. I encourage it. Just get your job, get your outcomes done here. Make us successful. That makes you more successful.
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That environment I would tell you, go work in. That's a good one. And mine are aligned. Mine are aligned. Right? So I'm working for a company that's trying to do coaching, and they're trying to bring, do kind of a 2 sided marketplace for coaching. Their target market is different than mine. Right? They're trying to do b to b, doing a bunch of stuff, so we're not in competition with each other. But my understanding the business of coaching from being a coach adds value to working in this other. So if, yeah, if you can create that alignment, it's incredible. I do think there's a there's an interesting challenge that you sort of hinted at there with, sort of your point of working towards something and thinking about that future helped you in the moment, which is, we have this tendency to kind of get pulled between future ambition and current acceptance of our where we're at. And I I think of this as as kind of a dialectic of of 2 different things that shows up in in coaching a lot where people you know, some folks are super ambitious. They're entirely focused on the future and not at all paying attention to their current state. Some folks are not ambitious. They're not looking at the future, and they're entirely focused on their current state. Both of those set you up for failure because if you're too far in the future, then you'll never get there because you're not realistically looking at where you're at and how you can move in that direction. If you're too much in the the moment, you have nothing pulling you. You have nowhere that's gonna take you to go. And so I think you need to hold on to both of those things. You need to have that ambition for where you're going. Is it a new business that you wanna start? Is it a job that you want? I mean and it can be very unique. I have a a friend who spent 4 or 5 years setting up a consulting business where he worked with people that were before we were all remote, we're entirely comfortable with remote and asynchronous work, and he did this so he could run his business while he just went around the world. And he told me, I have set up my consulting business so that I can every hour decide, do I want to work this hour, or do I not want to work this hour? And it didn't matter what time zone he was in, where he was, so long as he had an interconnect net connection, he was good. I love that. It's not the life that I have chosen. I have a family. I have kids. I need a little more stability, But the level of deliberateness of this is what I'm going for, and so I'm gonna figure out step by step what do I need from where I am today to get to that?
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That is what sets you up. Now you'll you'll have these journeys too. So in my own journey here, right, and I'll explain this because I I see this in your I know you're gonna think of it too because you're still coaching. I am founder led sales still, and we you know, and I will be in this business for some time. Then taking that next step to find working not completely on, but meaning like I'm not the only one doing stuff I couldn't do. I can't take off 4 weeks without it impacting 6 months revenue from now. That's to me, I know I'm thinking through to do that, but I am personally stuck sometimes in the minutia of doing podcasts, of answering questions, doing sales calls. That is a hard transition. It's also the one that's going to take us from, let's say, around a1000000 revenue to 5 or 10. And so it's worth it's a problem worth solving. No doubt about it, but it's a lot of work. And I'll tell you out there, you guys, you might be at smaller scale where you might be saying, how do I get to $10,000 a month in my first or how do I get my first client or how do I get to whatever? You're gonna always face these challenges. You need to invest in the time to do it. In in the documenting of and I hate doing this. So I've hired some of the the documenting of standard operating procedures, automating certain tasks and follow ups, your downstream marketing to help you with sales when you've already met with somebody so you don't have to go through the whole process. These things, that investment and time will pay off. It is the path. And in your own, you said bare bones, but my guess is you're not still skimping on those kind of things because this isn't your first time. So I'm taking a leap without knowing. But what's your take on that, and what are you doing about it? Yeah. I mean, the more you can document things, the more you make your own life easier. Teams that you hire, the teams you hire would do the 30% you don't do well. As well as
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and the teams you hire and expand. Yeah. So, yeah, I started I started from templates. I started from okay. Here's something I'll ask what technology are you using. Something comes up, I try to templatize it.
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There you go. That's I mean, that docs. Tell people sometimes the world still runs on Excel. It's that easy. So No. I've I run basically my whole business on Google.
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Gmail, Google Docs, spreadsheets. I mean, you you had a a question in your thing of what CRM do you use? And I was like, yeah, I used to do fancy CRMs. Now it's literally like Gmail plus Right. Spreadsheet. Well, hey. Listen. I asked that question because we're you know,
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it's it's a selfish question because we don't have one. We have Mailchimp that we collect. We don't do much with because I'm not sure what I want to do with it. So we don't want to invest in a CRM. Now to be fair, on the c m you know, this is a question that's gonna come up entrepreneurs. Don't overinvest in 1. I will say something like a high level is interesting because you can do some email marketing, SMS. You can keep track of your customers there. You can sell them things. You can interact with them pretty well in one spot. That's not a bad pick. I would I would say minimize your cost monthly and figure that out. But,
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let me ask you. So Totally. I mean, building an email list is well worth it, and because it's still the one direct owned channel that is the most reliable. I mean, I guess you could do text now as well. But I feel like that that channel is also becoming saturated and and annoying. And I personally hate text based marketing at at least directed at me. But, like, email, you own that list. You can take it with you. They have given you permission, and it's not dependent on some platform's platforms whims for their algorithm for when does it reach people.
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Agreed. And if you can build it on a warm level, even better, which with our so I know with us, we we build it with interaction. So, like, when you and I met for the first time, you became part of our list. You won't see much from us because we don't do much with it, but we're like, let's build it. Let's figure out what we really want to do with this later, and and drive value once we do it. So that's the thing. Don't spam people. Don't spam people. Give them value.
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And coming back to the unreasonable effectiveness of talking with people, if you regularly give them value through that list, you can also ask them questions, not in this business, but a previous business. Some of the best both marketing, particularly marketing, but also sometimes product ideas came out of me literally emailing my list being like, hey, I'm noodling on this problem.
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Does anyone else have this problem? What are you thinking about for it? Perfect example. And, actually, to be fair, we talk about this a little off camera. The movement of and the mission I have for cut the tie. It's likely what I'll use the list for on instantly relevant and say, hey. I I'm starting this community. Would you mind giving your ideas to a 3 question survey of do this, don't do this? What's the one thing you would do? What's the one thing you hate you know, you wouldn't do? What's another idea when you hear this this? Like and just keep it a very simple thing. And I think it's a it's a way to see, a, who's interested, and, b, I'll get some ideas of what to do, what not to do with it. So I I think you're you're spot on. Hey. This is a part of the show, by the way, where you gotta do a shameless plug. So if you're listening right now, don't hang up. Don't stop. Let him tell you how to get a hold of him and what do you get for talking to k Ball. Go ahead.
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Sure. So there's a couple different things. If you're interested in my coaching, you can actually get a free exploratory session with me. Go to my website, kball.llc, click on coaching, and there will be a button to sign up for that. It's just a conversation. If you've never experienced coaching, the best way to understand what it's like and the value is to experience it. So you can go there. You can also sign up for my newsletter slash YouTube show, which is called human skills. It is focused on the skills that around humans, managing yourself, managing others, managing relationships, that are relevant in the tech industry. It does have a tech industry bias. So if you're not in that, not all of the episodes will be relevant to you, but some of them will. There's a lot of pure play management leadership content as well, and you can sign up for that at humanskills dotc0.
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So those are the 2 things I'm gonna plug right now. I'm I'm bringing up the YouTube channel. You're about to get a subscriber here. Hold on. We're gonna do this. I can figure out how to use the, I am number 188. Thank you very much. So today, it's a 188 subscribers. Yep. We're gonna go buy we're gonna get bigger. Small. Did Did I do the right one? Looks like it is. Gonna get much bigger. I did. Alright. Human skills co at human skills co. That's the YouTube channel. Check it out. Kevin, by the way, thanks so much for coming. Wait. I've just made a couple of questions to kind of, you know, drive this. Maybe leave the audience maybe with with in your whole journey, what's the one piece of advice you're gonna give an entrepreneur?
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Just freaking talk to people. We talked about this a little bit coming on, but it's something that I mean, I mentioned, you can have a free exploratory session with me. I will talk to you for a freaking hour. A long session. That's that's generous. It's a long session. And why do I do that? There's a couple of reasons. Number 1, it's the best sales technique I've ever found. Right? You experience this thing. You're gonna buy it's not the cheapest sales technique I've ever found, but it's the best converting sales technique I've ever found. But number 2, I learn more out of those sessions than anything else because it gives me visibility into the challenges that my target market are having. And even if they don't wanna work with me because the thing that I'm offering isn't working right for their challenge, it gives me insight in how do I need to change my pitch, my product, my service, all these different my marketing, all those different angles to be able to connect with these people and deliver value to them. I feel like I, you know, being a technologist when I started out, I was reluctant to talk to people in person. Can't you just, you know, Google this, send them an email? Just go out and talk to people. Get them on the phone. Get them in person. What have you. Be curious about their challenges and focus on, like, what are the challenges and what genuinely might you be able to do to help them. But I feel like that more than anything else is like it don't don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. You don't need 50 marketing channels
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when you're starting. You need to find somebody that is in your target market and just talk to them. And and if you don't know what to say, because I've been, you know, I talk to plenty of people. I talk too much actually, but, the the just ask questions that are open ended and thoughtful and actually listen and come up with another question. Don't you know, I say this, and and I'm the worst about doing this, but don't solution. Ask more questions. Have you thought of? Does it make sense? Tell me more. If you do that, not only people like the fact that you're asking questions, they'll leave that conversation going, I like that guy. If you talk the whole time, which you probably won't if you're afraid of talking, but, but, you know, if you're not standoffish and you just ask questions and actually empathetically listen, you're gonna go a long way to build a new new relationship that's positive, business, friend, whatever. So, in in your journey too, did you read any kind of books, or did you have any mentors or anybody you you wanna kinda
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give advice to? I read a ton of books. I was actually just thinking of 1 as we were talking about, using emails for survey, which was the Ask Method by, Ryan Levesque. It's a good introduction to just how simple it can be to use any sort of audience that you have access to to gain marketing insights, gain product insights, just by asking them. Recurring theme about just talking to people. Also big brain shift for me years ago, it's maybe a little dated at this point, was The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries, that is has a similar theme of you need to get out and talk to people, but it's a little bit more, formulated. It talks about this concept of customer customer development, you know, identifying your customer, helping understand what they need, how to sell to them, all those different areas. So that definitely stands out. Trying to think of any other particular entrepreneurship
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relevant. I mean, those are pretty solid. You described your your friend who did the business consulting. It sounded like you read the Tim Ferriss 4 day workweek.
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Looks like that guy took the That is that is also a good one. That is yeah. No. He was definitely a an advocate, and I I love Tim Ferris's stuff. He does a great job of aggregating interesting, things, and and 4 day work week is a good one. Some of it also a little dated, I think, at this point, but, but definitely as an inspiration and something to to think about. Also sort of an offshoot, recommendation, but on the theme of automating parts of your business, writing things down, and a modern day version of SimCity. If you haven't checked out the game Factorio I've heard that one. Check it out. It is a, tour de force in building progressive levels of automation. Well, definitely check that out.
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Kevin, thank you so much, by the way, just the time, your knowledge, in, you know, on camera, off camera. We've really enjoyed the conversations we've had. I love that you're you're, hustling and you're, you know, thinking through things, and and I and I've I've gotten some good advice from just kind of, you know, just approach of bare bones and and, how to target your market. Like, it it sometimes sometimes it's good just to hear the simplicity of of of what you're doing. So so thank you so much for coming on today. Yeah. Happy to be here. Thanks for the conversation. And if you made it this far in the show, you gotta go to kballl, dot llc. So it's kball.llc. I didn't even know you could have a dotllc. So now I got a bunch of new domains to go by. But check him out. I I think, you know, with an hour of his time, if you're in the specifically, if you're in the you know, any entrepreneur can go, but I'd say specifically if you're a technical or, you know, you you're, you know, you got a someone in your life that's like that think it might benefit, I think just check it out. An hour of someone's time is to me in this day and age is amazing. So that's incredibly generous. And, but check check them out, K Ball.
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I might have to dial it back if you send to me Well, I mean, like,
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let's not get crazy here. But, like, the ones that do like you listen, that's really generous. But, if you've made it this far and this was your first time, I hope you come back again. And if you've been here before, thank you for listening to this point, in the in in the show. And, you know, until we can meet again, I really do want you to go out there and unleash your entrepreneur. I want you to go help another entrepreneur if you are 1 and seek help if you if you're thinking of going that direction. But really get out there, unleash it, become the entrepreneur you've always wanted to be. Thank you for listening.