How I Became Coach Kiah - My Entrepreneurial Journey
In honor of October being National Women’s Small Business Month, I am dedicating the next four episodes to women entrepreneurship. I’ve found that whether it’s the journey of health or business, the underlying factor that determines our success is the same: mindset.
We’re kicking off this series with my own entrepreneurship story. The journey to becoming Coach Kiah has been anything but a straight path. Growing up I never intended to become an entrepreneur, but over time my heart (and homesickness) eventually pulled me in that direction. There have been lots of unexpected twists and turns along the way and in this episode, I share with you the story of how it all unfolded.
In this episode, we’ll chat about:
My first entrepreneurial endeavors in a one-room schoolhouse
The first full-time business I owned and why I pivoted
What the behind the scenes of Coach Kiah currently looks like
A YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR
Some kids start their entrepreneurial journey with a lemonade stand on the sidewalk in front of their house. As someone who grew up in a ranching community an hour from the nearest town, that wasn’t really an option for me. The only traffic drivebys we got were herds of elk, antelope, and maybe the occasional cousin or two.
I guess you could say my first dabble into entrepreneurship started in the back of a one-room schoolhouse for our local community craft show. I had a “movie theater” which was more a glorified daycare set-up where I also sold homemade crafts, including wood coasters I made from juniper branches on the ranch.
A few years later, I jumped into the livestock world showing pigs and steers through 4-H and FFA at my local county fair. In my junior year of high school, I had a heifer that was a bit too wild to take to the fair, so I kept her on the ranch and started my very own cattle herd separate from the ranch. I used the money earned from selling my first bull calf to pay the downpayment on my college dorm room and my mom cared for the rest of the herd while I was away.
I never set out to be an entrepreneur. Growing up, I always said I wanted to be a teacher. After getting into an RTV accident in high school and spending eight days in the hospital, I thought maybe I’d become a nurse instead. My first college chemistry class squashed that dream pretty quickly, though.
I ended up graduating from UC Davis with a degree in Human Development and a minor in Education, still unsure of what I wanted to be “when I grew up.” All I knew, and what my grandpa had always told me, was that no matter what I ended up doing it needed to be something with people.
A HUNGER FOR FREEDOM
My heart ended up pulling me back to the agriculture industry I grew up in and toward agricultural communications, my first “big kid” job being the Director of Consumer Affairs for the Kentucky Beef Council. I loved it and learned so much in that role, but after living across the country from my family for so long I started to get really homesick.
My oldest niece was born the week after I moved to Kentucky and I missed two more nieces being born after that. It killed me to be so far from home and I felt like I was missing precious years of their childhood. I wanted more flexibility to go home when I wanted for however long I wanted. I wanted more freedom.
Ultimately, it was that hunger for freedom that made me pursue starting my own business. I wanted the opportunity to create my own schedule and build my wealth on my own terms, but I wasn’t really sure where to start.
THE BEGINNING OF A BUSINESS
At the time, I knew I wanted more for myself. I was doing a lot of hoping and wishing, scrolling through social media, and longingly living vicariously through other women entrepreneurs in my feed. And… well, nothing happened. It turns out hoping and wishing wasn’t an effective strategy. I knew it was time to take action.
It wasn’t by accident that I started my own business around the same time that I started my health journey. Both journeys were at their core about challenging the beliefs I had about myself, whether that was my body image and self-worth or what I was capable of accomplishing in my career.
I started binge listening to women entrepreneur podcasts, and rather than just hoping and wishing, learning how they did it themselves so that I could start making moves for myself too. I decided that other people’s success just proved what was possible. If they could do it, maybe I could too.
THE FIRST BUSINESS - BURLEY & BARLEY
I started my health journey on October 1, 2018, and as part of that, I committed to waking up one hour earlier for myself. I would use 30 minutes to move my body and the other 30 minutes to journal and brainstorm what my first business venture would be.
I was learning a ton of great marketing skills at my 9-to-5 job and my boyfriend at the time, my now husband Brent, taught me how to use design software in the evenings when we got home from work. I loved being creative and I loved my career in agriculture, so I decided that my first side hustle would incorporate the two by doing marketing and graphic design for farms and ranches.
And so, Burley & Barley Creative & Editorial was born.
The name Burley & Barley was a nod to our ag roots. Brent grew up on a burley tobacco farm in Western Kentucky and on my family’s cattle ranch we also farmed barley. Our business took many forms, but we started primarily doing logo design and graphics in the evenings for friends and family.
Eventually, as we picked up clients here and there, we dabbled in other things like social media marketing, freelance editorial writing, website design, and by accident I fell into watercoloring as my niche. It started when one of our clients asked if I could make her a watercolor-styled logo for her cookie decorating business. Since I’m a “yes” girl, I gave it a shot even though I hadn’t watercolored probably since third grade. She loved and it and apparently so did other clients because watercolor kind of became my thing. I watercolored barns for Christmas tree farms in Michigan, a whole herd of cows wearing accessories for my friend’s boutique Burlap Bovine, and more.
I was an employee by day and an artist and entrepreneur by night, still nowhere close to bringing in the income I wanted to before taking the leap into full-time business ownership.
SIDE HUSTLE TO FULL-TIME
Just a few months into entrepreneurship, a job opened up in California that I thought might be the perfect fit for my boyfriend Brent. Terribly homesick, I convinced him to apply for the position of Executive Director for my home county’s Farm Bureau. He applied and was offered the position and to my surprise, I convinced a southern boy to leave the south. No easy feat, trust me!
At that point, I was faced with a tough decision. Do I try to find a full-time job in California since I wasn’t financially where I wanted to be in my side hustle yet, or do I go all-in on growing and building the business as a full-time entrepreneur?
I’m so grateful and fortunate that Brent was willing to carry the financial burden for a while so that I could give it a try. Full transparency, I had only made $2000 in my side hustle at the time, so it felt like a HUGE risk. But, I jumped in with both feet and decided to give it my all.
THE PIVOT
Slowly but surely, Burley & Barley grew and I was able to pick up some awesome clients on the west coast that brought some more income and stability to my business. I loved used my creative talents to support these ag businesses all across the country, but I found myself wishing I could use those talents for MYSELF too. Suddenly, art began to feel a lot more like work than fun.
Meanwhile, as I was growing my business, I was also sharing my health journey with family and friends on my personal social media pages. People kept asking me what I was doing and to my surprise, inquiring if I did any private coaching.
Hello, imposter syndrome! Me, a coach? Am I even qualified to do that?
But, as a shameless “yes” girl, I decided to give it a shot with the caveat that my first clients knew that I had no idea what I was doing yet. If they were willing to take a chance on me, I was willing to try it out.
And y’all, I fell in love with it.
It was work that felt aligned in ways that I had never felt before. I felt like my talents, my story, my experience, and my passions were falling into place like a perfect puzzle. Out on a walk one day, I also had the realization that the college degree I thought would never be relevant to my career - Human Development and Education - is kind of exactly what I was doing.
I picked up a few clients here and there, still not openly advertising myself as a coach, and there I was again with a side hustle to my full-time hustle. I still wasn’t sure if it was a viable business though. Can I really make a living on coaching? Is it too risky to leave the design and marketing business behind to really go for it?
THE BIG SHIFT
Then, the summer of 2020 happened.
I was fortunate enough to have the team at Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner. pitch my health story to some big media outlets, and to my surprise, they picked it up! I was in the June 2020 issue of People Magazine, on Good Morning America, Access Hollywood, and more. In just a couple of months, my story had been shared with 1.5 billion people all around the world and my consultation calendar was booked out for weeks.
I knew this was my chance to really go for it. I realized that the mountain I was climbing with Burley & Barley, on track to start my own full-fledged marketing agency, wasn’t the mountain I even wanted to be on anymore.
So after a lot of back and forth debating, I gave my Burley & Barley clients one month’s notice and well full-time as Coach Kiah in July of 2020.
BEHIND THE SCENES OF COACH KIAH
I started both of my businesses as a solopreneur and to this day, it is still mostly just me, Kiah, party of one, serving my clients. One of the hardest lessons that I’m still learning is that I can’t do it all on my own and I don’t have to. Outsourcing is intimidating and scary, but I’m slowly getting the support and help that I need to show up best for my community.
While it is still mostly jusrt me with all the day-to-day pieces, I have expanded by contracting with a few other women that help support me.
I have a wonderful Virtual Assistant named Jill who I found through word-of-mouth. Her family ranches in Kansas, she is a momma of two sweet little girls, and has become my saving grace. Her role currently includes helping me schedule out emails, edit and produce my podcast, and keep me organized with reminders that would almost surely slip my mind.
I also have a social media ads manager named Lauren who I met in college at UC Davis. She lives in Iowa with her family and is a new full-time entrepreneur, leaving her job in agriculture to support small businesses like mine by helping us get our message in front of the people that need it.
On occasion, I bring in my best friend Jessica as an assistant coach. She is a licensed therapist in her day job and will help me host coaching calls and book clubs in my community when I need a little extra support.
And finally, I have one of my first ever one-on-one coaching clients, Kerry, who serves as my Community Support Specialist, helping me manage my online Facebook community. If you’re a regular listener to the podcast, you might remember meeting her in Episode 8: Lessons Learned Losing 100 Pounds.
LESSONS LEARNED SO FAR
Entrepreneurship is challenging. It’s lonely. It’s scary. It’s wonderful. And sometimes all those things in one day. While I am by no means a business expert and I still have TONS more to learn, I like to think that I’ve learned a few things along the way that I’d like to share with you.
LESSON 1: Just start.
Be willing to be messy and learn as you go. Know that you are going to have bad days. Things aren’t going to always pan out as you hoped. Clients may not always be pleased and may fall through and that’s just all part of the process. Growth and learning don’t happen when everything is going right, it happens when you make mistakes and fail. Embrace that it’s part of the process, and just keep going.
LESSON 2: Be willing to ask questions and seek answers.
Listen to podcasts. Reach out and ask people questions. You might be surprised how many are willing to share! When I first started, I had friends who were doing freelance marketing and agency work who were happy to give me business advice. I had friends who were coaching that were glad to hop on the phone and share their own experiences with me. Don’t let your fear of looking stupid or asking a dumb question stop you from finding the answers you need. The only way to build confidence is to learn and being willing to ask questions is a great place to start.
LESSON 3: Give yourself permission to try and pivot.
My business has taken many shapes and forms already and I imagine that it will continue to do so in the future. That’s one of the beauties of entrepreneurship, it can be as flexible as you are. That being said, don’t give up on an idea if it doesn’t work right away. Give it time and space to breathe, rework and strategize. But if you get halfway up a mountain and realize it’s not the mountain you actually want to be climbing, I say it’s okay to change directions.
LESSON 4: Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.
This is YOUR entrepreneurial journey, nobody else’s. Comparison will cripple you if you let it. Someone else’s success doesn’t mean there is any less room for you, if anything it is just an example of what is possible. Put on your blinders and take the next step forward on your own path without letting other people’s paths distract you.
LESSON 5: Keep learning.
I haven’t “arrived” and most days I still feel like I have NO idea what I’m doing. But no matter what, I’m continued to always be learning and growing. I’m convinced nobody has business or life entirely figured out yet. So if you feel lost and unsure, maybe you’re right on track.