We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ken Blackman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ken below.
Hi Ken, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
My niche found me, rather than vice versa. When I left the educational wellness organization I’d been working for as a top coach and teacher, and decided to strike out on my own, it wasn’t with a lot of pre-planning. This was in 2014. My background was in relationships, communication, emotional intelligence, and intimacy. I didn’t like the direction the company was headed, had a falling out with the founders, and left. One thing I did know was that, rather than find a new employer, it was time to teach what I knew under my own banner.
Like many entrepreneurs, my domain knowledge exceeded my business experience. Fortunately, quite a few of my former students were eager to work with me directly. One of my favorite courses had been for men who wanted to show up more fully in their lives, and an obvious first option was to focus on coaching men. As soon as I began to market myself this way, a funny thing happened. Who I was actually attracting as clients were successful single women seeking the same kind of success in their romantic lives. Eventually I started to consider that as my niche, but as I started to embrace it, my clientele shifted again. Now couples were seeking me out.
Mind you, I was single myself, by choice. But I did understand the inner workings of a great relationship. My business grew to six figures on word of mouth, as friends of couples i’d coach sought me out, saying, “Whatever it was you did for them, we want that, because they’re completely transformed.”
I’m now happily married myself and have been coaching couples and teaching relationship courses almost exclusively for the last eight years. If there’s a lesson in there it would be to be open to the possibility of the world telling you what your ideal niche is.
Ken, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I spent my first decade of work as a software engineer at Apple. I was successful but nerdy, awkward, and emotionally backward. I needed help myself with how to have healthy fulfilling relationships with the opposite s*x. The training and coaching I got was so transformative, I decided this was the work I wanted to do. I walked away from my career in tech—right at the height of the first bubble, just before it crashed—to study, teach, and coach on relationships, communication, emotional intelligence, and intimacy. That was over 20 years ago and I’ve never looked back.
I particularly learned a lot from women who were smart, confident, capable, successful, attractive, comfortable in their own skin, and in ownership of their inner rightness, and wanted men to meet them as confident equals and partners in life, neither fawning nor domineering. And so my focus is on teaching and coaching a relationship model in which a woman can be her full, unapologetic self with a confident man who knows how to meet her. All of the healthiest, happiest, most resilient, fulfilling relationships I’ve seen are based in this model in some way.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
I work in an industry that is still in its early stages and still mostly unregulated. Coaching has earned an awful reputation. And I hate to say it but, rightly so. Not so much because of bad coaches, but because of good coaches who are unscrupulous or unethical. When you demonstrate that you can genuinely help someone, especially with deeply personal topics, they trust you. Betraying that trust is one of the worst, most harmful things you can do. So there is nothing that is more valuable to me than my own integrity. Not the appearance of integrity but actual integrity. I take very seriously the trust people put in me and dedicate myself to making sure they’re well-served. And I think that’s at the core of my reputation as a coach.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
This one’s easy because it was recent enough that I can still feel the sting. I was invited on a podcast to do a pundit-style post-game analysis of a talk by a major name in my industry, an author you may have heard of. I didn’t make a good showing of it. To be honest I was embarrassingly bad. I was the lone contrarian in the room, making an important point I’ve made before, but stumbled this time in the fast paced sound bite environment. My style is more professorial. Afterward I felt like I’d actually set my cause back a few steps, losing rather than gaining credibility and interest. I started fantasizing about my dream job, being a busboy at Denny’s. No responsibility, no thinking involved, no trying to figure out how to grow a business, no emotional heavy lifting, just give me something simple to do and I’ll do it. Then I got up, licked my wounds, and turned my attention to the next thing, which was an evening lecture with my wife and business partner. Our content received high praise across the board. But, we were also trying out a new teaching style and it went kind of sideways, enough that the audience could feel it, and so we got that feedback too. Stings like hell and made us both want to crawl under a rock. But, again, we worked through it, internally and with each other, learned the lessons we needed to do better next time, and started working on our next offering. Fail forward. You can’t get where you’re headed without fortitude.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://kenblackman.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kenblackmancoach/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KenBlackmanPersonal/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/KenBlackman
- Other: My blog on Medium: https://medium.com/straight-talkers
Image Credits
Ana Del Castillo, TRUE.STATE Creative