Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:00.949)
If you're business owner struggling to find a clear path to success but feel like you have to follow a rivet formula, then our guest, Kellan Bechtold, is about to provide you a simple win you can implement today. Kellan is the founder of the OutBeyond, a coaching and advisory studio for creative entrepreneurs. She helps people transform their business from full of potential to filled with purpose and profit.
through self-discovery instead of self-discipline. Kellan, so excited to have you here. It's gonna be a great episode.
Kellyn (The Out Beyond) (00:32.792)
Hey Adam, thank you so much for having me. I am excited to talk with you today and to give simple wins and to tell everybody about the OutBeyond.
Adam O'Leary (00:42.617)
Absolutely, so I've heard you discuss why you need to build your business from the inside out. What does that mean for an entrepreneur and how is it different from the traditional approach to business building?
Kellyn (The Out Beyond) (00:55.16)
Yeah, so I think the simplest way is where do you start when you want to take an action in your business? And is that, hey, I've seen Tim Ferriss do it this way. I've seen Bezos or whomever you're looking at do it this way. So I need to figure out how to apply the way they were successful to what I like to do. That would be building a business from the outside in. Opposed to...
What do I love to do? What are my gifts? Where is my zone of genius? What am I most excited about right now? And that is where I'm going to start in building out a business. That's the difference in a simple way.
Adam O'Leary (01:36.045)
love that and just to kind of go into that a little bit further, how did you come up with that concept? I I really enjoy that actually.
Kellyn (The Out Beyond) (01:43.511)
Yeah, so I was in the wrong career for over a decade. So I know what it is like to force myself day in and day out to work from the outside in. started, I graduated college, this is gonna age me, but in December of 2008, it was a lovely time for our economy here in the US. And I actually just worked in Chicago as a...
as a temp, but was so lucky to get a temp job at an executive career transition firm. There I learned the art of coaching and a career transition and I loved that job. But at some point I felt like all of my bosses were in their 60s, had already been CEOs. I was like 23 at the time. I felt like I needed to, I couldn't become a coach right then. So other than that job, which was my early inspiration,
I then end up going, getting an MBA, trying to get into health insurance, did not work well, end up in startup culture, in tech and financial tech of all places, and then ultimately in private equity. In all of those roles, the thing that was outside in for me was I inherently did not agree or believe in the business that I was working for. And...
I was outside in working because I was working either chief of staff, mean, I started out as executive assistant, chief of staff, then head of operations, really taking a CEO's vision. And I think I've said this to you before, but getting people to convincing the team to do things they don't want to do in the name of the CEO's vision, but like make it nice, add happy hour. And it turned out that getting people to
feel other people's, someone else's vision was building from the outside in for me. Building from the inside out was meeting people where they are, finding their gifts, honoring my own gifts, and figuring out what business looks like when you first start with what do I love to do? What am I really good at? I mean, know, Daniel Pink, all these people, Adam Grant, they all say this in one way or another.
Kellyn (The Out Beyond) (03:58.915)
But I think the OutBeyond goes to the next step, which is really doing intuitive, deep work to understand who you are before you start to build a business or sell a product.
Adam O'Leary (04:09.944)
So this is something I'm super interested in and I can't wait to hear what you're gonna say about this. I know, especially when you're a business owner, you're feeling all sorts of pressure, right? So for a business owner who feels pressure to constantly be hustling, right? The Gary Vaynerchuk mindset, going 12, 85 hours a day, however many hours there are in a day, how can they find the courage to prioritize rest and self-discovery?
Kellyn (The Out Beyond) (04:36.254)
Yeah, self-discovery over disciplining oneself. This is a lifelong practice I've been. I grew up on a chicken farm in Indiana. I am in a Methodist, German history family. Discipline yourself is your value, is the roots of where I came from. And what I realized is that is not sustainable. There is no way to bleed yourself ultimately to
true success and fulfillment. You can bleed yourself out to make a lot of money. That seems to be certain. We have tons of evidence of that in our society. But at the end of the day, how do you want to feel? To me, it's more than just the dollars in the bank account. And so for somebody who feels like they have to hustle to be successful, I would ask them to start first with what's your definition of success.
And at the end of your life or at the end of this project, how do you want to feel? If how you want to feel is exhausted, self-critical, like you never did enough, that's one way to go. If you want to feel like you have a full cup, like you stayed in integrity, like you accomplished what you really wanted to accomplish without crossing your own values, maybe self-discovery.
or slowing down and understanding your intention and taking one step out of the time, it might get you to success and fulfillment. Does that make sense? Yeah.
Adam O'Leary (06:11.528)
Absolutely and I know something that's going to be going through our listeners mind. So hopefully we're able to point them in the right direction. So there's this concept that you're talking about which is the fill cup, right? Making sure that you fill fulfilled. But at the end of the day, we need clients, right? If there's no clients, we need money, right? And I feel like there's this constant stress that will go through if you don't have clients, you feel like you have to hustle in order to go get those clients. So what would you say to individuals who are listening about that?
Kellyn (The Out Beyond) (06:41.666)
Yeah, so it's not that you don't have to work hard in the out beyond. I think there's a... I think when you go like woo or you start to talk about energy around business, it can kind of tend towards, if you just sit in a room quietly and meditate, then magically all of these clients are going to appear. Like I wish. If somebody has... If you've recorded with somebody who has that, please send me that episode. It's not so much that. I would say it is starting to...
your sales and marketing journey through a different door. I like to call it, the simple concept is, are you asking a who will buy question or a who am I question? A who will buy question is, I need to look and make sure that there are enough people who will buy this widget before I invest. Do enough people eat peanut butter in the US still for me to open a peanut butter company? It sounds like a, you know, I have an MBA. It sounds like a good business question.
How many people will buy peanut butter? Then again, over and over again, have we seen new peanut butter options in the market? Absolutely, right? And so a who am I question is, am I picking to sell peanut butter over jelly because I think there is a larger market? Or am I picking to sell peanut butter over jelly because I freaking love peanut butter? I love the smell of it. I love the texture of it.
I want to eat it on every single thing and that's why I'm gonna sell peanut butter instead of jelly. Another who will buy question is when you start to talk about, when you say you want to sell something and you're worried there aren't going to be enough people to do it, you want to start to, you notice yourself changing your product to try to get a bigger market. Kind of the opposite of niching down, frankly, versus a who am I question, again, return to
What do I want to spend my days doing? If I love talking to people and being in conversation, maybe being a developer isn't the right way to go. And I think the same about a business product or a business service. You want to make sure you are building what you love to do and delivering it the way you like to do it, not just because there's a potential market or a way you think you should.
Adam O'Leary (09:03.927)
So let's talk about that niching down as I think that's kind of interesting. So what do you kind of mean by that when we're looking at this from a, we're going into a new niche, let's say if it's especially a creative niche, right? And all of a sudden it's like, okay, I wanna be a photographer or I wanna be an art or whatever it might be. How do we define what our niche is that truly makes us happy and will allow us to shine as we go about this?
Kellyn (The Out Beyond) (09:30.435)
Yet, so I'll use an example of one of my current clients. Her name's Rachel. I'm sure she would be happy for me to use this example. She left her, she was in academics, but I had a more corporate job. And she left that job two years ago. She has always had a desire to have like a wellness coaching business. And so when she came to me about seven months ago, she came to the Outbeyond to build out a coaching wellness business. Now,
What I found out about Rachel is that she is an artist. She draws beautiful photos. She already has a published book. And she has this gift of reading Akashic records, which is like an intuitive thing. You can go and get your Akashic records read. of imagine going to get your tarot card read, only quite different. And she has all of these interests when she comes out of her corporate job. She comes in and she says, I want to do wellness coaching.
Who will buy, right? Wellness is a thing. Who's gonna buy this? As we've gone through the last six months, which is what do you really wanna do next? Where are you feeling most drawn? She ends up really focusing on Akashic Records training, leveling up her training there, focusing there. And she just sold out like her first seven spots in an instant and feels so excited about...
going the Akashic Records route, which in business terms is niching down from wellness. But if she had started in the wellness bucket and said, what is the biggest target market here? I don't know that she would have chosen the Akashic Records. What she did instead was follow her creative perpetual response, the next tug that she had, and then the business blossom from there. And so for any artistic...
folks who are listening who are authors and they love to paint and they love to do all of these things and they keep trying to put it in a box that someone's gonna buy, I would say take a few deep breaths, spend maybe 20 minutes journaling and asking yourself the question, what do I really love to do?
Kellyn (The Out Beyond) (11:41.228)
start there.
Adam O'Leary (11:41.799)
Absolutely. 100%. And for somebody who's thinking this, I'm just, I want to get a little tactical here just to kind of see your thoughts on this. So if we're looking at Akasha Records, right, I don't even know how to say that word, but if we're going that niche specific, where 90 % of human beings don't even know what that word is,
How do you go about getting people into your sphere? mean, because it's one thing, especially if you're making a full transition from a corporate type of an organization and then switching it where it's like, okay, I'm getting into this hyper specific thing. How do you go build your tribe there so you can sell out?
Kellyn (The Out Beyond) (12:04.738)
Mm-hmm.
Kellyn (The Out Beyond) (12:17.654)
Yeah, for sure. So I think one of my favorite things to do is to give someone a list of like the 40 ways you can market your business. LinkedIn post, LinkedIn ad, Facebook post, Facebook ad. Like, I mean, there's, you could go stand on the corner and hold a poster, right? There's really hundreds of things you could come up with to quote unquote market your business.
So many artistic folks come to me saying, do not know and marketing gives me, marketing and sales gives me the ick.
And what I always say is take this list of 45 things, I think that's how many I have on the list, take this list of 45 potential avenues for marketing. Think of it as the channel in which you reach the people who need your service, whether they need the beautiful painting on their wall, because they have a blank wall, or they need a massage because they have neck tension. In what way of these 45 marketing channels seems the most fun to
you. And I really do not care if it is drawing a poster and standing on the corner of your street or if it is building out an ad campaign. Rarely is. I rarely meet people whose interest is in building out an ad campaign. But hey, maybe it is for some folks, maybe just not in my realm. Of these channels, what seems like the most fun way for you to talk about what you do? Start there.
If that doesn't work, then come talk to me. But I have not had the experience that when a person picks the most fun, intriguing, exciting way to talk about what they're doing, that it hasn't worked. But when do we go there to make business decisions? What sounds the most fun? I never, in all of the meetings I ran, in all of the leadership team meetings I ran, in all of the board prep meetings I ran,
Kellyn (The Out Beyond) (14:25.474)
Did I ever say, what slide sounds like the most fun to pitch to these investors? I wonder what might've happened if we had asked those questions or if we all start to ask those questions. The evidence in my clients shows that when you are excited about what you're doing, no matter what it is, that is the energy that attracts the people to you. And look, I'm a little allergic to like manifest and energy and those sorts of things.
and then it works. And then I can't be so allergic to it anymore. So practically, whatever it is your decision is, write out everything you can think of, take a pink highlighter or a blue highlighter, your favorite color, and circle the things that you are most excited to do and see what could happen for you.
Adam O'Leary (15:13.769)
I love that. Well, Kellan, where can people go to learn more about you?
Kellyn (The Out Beyond) (15:16.716)
Yeah, so you can find me at theoutbeyond.com. You can also follow me on social media. I'm on Instagram, the KellenB, T-H-E-K-E-L-L-Y-N, letter B, or at theoutbeyond underscore on Instagram. That's where I am most active socially. You can also just email me at hello at theoutbeyond.com. I am...
thankful to be at this time in my business where I can still answer all of my own emails. I know there will be a time where that might not be the case. There has been a time in my past that wasn't the case. But right now I have an open window of time and I love to hear from entrepreneurs who feel like their business has gotten out in front of them or they feel like they have this creative business that is getting bogged down.
by strategy or business acumen or sales and marketing. I'd love to do that. If anyone reaches out to me, I also offer a free weekly creative entrepreneur support group called the Weekly Exhale. So if anyone's interested, that's not just open, I kind of have to meet you. So I don't share a link for that. But if anyone's interested in joining the Weekly Exhale to meet with me and other people like me who care about heart, who care about our values, who are doing what we love first, I'd love to hear from you at hello at theoutbeyond.com.
Adam O'Leary (16:38.346)
Amazing. Kellen, thank you so much for jumping on today. Awesome. Well, thank you all for listening. Have a wonderful rest of your day and we will see you on the next episode.
Kellyn (The Out Beyond) (16:40.994)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Adam.
