Treasa Edmond: 0:00

Welcome to the Boss Responses podcast. Today's one of those longer episodes where we talk more in depth with our weekly guest co-host about their business, what they do and how they help those of us who deal with clients. This week, our guest co-host has been Alan Heymann, and I was really excited when he agreed to be one of our guest co-hosts. Alan has coached leaders who were born in 31 countries and who work on four continents. His clients have spanned everything from corporations including Fortune 50, to municipal governments and nonprofit organizations. Alan is the author of the book Don't Just have the Soup 52 Analogies for leadership, coaching and Life. He's an expert communicator and an engaging speaker, and I think he brought a lot to the podcast this week. Today we're going to learn more about Alan, about his business and what that means to us.

Treasa Edmond: 0:55

Welcome to the Boss Responses podcast. If you're a freelancer, business owner or anyone who deals with clients, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Treasa Edmond. I've been dealing with clients and running my business for nearly two decades and in that time I've dealt with my share of doubt, imposter syndrome and not knowing what to say when a client asks a question. I wasn't ready for. I created this podcast to empower you with the Boss Responses you need to grow your business. Each week, my guest co-host and I will bring you five episodes packed with practical insights. Monday through Thursday, we answer your questions, and Fridays we dive deep to explore how our co-host embraced their role as the boss of their business. Welcome to Boss Responses, alan. Thank you for being with us this week. We really appreciate all of the insights you've brought us.

Alan Heymann: 1:51

Thank you so much for having me. It's been a lot of fun.

Treasa Edmond: 1:53

All right. Today we get to learn about you, what you do, why you do it and all of the problems and solutions you've discovered along the way. Let's start out with telling me just a little bit about what you do and why you do it, please.

Alan Heymann: 2:07

Absolutely. I'm a leadership and executive coach. My business is called Peaceful Direction. I have served so many sectors of the economy from this business, ranging from education and nonprofits and government which is where I spent most of my career before becoming a coach to finance and healthcare and consumer packaged goods and everything you can imagine. I like to say that I've been able to travel all around the world through the eyes of my clients. As of the moment, I think, I have served clients who were born in 31 countries, who are often living in a different country from the country of their birth and possibly their company is located in a third country. It's fascinating work. No day on this job is ever the same as the day that came before it. It is truly a unique and special experience every day I get to sit down in this chair.

Treasa Edmond: 2:53

That's amazing. Now you started out doing for a full-time job what a lot of us are doing as freelance work. Do you want to talk a little bit about that and your transition into being a business owner?

Alan Heymann: 3:07

Sure, it's kind of a long and somewhat convoluted story, but I was a journalist majoring college. I worked as a local news reporter in my home state of Illinois for a few years before ultimately moving out to the DC area where I now live. Here I've done primarily communications work, a little bit of marketing, mostly for government agencies and nonprofit associations, because there are tons of those in this part of the country. I was an individual contributor doing web content and speech writing and a little bit of graphic design and web stuff, all the way on up to leading a complex communications organization for a global nonprofit. I've pretty much had most of the jobs on the way up to the chain, but, as you point out, always working under somebody else's umbrella Prior to going out and working for myself as an executive and leadership coach, and that full-time transition was November 2019.

Alan Heymann: 3:58

Just about four years now. I have always been a single client guy. It's always been somebody else's say, agency, program, candidacy for office, project and utility. Even that I've been responsible for communicating about. And now, as a business owner, even though communications is not my work anymore, the product and service that I communicate about is very much me.

Treasa Edmond: 4:24

Which is a that can be a difficult transition.

Alan Heymann: 4:27

Truly truly Thank you.

Treasa Edmond: 4:29

Any small business owner understands the difficulty of talking about themselves. One of the things that I'm always fascinated about is the transition from employee mindset to business owner mindset, which is what this podcast is all about. Yours was really different because you went from employee mindset in one field to business owner mindset in a completely different field. How did that play out for you?

Alan Heymann: 4:54

Yeah, it was fascinating and somewhat scary in that I am not generally a person who embraces a ton of risk in life or in work. I needed some proof of concept. I needed at least an inkling that this thing was going to work, in addition to some savings, before I jumped out and did it on my own. I was coaching for clients before I left full-time work, but I was doing it at lunchtime. I was doing it sometimes during the evening hours here on the East Coast for clients who were on the West Coast. I had at least a bit of a notion that I could do this and that I could get paid for it before I jumped out to do it Proof of concept, very important. I had some runway built up so that I knew if the business was going to be slow for the first few months which it very much was we would be okay. There was comfort and safety in knowing that, even though I was taking a fairly big risk.

Alan Heymann: 5:46

The other thing I want to point out is this the leadership environment in the organization I was working for at the time had been going through a number of changes, some of which were not comfortable for me. This notion of I'm going to stereotype the question here for a minute, because I know you and your listeners will get it. Why would you leave a safe, high-paying job to go work for yourself and all this uncertainty and instability? The thing I want to tell you is those full-time jobs may seem like they're safe and stable, when they're often not even in organizations that don't change very much, even in civil service.

Alan Heymann: 6:18

If you're working in government, things can change very quickly and you find yourself either not working there anymore or really not wanting to work there anymore. What I decided in taking this lead was that I'm going to take responsibility now for my own professional direction and my own income. I've been doing it ever since. It's been a fascinating and great journey. I think one of the things you realize is you need to loosen your grip on this fear that the money isn't going to come.

Treasa Edmond: 6:48

That for me, yes, because you can always scrabble, you can always go out there and do the work and find the thing, or even fall back and do something else for a few months if you need to fill in the gap. But yeah, if you're laid off from your full-time job, you're laid off from your full-time job. I don't think there's anything such thing as job security these days for anyone. It's hard.

Alan Heymann: 7:09

Yeah, no one's getting the 40 years in a gold watch anymore, for sure.

Treasa Edmond: 7:13

Yeah, completely different world. As your business grew, you went from those slow months and you gradually built up your clientele and got all of that going. Did you find that you needed to implement systems or tools to help streamline your client processes?

Alan Heymann: 7:27

100%, by the way, I still am. First thing I'll point out is I'm a process-oriented person and I have set up small businesses before on behalf of others. Even way, way back when I was a much younger person, I did some freelance bookkeeping to make a little extra money. I'm generally familiar with how these things are set up and how they work. Does that make me a professional at it? No, does that make me the best person to be doing it at any given moment? No, but competent enough so that some of the things that be devil brand new business owners about forgetting to invoice clients or not paying their taxes on time never an issue for me. It was fine and up until probably just a couple of months ago, I was still doing my own bookkeeping with the systems that I had set up pretty much since day one, and it was working fine, nothing was broken.

Alan Heymann: 8:15

So what I did this year was I made a conscious choice as I sat down at the beginning of the year to think about where I might need some support, where I could do some improving, is to outsource some elements of my business that again were going fine Nothing was broken but that somebody else could do more efficiently, better in a more cost-effective way, using what I had already started. And I had precedent for this in the past for, as I said, having started small businesses and handed off the reins to other people to do so, I sat down and I found some help and I've got a tremendous virtual assistant is understating the role that she plays in my business, has been doing this type of work for other entrepreneurs for going on 20 years and knows a lot more about running a small business than I do, because she does it every day. He took my existing systems and built on them, improved them or tore them to shreds and started up new ones in some cases where that worked better. And there are things that are happening in my business now that I don't even know about anymore because she's got it and that's the way the relationship is supposed to work. And I've also just outsourced bookkeeping as of a couple of months ago. We're still a little bit in that transition, but it's going really well.

Alan Heymann: 9:25

And, yes, I can invoice my clients and, yes, it gives me a little hit of gratitude every time I type that in and it goes out and the money comes in. And, yes, I can balance my checkbook every month too. But getting myself into the mental space and energy to be able to do that kind of work as a distinction from the type of work I usually do every day, is a lot. That one or two hours of bookkeeping that I might be doing for myself could be handled much more quickly and better by somebody who's just doing it day in and day out for a bunch of clients, and this is just another project for them. So that has been nice too, watching the money flow in and out without having to have as much hands-on involvement from me.

Treasa Edmond: 10:07

Now, outsourcing is something that a lot of freelancers especially don't think about, and I see immense value in it. How did you realize that you'd reached the point where you were ready to do that?

Alan Heymann: 10:18

It wasn't the bookkeeping. I will share with you that this is something that is probably particular to coaches and the way that I operate my business, and that I coach in a number of different environments and I have private clients who hire me directly, and I also do some work for coaching companies, where they're managing the engagements and bringing in the clients for me and, of course, paying significantly less than the private side would. So what happened to me was I realized I was losing track of details. The management of an engagement consists of how many sessions does a person have allocated? Over what period of time have they booked them? Are they attending them on a regular basis? Are they missing sessions? Are there assessments I'm going to be doing for clients as part of the engagement? When do those need to happen? Are the debriefs scheduled? Am I giving myself time to prepare?

Alan Heymann: 11:04

And what happened was keeping track of everything that I just said to you in my head or using my little system spreadsheets. It wasn't working anymore. So I said I need someone to manage this process for me and remind me when I need to do things, so that when I get into that space with the client for that kind of sacred hour where they're fully present, and so am I. I'm not thinking about like, oh, I forgot to look up when the next session is, and like what if they need to reschedule next Tuesday and whatever, because it's handled. So there's not going to be a technology tool. I don't think that will be able to take all of that on for me, given the complexity and the number of inputs and outputs. But to have an imminently competent and qualified and capable person, just minding that part of the store for me, is great. Psn, by the way, it's still happening when I go on vacation, because she's still working too, and I don't even have to worry about that when I'm not on the clock.

Treasa Edmond: 12:00

I love hearing that, because I'm at that same place. I have all of these balls in the air and every once in a while I drop one and then it makes me feel horrible. So I realize I'm at that point. So how did it change your business when you let go of some of those things?

Alan Heymann: 12:12

Still am letting go. So a couple of things I'll point out. One this is a cost. You're going to spend some money on this, especially in the ramp up phase, where whoever you've got is learning your stuff, is getting access to your systems, maybe is building technologies for you and things of that nature. It's an investment, and so I look at it as an investment that frees up your time and energy for things that will either bring you greater joy or earn you more money. That's one.

Alan Heymann: 12:41

Two is wow, when I was a leader in organizational environments, that I have some lessons to learn along the way about delegating. And wow, do I talk to my clients who are leaders in organizations every single day about their issues with delegation. And I had to learn that stuff all over again as a small business owner who was used to doing everything himself, and that was a transition as in maybe I'm not going to get back to that client about that scheduling issue right this very moment, even though it's in my inbox, because it's not my job anymore, so I'm going to wait and let the person who built the system do the thing, and maybe there's going to be some manner of handling a given situation that happens over and over again that we can work on a solution for together like my new client intake process which was working very well when I remember to do all the steps myself, but now we have a process.

Treasa Edmond: 13:35

Yeah, and we could have a whole session just on delegation.

Alan Heymann: 13:39

Oh yes.

Treasa Edmond: 13:40

That's so difficult but so crucial, and even if it takes them twice as long to do it as it would you sometimes, you just still need to let it go because your time is more valuable. Speaking of crucial, setting expectations and client relationships, so this is crucial in any small business owner's world, but yours especially. How does that play out for you?

Alan Heymann: 14:01

So I want to rewind for just a moment back to the conversation we had about setting your rates and believing you're worth it and having the confidence to ask for what you believe that you're worth, because I think setting expectations with clients is related to that, and what do I mean?

Alan Heymann: 14:16

So I have to take certain steps to protect my energy, so that I'm available for clients when they need me and so the clients can get access to the coaching services that they've paid for when they need them.

Alan Heymann: 14:28

And that means that I'm going to approach things like no shows and last minute cancellations a certain way, and I'm going to have to set those expectations very clearly, both in my initial conversations with clients and in the contract that I've rewritten to address situations like that.

Alan Heymann: 14:42

When they happen they're rare and people are busy and crises happen and the boss calls us to a meeting at the last minute and people get COVID and we have to be responsive and we have to be adaptable and at the same time, I got to make sure I'm available and I got to make sure that my worth is reflected in what people are paying for access to my time. So all of that situation and how I approach it and how I think about it has evolved from the very first moments of you will come into a coaching session and I will bill you after the fact for that session that we just had to. The scenario that I've got now, which is you're going to pay me for a duration of time during which you will have up to a certain number of coaching sessions per month for that number of months, and I'm going to get half up front and half in the middle and you are accepting full responsibility for scheduling and attending all of the sessions that you have available.

Treasa Edmond: 15:39

I love that and that's a lesson that could translate to anyone. Your clients have a responsibility to get you the things that you need to do your job which in Allen's case is their presence and their thoughtfulness. They need to come prepared to work on themselves, which is that's a whole different ballgame.

Alan Heymann: 15:58

I love that.

Treasa Edmond: 16:00

And I did a similar no show type of policy. You're responsible for it. I bring what I bring to the table. You bring yourself and then the wherewithal to get the things done. But that's fun. So difficult clients then, because we all get them every once in a while. How do you deal with those? And I know difficult clients in your world are probably a little bit different than for most freelancers, but I think a lot of your principles will translate.

Alan Heymann: 16:26

I think so too.

Alan Heymann: 16:27

So pretty rare, I have to say.

Alan Heymann: 16:29

I'm very fortunate in that regard, in that I think my intake process and the way that I show up as a coach screens out people who you might consider difficult or maybe even just not the right fit for working with my temperament or my personality and that sort of thing.

Alan Heymann: 16:44

Things that come to mind, that make the work more challenging than it could be, let's say, often come down to issues, as you pointed out in the last question, of scheduling and presence.

Alan Heymann: 16:54

So if you are consistently a no show, if you're consistently rescheduling your appointments at the last minute, we're going to need to have a conversation about whether this coaching engagement is the thing that you need in your life right now and whether you're able to fully commit to it.

Alan Heymann: 17:06

And sometimes it isn't, and I actually enjoy having those conversations because the person recognizes what's happening and then we take action to fix it or to put it off until another time. And sometimes I will get an inkling that's going to be the case in between the, say, onboarding process and the first session, but if they've been extremely eager to sign on and the contract is signed and the invoice is paid, but then you're after them for weeks and weeks and weeks to get the first session scheduled. That's a warning sign and I don't see this as often now because I've got my mind or keeping an eye on how often people are scheduling and whether anybody's been missing for a while, and she brings that to my attention and I address it directly with the client. But those things are troubling when they happen.

Alan Heymann: 17:51

And the other is the it's situational because my private clients all hire me because they're ready to be coached and they have a specific issue or a set of issues at times that they'd like to address and they know what that is, in a contract coaching setting where I'm being hired by a company that does coaching and has a number of us as contractors, and the employer has purchased a number of seats and a coaching program, let's say, and dropped the manager or the leader into it.

Alan Heymann: 18:20

They may not know much about what coaching is or why they're there or why it's important for them, and I have to do that kind of education piece before we can get started. It is challenging sometimes if folks don't see the value but they're being required to do it. It is challenging sometimes if they don't give much thought to their coaching experience or their journey other than in the very moments before they're about to click the Zoom button. So if you're coming in and you don't have an inkling of what you want to talk about today, we can do it, it's gonna be fine, we'll get there. It just takes more work than somebody who's like okay, I've been thinking about this for the last two weeks, let's go. That's the ideal situation.

Treasa Edmond: 19:01

So do you find that the longer you work with clients, the more ready they are when they come into a session?

Alan Heymann: 19:06

Absolutely, because you don't need all the preamble, you don't need all the context, you don't need all the history. It's already there. It's remember that person we've been talking about on my team for the last nine months. Here's what happened today and here's what I'd like to unpack or process with you for sure, absolutely. That's amazing.

Treasa Edmond: 19:22

That's that Self-awareness and the leadership stepping up. So I love how you approach the difficult situation from what's best for your client instead of the inconvenience they're causing you. I think that's really important for everyone to pay attention to here. Also the fact that sometimes Alan's clients aren't directly his clients. They've been put in that situation by someone else and if you work with an agency or you work with a larger organization and they're having you work with one of their departments, that's something that you might have to deal with and realize that when you go into that, sometimes you have to do a little bit more education before you can have that trusting, respectful relationship so that you can get your work done.

Alan Heymann: 20:06

Yeah, and I want to be clear too I'm not trying to throw shade on the world of contract coaching. It's been essential to my business. I've had amazing clients through it, people who have hired me when they've gone on to other employers, people who have recommended me to coach their parents. Even so, some of these relationships are long-standing and they're absolutely wonderful. It's just it can be a luck of a draw type of thing, depending on, honestly, the skill that the coaching company has in matching their clients with the coaches, and some of them are really really good at it.

Treasa Edmond: 20:35

And I would imagine that you see some really wonderful results from that situation too, because you're able to help people Find the areas they need to work on that they didn't even know about truly. Yeah, I love that. Coaching is so valuable. I understand that you wrote a book.

Alan Heymann: 20:50

You'd write a book.

Treasa Edmond: 20:51

Yes, Tell us a little bit about that.

Alan Heymann: 20:53

Yeah. So the book is don't just have the soup. It's 52 analogies for leadership coaching in life. And what happened was this back in 2021, which was the year we all expected we were gonna be getting back to normal again and traveling internationally and going out and doing all the things we didn't do that.

Alan Heymann: 21:08

So I was home a lot, and one of the things that I noticed in my practice was that analogies Were popping up all over the place like almost faster than I could catch them. They were coming out of the minds of my clients. They were coming out of my own brain either during a call or after a call. Other coaches were bringing them in. So I started a bit of a collection. I wrote up a few of them and posted them on my blog, on my website. They seem to get fairly good traction there and after a while I realized I had a pretty sizable amount of these things, which turned out to be enough for a book. So I wrote up 52 of them.

Alan Heymann: 21:40

It's one for every week of the year. They're broken up into different categories like communication and relationship and leadership mindset, and a few about coaching as well, and my wife, who's an elementary school art teacher, did the illustrations. There's an illustration for every analogy in the book and on the cover, and what was neat about that was she and I have never done anything together professionally before. We've been a couple for a quarter century and our interests and our skills are just so different that they've never overlapped. So we did this together, and it's available wherever major books are sold.

Alan Heymann: 22:11

You can get it at thesuitbookcom, as my website link to it, and it's just a neat thing. I mean, honestly, I was a journalism major, I was a TV guy, so long form was never my strong suit, and there are so many amazing books about leadership out there and about personal growth and development and I didn't feel like the world really needed another one like that. And also I don't think of myself as the person who has the attention span, the time, the abilities to go deep and research a thing and then Produce a book on it. So with this, 52 small things assembled into a bigger thing that you can hold in your hand.

Treasa Edmond: 22:47

I love this and I remember that time and how we were all struggling to make something make sense when nothing made sense. I really do like that and I'm a big fan of books that are broken up into small chunks. Anyway, my mother don't take this as an offense, just used to call that bathroom reading.

Treasa Edmond: 23:04

Well you could take it with you and be done with that section and then move on, but you Are you not fully focused in that moment. So it really makes sense. I think that actually came from my grandma too. I love that. I love the idea, I've always loved analogies and I think that storytelling is so much a part of what I do. And storytelling works because you find something that is a commonality that people can put themselves in that situation and see it. So everyone read don't just have the soup. That's pretty important, all right, so they can find your book. Are there any other resources or any tidbits of information that you would leave people with?

Alan Heymann: 23:43

Sure, so I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. Folks can easily find me there. My website is peacefuldirectioncom. I have an email newsletter and a blog post that I send out once a month, so that's a sign up that you can do over there and that's the best way to get in touch with me, find out what I'm all about, learn about the services that I offer and figure out what next steps would be if you're looking for a coach or know somebody who is. The other thing is I have a free resource library on my website, so I've cultivated a list of links to magazine articles, podcasts, videos on issues that come up frequently in leadership coaching that I've experienced with my clients, so I've shared with you. I was a journalism major. I worked in communications for many years, and what I'm often telling people is that makes me an expert in absolutely nothing.

Treasa Edmond: 24:25

So I but it makes you a curator of information.

Alan Heymann: 24:28

That's exactly right. So I'm a generalist, to end all generalists, and what that means is I know where the experts are. So one of the things I bring to my clients and, in fact, to the world, through my website is, if you want the best thinking on delegation, time management, managing up, it's all there and I came up with none of that. I just found it and put it aside for you.

Treasa Edmond: 24:49

No, we may be kindred spirits. I'm a curator of knowledge and a facilitator of knowledge as well. It's one of my favorite things to do, so I will make sure the links to all of those are in the show notes For all of you listening. Go check out, alan, and absorb some of these resources. I know I will be One last question.

Alan Heymann: 25:06

Yes.

Treasa Edmond: 25:07

Are you ready?

Alan Heymann: 25:08

So ready.

Treasa Edmond: 25:09

What advice would you give to service providers or small business owners who are looking to create lasting, successful partnerships with their clients?

Alan Heymann: 25:19

I would say the key to creating lasting and successful partnerships with your clients is to understand that you don't have to do it all by yourself. There are wonderful people in similar work or in adjacent work that you can seek out who will help you, and you're probably not the first and only person to do this type of work. So don't feel like you're tempted to reinvent the wheel every single time on a type of project, on a procedure, on a piece of content or on a process. Benefit from the wisdom of those who have come before you, and you will be so much further ahead than having to try to figure all of this stuff out by yourself, because there's a lot, and honestly, I think podcasts like this are a great first step in that direction.

Treasa Edmond: 26:01

They really are, and that is solid gold from Alan. People Go back, rewind it a few seconds and listen to that answer again. Do not think that you have to do everything by yourself. Do not try to reinvent the wheel all of the time and take advantage of the knowledge of the people who have come before. Seek them out, form relationships, do all of that stuff. Alan, thank you so much for being here with us this week. They're so much great information. I hope everyone listens to every episode at least twice.

Alan Heymann: 26:27

Teresa, thank you so much. It's been great spending time with you and your listeners and I hope we get to do it again.

Treasa Edmond: 26:32

I'm sure we will Thank you so much.