Corey Hiben (00:00)

I struggled with not being able to see the results for my efforts, right? It’s like when you work a nine-to-five and you get a paycheck, feels as if no matter how good of an employee I was, the paycheck always looked the same.

John SmallMtn (00:06)

Hmm.

Corey Hiben (00:12)

And I had a really, really hard time with…

He said, “This is the hardest I’ve ever worked, but the most fulfilled that I’ve felt about my work.”

And I remember thinking at the moment, “I want to know what that feels…”

Realistically, when you choose your customers, you choose your future.

I don’t think most people realize that you can pretty much make a million-dollar business on almost any niche.

John SmallMtn (00:32)

Welcome to another episode of Founders Growth. My name is John Hill, AKA Small Mountain. I’m the founder of Adapted Growth. And today on the show we have Corey Hiben, and he is the founder of ChiroX, which is a marketing agency that focuses on chiropractic professionals. Welcome to the show, Corey. Can you talk a little bit about how long you’ve been running your business? We’ll start there.

Corey Hiben (00:52)

Yeah, sure.

I guess technically getting into the business world, one could say actually started probably roughly four or five years ago after working as an occupational therapist. I used to work as a healthcare professional. I was very much so in the nine-to-fiver, very quote-unquote “normie”—not to say that in an offensive statement—but yeah, it was a very normal nine-to-five job working in healthcare. But I’ll be honest, it really wore on me. I struggled with not being able to see the results for my efforts, right? When you work a nine-to-five and you get a paycheck, it feels as if no matter how good of an employee I was, the paycheck always looked the same.

John SmallMtn (01:29)

Hmm.

Corey Hiben (01:36)

And I had a really, really hard time with that, especially coming from a background in fitness, wellness, and exercise, where when you put in the work and you see the results, that feels really good. But when I didn’t have that same feedback loop in the professional setting, I hated it and it sucked.

So yeah, it started roughly five years ago as more or less what I would call more freelancing than actually a business owner, which I think is where most people actually technically start, despite the fact that they call themselves a business owner. But yeah, it’s always kind of been in the marketing, website, digital space. That’s always where it’s been because, to be transparent, I’ve always wanted to work remote before working remote became the norm. So that’s kind of how I took that direction. But yeah, it’s been roughly five years now.

John SmallMtn (01:57)

Interesting. Same.

There’s so much in there that I want to talk about, right? Because I personally think that the best thing to do is to go freelance initially. Go figure out what you want to be when you grow up. Don’t think that you have to have it locked and loaded before you start. Cause I had some of that energy before I started. It was more like, if I wasn’t building something that was a software thing like Facebook, I wasn’t really technically an entrepreneur, right? So I had all this kind of weight and baggage, but I love that idea that, in my opinion, there’s not anything wrong with starting just doing client work, right? Because you’re going to get really clear on the kind of work that you enjoy doing, who you like working with, and also who you don’t like working with. So I always kind of giggle whenever I see that “one-person CEO” who’s getting a little too excited about it and stuff like that. I wish that everybody would not need to put that kind of label on it and that kind of pressure on themselves. Go figure it out. You know, I think that’s really cool.

I’d like to talk about the transition, though, because I think the first sale is getting really okay that you can ask for more, and that it’s okay to want more and stuff, you know? And so, being kind of professionally driven of like, “Well, if I’m going to work this hard, I want more for it,” and stuff like that…

Were you getting a lot of pushback when you were talking about that with other people in your professional tier, or were you even talking about it with people? Was it just something you were feeling, but weren’t talking about?

Corey Hiben (03:51)

Yeah, I would say I was completely misunderstood. Nobody really understood that feedback loop that I was craving. I think most people were very comfortable with the golden handcuffs of getting paid their steady paycheck to work a certain set amount of hours. I don’t want to make it say there’s any judgment there, like if you’re happy with that, that’s totally cool. There’s nothing wrong with that.

And the shift really happened for me—honestly, I’ll never forget it—I met a guy. I lived in Minnesota at the time, and he had a business that was basically repairing potholes in the street, which sounds very odd, but there’s lots of potholes generally speaking anywhere where there’s cold because the ice freezes and it breaks the road, et cetera, et cetera. He was probably actually in his like 40s or 50s at the time, and he had just started that business.

And I remember having a conversation with him, and he said something to me that I’ll never forget. He said, “This is the hardest I’ve ever worked, but the most fulfilled that I’ve felt about my work.” And I remember when I heard that, it sunk deep into my soul. I remember thinking at the moment, “I want to know what that feels like,” cause I didn’t know. I didn’t know what that felt like.

I felt very blah. I felt like I’m just doing what I needed to do to make a paycheck, pay the bills, and pay my student loan debts. Nothing ever gave me any energy to want to try to work harder, or there was no incentive to work harder, really. Cause I was always capped at how much I could ever technically make within the industry. But that was the first person I met where I was like, “There is a different way to do this thing where we quote-unquote ‘make money.'” And that’s really where it shifted for me. I’ll be honest, there was really nobody in my life that was entrepreneurial or a business owner. I had no idea. It wasn’t even a path that I was aware of, to be honest.

John SmallMtn (05:29)

Same.

Man, so much of that same mode resonates for me as well—of not really having a lot of entrepreneurial examples to follow. So then you just start without an example, and you go looking for it, like, “Okay, who is successful? Who does things at a bigger scale?” And you’re going to be led to the same ones that are as helpful as they are limiting. At least they were for me.

So when you decided to leave, what was that like? Did you have a tier or a goal that indicated it was time? Cause it sounded like you started out side-hustling on the side. Was there a “When I hit X, I’m going to go full out on my own”? How did you get out of the nine-to-five?

Corey Hiben (06:29)

Great question. Two things happened. One of them was I built up a nest egg, which for me was a really big psychological safety net that I needed. So I basically built up quote-unquote “six months worth of savings.” Luckily, at the time I was still living with my parents, so I was able to save a lot of money and everything was just going into savings. I basically spent quite a bit of time literally just going to the gym, going to work, coming home and meal prepping that night, and then doing it again.

And I did that for a while until I basically built up a nest egg. So that was one piece of it—just having enough mental security to feel like I could actually try to do this thing on my own and try to somehow make a buck on my own.

The other thing that happened was I had a pretty pivotal conversation with my boss at the time. This is going to sound silly, but it was a conversation about my black jeans, essentially. I used to work as an occupational therapist in the outpatient setting. It’s a very casual setting. People would come in and they would need rehab therapy—I specialized in hand therapy at the time. I was working there for a while, and I remember my boss—I don’t know if she sent me an email or said something—she’s like, “We need to have a talk,” the classic “we need to talk,” which is the worst phrase of all time. I’ve talked with my fiance about this—never say that. If we need to talk, let’s just talk. We don’t need to wrap it around this stressful thing of “we need to talk.” Nobody wants to hear that, that’s the worst thing ever. So I never do that to people.

John SmallMtn (07:27)

Yeah. Don’t cliffhang your people, right?

It’s like, “Well, I’m setting them up.” Well, there’s better ways of setting people up for the agenda and the conversation. You’re essentially just cliffhanging with people. I can’t work with people who cliffhang me on projects and stuff like that. My wife, sometimes she’ll come in and she’s like, “Hey, we can talk about something later.” I’m like, “No, I need some context now so I can close this loop and get some focus back.” Sorry for cutting you off, but yeah.

Corey Hiben (08:17)

Right? No, cause otherwise you just ruminate over it and it drives me crazy because it takes up my mental space. If I don’t want to think about that right now, why did you… now this is all I’m going to think about. Great. Most people don’t understand it, but anyways, it doesn’t matter.

So, she needed to talk, and we sat down. She had this list of items that we needed to talk about in terms of how I was doing at work. There was a handful of things that were all fine, but there was one item on this list in particular where she goes, “So, I heard from one of the front desk girls that last week you wore black jeans to work.” And I was like, “Yeah.” Like I said, pretty casual clinic, and it was Friday, not a big deal. She’s like, “Yeah, that’s kind of out of the dress attire, so if you could just not do that, that’d be great.”

I remember sitting there thinking to myself, “There are so many things that I care about in this world, and one of them is not my black jeans.” I care about how well my patient is getting, what our outcomes look like, how much we are getting involved in the community, and what our… there were just so many things that mattered in my life at that moment, and one of them was not my black jean dress attire. I remember thinking in my head, “I’m never going to have this conversation again. This is insane to me. How is this the topic of conversation?” Right? There’s so many things that are more important to me.

So that was kind of the tipping point for me of, “All right, I need to get out of this setting.” It was the combination of having the financial means to be able to do it, and then also that conversation of, “This is not my people, this is not my setting, this is not how I want to live my day-to-day.” And yeah, from there, there’s a lot after that, but that’s where it happened.

John SmallMtn (09:40)

That’s fascinating. I’m curious if there’s an order of operations here. Were you saving money for something, and then it hit a tipping point and opened up this idea of, “I could use it for a business”? Or was it more like you had this conversation and you were like, “Nope, I am done. Let’s go into hardcore mode and save this money so we can do it”? Did one feed the other, or were you just saving because you’ve got great saving habits?

Corey Hiben (10:29)

I wish it was a moment where I flipped the table and stormed out of there, but that is not how it happened. It was essentially more like, from there, the realization and self-reflection of, “These aren’t my people. This is where I want to be.” From there, that’s where it started turning into exploring what it would look like to go out on my own. Luckily, I was already sort of doing the marketing for that company, and actually the previous company as well, so I had some skills built up in the marketing space, specifically in the health industry.

It started as literally reaching out to people in my local area and working for free, actually. That’s really how it started. There was a transition from that conversation to starting to do more or less the freelancing thing, actually getting clients—making little to no money, for the record. Most of the work was for free just to show that I could even add value and get connected to their network. Every once in a while somebody would throw me a bone, which was like the equivalent of $50. It was like nothing, but at least proved a proof of concept. It showed that at least I could somehow convince somebody to give me money for the work that I did.

I’m sure there was just a connection that happened in my brain of, “Okay, what if I kept doing this? What if I charged more money? What if I improved my skills? What if I added even more value? What if I learned more about this industry?” So that was kind of the stepping stones of it.

I’ll never forget the very first client that I worked with. I literally found her on Google Maps. She lived down the street from me. For whatever reason, she had a Google Business Profile of her health coaching business in my neighborhood. She had a couple of reviews on there, and I literally reached out to her and was like, “Hey, noticed some things on your website that I could probably improve.” She was like, “Yeah, sure.” I was like, “I’ll do it for free.” Obviously, I’m working for free, so why would she say no?

So I fixed some stuff on her website, and then she connected me to her entire network, not knowing at the time that she was a health coach for health coaches. She had a giant network of people that obviously needed additional help, but that was really the start of it. Still making very little, if any, money, but at least it showed that I could do this thing on my own.

John SmallMtn (12:18)

So I love this, right? Cause this is a difference in approach and philosophy. If you were going back and you were going to do it again, would you still take the free approach, or would you push for, “Let’s get some clients, let’s get some revenue”? Would you do it the same way if you were starting over today?

Corey Hiben (12:59)

It depends on my skills, and it depends on the listener. I think that’s the biggest thing. I actually probably would do it the same based on my levels of skills at that time. I wasn’t very good, right? Yeah, I was better than they were, but I wasn’t very good. I don’t think that my skills were up to par with what I charge today, where we’re very premium-priced and we actually technically only work with high-earning chiropractic business owners. But that’s because our skills have improved so much.

It also depends if you take the approach of the freelancer versus the business owner. Technically speaking to your point, yeah, you could probably actually charge a higher price from the beginning if you believed that you had somebody that could provide the value that you’re promising to them. This could come from the form of hiring somebody to do the work. So instead of me actually doing the website design, I could have charged a higher price and then hired somebody that actually has the skills of website design to provide the value. But at that time, my personal skills in marketing weren’t very good. So I’d probably do the same thing.

John SmallMtn (14:06)

I love the awareness that your skills were not at the level that you wanted them to be at. Because most people are running on some “fake it till you make it” kind of thinking sometimes.

How do you go from the generic health coaching, finding these people, to getting very focused on chiropractic? Was it a very obvious trend? Was it a decision state that just kind of showed up for you? How did you make the pivot?

Corey Hiben (14:40)

In one word: pain.

I think this is so true, especially cause I do some consulting as well for other people that want to start agencies. Matthew McConaughey says it best: we’re really bad at knowing what we want, but we’re really good at knowing what we don’t want. Essentially what that means is that most of learning happens by doing a lot of stuff, feeling the pain of what it feels like to not want to do certain things, and then learning from that experience.

It’s a long-winded way to say I worked with a lot of clients before I realized who are the ideal ones and who are not the ideal ones. I worked with health coaches, PTs, OTs, doctors, Kairos, health tech companies, even companies that were out of brand like data consulting, photographers… I worked with a whole myriad of industries before I slowly whittled my way down to seeing who is most in alignment with my values.

Honestly, at the end of the day, I don’t think everybody needs to take that approach, but that’s the approach that I took. Realistically, when you choose your customers, you choose your future. What that means is that you’re going to be working with these people on a regular day-to-day basis, and if you don’t like them, probably not a good customer to choose. So that’s kind of the approach that I’ve taken to it now. Also, my fiance is a chiropractor, which helps as well.

John SmallMtn (16:09)

For sure, right?

One of the reasons that I work in this space and work with the kinds of people I’m trying to work with is they don’t know that they can say no, right? Sometimes they get very fixated on, “I got to take everybody in my nature, got to take everyone who has a pulse and a wallet.” It’s like, “No.”

It’s always the coolest moment for me whenever someone is like, “I can say no to this.” And it’s like, “Yeah, please say no.” Because if you don’t want to serve them, or if you don’t think they’re going to hear you, listen, or take action from you… we don’t have to go so far as label them as being uncoachable or that they’re the problem. Strategy is difficult, and if it’s not aligned, it’s just not aligned, right? Trying to force a fit is what everybody should be trying to avoid in my personal opinion, right? Because it’s not what you close, it’s what you can keep. If you don’t want to keep them, or if you don’t think they’re going to stay, why?

With most people, it’s a weird thing. It’s like a lesson that I have to teach probably half of the people that I work with: you can tell them no. You can do the, “Hey, it’s not you, it’s me. We’re not the right ones to serve you. We’re not the right ones to do this. We work differently with our clients than what it sounds like you’re looking for.” There’s a bunch of strategy around that because you get to kind of reset expectations, but ultimately it’s got to come from a place of, “No, thank you. We need to do it our way or else this is not going to work out to anybody’s benefit.” So how—yeah, please.

Corey Hiben (17:45)

I think a huge part of that too, just to add to that, is that I think about it in terms of an hourglass: wide at the top, narrow in the middle, wide at the bottom. What I mean by that is that, generally speaking, when people start out, I would say stay broad. Because you really don’t know who your ideal client is or who a good market fit is, who you like working with, or who you don’t like working with—which is kind of what I did. I was very broad in who I was working with.

But as you slowly work with enough people, you whittle down to getting super, super narrow, picking a very specific person, and saying no a lot more than you’re saying yes. Then the cool thing happens: once you get super crystal clear on who it is that you’re serving, now you can actually widen out again, both in people and in services. Once you’re super clear on it, now you can go, “Okay, we do Google Ads marketing. Do they also need social media marketing?” Or maybe there’s an adjacent industry. We work with chiropractors, and dentists are the exact same business model. Could we also serve them?

So then it allows you to broaden out again, but it’s a matter of knowing where you’re at in the journey and understanding that it’s wide, narrow, wide, depending upon where you’re at.

John SmallMtn (18:43)

I love the hourglass thing. I talk about it with people, and my metaphor’s not nearly as good as yours, but I talk about being Gandalf on the bridge protecting the hobbits—the hobbits in your delivery team. If you bring in all these ghouls and monsters and everything, they’re going to leave. This is for any team that you have. So, “None shall pass!” It must be this tall to ride the ride, or else you’ve got to find a way to break their heart nicely. Don’t take a crap all over them or anything, but try to find a way to save the time.

The thing that I like that you’re saying at the end of this is once you get really good at knowing not just the niche—cause everyone talks about “riches in niches”—but the caliber of people that you can work well with, then you can open it back up a little bit and go a little bit wider. Because it’s not the niche, it’s the alignment, the philosophies, and working methods that really are the difference between success and failure, you know?

Corey, that’s very cool, because most people are just like, “Niche down, niche down,” and everything is going to be better. But eventually you run out of the niche, right? If you don’t get to that moment of clarity of, “I need this type of person. They don’t need to be doing necessarily this thing, but they need to see it this way,” then we can go explore new segments and territories and cool things like that. You’ve got to work in that niche enough so that when you see that even within that niche, there’s going to be different kinds of characters and different kinds of people with different philosophies.

When you’re thinking about that wide-narrow-wide, where do you think most people get stuck?

Corey Hiben (20:44)

The top for sure. Because in the early stages—it’s like anything when it comes to business, fitness, relationships, dating, you name it—people can’t handle the valley of despair, right? Seth Godin has a great book on this called The Dip, and there’s many examples and expressions of this: you get into anything—literally anything: playing the guitar, starting a business, learning how to run—it doesn’t matter what it is. You start off with excitement. There’s a rise and you’re like, “Cool, this new thing! I got my new running shoes, my new Garmin watch, and this cool trail!” Then all of a sudden, it gets hard, boring, monotonous, and super lame.

That’s where most people quit. Almost every single person quits there in the dip—in the point where you’re actually going to start making progress towards the thing that you want. This is just another example of that. In the early stages of business, when you have no idea what your product, your services, or your ideal clients are, what the market wants, what you want, what is even valuable, or what people are willing to pay money for… you have no idea any of these things until you start talking to people, engaging, having conversations, and trying to add value, which you very likely will not initially. Most people quit. That’s where most people quit. Straight up, this is how it works.

John SmallMtn (00:21:58)

I love that, right? Like everyone preaches about bring value. I remember being very confused about that whenever I first started, and then finding your own way of value, and then you get too excited about it. It’s such a journey, right, to figure that out.

I’m changing gears just a little bit, because we talked a little bit about fitness before hitting record, right? And you’ve talked a little bit about it here. When we got connected, fitness was something that was discussed. Is there anything from your fitness background, any parts of the mindset around fitness that has carried over or translated in a beneficial way on your path as a founder?

Corey Hiben (00:22:40)

God, man, yeah, that’s such a deep question for me. It’s so hardwired into my DNA. I’ll give you the short story of how it really saved my life. When I was roughly 16 or 17 years old, I was dating a girl at the time and we broke up. I was young and hormonal, and I had no idea what up from down was. It crushed me to the deepest and darkest depression I’ve ever been in my entire life.

John SmallMtn (00:23:01)

Mm-hmm.

Corey Hiben (00:23:06)

I remember just being in my parents’ basement at the time, because obviously I was still in high school, sobbing horrendously, having no direction in life, and legitimately suicidal. I legitimately just didn’t want to be around anymore. My mom saw it at the time and she started inviting me to go to the local YMCA where her gym was. I went to the gym and worked out. Nothing groundbreaking.

John SmallMtn (00:23:26)

Really?

Corey Hiben (00:23:32)

I did a typical guy workout—it was probably some bicep curls and bench press. I left that day, and I wasn’t cured by any shape or form, but I remember feeling just a little better. A few days go by and my mom invites me again. I go back to the gym and I leave, and same thing. I was like, “Man, I feel a little bit better.” Then I did that enough times where all of a sudden I realized, “Wow, I’m not depressed anymore. This is weird.”

John SmallMtn (00:23:58)

Yeah.

Corey Hiben (00:23:58)

Now reflecting back at it, I know exactly what happened: it basically hardwired health, fitness, and wellness with happiness. Those things are tied together in my brain in such a deep, visceral way that it’s just a part of my identity now. So I’ve been doing it—I’m 37 now, so for 20-plus years I’ve been exercising, doing fitness and wellness and the whole gamut, which is how I kind of got into healthcare and occupational therapy and everything of that nature.

John SmallMtn (00:24:27)

Wild.

Corey Hiben (00:24:27)

I can safely tell you, yeah, the carryovers, kind of like we talked about before recording, are just hilarious at times. In terms of the parallels between fitness and business, it’s eerie. You do this hard thing and you get this result from it, and the ups and downs of it, and the quote-unquote “injuries” or the failures… the parallels are endless.

And also, I can safely say it’s keeping me sane, because most of business and entrepreneurship is the never-ending roller coaster of ups and downs—feeling like you’re on top of the world, you’re crushing it, you’re making big sales, and you’re fulfilling awesome clients, to all of a sudden feeling like, “Oh my God, it’s all going to explode. What is happening?” It’s like, how do you manage that? I think the fitness stuff has been a huge part of that for me.

John SmallMtn (00:24:59)

100%. Kudos to your mom for being the kind of person who didn’t just tell you to cheer up, buck up, or stiffen up that upper lip, and actually gave you something that was so helpful in the grand scheme of things.

When I was listening to Tim Ferriss’ podcast, he was talking about how he dealt with depression. It was one of those things where I sometimes get down, but I never really thought that I had depression and stuff like that. But then hearing how he was talking about it, I was like, “Well, maybe I do have some of that.” Then doing this very boom-bust kind of thing of being a founder… it’s hard to walk both sides of it, right? Be even-keeled, but also appreciate your growth, but also learn from the failures, the lessons, and everything else like that.

I heard Tim Ferriss say, “The best thing I’ve found is going and getting into my body.” And I was like, “Wait a minute,” because I’d already been a martial arts guy, right? So I’d had moments of epiphany where someone’s trying to punch me or choke me, and then I can figure out the gap in the problem for the first time, you know? So I’d already kind of seen this as just a thing that sometimes helped me. But then hearing that, I started to get into walking, forcing it, and using it as a signal so that way I don’t spiral or beat myself up. It’s allowing myself to feel what I feel and then use it intentionally, as opposed to some of my older wiring of, “Well, I shouldn’t let this bother me.”

If it bothers you, it bothers you, right? But have ways of getting unstuck. That’s the most important thing. When you’re new to this and you don’t know who you are yet or the patterns that lead you away from progress, you don’t even know that they’re detrimental to yourself yet. If you’re running around on crazy ego juice that you’re smart enough and people like you and everything, it’s just too easy to maroon yourself off without any support. I see a lot of people struggle with that because they’re seeing everybody as a competitor, so then they want to put themselves over here by themselves. No one can help them because no one else gets it, and you’re kind of creating a beautiful little jail cell for yourself that’s really hard to get out of, you know?

Corey Hiben (00:27:38)

I think depleting the body is a beautiful way to quiet the mind.

John SmallMtn (00:27:43)

I’m sorry to step over you, but… depleting the body. I’ve never heard it phrased that way, but that idea of purposefully depleting this… I’m a word nerd, so when the right word is applied and it changes things, that’s a cool moment for me. Sorry to geek out, please continue.

Corey Hiben (00:27:50)

…to quiet the mind. Yeah, it’s been my experience with it anyway. It’s actually kind of how I got into running. I alluded to it earlier—I always thought running was the dumbest thing of all time. For probably roughly 20 years of my fitness journey, I’d never run. I thought it was silly, a waste of time. I was always predominantly in weight training and lifting weights. I competed in some bodybuilding stuff, and that was always my outlet.

Then running became a really great way to do exactly what I just mentioned—kind of depleting the body to quiet the mind. It gives me a space to notice my thoughts. It’s very meditative for me.

I want to say this with an asterisk caveat to anybody: I also think that fitness can equally be a distraction as well, depending upon who you are. I have found myself going on a run to not actually do the work that I should be doing, which is actually probably the thing that’s going to relieve the stress that I’m feeling. So it can very easily be a quote-unquote “healthy outlet” which actually isn’t solving the problem in your business that you really do need to solve to relieve that stress. I do want to say that caveat.

John SmallMtn (00:29:10)

Absolutely. My gosh, I love that, right? Because I’m a very routine-driven person and sometimes I will pick up bad habits that make me feel like I’m at least consistent, right? But consistency in the right ways is game-changing. Consistency in the wrong ways is just frustration. Avoidance is how I talk about it with my clients—where this thing that you normally wouldn’t do, but it’s part of your routine, becomes this looming thing, and we feel like we must go do this thing. Well, we might just be avoiding the real work that we should be doing. So we need to be able to not be so addicted to our routines that we’re in autopilot mode. We’ve got to be able to think outside the box.

Huge nugget, man. That’s awesome.

So, changing gears just a little bit: on your path inside of the agency, can I ask how many people work on your team now?

Corey Hiben (00:30:06)

Five. Five.

John SmallMtn (00:30:08)

Five, okay. Where have you had to adapt yourself the most in working and leading a team? Is there anything that stands out as the chronic mess-up or the thing that you wish you’d seen sooner?

Corey Hiben (00:30:23)

Control issues. I mean, God, yeah.

John SmallMtn (00:30:25)

Hahaha!

Corey Hiben (00:30:29)

I think this is the challenge of anyone who decides to walk this path. It’s so common. I definitely do not feel alone in this journey. Anyone who decides that they have the goal to try to build a business, freelance, do their own thing, build an empire, or whatever your dreams or ambitions are… it’s like you probably got into it because you already had control issues, didn’t want to have a boss, and wanted to control your life. As a result, the thing that made you go that direction is also going to be your Achilles’ heel in terms of learning how to not do all of the work.

It took me a long time to learn how to delegate. If I had to put a single statement around it: yeah, learning to delegate. That still continues to be the challenge, right? And it’s not uncommon when you look at all the greatest founders, at least that I admire. Most of them were perfectionists. Most of them want to hold on to things.

There’s exceptions. I think Richard Branson is an exception, where he’s the master of delegation, which is why he’s built so many different companies and why he has so many different empires. Because he realizes—one, because he’s dyslexic, but two, he’s learned that you can build so much more when you do it with other people. So, yeah, that continues to be the challenge: letting go.

John SmallMtn (00:31:37)

Did you, on your path… I talk with a lot of people, and when they start out, there’s no real aspirations to make it big, right? You know, “Let’s keep this as small as possible.” I’m curious, did you have a similar shift? Were you just trying to do a small solopreneur kind of thing, or maybe more of a lifestyle business, and then along the way it shifted? Or were you set from the jump of like, “Okay, there’s going to be a team, maybe some cool culture, and we’re trying to build something different”?

Corey Hiben (00:32:26)

Great question, man. I was unfortunately—or fortunately, I don’t know—sold the dream of solopreneurship. I don’t know if you got hooked into that clickbait dream, but I was very drawn to that as an introvert: this idea that I could build a successful business, whatever that means, whether it’s six figures or seven figures, without any other employees. I’m not saying that doesn’t exist—it definitely does, there’s definitely people that do it.

The problem is what most of them will not tell you: it’s really, really hard, and the crux of the entire business comes down to your ability to garner attention. That is the crux of the entire business. Basically, you can garner attention—whether it’s through writing, videos, social, newsletters, YouTube, podcasts, whatever—and then channel it typically towards online courses. Now I don’t even know what a lot of these people are selling, since there’s so much free information out there. I actually have no idea what their digital products are, but that was traditionally how that business model was sold. It was very attractive, and I was sold into it.

But it just requires such a specialized skill in being able to garner attention, which most people just can’t do. Since learning that that is really, really hard and takes a really, really long time… that’s the other thing people don’t realize: the ability to garner all that attention can oftentimes take four, five, maybe six years just to get the audience that you need to make it a sustainable business. I realized that wasn’t really the path for me, and I realized that I needed help, which was another huge, groundbreaking moment for me. Even the idea of needing help felt very vulnerable, I guess you could say.

John SmallMtn (00:34:15)

Yeah, it’s like a crack in the glass. Like, “Am I allowed to do this if I don’t know everything?” Right? It’s a bad weight to carry, for sure.

Corey Hiben (00:34:22)

Right, totally. All that to say, yeah, I had to learn how to ask for help, get things off my plate, and realize I can’t do everything. Now at this point, the dream has evolved. It’s changed from a solo business to basically a small team—that’s the most attractive thing for me. Based on a lot of the mentors that I follow and the other people that have built amazing businesses that I admire, most of them have basically said anything over roughly 12 people turns into kind of an HR challenge and you’re dealing with a whole different myriad of problems. That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun to me. Plus, you can very successfully build a seven-, sometimes eight-figure business with less than 12 people. That sounds attractive to me.

John SmallMtn (00:34:59)

Interesting. I like the thinking there a lot.

Was there a specific crack in the glass of the whole solopreneurship thing? For me, my portal—I don’t know when you first started to look over in this direction—for me it was like The 4-Hour Workweek, right? But the thing that I kept running into was that these people only ever learned the lesson after they were so pissed off and mad that they had to leave as a mental health kind of thing. Tim Ferriss talks about it, and then he’s like, “Oh, well, actually it was better when I wasn’t there all day, every day.”

I always try to caution people that that’s an end state. Trying to start that way, you’re probably going to be in part-timer mode, and you can’t be a founder in part-timer mode and really get momentum and traction. In my opinion, you have to decide you’re going to do it. But I think it’s always okay to be working to clean it up, make it tighter, and make it better.

I think the whole concept of “this can just be a hobby that is going to be fine for you” is a very comfortable poison to drink. That’s kind of how I think about it.

Corey Hiben (00:36:25)

Yeah, I think the crack in the glass for me was a business at the time called Design Joy—I think they’re still around. It was a solopreneur-type business, and it was pretty adjacent to what I was doing at the time, predominantly focusing on websites. The whole concept of the business was basically subscription-based, where somebody could pay a monthly fee and you got unlimited designs, essentially. He would do website designs, logo designs, and all those other things.

However, he was making, I’m pretty positive, seven figures based on how many subscriptions he had. It was a very premium-priced subscription. But what he wouldn’t tell you, or what most people wouldn’t tell you about his business model, was that essentially he was working 16-hour days every single day. Yeah, he was making a ton of money, but if he wasn’t the one designing for these people, he wasn’t making money. So when I saw that, I was like, “I don’t want to do that.”

I like design and I like building websites—it’s definitely one of the services that we offer—but the idea of scaling it to the point where you are the bottleneck and you are the person responsible for making the paychecks every single day… that’s stressful, man. That’s where I realized, “Okay, there’s got to be a better way.” That’s where I started tapping into bringing on a team and realizing that I don’t have to be the one doing everything within the business, even though this sexy solopreneurship thing sounded really sexy.

Honestly, most of the solopreneurship stuff comes from content creators, at the end of the day. People who are content creators is typically where you see it. What they don’t tell you is that they’re shackled to content creation: if they stop creating content, then their business revenue goes down. That’s just a lot of pressure, it can become exhausting, and that wasn’t what I wanted.

John SmallMtn (00:38:05)

I hope that people who are listening to this take that note, because it’s super easy to be reading even the people that are continuing to push this narrative and thinking, “Well, it’s going to be different for me.” Imagine carrying that weight and thinking that you’re the problem, when this is just way more multifaceted than what you got sold on when you were thinking that this was going to be easy.

Fascinating. So, changing topics just a little bit because I want to respect your time—I’ve got some rapid-fire questions for you here, Corey. When you’re thinking about a brand-new founder, since you work in the world of marketing, advertising, and search specifically, when someone is starting out, what would be your day-one advice when it comes to your lane of greatness? How can you set a brand-new founder up for success to get some motion, or at least be working in the right direction when they’re brand new?

Corey Hiben (00:39:17)

I would say it’s okay to change your mind. I think that’s where most of the people that I talk to get stuck: they think that once they make a decision on something, that’s what they have to do. They feel as if it’s going to pigeonhole them, or “What if this doesn’t work out?” or “What if this fails? I want to make sure I pick the right one.” There’s about a 99.9% chance that you’re going to pick wrong, and it’s okay to change your mind. There’s almost a 100% chance that you’re going to pivot. So I would say, it’s okay to change your mind, and don’t get so stuck on the first decision, because there’s no way you have all the data that you need to make the right decision.

John SmallMtn (00:39:55)

Man, I love that. Can you give an example of something in marketing or in your lane that someone would need to change their opinion on that maybe people struggle with?

Corey Hiben (00:40:08)

Yeah. This really comes down to the niching thing—I think that’s the easy example for people to wrap their head around. Here’s one I just had a conversation with: there’s a physical therapist—not an occupational therapist—and he saw what I did with my agency, so he kind of wanted to walk the same path. He was working in healthcare, realized he wanted to start his digital business, and work from home, as so many of us want to do.

He was initially working with, I think, other PTs. Then as he walked that path, he actually realized he didn’t like it as much as he thought he did. He completely pivoted to actually working with regenerative farms, of all things! Now he’s kind of niched down towards working with farmers. I don’t know how lucrative it is, I don’t know what that business model looks like, or if farmers pay good money—I have no idea. But he’s completely pivoted into working with farmers. Yeah, that’s a perfect example of how you can always change your mind.

John SmallMtn (00:41:01)

At the beginning of the interview, you were like, “This is not a thing I want to care about. I want to care about this thing,” right? One of my favorite people, Dan, has this line that folksy wisdom ends up making sense to us. I used to hate the line, “If you do something you love, you never work a day in your life.” I hated that line. I thought it was something bubbly people just said to themselves whenever they were trying to sell themselves on the fact that they’d like to work and everything.

I know a lot of people, especially in the advertising niche—because that’s where I spent a bunch of time myself before this business—and they would go pick a niche just based upon, “Well, dentists sure do seem to charge a lot, so let me just go focus on dentists.” Man, if you don’t like dentists, that’s going to be a nightmare. The money is never enough in that kind of situation.

Alignment with the people carries us so much further than, “Well, better be an eight-figure company because I hate these scumbags.” You’ve missed some very important forks on the path if that’s what you’re trying to sell yourself on when it’s your business. Why would you make something you hate when it’s yours and you have all the decision-making capability on the planet? It just doesn’t make any sense to me. But when you’re new and you’re more scared to fail than you are scared to try… “Well, they seem to charge a lot of money, and attorneys can probably pay a lot for marketing. So let me just go focus over here,” and not, “Do we think we can serve these people? Are we going to be excited to help these people? Are they going to listen to us?” It’s so easy to make it harder than it has to be just from the jump, because we’re doing the math badly is how I talk about it with people.

Corey Hiben (00:42:48)

I don’t think most people realize that you can pretty much make a million-dollar business on almost any niche, also. Here’s an example that most people don’t think about: I remember hearing about—I don’t know if you knew this, but fun fact—there is an industry of salt and pepper shaker collectors. How crazy is that? That’s a thing, that’s a niche. I’d be willing to bet there’s a million-dollar business hidden in there somewhere. I don’t know exactly what the business model looks like or how that plays out, but that’s an industry.

Another one that I’ll give you as well—my fiance and I just watched a documentary on this, it’s fascinating—Pez dispensers. A super lucrative industry actually, especially back in its heyday when everyone was trying to get them out of Russia, I believe is where they came from. But yeah, it’s like there’s a million-dollar business hidden in there.

Technically, there’s no niche too small, depending upon what your ambitions are. Don’t get me wrong: if you’re looking to go the billion-dollar route, that’s a different conversation. There’s probably very few that can walk that route. But if you’re just trying to make seven figures—which most people would be very happy with seven figures—there’s really no niche too small, in my opinion.

John SmallMtn (00:43:45)

Agreed, 100%.

Dude, I’m so glad that you said that. First of all, my wife, who’s going to edit this, is a salt and pepper shaker collector. They always have to be super kitschy and animals, and if they nestle together, it’s game over. She goes thrifting for them. People are now buying them for us, and we’re running out of space, so that is just hilarious.

Honestly, I take the same opinion: there’s a niche for literally everything. There’s an audience for everything. I didn’t always believe that; I had to spend a bunch of time in marketing groups and with people like Noah Kagan for that stuff to sink in. But now it’s like, don’t go try to fight in a space you’re not excited to take up. If you do get there, take up the space meaningfully—have some opinions and have some things that matter to you, because that’s what people want. If you’re working in this kind of space where your knowledge and ability is helping them grow or helping them improve, we need deeper alignment than if you’re just selling a product to somebody.

Fast-forwarding a little bit: when you think about all the business advice, all the tweets, all the posts—SEO is dead, AI is a thing, and everything—what is the thing that you see touted the most that you disagree with the most? What’s your least favorite popular business advice that’s a tweet?

Corey Hiben (00:45:33)

Yeah, you kind of alluded to it. I’ve been noticing it even more after our previous conversation, especially on YouTube. If you start paying attention to thumbnails, it feels like everything’s dead. Literally insert any topic, whether it’s social media, SEO, ads, driving cars, or name your thing—it’s like, “This thing is dead.”

It’s like, “Nah, it’s not.” Are things changing? Are things evolving? Is there always nuance? Are people going to have to pivot and adapt? Are new skills going to have to be learned? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But none of them are dead. Stop saying everything’s dead. That’s beginning to drive me nuts. The more I talk about it and the more I think about it, the more I’m noticing it on thumbnails and posts.

I get why people do it: when you put a stake in the sand, plant your flag, and say this thing, it gets people’s attention, they watch, and it’s clickbait. I get why people do it. I’m a marketer, I fully understand it. But it also annoys the hell out of me.

John SmallMtn (00:46:43)

Yeah, the same. I’ll be on LinkedIn—LinkedIn is where I try to spend most of my social time—and it’ll be, “Cold calling is dead,” and then it’ll be, “Inbound marketing is dead.” You can almost just set your clock by it.

What I always think is funny is I’ll go look at that person who’s making this very polarizing post, and it’s always level one, right? Let’s call out the frustration and make someone else the bad guy, which is just standard rhetoric and persuasion plays. But when you know too much and you just see it everywhere, God, it makes you the worst person to hang out with for people that haven’t seen that stuff for themselves yet. I tell everybody, “You don’t want my opinion on your marketing or any marketing you love, because it’s probably going to be very different than yours, because I spend all the time looking at this stuff.” Gosh, yeah, I love that.

When you think about now—because you’ve been in the space for a while, you’ve made some progress, you’ve built a team, and you’ve gotten out of some of the traps and the thinking that wasn’t serving you and wasn’t working towards your goals—what would be your piece of advice for someone who’s starting today in the environment we’re in now? With your knowledge and experience, and some of the things not going according to plan, what would you advise someone who’s taking action on their first day today?

Corey Hiben (00:48:12)

God, I’d be using AI so much. The amount of time that that is involved in my business now is unbelievable. I don’t even mean from the standpoint of how most people use it. Most people use Version 1.0, which is writing emails, copywriting, or sending a bunch of cold DM messages. That’s how Version 1.0 of most people are using it.

The way that I would be using it—and am using it, and would suggest anybody getting into any industry uses it—is as the world’s greatest consultant. I’ll give you a very precise example of how I use it on a regular basis. I’ve been doing weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly reviews for a number of years. Ever since AI platforms like Gemini and ChatGPT came around, I have started uploading the document that I use for these regular reviews into a specific chat, and I’m having it give me feedback, notice trends, and notice what I should or should not be working on, essentially.

It has been a game-changer for me. It has short-tracked so much wasted time and energy, and so many pitfalls that I should not have been doing even now today. I’m by no means where I want to be in my business, and there’s still plenty of lessons to learn. Having this as a regular consultant to give me feedback… just this past week I was telling it, “These are the three goals that I wanted to accomplish this week. These are the things that we’re moving towards. These are some of the tasks I’m going to work on.” It was basically like, “Yo, based on what your actual projections are and what you actually want to do, one or two of these are actually probably just a distraction and a complete waste of time. You should actually probably be doing this thing.” It was right. It was spot on. It was pointing out my blind spots and being like, “Actually, those tasks are kind of a waste of time. They’re not the actual bottleneck of the business at this moment. I should be focusing all my resources on this one specifically. Anything else is a distraction.”

I was like, “That’s amazing.” I would not have gotten that before. I would have had to walk that path, make the mistakes, realize I got no return on it, and then pivot. Now I can short-track a lot of that. That’s the number one thing I would say to anybody getting into the space.

John SmallMtn (00:50:33)

I love that. Diving into that a little bit: change is difficult, and admitting that we’re less than perfect is also difficult for humans to do. There was a stage in my development where I got really into time blocking. Even though I’m a pretty regimented guy and very routine-driven, I felt like I was essentially signing my life and freedom away, that I was just going to become this robot, and I was oddly resistant to it. Now, since I don’t have to hold space for that, I can hold space for other things, and I’m better. But there’s this getting comfortable with how bad of knowledge keepers and time guessers we are.

How would you recommend someone, if they’re new to AI and maybe don’t have all the levels of awareness that you do… how would you advise a brand-new founder to not do the thing where they think that they’re perfect and everyone else is the problem, in order to use AI for that level of good?

Corey Hiben (00:51:50)

Yeah, I think that comes back to a meta-skill more than anything, right? You nailed it in terms of awareness. I spend an obscene amount of time walking, meditating, being alone with my thoughts, sitting in a sauna, and just ruminating through things without any sort of stimuli. I think the meta-skill there is self-awareness around knowing yourself well enough to know when you are just spinning your wheels, wasting your time, or wasting your energy.

The AI thing has played into it in the sense of being the still person in control, and having the awareness of what is the right or wrong direction with gentle guidance from a platform that has more knowledge than I’ll ever have in my entire life. I think that’s where I’ve found that balance. Cause you’re right: if somebody is a little more ADHD and they get caught in every rabbit hole, it could be dangerous for them.

John SmallMtn (00:52:39)

There’s a beautiful moment in time when you’re using these tools and you say, “Now wait a minute—interview me. Where am I screwed up on this thing? Is this a good piece of content? Is this a good DM?” Because if you’re using it for all that lower-level stuff and thinking, “Now I don’t have to hire contractors, I can just use AI to do all this stuff that I don’t want to do,” you’re probably still not thinking, “Please interview me so we can do these things.” That’s a really cool season of your own development and path, of just realizing that while you have ideas, everything you don’t know you’re just going to make worse through these tools, because it just amplifies everything.

How do you keep yourself in the loop, versus thinking that your job is to make sure that the loop is perfect based upon your ideas and thinking? Do you have any tricks?

Corey Hiben (00:53:53)

The one thing I didn’t mention as well is that I have two mentors that also very much help keep me on track and make sure that the train is riding in the right direction. One of them I meet every two weeks on Friday for like a half an hour. It’s very routine for him to… actually just happened this last week, where we were going over some of the Google Ads that we were running for a client, and he was straight up like, “This is Problem Number One. This is something that needs to be at the top of the list of what you guys should be working on at this moment.”

So I guess that’s the other guardrail, because at the end of the day, we do get caught in our own echo chamber, right? I get what you’re saying, that AI could only amplify that echo chamber. So how do you break free from that? It’s probably the combination of mentors, spending time alone, walking, meditating, and breaking free from some of those echo chambers. Those are probably the biggest things that I’ve been doing.

John SmallMtn (00:55:00)

What I noticed was leaving some of the communities that I was so excited to be in actually unlocked some thinking and room for growth. It was actually very helpful. While I’m a big fan of community—sounds like you are as well—we need the right community. Sometimes it’ll hold us back, even though it’s well-intentioned, because it’s just not the right thing for us. I love that.

Corey, I want to be super respectful of your time, man. I really appreciate you coming in here and doing this. I really think that people who take the time to listen to this are going to get some great value out of it. If someone wanted to check out you, your brand, and what you’re working on, where would you send them?

Corey Hiben (00:55:43)

I am disgustingly active on LinkedIn, so feel free to find me there. I treat LinkedIn as if it’s my personal diary, so if anybody wants to find me on there, I’m pretty disgustingly active. Other than that, I have coreyhi.com—that’s my personal website—or chiroxmarketing.com is my business website. But those are probably the best places.

John SmallMtn (00:56:02)

Awesome. Thank you so much for doing this, man. I really appreciate it.

Corey Hiben (00:56:09)

Yeah, thanks man.