#starting a business #self-employment
"How are your projects going?" We spoke regularly on the phone, and he sounded relaxed when he said, "I'm happy. Could be more, but it's ok". That was a good message. A year ago, it had seemed very different. We knew each other from before when he came to me for coaching. "Is this a problem for you?" he had asked me very directly. And I had answered him that we were both professional enough to deal with it. Coaching needs closeness and distance at the same time. And it became clear quite quickly in our work together that we got on well together.

Mr. Karbach was in his early fifties and the sales manager of a media company. There had been friction between him and his new boss for a while. The latter understood little about the industry and had a completely different view of distribution. In addition, the media industry was under increasing pressure and it was becoming more and more difficult to achieve sales targets. The demands of the boss became more and more of a mission impossible. And so, in the end, it came to a rather unpleasant separation, which put a lot of strain on my coachee at first.

This had a lasting effect, and our biographical work quickly revealed that there was a lot to be done. We worked out his strengths and weaknesses, talked in detail about his successes, but also about what had gone wrong, and above all about what he really enjoyed.

And it turned out that he had grown into the subject of sales through various jobs, rather randomly determined by job opportunities and always out of a certain pressure to earn enough money to support his family. That was the starting point of our goal-setting discussion. We had worked out that his greatest opportunities were, of course, in the sales environment, but that his talents lay elsewhere.

I asked him: "What if you were to imagine following what you are passionate about and what was the starting point for your studies and first work experience?

He had studied design, worked in that field at first, and then it had developed differently. He looked at me and said, "That would be nice, of course, but that was so long ago. How am I going to make enough money doing that to pay for all my expenses?" I remembered a quote from Seneca and said, "It is not because it is hard that we dare not do it, but because we dare not do it that it is hard," and let the phrase work.

There was a little pause. Then he replied, "Yeah, if I were 30 again, maybe I could. Now, with all the responsibilities, house, family, kids in college, how would that work?" I grabbed another cup of coffee, poured him one too, and just said, "You have to want it, and we need a plan. Think about it calmly. Talk it over with your wife. We can discuss the subject between the three of us then. And if it's an opti- on you want to consider, then I will guide you to the point where you can decide if you want to go that way."

That's what happened. Even though the following process was always accompanied by fears and doubts and there were many critical points to overcome, also financially, we worked continuously on the realization of his idea: An agency for communication and design with its own design line. In this way, he was able to ideally combine his creativity with his hard-earned sales strength in his new business, soon received his first orders and gained more and more confidence in his own abilities.

It was shortly before Christmas in the year of the foundation when he called me. He sounded enthusiastic: "I have reached my target figures exactly". I was delighted, and since then we have talked regularly on the phone, and I felt my joy and security grow from time to time.