Career Relaunch®
Joseph Liu
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Uncovering Hidden Blessings with Ben Kuhl- CR109
All sorts of setbacks can come up during your career. You narrowly miss landing your dream job. You get put on a project you don’t love. You have a horrible manager. You go through a round of budget cuts. You have a family emergency come up. You have a sudden health issue. Or you realise you’ve taken the wrong job. We all experience disappointments, stressors, or unexpected twists and turns in our career that test our resilience, patience, and fortitude. Career setbacks can’t be avoided. No matter how well you plan things out, stuff comes up, and your ability to navigate and manage those setbacks will make the difference between you getting stuck in a rut or bouncing back to find a better way forward. In this episode of the Career Relaunch® podcast, Ben Kuhl, a sports and events hospitality management professional turned woodworking, shelf-making craftsman shares his thoughts on his shift from white-collar to blue-collar work, and I also share some thoughts on the hidden blessings behind career setbacks. 💡 Key Career Insights We all experience setbacks in our careers, and your ability to accept, embrace, and manage them can make the difference between getting stuck in a rut and opening a new, more promising chapter in your career. While career disappointments are inevitable, sometimes, they’re blessings in disguise that enable you to recalibrate and relaunch yourself down a more fulfilling professional path. The past roles you’ve had, even those that felt like a poor fit, can play a critical role in your career evolution. You never know how your past experiences will show up again and assist you in your future career. 💪🏼Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of recognising and embracing career setbacks as an opportunity to shift your career in a new direction. Consider a situation in your own career you’ve found stressful, unsettling, or disappointing. Then, think about what this experience may be telling you about what’s truly important to you at this moment in your life and career. What’s one step you could take in the new year to honor that priority and move yourself in a more promising direction? 📖 Episode Chapters 00:00:00 Overview 00:01:07 Introduction: Career Setbacks 00:03:12 Ben Kuhl’s Career Journey 00:37:08 Mental Fuel®: Blessings in Disguise 00:45:03 Listener Challenge: Identify Career Setback’s Upside 00:45:32 Wrap Up 👤 About Ben Kuhl Ben Kuhl initially built his career in sport management and hospitality, gaining experience in operations, events, and client service. After getting laid off from his most recent role in product management, he launched Shelf Expression, a Charlotte woodworking brand specializing in custom, high-end floating shelves and mantels. His background gives him a unique edge in blending business strategy with hands-on craftsmanship. Today, his shelves ship nationwide while maintaining a focus on quality and design. Learn more about Ben’s work on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and be sure to check out Ben’s Etsy store. 👍🏻 Did You Enjoy This Episode? Please Let Us Know! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Follow: Be sure to follow the Career Relaunch® podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow the Career Relaunch® podcast on Facebook and LinkedIn. You can also follow host Joseph on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Threads, and Bluesky. 💬 Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners! Leave Joseph a Voicemail You can also leave a comment below. Thanks! 🙏🏻 Thanks to Vista Social for Supporting Career Relaunch Vista Social is a versatile, time-saving tool to manage all your social media accounts in one place. You can easily create, schedule, optimise, and publish content directly to multiple social media profiles from one simple dashboard. I actually use it myself to manage all my online profiles. 📄 Episode Transcript [00:03:22] Joseph: Okay, well let’s just start off by getting a lay of the land. What’s happening in your current life right now? Like what’s been keeping you busy both personally and professionally? [00:03:33] Ben: I own my own business. Started a woodworking business back in the beginning of 2020, right before Covid. And ever since then, things have just absolutely exploded with work. So my woodworking business, I primarily focus on floating shelves and mantles. And yeah, things in 2020 just exploded and it’s just snowballed from there. So my life right now is woodworking out of my little two car garage and my family. So my wife, I have two kids, a nine year old and seven year old. So trying to figure out the balance between working from home, you know, on nights and weekends and also trying to be there for my kids is primarily what takes up most of my life at the moment. So maybe in a half hour for scrolling on Instagram before bed. But mainly those things. [00:04:17] Joseph: It’s interesting when you’re running your own business. It’s kind of a balance between running your business, making sure you’re still spending time with your kids, making sure you have time to actually rest here and there, and also just have some downtime to just mentally check out a little bit, because I know it can be all consuming to run your own business. Can I hear a little bit more about the types of woodworking that you do at Shelf Expression, which is the name of your business? [00:04:43] Ben: I started the business back, like I said, end of 2019, beginning of 2020, just making generic floating shelves to help pay for childcare, any additional unforeseen bills that came up and posted those on Etsy and they really took off. Then March of 2020 lockdown happened. Everybody was at home. They were redecorating their homes. They were trying to figure out how to bring a little bit more life into their office or their home offices. When everybody was at home in lockdown and things exploded. So right now I focus 95% on making floating shelves. It’s almost don’t really like to say that I’m a woodworker, because it’s one of the most, I wouldn’t say boring aspects of woodworking, but it’s shelf making. So I love being able to get creative and try to figure out different ways that I can keep my mind fresh on making the shelves as I go along. But yeah, 95% of my woodworking is making high end floating shelves and then also fireplace mantels, so hopefully continue to grow. [00:05:45] Joseph: Well, I do want to come back to your time now as a shelf. I’m just going to call it a shelf craftsman. [00:05:51] Ben: There you go. [00:05:52] Joseph: Perfect. Yeah, I actually have some questions about shelves for you, which we can come back to later. But exactly. I do want to go back to your time before working in this space. And you used to work as an event manager and eventually as a director of product management for Sports Hospitality Company. But before we get to that, I’d love to hear a little bit more about you and just where you grew up. And I guess specifically, what do you remember being interested in during your childhood days? [00:06:23] Ben: So I grew up in north central Ohio, right on Lake Erie, about 45 minutes west of Cleveland on a farm. So my childhood was always helping my dad out on the farm. When I was younger, as I got a little bit older it was more sports. So being involved in basketball and football and baseball, as I did through middle school and high school in the summers, waking up at five in the morning and picking sweet corn and being covered in pollen and always having that little bit of a blue collar mentality behind, you know, seeing my dad come home at 8:00 at night and being out for 14 to 16 hours drove home with me. The how important work ethic is to being successful and being a, you know, a son of a farmer really taught me that. You know, unfortunately, a lot of times, no matter how hard you work, you often aren’t as successful as you could be, especially in farming, because there are so many variables that play into being successful, like weather and markets and soil conditions, and seeing him work his tail off and being upset that it hadn’t rained in a month. Or maybe it’s rained five inches over the last two days, and knowing that your yield was going to suffer because of that really made me start to think about, you know, maybe carrying on the family farm isn’t something that I had as much interest in as I did when I was a kid. So that’s when once I started transitioning to being more involved in sports in the city I grew up in, started thinking about more about going off to college and getting a degree and getting out of north central Ohio. You know, my parents are so prevalent through my upbringing and the instilling of work your tail off and hopefully good things will happen. At least it’ll set you up to have a positive outcome for the rest of your life if you work hard. [00:08:24] Joseph: As you may recall, when we first chatted, I actually grew up in Ohio, also myself. I spent about age 2 to 6 in Hamilton, Ohio. I grew up in a very not fully rural, but it certainly wasn’t in an urban area like you mentioned. Very blue collar, very kind of ordinary. I would say life, but it does instill you with a lot of good values and good work ethic. Now you would eventually go on to Ohio University and you ended up studying sports and Fitness Administration. You did mention that there was, at least I guess, a potential consider
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