Chris Kulbaba: Your Invisible Mentor
Interviewee Name: Chris Kulbaba, Career and Employment Counsellor, Public Speaker
Company Name: London Employment Help Centre
Website: http://linkedinheavyweight.com
Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Chris Kulbaba: I consider myself to be first and foremost a family man so that’s really my focus. I have six children between my partner and I so family is very important. The next thing is that I consider myself to be a helper and a collector. I was told very recently that I collect people and information, and I thought that was a very appropriate description of me. And the last thing is I consider myself to be a social media fanatic – I love that stuff.
Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?
Chris Kulbaba: A Monday to Friday typical day means getting up at six o’clock, taking my two dogs out to do their business, then having my breakfast while I’m updating and connecting with all my social media channels. I usually leave the house at 7:45 am, so it’s about an hour in the morning that I am doing social media. A day at work is never truly typical however because I do several things: I facilitate workshops, I do individual counselling, I also do group intakes, and I teach several different workshops.
So day-to-day I could be in a workshop, or doing personal counselling, or writing resumes, or doing resume practice, or discussing life skills with clients. So in that mix of items I see clients until about 4:30, from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm is my regular work hours, then of course I come home and I like to have dinner at home. I like to talk to my family and see what their day is like and somewhere between 9 and 10 pm usually for a half-an-hour to 45 minutes I am updating and connecting on social media.
That’s what I do Mondays to Fridays! Saturdays I try to set aside some time for my blogging, usually for an hour in the morning before anyone gets up.
Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?
Chris Kulbaba: When I looked at the questions, believe it or not this was the hardest one I found to answer. I try to empathize with all of my clients because I was also a job seeker several times and I remember the feelings that came with that position. So the most important thing for me is to sit myself in my client’s shoes when I’m dealing with a client, and I try to do that with many of my network contacts. I try to imagine what I can help them with, and who do I know that can help them.
Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
Chris Kulbaba: I have asked myself this question several times. And I don’t know if I would do too many things differently because the mistakes I’ve made have helped to shape my attitude, my beliefs, and my goals so knowing what I now know I would honestly say that I wouldn’t do much differently. I am who I am because of the struggles that I’ve had so I don’t know if I would do anything differently if I could still come out the other end knowing what I know and feeling what I feel and believing what I believe. I might have stayed in school a bit longer for more formal education, if I had to choose one thing that would be it.
Avil Beckford: What's the most important business or other discovery you've made in the past year?
Chris Kulbaba: I discovered the true impact that social media can have. A quick story, in the past year I’ve helped people become Canadian citizens from India that had reached out to me through LinkedIn and that was pretty significant that I could do that for them for free. That was a very significant discovery I made about the true scope and reach of these tools. It’s a global tool.
Avil Beckford: What are the three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?
Chris Kulbaba:
- I work for a community service agency so one of the threats to that particular business is the impact of the economic crisis. We are having a very difficult time helping our clients find jobs. One of the strategies we are using is networking actively with employers to try to understand what they are looking for in a job seeker so that we can further help to coach our clients to be successful.
- Another threat that is coming to my personal business – The LinkedIn Heavyweight, the things I’m doing with LinkedIn – is the challenge to show other people, how effective it is and unfortunately social media is not a silver bullet. So after actively using this tool for several years now and learning, changing and strategizing, I’m finally able to point to specific successes that I’ve made through network contacts through social media, then I’m further bringing other people in front of me explaining to them, “this is some of the impact that this communication tool can have.”
- The final threat is having people challenge me when they do not get immediate results, they point that out. Again I have to come back to the fact that social media and communicating and networking in this way is an organic process and like anything organic, you need to nurture and feed it. So the first thing I now do with clients at the beginning is ask them a few quick questions such as: What is your end goal, what do you want to accomplish? How much time are you willing to commit to this? and How are you going to nurture and feed your network so that it grows into a vibrant organism.
Avil Beckford: So Chris, have you gotten any business through LinkedIn?
Chris Kulbaba: Absolutely, it hasn’t been business in the sense that I’m making a profit, so when I say that I’m having business through LinkedIn, I’ve been able to interact with several different people and give them very pointed feedback to increasing the effectiveness of their LinkedIn profile. So at this point as I’m strategizing my own business I’m doing some A, B, C testing so I’m trying Strategy A, Strategy B and so on to see which one is generating the results I want. So at this point, my definition of business and my definition of success are measured by the number of referrals that I’m getting from these first few clients. I’ve made some profit but it’s quite negligible at this point. My goal wasn’t to make a profit, it was to determine the saturation of what I can offer inside the market, to see if people want to buy. The answer so far is yes.
Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?
Chris Kulbaba: What’s unique is that I bring it forward to job seekers and I help them to envision themselves through a different lens. So utilizing social media as a broadcasting platform for your personal brand is one part of it, but it’s also determining your features and benefits. So what I do is use the analogy of a car. When you bought your last car did you buy it because it has four wheels, windows, doors and a trunk, you probably didn’t buy it for those features because they are on every car. Maybe you bought the car because the design was what you wanted, maybe you bought it because of the heated seats, there is a feature that attracted you to that car that’s unique, and then the benefits to those features. So maybe the car was a nice colour, and it was a nice design. Job seekers are the same, as a person you have a feature, so how does that benefit the employer? How can you tell people about the features that you have and the benefits to them. How can you engage them in conversation about your features and benefits?
Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?
Chris Kulbaba: The major challenge I had in life was figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I worked in a factory for 16 years and I didn’t realize that I could do something different. I was making good money and I had full benefits and I thought that was as good as it was going to get, and then the factory closed and I was very lost and very hurt.
I met some people form the community services and I fell into the world of career development, and not only that, I learned that I had a natural aptitude for the work and that it was just so rewarding and enriching to help people solve pain that I was experiencing and that I had experienced, and for me that was a huge challenge to figure out what I wanted to be and how I wanted to do it.
I started off with information interviews. I had never written a resume until my mid-thirties because every job I had had until then was through a family member. The major challenge was how to write a resume when I’m here trying to help people write resumes and I don’t know how to write one myself. So I had to figure out what I wanted to do. As Coordinator of the Action Centre, which the government funded under contract after the business closed, I was able to network and learn and I was also able to define myself slowly as a career development practitioner. I was also slowly able to create a niche for myself in this industry by listening, investigating and taking action through a strategic process. I’d say it took me two years of effort to fully immerse myself into this sector to feel comfortable in it.
Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.
Chris Kulbaba: I would have to say my big break was Coordinator of the Action Centre. A mentor, the HR manager was advocating for me to get that position. That was a huge break and it really set me up for everything that has happened in the last four-and-a-half years.
Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?
Chris Kulbaba: My biggest failure in my life was my marriage. It takes two to make it and it takes two to break it. So what I learned out of that was any relationship, whether it’s personal or professional is going to wither and die if you don’t feed it. If you do not use the F word once in a while, and that is feedback, you have to ask the other person are they getting what they need and then you have to decide if you can or can’t provide it. When I started to apply those lessons, and I still stumble and fall, I learned that nurturing a relationship is a lot of effort and a lot of work but of course the more you put into it the more you are going to get out of it whether it’s personal or professional.
Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?
Chris Kulbaba: The toughest decision I had to make was to leave the Action Centre and start looking for other work. I was running the Action Centre helping people, some of them had high school, some of them were in their fifties and had a grade nine education. They were looking to me to help them and their families. As I looked around the Action Centre and tried to ask other people to take part of the role that I was doing nobody was willing to do it. I had a very difficult decision about stepping out of that role so that I could provide for myself and family while at the same time trying to train a successor and trying to ensure that everyone was still getting the quality service they needed. It was very, very difficult.
Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?
Chris Kulbaba:
- The first event happened when I was just a young person. I was 15 years old and we were on vacation in the Cayman Islands and I learned of my thirst for travel and other cultures, how deep it was within me simply by experiencing a wonderful place that was so different from my own. So very early on I had a real desire to learn about cultures, different places and to visit other places.
- Another event was failing university, and when I say failing, it’s not failing academically. I failed to choose education-wise a career path that was right for me. In university I had taken music education. At the age of fourteen I was playing with the London Youth Symphony, at aged 16, I was invited to play with the Western Symphony Orchestra, so I thought this makes sense and I didn’t really investigate it. When I got to university and started taking the schooling, in the middle of it I realized it was a really bad decision, this isn’t something I should have done.
- The third moment that really impacted my entire life was when I insulted a friend of mine. We were at the factory working the night shift and he was doing day trading, real estate and he was working at the factory. So I said to him, “Why are you at the factory, you really do not belong here?” He was very angry and turned to me and said, “Who the hell are you to tell me that I do not belong? What are you doing to improve your life?” I thought about what he said and he was right, so for the next 11 years I took continuing education courses at college and university.
Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?
Chris Kulbaba: This may sound a bit hokey, but I’m really proud of my children. That’s a big accomplishment for me to listen when we’re discussing life decisions and hear how they rationalize their decisions, and to hear their values and to see their interactions with other people. They are polite, very intelligent, that’s a huge accomplishment to me to know that as a father and a parent I have helped them to make good decisions.
Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?
Chris Kulbaba: They are still mentoring and still influencing my life. It was a very difficult process because I was being mentored without knowing that I was being mentored by several people. And when I finally stopped pushing against the flow of information and I started to accept and embrace it that was when the true learning began. Since then I have tried to use my ear twice as much as my mouth, something I still struggle with. The return on that investment by my mentors has been enormous. One of the other influences of mentors is one of my mentors telling me that I can mentor other people.
Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?
Chris Kulbaba: There are four people I would consider as mentors and the biggest message I received is to stop getting in my own way.
Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?
Chris Kulbaba: Always walk you talk. If you are going to say that something is important then that’s the way you should behave.
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