The catalog was on a client’s desk: artificial stone veneer, manufactured to look like the real thing. Jeff Heggie was sitting across from the man, doing his job as a bank branch manager in Cardston, Alberta, and he saw a business in it.
That conversation, sometime around 2005, led to him leaving banking, partnering with a man named Dal Zemp, and co-founding Kodiak Mountain Stone. They opened a production facility in Cardston and a second factory in Springville, Utah. Over roughly 16 years, according to Heggie, the company expanded into retail locations and broadened its product range to include natural stone, brick, and acrylic stucco. He spent those years working through what running a manufacturing business actually requires: team building, hiring, managing through economic downturns, developing sales systems, and keeping an operation going when conditions stop cooperating.
That kind of experience is hard to simulate. It is also, Heggie would argue, exactly what useful coaching needs to be built on.
Before Kodiak Mountain Stone, he had worked up to branch manager at ATB Financial, where he spent time with farming and business clients across rural Alberta, watching real people run real operations. He had graduated with a major in entrepreneurship and now had something more practical: a working view of how businesses actually behaved under pressure.
Parallel to all of this, sport. Heggie grew up in Southern Alberta playing hockey, football, baseball, and basketball, and competed for years as a professional rodeo cowboy. He later spent more than 20 years coaching basketball, including at American Leadership Academy in Arizona. Coaching gave him a sustained lens on how people perform under pressure, and what he kept observing was the same pattern in athletes that he had seen in business owners. Consistent performance was less about natural ability than about a specific set of habits: how someone talked to themselves, how they prepared, how they responded when things went wrong.
The athletes who performed consistently had built those habits deliberately. The ones who struggled were still treating confidence as something they either had or didn’t.
That observation became the foundation for The Confident Athlete Program, which Heggie co-created with Tami Matheny, a mental game coach, author, and speaker who works with coaches, athletes, and teams. The program addresses the mental side of athletic performance directly: self-talk, body language, visualization, and the practice of building confidence through deliberate preparation and follow-through. The two co-creators also wrote Challenger Deep: Athletes Rising Above Adversity, published in February 2024. The book collects 30 short stories of elite athletes working through serious adversity, with reflection questions and practical action steps throughout. It is built as a working document, not a collection of inspirational highlights.
For Jeff Heggie Coaching, the gap between athlete coaching and entrepreneur coaching is a short one. Both require sustained performance under pressure, consistent follow-through without external accountability, and the ability to respond constructively when results don’t match effort. Through the Entrepreneur Coaching Group and one-on-one work, Heggie helps business owners and entrepreneurial professionals build what he describes as an “optimal performing entrepreneur” practice, a concept that covers business performance alongside success in relationships, health, and personal development. He is skeptical of coaching frameworks that treat business growth as something separate from the rest of a person’s life.
Part of his current practice centers on working with people who want to build a business in the health and wellness sector. He is direct that this work is not built on shortcuts: his emphasis is on the systems, habits, and skills that a sustainable business requires, developed through consistent daily actions over time. The 4 Week Win Challenge, an accountability and personal development program he runs, concentrates specifically on this gap between intention and follow-through, helping participants build effective daily routines over a focused 28-day cycle.
His podcasts run alongside the coaching work. The Daily Success Strategies podcast addresses practical entrepreneurship and performance topics. The Challenger Deep: Athletes Rising Above Adversity podcast, co-hosted with Matheny, extends the themes from their book into ongoing conversations about resilience and competitive mindset.
The phrase Heggie uses for what he is working toward with his clients is “a life of abundant choice,” which he describes as having the confidence and resources to make decisions based on purpose rather than limitation. It connects, in his account, directly to what he learned across 16 years of manufacturing operations: that what someone is capable of is almost always a function of what they have built, one consistent day at a time.
