When the American housing market collapsed in 2008, Jeff Heggie was three years into running a manufactured stone company with factories in two countries.
The company was Kodiak Mountain Stone. He had co-founded it in 2005, leaving a branch manager position at ATB Financial in Cardston, Alberta, where he had spent years working with farmers and business clients, watching how entrepreneurs made decisions when markets did not cooperate. Now it was his turn to find out. New home construction had slowed sharply across the American market. The team at Kodiak Mountain Stone assessed where the remaining opportunity was and found that renovation work was holding up better than new builds. They redirected their focus. The Cardston factory, already struggling with a limited local labor pool, was closed. Operations consolidated around a more automated facility in Springville, Utah. None of those decisions came with a guarantee, and there was no time to wait for one.
The company did not fold.
Heggie ran Kodiak Mountain Stone for approximately 16 years in total, steering it from a manufacturing operation through an expansion into retail and a broader shift into distribution and supply. Spotlight on Business Magazine profiled the company during that period, documenting how it evolved from a stone veneer manufacturer into a wider supplier of masonry products to homebuilders and homeowners across North America.
He went through business cycles that did not consult his plans. That experience, Heggie says, is where his coaching practice actually comes from.
Jeff Heggie Coaching works with entrepreneurs, leaders, and athletes across a range of programs and individual engagements. Heggie’s own background spans more than two decades in business, with experience in manufacturing, real estate, financial services, and consulting, by his own account. As he outlines his approach, lasting performance depends on the right mindset and workable daily systems, built to function during the stretches when motivation runs thin. He made payroll through a recession. The framework he teaches is not hypothetical.
A significant part of his current work involves helping people with entrepreneurial inclinations build a business in the health and wellness sector, whether alongside an existing career or as something grown over time. The pitch is not easy promises. The emphasis is preparation, honest assessment of priorities, and the daily habits that any real business actually runs on. He works particularly with business owners, coaches, and health and fitness professionals who want to apply their existing experience and relationships to building something of their own.
The athlete side of his practice runs through The Confident Athlete Program, which Heggie co-founded with mental performance coach Tami Matheny. The program addresses the mental dimensions of competitive sport, covering topics from self-talk and body language to the preparation habits and visualization work that Heggie and Matheny believe determine how far an athlete actually goes. Heggie has coached basketball at various levels for more than twenty years, he says, and spent time earlier in his career as a professional rodeo cowboy. He is not describing competitive pressure from the outside.
He and Matheny co-authored Challenger Deep: Athletes Rising Above Adversity, a book built around accounts of athletes who have worked through significant obstacles in their sports. The argument underneath it is one Heggie applies broadly: that how someone responds to adversity matters more than whether they face it.
The 4 Week Win Challenge, another program in the Jeff Heggie Coaching lineup, runs over four weeks and centers on accountability and consistent follow-through on individual routines. The premise is the same one that runs through everything Heggie teaches: that the commitments a person keeps or abandons on an ordinary day are the actual mechanics of progress, not the single dramatic decision.
Heggie describes his broader goal as helping people build what he calls “a life of abundant choice,” meaning the confidence and resources to make decisions based on purpose rather than what circumstances force on them. He hosts two podcasts, The Jeff Heggie Show and the Challenger Deep Podcast, and takes on speaking engagements for companies, teams, and events. He and his wife Tamara, originally from Southern Alberta, are based in Arizona.
When Heggie talks about his years running Kodiak Mountain Stone, the housing crisis comes up without much prompting. Not as a survival narrative. More as the part of his record that taught him what a business actually requires when there is no good option and someone still has to decide.