Kathy Binner: Thirty Years of Building in Columbus

The Arcfluence Podcast

This piece is part of an ongoing series in which Arcfluence gets out into Columbus and tries to understand the people who live, work, and invest here — the operators, the builders, the educators, the lenders, the long-tenured residents who quietly shape the neighborhoods we end up designing in. The Arcfluence Podcast is one of the surfaces for that work. Kathy Binner is one of those people.

That is Kathy Binner, advice she gives people still inside a day job who are trying to figure out how to make the leap. It is not a productivity tip. It is a posture — show up to the work you already have like the people you do it for are your customers, like your name is on the door even when it isn’t yet, like the thing in front of you matters. The leap is built on a habit you are either practicing right now or you are not.

Kathy gets to say that because she has been building things in Columbus for thirty years. A salon, then a building to put the salon in, then more buildings, then an academy, then four collaborative books, a scholarship, and a giving page that runs in real time on her website. None of that existed before she started. Most of it is still running. The conversation, recorded for the Arcfluence Podcast, walks through how she got there and what she has learned along the way.

Buying the First Building

Kathy was sitting in someone else’s salon, paying booth rent, when the obvious question landed. She had picked up nail-tech work to supplement a corporate income, and after a stretch of paying weekly booth rent she watched the salon owner collect everyone’s booth rent and turn around and pay rent to a landlord. Why doesn’t the owner just buy a building?

That question started it. The first commercial property was a small block in downtown Canal Winchester that had recently flipped from residential to commercial. Opening it as a salon meant filing for a change of use, and that meant figuring out, on her own, what life-safety, structural, MEP, and accessibility requirements applied to a building about to host the public.

That is the moment, on the show, where Nick and Paul lean in. A residential-to-retail change of use can run tens of thousands of dollars before a fixture goes in. Kathy paid that tuition and learned. The discipline she paid for there became the discipline she has applied to everything since.

Friday Off, and the Books

Once the salon was running, Kathy noticed that Friday was the busiest day in a beauty salon. So she decided to take Fridays off and get her clients out of that mix. The Friday turned into the room where the rest of the work got built — the writing, the teaching, the mentoring of other people building their own things.

Her four contributed-to books, in order: Called to Speak, Lead and Impact; Impact Entrepreneur; The Biohacking Entrepreneur; and Beyond Biohacking. The Biohacking books came out of her own health rebuild — twenty-five years behind a nail table had taken a toll, and the protocols she developed to recover became the substrate for everything else she does now.

The Stephanie Milo Jenkins Initiative

Kathy lost a close friend to COVID. Stephanie was a real estate agent; the Stephanie Milo Jenkins Initiative is the scholarship Kathy created in her name to help people get licensed as agents. The academy’s giving page funds it alongside clean water for a tribe, books and uniforms for schoolchildren, and sewing machines for women in another country supporting their families by sewing tote bags. Giving is not a separate budget line for Kathy. It is the natural runoff of the rest of the business.

Folding Into COIN

The other thread of the episode is community as education. Kathy ran her own meetup, Happy House Hunters, for about a decade. It worked. Students were learning, the room was filling. And one day she realized she was the most experienced operator in the room, which meant the people she was teaching were quietly accepting her ceiling as theirs. She did not want to be the ceiling.

So she folded Happy House Hunters into the Central Ohio Investor Network — COIN — the Columbus community Nick has helped run for years. It was a deliberate choice. Consolidation rather than competition. Joining the bigger room rather than defending her own. The same impulse that runs through her academy, her collaborative book model, and the way she shows up at COIN now as a leadership-team member rather than an outside speaker.

Thirty years in, Kathy is still in the rooms where she started, just at a different chair.

Find Her

Kathy is the founder of Kathy Binner International Academy. Her four contributed-to books and the giving page live on her site. She is on the COIN leadership team. Find everything at kathybinner.com. Listen to the full conversation on the Arcfluence Podcast.