Hutton Henry (2-2-9-5) never felt like he fit in at school or in the corporate world. After getting his Kolbe result, he finally understood why. Now, he’s taking the things about himself that felt like limitations and is using them as his greatest strengths.
You may not fit easily within a certain environment, or system, or work role, but that doesn’t mean there’s a problem with you. It just means you need to take stock of how you operate best and put those superpowers to work.
Hutton is the CEO and Founder of his own business, Beyond M&A, a Kolbe Certified™ Consultant, and the author of two books. By all accounts, he’s thriving, and he uses his wealth of experience, impressive skills, and natural strengths to help others excel as well.
But, as he told Kolbe Corp CEO David Kolbe on the Powered by Instinct podcast, that freedom didn’t come easy.
“I taught myself to code as an eight-year-old, but I didn’t do any schoolwork or homework,” Hutton explained. “Every day when I finished school, I threw all of my books, whatever I’d written, in the bin. I did that throughout my whole schooling. I mean, I’d be a parents’ nightmare.”
He needed to get to the bottom line and come up with new ideas, not exhaustively study and fit within his school’s many established systems. He also needed to build things, and that need wasn’t being met in the classroom.
Still, Hutton was talented, and managed to secure an impressive career after school was over.
“Long story short,” he says, “I was very lucky that I hit a job that was effectively a hobby. My first job was with Ford, and I went all over the world and built loads of good things. And that was down to the support of lots of other very great people, and also the fact there were probably lots of people who naturally delve deep and others who systematize around me organizing my chaos.”
He had an amazing career for nearly 10 years, but there was a part of him that thought, “This is not really me.”
“All I knew that was something was wrong, and I needed to move, and I took a very risky move of leaving a very brilliant job into something that wasn’t brilliant at the time, consulting.”
He knew consulting fit him so much better, but he didn’t know why. And then he got his Kolbe A™ Index result.
“I was like, ‘Wow, I totally understand this’; because I always thought that I wasn’t doing well at school because I was being delinquent. But what I got from the Kolbe result was actually, this is just you. That type of very structured academia didn’t really fit. It changed my story from somebody that was not able to do something because of a disadvantage, to someone who just had to find the path that suited me.”
Now, Hutton works with venture capital and corporate investors, assessing companies and tech teams on their behalf. It’s a practice called technology due diligence. Hutton’s team checks things out and then go back to the investor and explain to them in layman terms how that technology operates.
Hutton understands that he wasn’t able to be his true self until he understood how he naturally operates. And he has not lost sight of that in his work.
“And a big part of that, and my mission,” Hutton explains, “is to get or ask people to really understand it’s the people that matter, that they’re the people who build that technology.”
Want to find the freedom to be yourself? The first step is to take the Kolbe A Index.
Listen to the full conversation with Hutton Henry:
