Coffee With E

Wait, He Quit His Rock Band? Ben Guiles Explains It All

• Erica Rawls

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Join us on “Coffee with E” as we sit down with Ben Guiles, who shares why he walked away from his rock star life in Small Town Titans. He talks about going viral with their “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” cover, how sports shaped his mindset, and what it means to choose family over fame. This honest chat is all about chasing dreams, facing big decisions, and never losing sight of what matters most.

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Benjamin Guiles:

One of my favorite things to do was sit on the back porch and listen to music with my dad. There's a lot of lessons and mindset things that you learn in sports that apply to businesses or just who you are as a person. I was taught to never be satisfied. There's always more you can do. You can always be better. You can always be better. I had to have this like kind of come to Jesus moment with myself and realize like all right, I have this passion, this dream of being a rock star, right.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah.

Erica Rawls:

But, just imagine being a little boy and all you ever wanted to do was to be a part of something huge, make a huge impact in the world, whether it's through sports or through song, or through just giving back. Well, I have the privilege to be sitting back with none other than Ben Giles, who recently retired his guitar playing for Small Town Titans. Now, this wasn't an easy feat. Why? Because he's given 13 years to this band, where he probably imagined himself going for a very long time, and yet, because of life changes, he has decided to take another direction and he's here with us to share it. Are you ready?

Benjamin Guiles:

I'm ready.

Erica Rawls:

He's ready. Grab your coffee, set yourself up whether you're on your way to work or if you're just getting ready for work. Whatever it is, tune in, because this one's going to be quite special.

Benjamin Guiles:

Let's do it, Erica.

Erica Rawls:

Welcome Ben.

Benjamin Guiles:

Thank you for having me. You're welcome. Hit me with these questions.

Erica Rawls:

Yes, I'm so happy to have you here.

Benjamin Guiles:

Yeah, I'm happy to be here.

Erica Rawls:

So I always have admired you, and you know my girl, brittany, from afar. Yes, so I had the privilege of meeting you. Know my girl, brittany, from afar yes, so I had the privilege of meeting you. Oh my gosh.

Benjamin Guiles:

Maybe Years ago, a couple of years ago, I think Right.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah, Like three, three, four years ago maybe.

Benjamin Guiles:

Yeah, yeah, sounds about right.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah. So always heard about you but never knew you until you started coming around more with your wife being you know, I'll call it the CEO of our company, right? So always laid back and quiet. And then when I got to know you, I was like, oh my gosh, you are such a cool guy and the very how multifaceted you are. I was just, oh, I was just very impressed by how you handled yourself. Oh, yeah, so when I found out that you, oh, you were actually part of a group, a rock band, I was like, really like, how does that even?

Benjamin Guiles:

yeah, you're like, because you know my wife, you're like her. She married a guy. Yeah, rock band like that does not make sense. It doesn't because she's like, she's her, if anybody, if you see my wife like, she doesn't necessarily look like somebody who would be like.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So share with me how did you even like get into that industry, because I know you know you were the all star football player.

Benjamin Guiles:

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I was an athlete my entire life. That was my main focus, even outside of school. An athlete my entire life. That was my main focus, even outside of school. Like, I pretty much went to school so I could be an athlete, Played football, baseball and basketball growing up and I loved the way that playing those sports made me feel. I loved scoring touchdowns, Not going to lie when people clap for you. It's pretty awesome, yeah, so just naturally grab it. Adrenaline rush and there's not much that can really replace that. So I just played sports. I went to college, played football in college, but throughout my athletic career one of my favorite things to do was sit on the back porch and listen to music with my dad. My dad was a big music fan anything hard rock, rhythm and blues. He had the CD collection. We would listen to albums front to back, like that kind of thing.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah.

Benjamin Guiles:

And we would sit out there and he'd have a beer and maybe a couple times before I was 21, I got to have a beer with him while we did that Right. So I loved doing that. I was an athlete and, to make a long story short, when I couldn't be a professional athlete, I needed something to fill that void. So I played four years of football in college. During that four years I slowly started to get into playing music. I got my first guitar when I was 17 and I was like this is cool, I really like playing guitar. But then I didn't realize that I wanted to make it a career until I was like needing that fulfillment, that something to replace what it felt like being on the football field.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah.

Benjamin Guiles:

So I started playing shows with this band, small Town Titans. We kind of magically formed All of us were in other bands just kind of meddling about.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah.

Benjamin Guiles:

We all broke up at the same time, Came together and we're all just like, hey, do you want to book a show? And we did. And then it literally never stopped until recently. For 13 years we just continued as the band playing rock and roll and I was happy, got my adrenaline out. Yeah, that's the story in a nutshell.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah, I mean I know because you know playing sports myself and then raising children. You do get that. What is it? A dopamine high from Gary?

Benjamin Guiles:

Yeah, for sure.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah, especially when you are. Yeah, especially when you are, like the, I guess, the star of the team, right Cause you didn't do too bad yourself.

Benjamin Guiles:

No yeah.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah, you're trying to be humble right now.

Benjamin Guiles:

Well, yeah, it's kind of hard for me to sit here and be like I was the star of the team.

Erica Rawls:

Well, yeah, it's kind of hard for me to sit here and be like, oh, I was the star of the team.

Benjamin Guiles:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but no, I did well in football. I got a couple of awards for breaking records.

Erica Rawls:

Right, you're killing me, ben. A couple of awards for breaking records. I think you have a state award or something, am I right?

Benjamin Guiles:

I was an All-American.

Erica Rawls:

All-American. Okay, all right, yes, and I got.

Benjamin Guiles:

I got something called the Gene Carpenter award, which, uh, apparently only a few people in the country get. I got it. I got to go to MetLife stadium. I sat next to Andrew Luck and his dad and, uh, I got the award. Uh, that was super cool experience. My dad was stoked about that, so he got to come along Right, but yeah, yeah, so I was a successful football player.

Erica Rawls:

The reason why I bring that up is because for you to be successful in football, right, you expect yourself to be successful in everything else that you touch. Yes, right, because you had a natural talent right.

Benjamin Guiles:

And you didn't have to work on it as a person Like I was taught to never be satisfied.

Benjamin Guiles:

There's always more you can do. You can always be better. So that kind of mentality has followed me. I never kind of sit back and reflect and be like I'm happy with where I am right now. That's just not how I'm wired. You're like all right, yeah, I can be happy with where I am right now. That's just not how I'm wired. You're like all right, yeah, I can be happy with where I am. But what's next? Where am I going? What am I going to do to be better or the best? You always want to be the best.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah, at whatever it is you do, yeah, 100%. And the reason why I brought up is because then the next thing that you touch then is this band. Yeah, so you want to be the best.

Benjamin Guiles:

I wanted to be selling out arenas. I wanted to have, I wanted a legacy.

Erica Rawls:

Like I wanted. I wanted to be a rock star. You wanted to be a rock star, yeah, so let's talk about that journey.

Benjamin Guiles:

So when you want to be a rock star, the first thing you got to do is write music. I loved doing that. That was one of my favorite things to do. I loved writing songs and we wrote a couple together as a band me, johnny and Phil and we started gigging and we just grew by organically playing shows. Organically playing shows Um, we actually had one song that was called party in hell, the first song we ever wrote.

Benjamin Guiles:

That without that song, I don't think we would have ever been able to continue as a band, because that was the one that people were like oh my God, you guys wrote this song. Like you can do this for real, this is really good. Um, so we, we just kept grinding, kept grinding and kept grinding, and every time, um, we would write a new song, we'd try to make it a little bit better. Same thing with with how we recorded it we try to record it a little bit better. And if you just do that over and over and over again with whatever you're, you're gonna find some success. And I think that sometimes success isn't like oh, I did all the right things. Sometimes success is just I never quit yeah, yeah, just being consistent and persistent right, and you know there's a lot of difficult industries in the world.

Benjamin Guiles:

I would be hard-pressed to say there is a more difficult industry to be successful in than the music industry. It is very difficult to get people to care. Oh, just flat out. It's hard to make people care about your music.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah, and to be relevant, yeah. So what are some of the challenges that you had? Hey, I'm hoping you're enjoying this episode of Coffee with E. I had to take 30 seconds to share with you one of our sponsors for this episode, Top Construction. They are a premier construction company located in central PA, so if you live in Dauphin, Cumberland, Lancaster and Lebanon counties, you want to check them out. Not only are they reliable, they are reasonable and they get the job done. Now let's go back to the episode.

Benjamin Guiles:

Just getting off the ground, I think, getting social proof, getting people to respect you. If you are a musician, a lot of times you tell your friends and your family and they're like, oh, that's cute, you're making music, I will support you and I think it's awesome. But then they're not like, wow, they're going for it. It's not that kind of support. Yeah, yeah, it's cute and I'll show up on Saturday maybe if I have time. Yeah, so you have to have. The hardest thing for us was to get social proof, and what social proof is is just like getting people to know that you're good or believe that you're good based on the amount of other people that think you're good.

Erica Rawls:

Right.

Benjamin Guiles:

Right, I feel so stupid saying this, but that's what it is. It's social proof. If a large room of people like you, then there's a better chance for more people to come into that room.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah.

Benjamin Guiles:

We got lucky with the Grinch when we did that song.

Erica Rawls:

Oh really.

Benjamin Guiles:

Okay, that's the one that put us on the map.

Erica Rawls:

Okay.

Benjamin Guiles:

We were small time playing gigs to, you know, 10 people to a hundred people, it varied.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah.

Benjamin Guiles:

And we would travel the country doing that Very uncomfortable. But then we recorded the Grinch. We did a cover of you're a meme on Mr Grinch in a rock and roll style, right, and it went viral really yeah, this is the.

Benjamin Guiles:

The power of virality in business is a real thing, okay, so that video went viral. I think it got like 36 million views in less than a week and it's probably upwards of like 50 or 60 now. Wow, on Facebook alone, and it did pretty well on all the other platforms too. But, like, it really blew up on Facebook and we were able to build a career off of that.

Erica Rawls:

Oh, that's awesome. So, awesome so you built this momentum.

Benjamin Guiles:

We built the momentum, and then the good part of the consistency and the grinding that we that we did was we had a like a platform for everybody to fall back onto once they saw the Grinch and liked that song yeah we had two albums out, we had a solid YouTube presence, we had all this content, all this content for people to come check out. So it wasn't just like we went viral and then couldn't maintain it. It was we went viral and now all these people are in our fully functioning ecosystem.

Erica Rawls:

Oh, that's great.

Benjamin Guiles:

We had an online store. We were selling physical copies of albums and digital downloads and digital downloads, and we were like, oh man, we made, like I want to say we made like $70,000 just that Christmas on the store alone, which for a band that's not making a lot of money, is a huge thing $70,000 over a season. Yeah, yeah. We made a lot of money that that that christmas that is great.

Erica Rawls:

Okay, so you're making all this money. People are starting to see you. You have the social proof. Why did you decide?

Benjamin Guiles:

why did I decide to leave?

Benjamin Guiles:

yeah, to leave it was everything you were saying, you were traveling yeah, yeah, all all the good things, yeah, they're. You know, um, I still have a good relationship with with the guys in the band, um, but it didn't. It started to not align with what my values were in life. Now, this, this virality, happened like five or six years ago, um, and since then we haven't had that same level of success. If it was to happen over and over and over again, I would be probably making like a million dollars a year and I'd still be in the band because it would make financial sense and I could have the finances to live the life that I wanted to live, but we weren't making enough money to fly my wife and kids everywhere with me.

Benjamin Guiles:

I had to have this kind of come to Jesus moment with myself and realize, like, all right, I have this passion, this dream of being a rock star, right yeah, but I have all these other things in life that really matter to me. And if I want to, I can't really have both without some sacrifices. And I just was like man, you know what, like I think I'm going to have to choose which one I want, because I can be fulfilled and find something else to do and have, like you know, the family time and the things that I want, or I can just drop everything and risk my relationship and continue to be on the road.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah.

Benjamin Guiles:

I wasn't willing to do that. Um, I had an epiphany one day. I was sitting there and I just thought to myself. I was like all right, what's the best possible thing that could happen to me in my music career? Well, it would probably be something along the lines of all right, james Hetfield from Metallica, one of the biggest bands in the world, calls me on my personal cell phone and says hey, we're going to give you a record deal and you're going to go on tour with Metallica. Any musician in the world would be jumping for joy. That's a life-changing event.

Erica Rawls:

Right.

Benjamin Guiles:

Positive, life-changing event, sure, but my initial reaction to thinking that I was like man, if that happened, my first thought would be and that's when I knew, that's when I knew I had to I had to call my uh, my two husbands of business right you know johnny and phil and then have a really difficult conversation about hey, you know, passion. The heart isn't there anymore.

Erica Rawls:

I think I have to step away.

Benjamin Guiles:

They kind of saw it coming, but I think it hurt for them as well as it did for me. Yeah, sometimes I think you got to make those decisions and I'm grateful that I had that realization.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah.

Benjamin Guiles:

So you had to make a decision in the path that you wanted to take, and you knew that didn't matter what decision you made, you were going to hurt one family, oh yes, definitely Somebody was getting hurt, no matter what I chose, and that was why I think it took me so long to make that decision, because I'd been thinking about it for like three years before I finally made the phone call, so it was not easy.

Erica Rawls:

So you're only a couple weeks days probably when we record this. Since you made the decision, how are you feeling?

Benjamin Guiles:

I feel amazing to be honest, um, if it's, yeah, it's, it's the truth, like I feel free, I feel, you know, I, I, I called nate um for anybody watching or listening, like the business I'm a part of, neary Creative produces these podcasts and my head pops off the pillow in the morning.

Erica Rawls:

Oh good.

Benjamin Guiles:

And I'm so excited to come in here and spend my time and energy growing this to as big as it can possibly be. Nate's a great person. He's sitting right over there, but he was gracious enough to trust me and bring me in, and I love it. This is where I need to be. I get to be creative every day and I get to make an impact on people in a different way, but still an impact on people and I get to help grow visions and businesses through media, and I can't be happier because when I was in the band, I was the video guy, the editor, the content creator, and I loved doing that. So I'm still doing that. It's just for a business that you know allows me to sink my roots in and that I believe has a long, a lot of longevity yeah, and you're doing that for other businesses.

Benjamin Guiles:

Mm-hmm.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah, yeah, that's awesome.

Benjamin Guiles:

It's super cool. I love it.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah.

Benjamin Guiles:

Couldn't be happier.

Benjamin Guiles:

So then, if you had to, do it all over again, would you? Yes, I would. I met my wife at our Small Town Titans show Aw, that's so sweet. She had blonde hair at the time and she was. She came, I think she had a shot of jameson or something, maybe two, uh, but she never went out. He stole somebody's small town titan's hat and came up to the front row and I saw her and I turned around to my drummer and I said I'm gonna kiss that hot blonde at midnight because it was New Year's Eve.

Erica Rawls:

Oh, that's so great.

Benjamin Guiles:

And midnight rolled around, I chickened out. I didn't do it, but she, but she came and got me, she grabbed me by the arm and she said I think you owe me a kiss, because she heard me say that to my drummer, because my microphone was on.

Erica Rawls:

Well, that's hilarious.

Benjamin Guiles:

And you know, she grabbed me and I was. That's all I needed. I ate her whole face, you ate her face. I gave her the sloppiest, probably the worst first kiss ever, but it worked, it worked. She's still my wife.

Erica Rawls:

That is the best story ever. Wow, yeah, you know what, ben? That's just amazing. So any words of encouragement that you would love to give the viewers, because this is just a great story.

Benjamin Guiles:

Yeah, so if you're in the music industry, quit.

Erica Rawls:

Don't do it, that's not.

Benjamin Guiles:

Hear me out. Okay, if you're in the music industry, quit, give up now. Find something more comfortable. It's way too hard, it's way too stressful. Uh, you're. You're going to be very uncomfortable for a very long time and you're probably never going to make any money. And if you think I'm wrong, you might be cut out for this. That's what I think oh, okay if you disagree with me after hearing what I just said, then you might, you might I got you.

Erica Rawls:

Okay, okay, reverse psychology. I was like wait, what is this? We're supposed to be? Empowering the people. Empowering the people, that's awesome. Yeah, thank you so much you got it yeah, I really do appreciate this because, um, I know, before we started, you were like um, I don't know if I'm going to fit in with your uh, you know your community or the people that you. You know you look in the reach and that's not true.

Benjamin Guiles:

Well, there's all they are empowering and, um, you shared how you overcame and I think I was also nervous about just talking about it because it's still so fresh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's awesome a lot of. I thought there was going to be a lot harder questions.

Erica Rawls:

No. Good I just keep talking, shade.

Benjamin Guiles:

No, I thought you were going to be like why did you leave? No, seriously, Was there something bad?

Erica Rawls:

No, I was never going to do that. I'm just I would have never, never, never, no. So I appreciate you really do. Yeah, so how we can get in contact with this guy? He's probably the one of the most creative people that I know, him and his partner. Yes, nate, they run Nyeri Creatives out of Boiling Spring, no Mechanicsburg.

Benjamin Guiles:

Yeah, it's a small town called New Kingston. Yeah, mechanicsburg and Carlla yeah, yeah, yeah.

Erica Rawls:

So um they do podcasting, um videos professional video production uh listing photography listing photography, I mean all the things. Yeah, now social media yep, we're bringing.

Benjamin Guiles:

We're bringing a little uh branching into social media management, because that's the last piece of the puzzle. Everybody that works with us always asks like do you manage socials? I just don't want to do it anymore. And we're like we'll figure that out.

Erica Rawls:

Yeah, yeah.

Benjamin Guiles:

So that's what we're doing. We're going to be like this one-stop shop ecosystem for all things creative media.

Erica Rawls:

That's great, and because you know that he does things at a high level, you can guarantee that he and his partner are doing the darn thing. Yes, they're selling for nothing less but the best and make an impact in the community. So thank you, ben.

Benjamin Guiles:

Thank you. I appreciate you, Erica.

Erica Rawls:

I appreciate you. So you know what y'all. This is a wrap. Hope you enjoyed your coffee with E and until next time, see ya.

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