Eben Pagan | The Inner Work of Scaling a Business

You know, I was a dating guru, and like I said, I was the world's most unlikely dating guru because I really had no sense at all. All of my intuitions about girls and when I was a kid were wrong. And all of you know, all my intuitions about women when I was a young man were wrong. I was doing everything, like, exactly backwards. And then I learned how the whole thing worked. I learned how the mating game worked and the mating dance and flirting and it was all this very counterintuitive stuff to me. But then once I learned it, I was able to go and teach, you know, a whole generation of young, kind of socially awkward men because I had been through it and I could translate into the language of someone who wasn't confident. And so wherever you're not confident or wherever you feel like you just haven't been able to figure things out in a certain area or where you don't have intuition, go to work there, figure it out, solve it. Because then all of a sudden, you can help so many other people.

Welcome to the Radical responsibility podcast. I'm Dr. Fleet Mahl and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of authentic transformation. In each episode, I' bring you insights from leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology, and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness and life optimization. This is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change, helping you find alignment with the person you were always meant to be. Let's get started. What if transformation isn't just about thinking differently, but feeling differently? Science shows us that true change happens when we align not just our minds, but also the neural networks in our hearts and guts. This Heart mind connection is the key to deeper healing, resilience and expanded awareness. That's why I created the Heart Mind All Access, membership and community, a space designed to help you rewire your nervous system, cultivate heart intelligence, and live with greater clarity and purpose. With over 1000 hours of transformational teachings specifically curated to meet your needs. You'll learn from world renowned meditation teachers, neuroscientists and experts in neuroplasticity, all sharing powerful tools to help you shift your mindset and heartset, regulate your emotions and unlock your full potential. You'll also gain unlimited access to every summit and course we've ever produced, a treasure trove of Wisdom worth over $10,000 and growing, plus live gatherings and an inspiring global community to support your journey. If you're ready to step into a more heart centered, connected and conscious life, I invite you to join us. Click the link to Learn more and start your journey today. Have you ever wondered what truly sets successful entrepreneurs apart? Not just in business, but in how they live and lead. In this episode, I sit down with Ivan Pagan, a brilliant mind and deeply reflective entrepreneur whose journey from financial insecurity to multi business success reveals something deeper than strategy. Even shares how real growth happens, not from chasing hacks or hustle, but by doing the inner work, developing emotion regulation, aligning with your calling, and serving from a place of authority, authentic connection. We explore how mindset shapes outcomes, why teaching is one of the most powerful tools for learning, and how coaches and solopreneurs can build meaningful businesses rooted in service and clarity. Whether you're building your first offer or scaling a thriving practice, you'll find both grounded insights and spiritual depth in this conversation. This isn't just about growing a business. It's about becoming the kind of human being who, who can hold that growth with wisdom, presence and purpose. My name is Dr. Philippe Mahl, your co host for this session. And I'm really thrilled to be here today with Evan Pagan. Welcome, Evan.

Hey Philippe. Great to be here.

So I know it's really unfair to ask you to encapsulate it in just a couple minutes, but I would like to touch in on, on your origin story a little bit. Evan, as an entrepreneur, a teacher and an entrepreneur, how did you stumble into that or make the leap into that? I remember when I first tuned into you, you had built quite a business just with you and a, and teaching from that whiteboard, I think, in a basement studio and teaching great content. So how did this arise?

Well, I mean, it really all started when I was broke, which was for about the first 25 years of my life. And I had these very cool hippie parents who moved out to the backwoods of Oregon to raise me. They wanted me to kind of grow up in the country. And so I grew up, you know, this kind of farm, this very off the grid kind of lifestyle. And I mean kind of culturally. I had no, no influences that had figured out business, money, success, entrepreneurship. I was a long haired rock and roll guitar player and I got up into my early 20s and you know, I was making $75 a week as a guitar player and $10 an hour in my manual labor job. And I just said I want to have nicer things. You know, I'm tired of driving two and 300 cars. And so I got a real estate license assuming like, okay, well, people that made a lot of money, they seem to have either made the money in real estate or invested it in real estate. And I was kind of a miserable failure. There was a long haired kid trying to sell real estate with a two door Camaro. And then that led me to learn, well, to have a business you need to get clients. And so I discovered sales and marketing. And finally after several years, I put all the pieces together and I learned how to get clients. That was really the game changer was realizing that business, you know, you don't just hang out your shingle and then all of a sudden, you know, you make millions of dollars, but you actually have to learn the skill of how to create value for people, how to advertise, how to market, how to get clients. And then as you mentioned there, I wrote a book of dating advice in the early 2000s and I put that online. My good friend Dean Jackson showed me what he was doing there and kind of mentored me a little bit. And it took off and I built it into a really successful online company. But I'm so curious. I have to learn everything about everything. And so I learned about business and growth and scaling and hiring teams and started teaching that. And yeah, I've just taught a bunch of different topics now launched several startups, have an AI startup called Daily AI that now delivers positive daily news to over 6 million people. I'm just interested in a lot of stuff, Fleet. I really love being an entrepreneur and I love helping other people to become more independent and make value for other people.

It's fascinating and fabulous and inspiring. And I gotta ask you though, were you in relationship with Lala at the time that you started putting out your dating advice or was that before Lala?

Oh, no, no, no, no. I, I met Annie. Let's see, about to think this one through. But probably about eight or nine years after I was, you know, a dating guru kind of thing. So I went through that whole phase of my life that was kind of over and you know, I was on to a couple of new things. And then I met her and she of course love coach. And then we fell in love and.

Yeah, yeah, it kind of came full circle there. So were you a dating expert when you put that out there?

Well, I mean, I had become, I mean, for a few minutes there, I was the number one dating guru in the world, which is very strange. I like to say I'm the world's most unlikely D guru because I had, you know, no girlfriends when I was a kid. I had no idea how this all worked and I had to kind of go, you know, learn it step by step. But I can say that possibly because, I mean, you met, you know, my wife Annie. She's amazing and I guess it worked.

Yeah, absolutely. Obviously it worked. And Annie is absolutely amazing. We're really happy to recently interview for our relationship summit. So very excited about that. You know, entrepreneurs inevitably deal with fear and confidence issues and it's pretty easy to get stuck and overwhelmed and all kinds of things. And I don't know, you emphasize the importance of really looking at our fears, facing our fears to build resilience. Also being able to have multiple perspectives, which I guess is kind of a human psychological flexibility, and being able to have multiple perspectives is a fairly advanced human trait. And so I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit on the road to entrepreneurship.

Well, being an entrepreneur is such a cool adventure because you get to learn so much, you get to create value for other people. And in a lot of ways it's kind of this ultimate personal development accelerator because wherever you haven't worked through your own stuff, that's where you get blocked as an entrepreneur. You know, when I got started, I was terrified of calling people or reaching out to people or talking to people. In fact, this is before I learned about dating, which it turned out that was a kind of root cause there as well. And so therefore I wasn't able to get any clients. And I had to learn to overcome this kind of inner challenge and this fear that I had. But when I learned to, it made such a massive difference because I learned, oh, people aren't that scary. And in fact, most of the time, almost all the time, if you reach out to people and you know, you have a good kind of high value offer that you're making and you're doing it in a high integrity way most of the time, people are really actually happy to hear from you. And if you do, you know, if you do it correctly, not only are they happy to hear from you, but they're really glad you showed up in their life so that they can get involved with your business, right? But if you believe that people are scary and that they're going to reject you and you're afraid of them, then they're going to show up that way because you're not going to be prepared. You're going to be showing up expecting people to not want to hear from you. So you're going to be behaving like a person who is feeling like they're annoying. You know, I mean, it just, it's all a big self fulfilling prophecy in a lot of ways. And so, so yeah, I mean, we have to learn to overcome our fears if we want to succeed. And I think entrepreneurship is such a great path, business is such a great path to learn this because it has the dual payoff of being able to take your natural, your gifts, your intelligence, your genius, and then go use that to create a lot of value for other people so you can make an impact, you can help real people in their lives, and then you can have a more scalable income. You know, it has a kind of endless upside potential. And so for all of these reasons, I think it's a very important phase of life to go through.

And I think you described yourself as an introvert. So to be able to step out from that and become a public teacher and so forth. I've actually heard from quite a few successful entrepreneurs who teach and, you know, teach frameworks and models and so forth, who have all said they start off as an introvert. So there seems to be something there about overcoming some of our native challenges that allows us to succeed.

That's the interesting thing. I mean, as you, you know, if you get into psychology, if you get into, you know, Carl Jung's work and so forth, you start realizing, okay, life is. Is set up such that you do something for several decades, and then you get to this kind of middle phase of your life and you start changing and a whole different dimension of your personality comes out. So if you were, you know, kind of a more stoic person and more closed off emotionally and maybe more kind of pragmatic and rational, you get to the middle of your life, and all of a sudden you start feeling all these feelings and you start caring about people and wanting to express yourself and wanting to make, you know, and wanting to contribute. Or if you start off your life in the first several decades, you're more of an emotional person, much more sensitive, maybe very empathic. You like connecting with people. You get to the middle of your life, and then a whole other side of you comes out and then says, hey, you know what? I've done enough supporting of other people and living for other people. It's time for me to express myself and live for myself. And entrepreneurship allows you, in my experience, to explore these different dimensions of your personality. And if you look at your fears, your weaknesses, the places where maybe you feel like you don't have as much confidence, if you look at those as your biggest opportunities to then go and develop, when you do learn to overcome them, all of a sudden now you're one of the few people that actually faced their fears and found A path you went on the hero's journey. So this becomes this massive asset that you can come back. So, for example, you know, I was a dating guru, and. And like I said, I was the world's most unlikely dating guru because I really had no sense at all. All of my intuitions about girls and when I was a kid were wrong. And all of, you know, all my intuitions about women when I was a young man were wrong. I was doing everything, like, exactly backwards. And then I learned how the whole thing worked. I learned how the mating game worked and the mating dance and flirting, and it was all this very counterintuitive stuff to me. But then once I learned it, I was able to go and teach, you know, a whole generation of young, kind of socially awkward men, because I had been through it, and I could translate into the language of someone who wasn't confident. And so wherever you're not confident or wherever you feel like you just haven't been able to figure things out in a certain area or where you don't have intuition, go to work there, figure it out, solve it, because then all of a sudden, you can help so many other people.

Yeah, I think you made a really important point there. You had been through it, right. So you're teaching what you learned. You didn't. You weren't just naturally great at dating, but you had actually gone through the struggle and learned it and overcome that, and then you're able to teach it. So that's. I think that's really key. So today we're focused on the entrepreneurial mindset, which seems so foundational, our mindset, and in some way, we could even talk about the heart set a little bit sometimes. But what do you feel is, like, the most critical shift in mindset that an entrepreneur needs to make to be successful? And then that may evolve. There may be more shifts coming along as we develop our business and things change or we scale and so forth.

Yeah, well, I think the key mindset to have, the thing that really separates entrepreneurs from most other people is that entrepreneurs look around reality, and everywhere they see gaps, problems, frustrations, inefficiency, they see opportunity. Right. So entrepreneurs look through the world, and instead of being frustrated and just like being saying, oh, man, it's, you know, it's too hard to get my car fixed, or, oh, you know, this particular service is wasting my time, or I can't find a good handyman, or whatever they say, you know, it's hard for me to find a handyman that's probably a good business opportunity. I should start a business and I should go and get a bunch of really great handymen and then I can be the one to call and then I can send out a handyman. They kind of, you know, they turn lemons into lemonade. They always see that other way of looking at things. I'm thinking right now of a man that I met several years ago who sold his company, I think, for $700 million. And I was talking to him and he worked at YouTube and they were getting lots of calls at YouTube for running a certain kind of ads before their videos. And YouTube was growing so fast they weren't interested. They just didn't have time to do it or pay attention to it. And he, well, I'll do it. So he left and he went and started a company, built it, and I think they sold it. I think it was 700 million they sold it for. And so that's. An entrepreneur is someone who's looking for all those places where people want things or they need them, or they have frustrations and they're not getting them solved. And they go, hey, this is a place to create value. And there's an unlimited kind of landscape of those opportunities in life. The challenge though, is that not all of them work. And you have to solve a bunch of different puzzles in order to turn one of these opportunities or challenges or frustrations or places where value could be created to turn it into a product, a service, a business, something that's actually a value delivering machine that throws off money and profit. So it's not like you just go, oh, I've got a handyman business idea. And then the next day, you know, you're making a million dollars. You actually have to go solve a bunch of sequential problems. Like, you know, how am I going to advertise? Who are the handymen? How are, am I going to make sure that the, you know, the quality of the service is good? How am I going to get referrals? How am I going to make sure I make a profit? But each of the puzzles, to me anyway, while they're challenging, each of them is a. It's like a little Rubik's cube that allows you to learn a new set of skills and then learn, learn more about how the world works and how relationships work and how money works and so forth. So yeah, I think the key mindset is entrepreneurs look through the world and they see those gaps, they see those places where, you know, there's a lack of something that everybody wants or where there's a frustration or a problem. And they say there I could create a product or service that could help people.

Well, that's such an important distinction. Some people say entrepreneurs are born and some, maybe some of us are kind of born with entrepreneurial instincts or that predilection. But people can train themselves to be entrepreneurs as well. And kind of what you were describing there is, I think the majority of human beings kind of live in a state of reactivity. And also that reactivity becomes habitual, it comes out of our childhoods. And you're talking about entrepreneur lives more in a state of curiosity instead of a state of reactivity. And that implies they have some skills of self regulation. And now you not only teach business and marketing, but you teach personal development. I wonder if you could just point to the importance of having some way to regulate ourselves so that we can be in that more proactive, curious stance in life instead of just being back in this reactivity all the time.

Yeah, yeah. So my favorite mental model, I'm a collector of mental models and I love Charlie Munger's idea of the lattice work where you need a hundred mental models from diverse areas of life that you use in your mind to understand situations, to be productive, to communicate, to make decisions and plan vision and so forth. And then you become very, very creative. Okay, so my favorite mental model is called the triune brain. And it's a model that comes from Dr. Paul McLean, who was a neuroscientist and he studied comparative brain anatomy. And he noticed that we humans, we have kind of these brain structures in common with reptiles, with mammals, and then kind of with higher primates, with apes. And so some people don't like this model, but it's so useful to me because I use it almost like a metaphor, that we have a part of our brain that is the ancient reptilian part of the brain, that's really the physical brain, and it runs the autonomic nervous system and it keeps us alive and it keeps us reproducing. Right? It's the fight or flight brain, and it's the survival and sex brain, but it runs the physical world. Then we have another brain that emerged beyond that, right? That's the mammalian brain, and that's the emotional, social, brain. And that allows us to have these emotional feelings and have attachment bonds and have these complex relationships with family and tribe and community. And then we have the thinking part of the brain, which is the human part of the brain, which is the dense kind of cortex and particularly the prefrontal cortex, very dense, nerve packed part of the brain. That allows us to do this abstract thought where we can use symbols and language and so forth. Okay? So I'm not trying to talk about, you know, some brain anatomy class here, but what I am trying to say is that we basically have three brains in one. We have a physical brain, okay, that runs the physical, that deals with the physical world. We have an emotional, social, brain that deals with relationships and feelings. And then we have a mental brain that deals with abstract thought, calculation, planning, language and so forth. So you're talking about self regulation. And I think that it's because self regulation is a big part of the zeitgeist right now. It's a big part of the conversation. And I think most people think of this as an emotional phenomena, right? Self regulation is emotional and it is our emotional state is very important. But I think that it's key to really see that physical regulation, emotional regulation, and mental regulation that we need to practice in all three dimensions. Okay? And if you just want to have a real wake up call in life, okay, try three different things. Okay? Number one, try fasting. If you've never fasted, just try fasting one night, go to sleep. The next day when you wake up, don't eat any food the whole time you're awake, go to sleep again and then wake up, whatever, 36 hours later and eat. Then just watch your emotions and your mind through that experience and just watch what it does to do that. Okay? Another one, if you really want to wake up, is try meditation. You know, just sit down and just try for 20 minutes to still your mind if you've never meditated. And again, you'll realize immediately how out of control your mind is. And another one could be next time you're with your romantic partner or talking to your mom or your brother or your sister, and they do the thing that normally triggers you to get upset. Just stay very cool and calm and don't let it bother you at all emotionally. And what you'll see if you practice these things is you'll see that you're really running on autopilot, that we're being bounced around in life like a pinball and a pinball machine. And we don't realize it. We don't really notice this. And so when we're talking about self regulation, what we're talking about is living more consciously, living intentionally and directing ourselves. And so we can go down any of these rabbit holes that you want, Fleet, but self regulation is very important. But we have to learn the practices and the methods and the techniques to do it. Physically with our bodies and in our physical world, with our emotions and our relationships and also with our thoughts and our communication.

Yeah, absolutely. And if I had to say, we teach one thing at Hardmodd Institute, it's self regulation. We also teach co regulation and other things. But I think it's just so foundational to being a successful human being, a conscious successful human being, whatever our endeavors are. And for entrepreneurs that face all the anxieties and the overwhelming, the changes and the uncertainties and so forth, it just seems so critical. It seems like trying to be an entrepreneur without self regulation skills is like walking through a minefield blindfolded or something.

It's just very well said so, you.

Know, we're also social beings and we're really influenced by the people we hang with and emulate and the mentors we have or don't have and so forth. And so I know you've spoken about the transformative power of choosing the right social influences, whether as a human being in general, but as an entrepreneur specifically. So I wonder if you could talk about that a bit.

Yeah. You know, somehow when I was late teenage years maybe I got a copy of Think and Grow Rich, which by now most people have read. And I, you know, don't know, I don't remember how it showed up in my life. Maybe found it at a Goodwill store or something, right? And in there, Napoleon Hill says, no great power or success is possible without the mastermind, right? And the mastermind is a group of people that comes together, right, with the conscious, intentional kind of focus on the success of the individual members. So I read that and maybe I played with it a little bit, but I didn't really understand it. I didn't really get it. Okay. And then a few years later, I got a copy of Brian Tracy's Psychology of Achievement. And at this point, this is maybe I was maybe 22 or 23 and I had been listening to Tony Robbins and reading some Wayne Dyer and Dennis Waitley and kind of, you know, going through the self help gurus back then. And then I found Psychology of Achievement and what an amazing program that was like. It had the best of all the others, plus, you know, some other ideas. And in there he talked about the psychological research around what's called the reference group. And he talked about how your reference group is essentially what shapes you. And that even if you're taken out of your reference group and you go and you learn a new set of behaviors, a new way of thinking, a new way of feeling, that if you get dropped back into your reference group, you just revert, you go right back to who you were because it has so much power. And then I went on and later, you know, learned about Robin Dunbar and this whole idea that if you take the five people closest to you and you average them out, that's who you are and your self esteem. So this just became this recurrent theme that I started seeing through life. And at some point I was like, oh, maybe I should start doing something with this and actually getting masterminds together and kind of seeing how this works. And that's when, you know, the game changed. Because if you want to make a change in your life, if you actually want to transform yourself physically, emotionally in business, you can read books, you can sit at home messing around with it and so forth, but nothing has the power of going and finding a community of practice where there are real actual people doing the thing and you can see it and they're all operating in a culture. It just reformats and reprograms your whole system. And so, yes, if you want to make change, add social influences who have already achieved the thing that you want to achieve. So it's just totally normal. And if you really want to accelerate it, get a group of them together or join a mastermind or a community of people that practice this way. And it'll have like ten or a hundred times the impact of sitting at home and trying to do it yourself. And again, because it normalizes it, you know, if you want to become a millionaire, start a mastermind that's got eight or ten millionaires in it and just start meeting up with them and talking to them. And then you just realize, oh, it's normal for these people to all be millionaires. It's normal for them to have a business. Or, you know, when you show up and you're like, oh man, I had a problem. One of my customers asked for a refund today, or one of my employees didn't show up on time or, you know, and you're feeling like, oh, why me? And then you go meet up with your mastermind group of people who are already a level or two beyond you, and they say, oh yeah, yeah, you know, that's normal, that's natural. Happens to us all the time. Here's what you do about that. Again, it just normalizes everything. It makes everything totally natural so that you can just kind of keep going. And so yes, absolutely. And do this. It's a big deal.

I love you use the term community of practice. I'm very familiar with that term from the work we do in the public safety field of bringing skill sets, mindfulness based skills, and there we define it as a group of professionals coming together to enhance their professional skill sets together. And just the idea of practice altogether to realize. And again, this comes back to your personal development work. We're always practicing something. The question is, what are we practicing? But can we get in the mindset of practicing the behaviors and skills that will lead to being a successful entrepreneur?

Yeah, exactly.

So one of the ways that you stepped into further levels of success was beginning to teach what you learned. Right. So you teach data, you learned how to do the dating thing, you started teaching that and you learned other things. You started teaching that. I have to keep giving a shout out. I don't know if it's a course you recommend anymore because it's a course you did a long time ago, but you're waking up productive for me was a real game changer. So I recommend people find out about that course. But could you talk about the role of teaching in terms of developing yourself as an entrepreneur?

Yeah. This is like the coolest self development and success hack that I think I've ever discovered, which is if you teach something, you not only learn it, but you also learn it at a higher level. So because what you're doing when you're teaching something is you're thinking strategically about the knowledge and you're also thinking from the perspective of the other person and imagining how they're hearing it. And so I don't remember right now where I stumbled upon this idea or how this worked, but at some point I realized, oh, everything that I learned that's important, as soon as possible, I should start teaching it. And it just became a, you know, a way of being, a way of living. If I really want to learn something, start teaching it. Another thing is that if you learn things expecting that you're going to teach it, you learn it in a different way too. It kind of encodes itself into your neurology of your brain in a different way. It's kind of like when you're in school and you're, you know, you're doing a reading of a textbook or a story. If you're reading it to just read it and you're like, okay, well I'm just going to read this. It's one level. But if you're reading it and then you know that at the end of that hour you're going to be tested on the knowledge, you read in a different way, you think about it differently, or if you are reading it because you know you're going to write a report. Your brain is literally looking at the knowledge with a different kind of perspectival lens. And you're taking notes and you're rereading things. You're making sure that you understand. And so if you kind of shift to this mindset of I'm going to, you know, I'm going to learn a lot of really valuable things, and then I'm going to make sure I teach every single thing that I learned that's valuable changes how you approach learning. It changes what you learn. It changes how you take notes, how you think about things. I have. I mean, at this point, it's gotta be hundreds of note files with different sets of ideas and different topics. Dozens and dozens of them are courses and programs and books and things that I would like to do in the future at some point. So I'm just collecting and I put links and I put insight, and I try to organize my knowledge so that when the time comes to go and teach on that topic, that it'll all be there. And then if I'm going to create a course or do a teaching session on that topic, I can open it up and I can, you know, kind of review and so forth. But as a practice, just teaching every important thing that you learn as soon as possible. Call someone up, go online, do a podcast, write a newsletter, restate an important thing that you learn, and then make sure you're learning about topics where you could teach on them or where you could create a little video or do a little course. Again, it's just such a cool hack for learning and making value.

And I assume you didn't start off as a natural teacher, right? You probably spent a lot of time looking into a camera, teaching, practicing, doing things. But over the time, I mean, I think you're an amazing teacher today, but is that something you incrementally learned over time?

Yeah. If you really want to see, go see if you can find a copy of. You know, one of the first videos I made when I first started teaching Double youe Dating. What I would do is I go up and I would. I had these PowerPoint presentations where I'd put up a slide that would have like 15 bullets that were tiny. And I just read all the bullets. And then I would turn and I'd make a couple of comments, and then I'd go to the next slide and I'd read all the bullets. And, you know, I just. Yeah, it wasn't there, but I kept going. And after Doing it for a while I realized, oh, I need to learn how to do this. I need to learn how to be comfortable if I'm teaching things. And so I went and started studying it and I read books about teaching and I learned more about it. And then at some point I just said, I am not comfortable when I'm standing on a stage. I get nervous. I don't feel natural there. So I need to figure that out. And so I just started teaching and speaking at anything I could. If anybody asked me, I'd go. I'd fly on my own dime to go teach. I would take up. I said yes to every offer to do an interview or a program. And I did a lot of my own courses. And I just said, I'm going to do this until I can just walk onto a stage or go into an interview anywhere and be comfortable. So I just practiced that. And until I did. And then one day I was like, okay, I feel pretty good about it. I still get a little bit nervous before talks and teaching and things, but I generally am okay now in any environment. And, you know, Toastmasters is really good. I never did Toastmasters, but I did a networking group that was similar where you go in the morning, you know, and you have breakfast and then everyone stands up and gives like a little two minute, you know, kind of pitch or thing. And you just practice, you know, you just practice. So things like that can be really helpful as well.

Yeah, it's all practice. I know you've worked with Tony Robbins. His story always stuck with me that when he wanted to develop himself as a great speaker, you know, most people might get a gig a month, a gig a week. So over five years, how many he went out and signed up for any speaking gig. He was speaking three, four times a day at the Garden club. Whoever would listen to him. And so he was getting like, you know, 100x the opportunities most people get and develop themselves as a speaker so much more quickly like that.

So most people can relate to typing. You know, most people learned how to touch type. And so I used to hunt and peck, okay, for a long time. In fact, I would sit there and look at my fingers and, you know, type with three fingers and whatever. Until I was in my late 20s and I needed to get a date. And one of my friends showed me how he was doing online dating. And that was the motivation I needed to actually learn to touch type because I couldn't type fast enough to chat. And so I went and got a little book on, you know, how to touch Type. And I was like, okay, frf. And you know, all that kind of stuff. But the point I'm making is that if you've learned to touch type, something happens where after you do it for maybe a couple, few months, all of a sudden you stop thinking about the letters. And now you can just take your thoughts and you can translate them directly into the words, right into the keys. And then, like, it unlocks a whole new level of productivity, right? So the typing, what you're trying to do there is you're trying to automate it or create what's called an automaticity. With public speaking, it's the same kind of thing teaching public speaking. You want to learn it and practice it as much as you can so that it becomes like the touch typing, so that you can just now communicate what you're trying to communicate. You don't have to think about it anymore. Another metaphor would be like driving. I like to use this one sometimes. You know, you remember when you first got your first driving lesson where you sat down and you learned, okay, push down the accelerator pedal. Okay, that goes forward. Okay, now turn the wheel. Okay, now you have to push down the accelerator pedal and turn the wheel to navigate. Oh, you want to stop. You have to take your foot off the gas and put it on the brake. And you have to do all these things, and your car's jerking around and you're feeling awkward and you're getting scared because it's all unnatural. But you practice for a few months, and then all of a sudden, you don't think anymore about putting your foot on the gas or putting your foot on the brake. It's all automatic. You don't think about which way you turn the wheel, and then you can go drive somewhere. And that's the key, is you're not learning how to put your foot on the accelerator pedal so that you can accelerate. You're doing it so that it can become one of the skills that you have, one of the automatic kind of elements of being able to go somewhere. And that is really key with public speaking, because again, once you learn how to do it, once it becomes natural, once it becomes something that's kind of integrated well now you can take your message and get it out to lots of people, and that's where most people are stopped.

So another thing you emphasize is adding 10x the value that we're going to receive. Now, I have a question about that. You know, I certainly believe add value, add value, add value. And there's a principle of reciprocity and a Lot of teachers of entrepreneurship and especially online teaching, coaching, all the kind of ways we put ourselves out there and teach and create value that way. And there are some others that say, no, don't forget, you got to sell. And they clearly says, some people spend too much time teaching and not time selling. So it seems to be some kind of balance in there. And I'm sure it's not all black and white, but there's some kind of balance in there of really wanting that value for sure, having that mindset, but adding value, but then also the ways in which we create the desire or the need for somebody to then, you know, engage with our products for more value.

Yeah. Well, let's talk for a moment about what value is, what we're even talking about here. Okay? So an exercise that I recommend when I'm teaching this stuff is to take a post it note. So for everyone listening, if you got a post it note that said it's around, okay, just grab one, okay. And then on it, write the question, what is value? Put a question mark after it, and then stick it up on your computer monitor or put it up on your bulletin board or somewhere where you'll see it a few times a day. And for the next month or so, every day, just consider. Ask yourself a few times a day, what is value? What actually is it and how does it work and how do we experience it, and why are some things valuable and some things not? But most importantly, what's valuable to your ideal client? Okay? To what I call your avatar of your client. And in fact, if you want to talk business and entrepreneurship, we should talk avatars at some point, Fleet. So you might want to, you know, bring that in here. But the point is, imagine that you are an ideal client and then go talk to a bunch of ideal clients and find out what value is to them. What does it actually mean and how do they experience it, and where do they have challenges and where do they have opportunities and where do they have needs that you could help fill? Because the problem is a lot of people are teaching and teaching and they're trying to give away and they're trying to serve and they're trying to be helpful, but they're missing because they're not connecting with their ideal client. They're saying a bunch of stuff that's. I don't want to use the term narcissistic because that's not it, but it's kind of because it's. They're talking about what they want and they're talking about what they would think is valuable, but they're not really tuned into their ideal client. And so when we're Talking about creating 10 times the value here, what we're first talking about is asking what is valuable to you? Okay. In other words, what are your big fears and frustrations and challenges? And what are your wants and your desires and your aspirations and your visions? I mean, most people that have, you know, been married to someone for 20 or 30 or 40 years have never sat down with the other person and said, okay, honey, let me ask you something, all right? What is love to you? What is it? Right? What is the thing that I do that makes you feel the most loved? What's the thing I could do that would make you feel the most loved? And then if the, you know, the person said, oh, you know, well, thank you for asking. I would really love it if you'd, you know, look me in the eyes and give me a hug and tell me that you loved me. They don't then say, okay, well, let me try it. Let me see. How do you want the hug? Do you want it this way? How do you want the eye contact? What's my voice tone? Right? Because even if they say, oh, look me in the eyes and give me a hug, they will then look the person in the eyes, say it, and give them a hug in a way that doesn't communicate that they love them because the other person was thinking a different kind of hug and a different kind of voice tone. They don't actually get the specs of what will help their own romantic partner to feel loved. And they don't go back and forth and they don't ask the question, well, what's the thing that I do that makes you feel the most unloved or not considered or the thing that annoys you the most? Show me that thing. And then let's see if that, you know, we can change that. And so if we're not doing it with our romantic partners and with our children and, you know, with our friends, this means we're probably not doing it with our clients. But holy cow, when you start going through the world and actually just getting the specs and asking people, what is value to you? What do you need? Where's your frustration? Where's your problem? Where's your challenge? And you really pay a lot of attention. I mean, this is the great companies out there. They're customer focused. And that's what this means, is they're just maniacally focused on taking great care of their clients and helping them out. So 10x the value starts with going and figuring out what value means to the client and then delivering lots of that. And then the second part of what you're talking about here, and I know I'm getting off on a rant here, the second part then is then how do you lead that into getting a sale? Because if you just give everything away, you know, if you opened up a, you know, an ice cream shop and you just put a big sign that said free ice cream forever, it's going to be hard to turn that into a business. At some point, you know, you can't give it all away, but make it up in volume. Right? That's a way of an accelerated way to go broke. And so you have to find that balance of having someone stand outside and say free ice cream samples. And then what's the right mix of the samples so that someone says, wow, this is great ice cream. And then the person is, you know, trained to say, go walk in right there, here's a coupon and here's one for your friend, you know, and tell them I sent you and you're going to get a special extra thing. And then to lead that, have that be an on ramp so that it leads to a sale and then follow up so that you turn that customer into a lifetime client.

So you're really talking about really tuning in and learning how to be in relationship and meet the needs of our ideal client. And you referenced this idea of Avatar before. So I'd like to frame this. And another thing I want to make sure we have time for you to talk about. I would imagine there's quite a few coaches or aspiring coaches in our audience. Maybe they already have a coaching practice or a solopreneur. They'd like to build that practice. They'd like to be able to charge more. Or maybe they'd like to develop a coaching business and train other coaches. Or maybe there's still someone who just the idea of being a life coach or a business coach or executive coach really appeals to them. They want to step into that. So figuring out who their ideal client is, figuring out that Avatar is going to be really critical to their success. So I wonder if you could talk about that maybe in the context of that profession. Because I know you train coaches and you train people coaches how to build a business.

Yes. Well, let's talk for a moment about what coach is, what a coach means, what it means to be a coach. So coaching is a sports metaphor. Okay? So it comes basically out of being a sports coach. And this is different from a therapist. Now, a lot of people don't realize this. A lot of people who are really empathic, caring people are drawn to coaching. But they come in kind of with this therapist mindset, like, I'm going to help all of these people. I'm going to support them emotionally. I'm going to, you know, help them to get up the courage to be able to do things in life. And sometimes some of this is, you know, is part of coaching. But coaching comes out of sports and it's about performance. And coaching is about looking back into your past and saying, how are you broken? Coaching is about looking forward into your future and saying, what do you want to achieve? What do you want to create? And then let's go to work right now into turning you into a high performance, creative, productive human being. Okay, so that's one piece in terms of being a coach. One of my definitions of coaching is essentially that a coach is someone who supports people through change. So most coaches who are successful, if you're talking six figure, seven figure coaches, the bread and butter for these coaches is three to six month coaching packages, okay, where you earn thousands to tens of thousands of dollars from each client for a coaching package. And what you find, the successful coaches, they're usually working with people who have come into a challenge or a change or some transition in their life. They woke up one day and they were 40 pounds overweight. And their doctor said, your cholesterol is high and you need to make a change. And they're like, oh my God, how did I get here? And then they go on a quest to lose those £40 and that might take six or 12 months. And then that's what they work with a coach on. Or they wake up one day and they're single and lonely and they're in their late 30s and they want to start a family and they're like, I need to do something about this. And so they hire a coach and they work with a coach to help them find a partner and have a successful relationship. Or they wake up one day and they're fired from their job and they need to go find a new one, or they want to launch a business or whatever. But coaching is based on people reaching a stage in their life where they want to make a transition, they want to make a change, or they run into a challenge and so forth. So when you get this, when you start to understand that coaching is about supporting people through changes and helping them achieve big visions in their life, well, then you realize, oh, I need to go Find the best clients for me. I need to find those clients that are like, an exact perfect match for my kind of intelligence, my experience, my style, right? My kind of unique way of interacting with people. And I think the best way to do this is to just get out there and call everybody you know from your personal network, professional network, anyone who you think might be, like, a good client, and just call them up and say, I'm a coach now, okay? Or, I'm starting to be a coach, and you're the kind of person that I would love to work with as a client. And maybe it's a friend or someone you know from the past who you wouldn't actually want them to be a client. But what you're saying is you're the kind of person who I would love to have as a client. And so I just want to interview you. What are the challenges you're dealing with in your life? What are you trying to accomplish? And what you want to do is you want to interview a bunch of people and build a psychological profile, find all the common denominators that kind of make these people unique for being good clients for you. And when you put all of these traits together, all these unique common denominators, and you create an image of that ideal client, I call that an avatar, okay? And most people don't realize this. It's really interesting. Fleet. Most people have heard the term avatar or customer avatar. Most people don't know that I am the one that gave that name to it. I started teaching this in my altitude program in 2007, and now it's literally become the name through the whole industry, which is very cool. And so the reason you create your avatar, though, okay, so most people kind of get, okay, I need to create an avatar. It's an ideal client. But the reason most people don't get the reason and the reason why is, you know, in this day and age, okay, in the 2020s, the way to get clients is to go online, run ads, create content, make videos, write newsletters. In other words, get your message out there to the world by creating some value in some way. And when you're doing that, you need to have a voice. You need to have a way that you communicate. Most people flip on their phone and they start making a video, and they sound like a bored, scared person who's, you know, writing a science paper that they don't want to write. It's boring, it's flat, it's not interesting. It sounds like they're kind of making some kind of a writing a paper that they're trying to get an A on. And the content that's interesting is the content that grabs you. You know, when it feels like the person is talking right to you, it feels like the person is communicating, like somehow coming through the device, like they're calling you up personally. And the way that you get to that place where you can write that way, you can speak that way, you can create videos that way is you build this profile of your avatar so that you have someone to talk to in your mind. Now, I know I'm putting a lot of concepts together here, but the point is that it's important to have a sense of who your ideal client is and then to have an image of that person in your mind. You want to give them a name, you want to give them a personality, and then to start talking to them in your writing, in your newsletters, in your videos, in your podcasts, in your marketing, because that's what gives you that voice where you sound interesting. You sound like you're talking to someone you know, and your clients start feeling like, wow, it really feels like you're talking to me. And they like having that relationship with you.

And I would imagine once we really learn the principles of coaching, we can probably get skillful at coaching people through lots of different types of challenges. But I would imagine a good place to start is that person we were before we changed, made the change in our own life, before we learned something, before we developed the capacity to have something, to offer that person we were. That's the journey we know best. And we can probably communicate to that person with the greatest ease in some ways.

Exactly. If, you know, like me, if you were single and you couldn't figure out how to get a date, and then you overcame a bunch of things and then you learned how to get a date. You are really an ideal person to teach people who are single and are trying to figure out how to get a date. See, most people don't realize where they were weak, where they have now compensated, learned, developed strength, developed skills. They don't really. They go well. Yeah, but I'm not a natural at surfing or I'm not a natural at sales. I had to go learn it. It didn't really come natural for me. Turns out, makes you a great coach because you're relatable, you can make sense. You can go and enter the world of the other person. I mean, do you want to learn how to lose weight from somebody who was 30 pounds overweight and then lost weight, or do you want to learn how to lose weight from a supermodel who's never been overweight? I mean, come on.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So we're just about to the end of our time here. Evan. Thank you so much. This has been illuminating. I want to ask you a little something about your journey. We have a whole day on scaling, et cetera. But you've gone from being a solopreneur to having multiple businesses managing a team over 75. I think it said in your bio contractors through which you run all these businesses. Can you say something about that journey as we develop ourselves as an entrepreneur? Because I'm sure there's people in our audience who are at all the different stages on that, whether just starting out or trying to go from six figures to seven or seven to eight. So I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about your journey and maybe some of the key elements that kept you moving forward and succeeding on that journey.

Yeah, sure. Yeah. That part of my bio there, that probably refers to when my core business had that many team members. Now I actually have several companies and businesses I've started that have different teams that work for them. So I've gotten to see this now in lots of different contexts. But the key is Michael Gerber wrote a great book several years ago called the E Myth. Now it's published as the E. Myth Revisited. And I recommend go get the original one because it's thinner and to me, it's just better. It's more kind of condensed. And what he said is the E Myth is the entrepreneurial myth. And it's the myth that it's mostly entrepreneurs who are starting businesses. And it turns out that most of the people who start businesses are not really true, like hardcore entrepreneurs. Most of them are actually what he called technicians who can do a particular skill. And then they say, hey, I should start a business doing this. So the person who can clip poodles says, I'm going to start a poodle clipping business, you know, or the person who's, you know, a good chef says, I'm going to start a restaurant. And then they get themselves into business and they go, oh, no, there's all this other stuff that I have to learn how to do. And he says it can almost be like a disadvantage if you know how to do the work of the business. And what he recommends is, and I love this mindset, he says, you want to build a franchise prototype. So as you make your business, you want to build it such that you could franchise it. So each time you have a process that's inside your business, you want to make a little SOP or standard operating procedure. This way, if you have to hire another person to do it, you can train them quickly. You know how your business runs. You want to make metrics and dashboards that you can look at so you can see how all of the different things work. You want to make hiring and recruiting and training, you know, you want to do all this stuff. So once you do find a product or service that works and that you can start scaling, you have a different set of puzzles to actually scale the business that delivers such thing. But the mindset is a lot of other people have done it. Steve Jobs, okay, he said himself, he said, you know, the business stuff is not that hard to learn. It's not that hard to learn, but you do have to go and learn it. And it's a different set of skills. And what's really cool now is we've got books, we've got classes, we've got courses, we've got generative AI. And if you look at each of the different dimensions of building a business as another personal development opportunity, you can learn so many things and it can make your whole life make more sense, you know. But scaling a business is about taking all that stuff you did and then breaking it into different specialties that you hire people to do. And what can be cool is you want to hire people who are better than you at each of those particular roles. And right now, you know, kind of my main business where I, you know, where Annie and I, my wife and I, we teach and we do coaching, we probably have 10 or 12 people on our core team there, and.