The Dad Starting Over Story - With @thedadvocate

Yeah, I, um, for those that don't know my story real quick that are brand new to me and everything that I do, um, I was married, wife number one, for a period of about 15 years, just shy of our 15-year anniversary. And, uh, I had 3 kiddos. The youngest was a year and a half old, 6 and 9 at the time. This was 12 years ago. And, uh, I was on vacation with my family in sunny St. Augustine, Florida when I discovered that my then wife was having an affair. Oh, and it just gutted me. And I was from that point forward a different human being. I mean, I went through all kinds of, oh, depression and trauma and awfulness. And in part of my— oh, it's absolutely every facet of the human experience is in a, you know, it was condensed into basically that year post-discovery. And we divorced immediately and all kinds of stuff. It wasn't good. And the kiddos involved, it was just terrible. But part of my therapy, I guess you could say. My own therapy was, um, oh, part of it was rediscovering things I used to do. A lot of divorce guys go through that. Well, now I have time on my hands without her. I'm ruminating in my mind, and let's, let's go back to things I used to do. Let's, let's take up guitar again. Let's hit the gym again. Let's play basketball again. And part of my previous life was like, I used to write a lot. I love to write. And so let me go back to writing again and let's start a blog all about my life as a, as a dad starting over in life. And it's like, I wonder if that domain is available. Dad starting over. Oh shit, it's like $11. So I bought it and I started writing. And of course nobody reads a stupid thing. And I started writing about my experiences in marriage number one and, uh, started writing, you know, writing about my experience, you know, just a new newly divorced dad and all the craziness of the ex and everything else.. And it wasn't until I wrote about one topic in particular that I got some attention, and that was sex and marriage. Like my experience in marriage number one, where there were, you know, very disconnected in that way. A lot of everything I wrote about in the book, The Dead Bedroom Fix, and, um, probably the best way, by the way, to find out more about it is deadbedroomfix.com. I have that domain. So if you just go to deadbedroomfix.com, it'll jump you to the main website and you can see all the different ways of buying and everything. But anywho, so, um, everything you see in that book, yeah, I experienced it. Like firsthand. I'm not, you know, just talking out of school here. This is exactly what I went through in marriage number one. And then what kind of allowed me to see things from an even different perspective from an outsider was I entered into new relationships via dating after divorce, and then eventually, uh, met the woman that would become wife number two. And I was like, how vastly different my mindset was and my results were. You know, not to be graphic or anything, intimately. I was a different person in the bedroom than what I used to be for 15-some-odd years, you know, in marriage number one. What's that all about? So I wrote about that in my blog then. And, uh, somebody said, you should write a book about this. This is like really good stuff. I was like, huh, you know, like now I have a mission, something to do. Say no more. So I wrote a book on it in 2017 called The Dead Bedroom Fix. And didn't do anything and sold a few copies. And one guy said, who was a marketing dude, online marketing SEO guy, said, I think this book has something. I think you could potentially sell a lot of copies of this. Like, what kind of traffic do you get to your website? And yada yada. And I told him, I was like, I get like 300 people a month visit the website. He's like, dude, what are you doing? This is no, no. And he helped me. And one of the things he said was, Why don't you, uh, sell this book like on Facebook or something? Like the Facebook advertising at the time was relatively, relatively inexpensive, way less than what it is now. And how it works is like an auction. You know, if I pay $50, I get in front of so many thousands of people. Now it's like hundreds, but then it was like tens of thousands of people would see it. You know, if I plop down $50, a lot of people would see my little ad. So I created an ad, I created a website. Click here to download or buy the PDF version of the book, or I put it on Amazon and stuff. And I remember I invested, I think it was $25. Like, let's see how this does. And it went against every tenet of advertising. You can't just say like, let's see how this does on day one and then decide whether or not to continue. You, you have to invest weeks, if not months into it. But I did. I was like, let's see how it works on day one. So I was like, $25 one night. All right. No sales coming in yet. I'll go to bed. And I woke up the next morning and I had $700 in my PayPal account. And I was like, what, what happened? I was like, all from sales of those dumb PDFs overnight. $700 from one $25 investment. And I was like, wow, there's something here. This is whoa. And I've been chasing that dragon ever since. 'Cause that was like a huge, like, you know, holy crap moment. And since then it's been this, you know, some really good days, some really shitty days of sales.

Yeah.

Sometimes nothing. Sometimes all of a sudden I'll just out of the blue, one hour sell 50 books. I'm like, where'd that come from? But anywho, that got me hundreds of people, then thousands of people, and people emailing me and people saying, "Can I talk to you for one-on-one advice?" And I would do it for free over like Skype. And then eventually somebody said the magic words, "You know, you should really charge for this. So it's not really fair. You just give away your time for nothing." I was like, "Oh, never thought about that. Okay." So I started researching that and became a coach in that regard. And, um, make a long story short, this has grown into something so much that I now have 6 other guys coaching along with me. We now have a private community. We now have— I've written 4 books. None of those, by the way, compare to the success of The Dead Bedroom Fix. And, um, all the sales of those other books combined don't equal the one Dead Bedroom Fix book. And we have courses, and we've started another brand that's more inclusive called Help for Men. You can learn more at help4men.com. That's where all the books are, the courses are, the communities. Highly recommend. And the private community is called the HFM, Help for Men Brotherhood. And we have private forums for men. We have live Zoom meetings. We record them all. We have over 900 hours of audio content, including the meeting recordings, the audiobooks at no additional charge of all my books. What else do we do? We have a podcast. We get together in person for conferences, events. We're having our 5th annual one coming up next year in the States. Uh, our guys in Australia are having their third conference next month in Sydney. Um, get together for meetups. We have coaching.

No chicks allowed.

No chicks allowed. Men only.

Men only.

Well, that being said, in our last conference, we had the guys— we said you guys can invite the ladies for the last dinner. And we have like several nights together. I like that. For the last dinner, you know, bring your wives. And it was awesome. They hit it off. They weren't— it wasn't weird. It was, it was great. It was nice having the female perspective on things like a big family, you know, it was awesome.

So I'm sure that, sure that those women are very pleased that their partners are taking the time to invest in these relationships with other men and bettering themselves, you know?

And, and there's so, and that was also, I mean, let's be honest, this was also a way, this was also a way for the guys to say, look, this is a legit thing. This isn't just like a huge man woman haters club. Like this is like a real thing. And the women come and they would say to me like point blank, it's so nice to finally meet you and the other guys to see that this is real and see what you're all about. I've just kind of heard in passing about this. I never really got to see what it was about. Now that I see it, like, oh, this is awesome. And now they have buy-in, and now they really, you know, they're pushing their guy out the door, like, go to another one of these, get on the meetings, get— because I see it's like a real helpful thing.