Fifteen Years, Year by Year

Before 2010

I started selling eggs at nine years old, barefoot on my parents' land, collecting them from the chickens and selling them to the neighbors. Bigger, cheaper, and from a kid they knew by name. By eleven or twelve I'd built my first real business. By sixteen I was running a web and marketing agency doing seven figures, in Newfoundland, with no driver's licence.

None of that is the fifteen years. That's the part before the part I'm counting. The fifteen years starts at eighteen, because eighteen is where the business stopped being a kid's side project and became the thing I'd spend the next decade and a half inside of, for better and for a long time worse.

2010

I was eighteen. I'd already scaled two seven-figure businesses off the agency work, and that year I started two tech startups on top of them.

From the outside this reads as momentum. It was. It was also the first year I was carrying more than one thing at a time without any structure underneath any of it. I could sell. I could build. Nobody had taught me how to run something I couldn't personally hold in my head, and at eighteen, running three things at once, I'd already crossed the point where that mattered.

2011

I went all-in on a moonshot.

I don't say this to be cryptic. It's the accurate word for what it was: one big bet, built on the belief that the two businesses underneath it could absorb whatever it cost. I overspent on a team I didn't yet have the structure to manage, badly enough that I went nearly bankrupt by the end of it. Right decision, wrong internal state, is how I'd describe it now. At the time it just felt like moving fast.

2012

The moonshot failed. The debt started bleeding from one business into the others, the way debt does when there's no wall between where the money for one thing ends and the money for another begins.

This is the year that doesn't get told, because nothing dramatic happened in it. No single bad afternoon. Just decisions from 2010 and 2011 compounding underneath the surface, the way a structural problem does before it becomes visible. Revenue was still fine. Revenue is a beautiful thing to hide behind.

2013

Then it came due.

I sold my business and went close to a million dollars into debt. I was twenty-one. The full version of what that looked like, and what I got wrong to get there, lives in the eggs, the agency, and the fall, and I'm not going to re-tell the scene here. What matters for this spine is the fact of it. Everything I'd built since I was eight collapsed in one calendar year, and the real thing that collapsed was my belief that I could build something without it eventually breaking on top of me.

If you want the psychology of why a business that size can still be running entirely on one person's nervous system, that's the whole first chapter of The Pattern. I wrote about sitting in an accountant's office at twenty-one, watching him do the math, and realizing every decision that got me there had seemed reasonable at the time. What I didn't have was the ability to see what I was doing.

2014

I was running a seven-figure agency again, with clients doing seven to nine figures.

On paper, that's a fourteen-month turnaround from total collapse to seven figures. It sounds like a comeback. What it was, underneath: fifteen thousand dollars a month in debt payments, before rent, before food, before a single dollar of the business's own costs. That number sat underneath every decision I made that year. You take clients you shouldn't take. You price from fear instead of value. You say yes to work that's wrong for you because missing a payment when you're already six figures down doesn't feel like a setback, it feels like the start of the real collapse.

Same architecture as 2010 through 2013. Just moving faster, with better numbers on the outside.

2015

I sold everything I owned. Then I replaced my monthly income in under four months, while still carrying the fifteen thousand a month in debt payments.

This is the year most tellings of my story point to as the comeback, and it's the year I've come to think of differently. A single client that year generated over two and a half million dollars for me. From the outside, recovery. From the inside, I was sleeping in one-hour chunks, because I was personally covering American, European, and Asian timezones for a business that still required me to be present for everything that mattered. Rebuilt the exact thing that broke me. Better numbers. Same design flaw.

This is also the year I sold my marketing agency for one dollar, to get out from under the weight of holding a business that size by myself. That's a full scene on its own, and it's told properly in the eggs, the agency, and the fall piece. What belongs in this spine is what came out of it: the belief that everything I teach now started from. If more people knew me. If they knew how I could help them. If they felt connected with me. Then regardless of the business I had, it would be successful. I didn't have a name for that for years. Eventually it became Relevancy, Omnipresence, Intimacy.

2016

Multi-seven-figures, and the year I started mentoring other Entrepreneurs for the first time.

This is also the year the 3 Lane Method got discovered rather than invented. I was on a live training call with a group of clients and something came out of my mouth I hadn't planned to say: not everyone is ready at the same time, some people don't even know they need help yet, others are searching but not ready to decide, and only a few are ready to move right now. You can't speak to all of them the same way. The room went quiet, then people started messaging me. That live moment is the origin of the Sidewalk, Slow Lane, Fast Lane framework, which I later wrote the full book on in Resonance.

The same year, I built a launch with less than sixty thousand dollars in ad spend that generated over a million dollars in sales. Not because I worked harder. Because I'd finally stopped speaking to everyone the same way. It was the biggest launch I'd done at the time, and it was proof, in a single number, that the framework I'd just stumbled onto on a call worked when I pointed it at money.

2016 is also when I stumbled into omnipresence by accident. I started paying to boost content I was already making, and a few months later people started treating me differently. A client hired me for consulting at a rate I hadn't even asked for. Twenty-five thousand dollars a month, offered, not negotiated. I'd accidentally become known inside my own bubble, without meaning to build a personal brand at all.

2017

Three times growth on the back of everything that had clicked into place the year before. Multi-seven-figures compounding, not just holding.

This is also the year I met Libby, at an ODESZA concert, two days after I'd committed to the universe that I was ready to find my person. We were married within five to six months of meeting. I bring this up here not as a romantic aside but because it marks something real about the arc: the business had stabilized enough, for the first time in seven years, that there was room for something outside of it.

2018

My first million-dollar month.

I remember it specifically because I was alone when it happened. Libby was in Africa for two weeks, and I couldn't go because of a green card issue. I was on the floor of my bathroom and I realized, sitting there, that maybe I didn't care about money the way I thought I did. It took six more months of convincing myself of that, because almost everyone around me tried to convince me otherwise. I had no one on my side of that particular realization except my wife.

This is the year the story stops being purely about revenue and starts being about what revenue was supposed to buy me. I didn't have the language for it yet. I wouldn't have it for years. But 2018 is where the question first showed up.

2019

I attended Peter Diamandis's Abundance 360 mastermind and came back with a vision that wouldn't leave me alone: the future was AI merging with business strategy. I could see it. I could feel it. I was ready to build it.

Then COVID happened.

2019 is also the year I started what became Project Nuclear, a partnership experiment across four companies at once, using the same operating model without having proven it yet on any of them. It didn't work as well as I'd hoped on any of the four, and it's a big part of why I'm slower to hand a proven playbook to someone before I've proven it, myself, on the specific business in front of me. The thinking that came out of Project Nuclear, and the six-pillar operating system underneath it, is the spine of The Nuclear Effect.

2020

COVID hit, and I lost ninety percent of my income in two weeks.

This is the year the business model I'd rebuilt in 2015 finally got tested by something outside my control instead of something inside it. The six-pillar system from Project Nuclear, unfinished as it was, is the reason the collapse didn't repeat 2013. I restructured instead of panicked. It became one of my best years, and the collapse is the reason. What it forced me to fix that I'd been avoiding.

2020 is also the year Libby and I bought our first house. New to America, no credit score, which meant fifty percent down. I didn't have a million dollars in cash sitting around, so I ran four cash campaigns and closed on the house with the money those campaigns made. It's a small detail in a hard year, but it's the origin of a tactic I still teach.

2021

Multi-seven-figures, steady, and the year the internal work started catching up with the external work for the first time in the whole fifteen years.

I'd spent a decade building systems for revenue and none for the person running them. 2021 is when that started to visibly show up as its own problem, not just a footnote to the business ones. The Levels of Consciousness framework, the one that maps Reactive, Willful, Intellectual, and Intuitive as the actual operating system behind every strategic decision, comes out of watching myself and my clients cycle through exactly these levels for years without a name for what was happening. If you want the framework in full, it lives here. This is the year the arc turns inward, and it doesn't turn back out again.

2022

The year I got honest, publicly, about ego, control, and how much of what I'd built at scale was still being run from the same fear-driven pattern that put me in an accountant's office at twenty-one. Different form. Same pattern. I was managing an eight-figure operation and still, some weeks, running it from the identical internal state I'd been running the seven-figure agency from a decade earlier.

This is also roughly when the pattern language itself started forming, years before it became a book. Watching client after client hit a ceiling that had nothing to do with strategy, and everything to do with an operating system underneath the strategy that had been adaptive once and had become the ceiling without anyone noticing the shift.

2023

A hard year, financially, in ways that don't make it into highlight reels. A major investor pulled out due to a personal crisis, requiring me to find capital I hadn't planned to need. Weeks later a second, unrelated crisis hit a second investor. It's the closest I've come, since twenty-one, to the specific anxiety of watching numbers move in the wrong direction and not having full control over why.

The difference, fifteen years and one full collapse into this, was capacity. Not that it didn't hurt. It did. But I could hold it without the identity collapse that came with 2013. That's the entire point of doing the internal work in 2021 and 2022. It doesn't remove the hard years. It changes what they cost you.

2024

I wrote out the fourteen-year version of this exact timeline for the first time, publicly, which is a strange thing to build a piece around a year later, but it's true and it matters to how this document exists at all. Naming the whole arc, year by year, in writing, was its own kind of reckoning. It's easier to tell a highlight reel than a timeline. A timeline makes you account for every year, including the ones where nothing good happened.

2024 is also the year I sold two media companies to a public company, and the year Tony Robbins hired me to help build his media business, off the back of a referral chain that started with a mentee's father years earlier. Proof, if I needed it at this point, that the omnipresence I'd stumbled into by accident in 2016 had compounded into something with real reach.

2025

Two things, both large, in the same year.

The first: I got sick, starting in late 2025, badly enough to be bedridden for months. Weeks of not being able to work normally, unable to face a screen, running everything by voice from bed. It scared me, because I realized how much of the business was still, after fifteen years, essentially me. The parts I'd thought I'd built to run without me hadn't. I'd spent years teaching the inner game to other Entrepreneurs and had let my own outer game, the actual systems and structure, go by the wayside.

The second: out of that forced stillness came the realization that every business runs on three forces, not one and not two. Intelligence, Consciousness, Energetics. I built the entire case for it, and the AI-era operating system that follows from it, into Human First. If 2019's Abundance 360 vision was the seed, 2025's illness is where it finally had to become real, because I no longer had the option of holding the intelligence layer together by hand.

2026, so far

Fifteen years in, ten thousand or more Entrepreneurs mentored, more than a billion dollars in collective client revenue across the businesses I've touched, and I'm still finding patterns in my own operating system that were adaptive at twenty-one and are a ceiling now. That's the actual headline, if there is one. Not that the pattern goes away. It doesn't. The goal was never elimination. It was visibility.

This year is the one I'm still living, so I won't pretend to have the finished version of it yet. What I can tell you is that the question underneath all fifteen years hasn't changed since 2018, on the bathroom floor, alone. It's just gotten more precise. Not "does this work." Whether it's built to survive me, on a day when I'm not the one holding it.

What the Whole Timeline Says

Read straight through, in order, a few things are hard to miss that don't show up when any one story gets told on its own.

The first is that nothing in here is a single dramatic turn. Every year is downstream of the year before it. 2013 didn't happen because of one bad decision in 2013. It happened because 2010 through 2012 compounded under the surface while revenue kept climbing and hid the compounding. 2020's collapse didn't break me the way 2013's did, and the reason had nothing to do with the smaller number. 2019's unfinished systems work had already started closing the gap between what the business needed and what I was personally holding.

The second is that the internal work and the external work are not two separate stories running in parallel. They're the same story. Every year the revenue moved, something underneath it moved first, usually a year or two earlier and usually invisible at the time. The Levels of Consciousness framework exists because I lived every one of those levels, in order, for over a decade, before I had a name for any of them.

The third is the part I want you to take from this, more than any single year's number. Fifteen years documented, in order, means none of it is a highlight reel anymore. It's a record. And a record is something you can check your own timeline against, instead of comparing your year three to somebody's year fifteen and wondering what's wrong with you.

If you want the diagnostic version of what's running underneath your own timeline right now, that's the whole premise of The Pattern. Not another framework to apply on top. The thing underneath the frameworks that decides whether they work.