My daughter once asked me something I didn’t have a good answer for: how do you tell someone they’re being a dickhead, and they thank you for it? It’s a fair question. That matter-of-fact way of speaking — no softening, no managing how it lands — has been with me since before any of this had a name. It’s part of what made the early businesses work.

People kept telling me they’d never experienced a conversation like it. Eventually I asked a coach I respected — someone who had worked with over 3,000 coaches professionally — whether what I had was actually unusual, or whether I was imagining it. She told me she’d never experienced anything like it, that the conversation was life-changing. She then asked me to have the same conversation with a friend of hers, also a coach. Her friend was blown away too.

That’s when the calls stopped being something I did on the side and became something worth building properly.