Scaling Businesses Through Purpose, Resilience, and Peer Support
Seth Casden: 08:21
Yeah, I’ve been to several alchemy’s a couple of university events. To me, that’s really the other half. You know, you have the forum experience. That’s incredible. But then really getting out of your own local chapter and seeing the regional events and obviously with some of the larger budgets that they have, they can have some incredible speakers.
And the Alchemy events have been fantastic.
John Corcoran: 08:44
Yeah, yeah. Seth, thanks so much for your time. Where can people go to learn more about you?
Seth Casden: 08:48
And you can find me on LinkedIn, Seth Casden or celliant.com, thanks for having me.
John Corcoran: 08:56
Yeah. Thanks so much.
John Corcoran: 08:57
John Corcoran here coming to you live from Entrepreneurs’ Organization Global Leadership Conference here in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii, 2025. I’m the Co-founder of Rise25, which is a company that is B2B podcasting and content marketing. And I’m also a member of EO San Francisco. And I’m here with Beau Atkins, who is from one of the Canada chapters in Saskatoon.
Okay, cool. And yeah, you have a company of a you are a lawyer in Canada, correct?
Beau Atkins: 09:26
Yeah. I think you said you identified as a recovering lawyer.
John Corcoran: 09:30
That’s right.
Beau Atkins: 09:31
I think I would probably put myself in that category too. Even though I run a law office, I don’t serve much of a lawyer function.
John Corcoran: 09:38
Good for you. They’re very lawyer. They’re very many lawyers that try to get out of that. Let’s go back to the start of your entrepreneurial journey. So when you started your first company, tell me a little bit of the origin story.
Beau Atkins: 09:50
Oh, man. I mean, if we’re talking my first company I was selling Pussywillows in as a ten year old five year old kid, door to door. So, I mean, I think most entrepreneurs I speak with, their journey starts really early. They don’t recognize they’re entrepreneurs. But the first time I think I recognized I was an entrepreneur was just out of high school.
I felt I, I approached every job I had, like I was an owner. And eventually I realized maybe I need to be an owner to get that control and be able to get the freedom.
John Corcoran: 10:21
Sometimes employers are not too crazy about you coming in and saying, you know, you really need to change the way that you’re doing all this stuff.
Beau Atkins: 10:27
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
John Corcoran: 10:28
And so you’ve had a legal practice for how many years.
Beau Atkins: 10:31
I have. I started my first one in 2015 and the one I currently run I started in 2020.
John Corcoran: 10:37
Okay. And then you also have Evolve Law.
Beau Atkins: 10:39
Yes.
John Corcoran: 10:40
Okay. And how and what does Evolve Law do?
Beau Atkins: 10:42
It’s a family law office servicing all of Canada offering accessible family law services, dealing with divorce, separation, prenuptial agreements, things like that.
John Corcoran: 10:54
And what do you mean by accessible?
Beau Atkins: 10:56
Well, I’ve tried to scale it, so I’ve tried to sort of model myself after, like the H&R block and TurboTax on on the finance side to make it more accessible to people. So it’s I’m my client is not an iOS or or an entrepreneur. It’s typically their employees, people with salaries and really relatively simple resolution.
John Corcoran: 11:19
So you’re addressing the part of the market that substantial part of the market that needs family law services and really like the cost can be out of touch for them.
Beau Atkins: 11:30
Exactly. Yeah. There was a study done a few years ago, actually, and this is one of the motivations I had for starting it, saying that 80% of people who need a lawyer don’t actually use a lawyer. And I thought that presented a tremendous opportunity, but also an opportunity to do good and offer people who are suffering. They’re going through the worst thing they’ve ever gone through.
Their kids are suffering because of that and often end up as unintended casualties. And so I had the opportunity to do this and hopefully help people get through it.
John Corcoran: 12:05
Tell us about some of the challenges around having an existing firm and then starting up this new entity and building both at the same time?
Beau Atkins: 12:12
Well, I didn’t build both, so I forced an exit from my last partnership. And a big reason was I struggled for a lot of years balancing the entrepreneur mindset and my entrepreneur brain and my lawyer brain. Because as I’m sure you can appreciate, the lawyer brain is constantly looking for risk issues, issue spotting, and versus the entrepreneur who is seeking opportunities and can at some times, in some instances, be blind to the risk. Yeah. And those two are doing battle to the point where I felt the lawyer brain was suffocating the business.
And so in 2019, I resolved to basically blow it up, start fresh, and not model myself after any law firms. But best business practices. And EO has been amazing for that. Just because it’s it sort of transcends industries. You’re not just exploring.
There are lawyer groups, but my in my forum, I don’t have any lawyers in there, so I get to borrow from experiences of other business owners.
John Corcoran: 13:22
You have three lawyers in my forum. There’s a lot, myself included. Talk a little bit about why you come to an event like this global leadership conference and what you get out of it, what you’ve gotten out of the last couple of days here?
Beau Atkins: 13:35
Well, I serve on a regional council in Canada, so I find it’s a great opportunity to learn how to be a leader of leaders. And every time, every position I’ve gone through in my path of leadership has just I felt elevated my skill set of again leading other business owners that are leaders in their organization, which has really percolated down into my organization where I feel like I’m showing up better for my team. And the Global Leadership Conference just has amazing programming, connections and experiences.
John Corcoran: 14:17
Yeah, well, Beau, this has been great. Where can people go to learn more about you and evolve your.
Beau Atkins: 14:21
LinkedIn is I’m annoyingly prolific on LinkedIn, so after a conference like this, I bet I’ll have 50 posts. So that’s the best place to connect with me. And then of course, check out our website.
John Corcoran: 14:37
Yeah, great. Thanks so much Beau.
Beau Atkins: 14:38
Awesome. Thank you.
John Corcoran: 14:39
Hey everyone. John Corcoran coming to you live from Entrepreneurs’ Organization’s Global Leadership Conference 2025, in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii. And I’m here with Bas Beek, who’s from the Netherlands chapter I, by the way, am from the San Francisco chapter. I’m the Co-founder of a company called Rise25, where we help companies to B2B companies to start podcasts and do content marketing. And you have a company that’s called Bas Beek.
Yes. You’ve had it for about 20 years now, started back in 2003. Let’s get to your origin story. How did you end up starting this company?
Bas Beek: 15:12
Yeah, I was a business consultant and I wanted to do something which was really something that people were standing in line for, okay. Which would make the world a better place. And that’s why I started with a new generation. Because if you want to make something a better place, start with a new generation.
John Corcoran: 15:29
And the model was to help companies with providing child care services. Yeah.
Bas Beek: 15:34
First we started with like daycares in companies, but later we found out that people want actually near their homes. So the name was the same company, the nanny in the company, but it was in the residential areas near schools and. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 15:50
Okay. Tell me about the early days. Like, was it a challenging in the early days or early years to get it up and running? Get it. You know, profitable?
Bas Beek: 15:59
Yeah. It was it took me five years before it was profitable, but that was because we had a big loan as well. And of course, I mean, it’s a service which is very important for parents. They don’t give their child at the first moment to someone that is new in the sector. Right.
So we had to build up a recognition, a brand name, our promise for a long time. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 16:23
Yeah. And was that difficult for you moving into sales? You know, you know, getting parents to to trust enough to hand over their child during the day.
Bas Beek: 16:33
Well, actually, I didn’t find it difficult. It took us a long time, but I didn’t find it difficult because my heart is there. I mean, I’m very passionate about the development of young children. I worked as a caregiver after I was a business consultant. Everybody was laughing at me, but that was the best thing I could ever have done.
So it was not difficult because all the parents have seen that passion and true care for children. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 16:58
So you must have had family friends who are like, what are you doing? You’re moving from business consultant to caregiver. You must have had a lot of people that were putting doubts in your head.
Bas Beek: 17:08
Yeah, exactly. They were. They were laughing at me. Like, what? What?
What are you doing? Yeah. All those people are not laughing anymore. I can assure you.
John Corcoran: 17:16
Yeah. So it’s a much larger company now. You have 1500 people working for you. I mean, imagine how many parents you’ve helped by taking care of their children so that they can they can work. Tell me about some of the other challenges you’ve had over the years.
We’ve had economic downturns. We’ve had Covid. Tell me about some of those.
Bas Beek: 17:35
Yeah. So the economic downturn, like the financial crisis, it took us three, four years to really. We didn’t do bad, but we were not growing as fast anymore, which was not a good thing either. But it was. It was difficult to get to keep people on board all the the clients because some people lost their jobs, etc. and at Covid there was even more hard.
It was harder because all the regulations and it is a people’s business. So if someone is sick or has to stay home or has. All these, how do you say it? Everything which has to do with with Covid, you need more people. You need new people, you need new hires.
And it was very difficult to find that. So it took us three years to grow out of that. That was really difficult. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 18:32
And you’ve been very involved in entrepreneurs organization. What drew you to EO and why do you get involved?
Bas Beek: 18:40
Yeah, EO is from the first moment it was a warm bath for me. It’s like. everything an entrepreneur cannot share with his or her employees. You can share with you have to share with a peer. And this was a organization of peers.
So at the first moment that I came into EO, it was like, wow, all these people, I can talk to them on the same level, the same frequency, the same vibes. I’m a member for 15 years and I’ve never lost that feeling. Always the same. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 19:14
And then this is Global Leadership Conference. Maybe you’ve been to others and over the years, I imagine. Why do you come to the show and what are some of your takeaways from this experience?
Bas Beek: 19:24
I always go to GLC because I’m a board member, so I do the learning tracks that are important for my chair, and every year there’s something new and you have new contacts as well. You learn from the best practices from people, and I get a lot of energy, a lot of energy from it. Yeah, I always get home physically exhausted and mentally completely inspired.
John Corcoran: 19:49
And any big takeaways from this the last two days here?
Bas Beek: 19:54
Yeah. About how to use AI in my business more but also I’m learning chair. So if I can create events that cost less but have a higher impact, it is great. And I have had some discussions about best practices from some US learning chairs that had very, very great creative ideas about not costing events that cost money, but that deliver money to you. Awesome.
John Corcoran: 20:22
Oh, that sounds great.
Bas Beek: 20:23
Exactly.
John Corcoran: 20:25
Where can they go to learn more about you, your website, LinkedIn?
Bas Beek: 20:28
Yeah, they can go to LinkedIn. My name is Bas Beek. And they can go to website compananny.com or .nl.
John Corcoran: 20:36
Okay, great. Thank you so much.
Bas Beek: 20:38
Thank you.
John Corcoran: 20:38
John Corcoran here at Entrepreneurs’ Organization’s Global Leadership Conference 2025, in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii. I am a member of EO San Francisco and also the Co-founder of Rise25, which helps B2B businesses to start podcasts and also do content marketing. And I’m here with John, who’s from the EO Atlanta chapter. And Jon, you are a business broker, a business advisor with Transworld Talk. Explain to me a little bit of what you do.
Jon Roman: 21:05
Correct. So I own an agency down in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s a business brokerage slash M&A advisory because we do deals all over the map from, you know, tens of thousands of dollars to $100 million deals. Okay. Open that in 2014.
I’m blessed to have 15 people working with me in a fully staffed office, and I think we dominate the Atlanta market.
John Corcoran: 21:27
And how it probably took a little while to get up to 15 different advisors. What was it like in the early days? What were some of the challenges back in 2014 when you were just getting started? You’ve been an employee before?
Jon Roman: 21:37
Yeah. Great question. So I transit from being a corporate banker all the way to being a business broker and M&A advisor. First days rent a space, making sure you have the right space and the right place. And then you go into it and it’s empty and all you have to just a computer, a desk and a chair and no portfolio, no clients and no one knew your name.
That’s how the first days happened.
John Corcoran: 22:03
So not easy.
Jon Roman: 22:05
Yeah. No, it was a very difficult but pleasant itinerary. So I learned to do things. You know, I’ve worked, like, every entrepreneur, 20 hours a day, maybe even 22, just to get things started. So the first two years were challenging but pleasant.
You know, we had good experiences going through all that.
John Corcoran: 22:25
What were some other challenges that you experienced, for example, like Covid? You know, a lot of companies experienced a lot of turmoil then.
Jon Roman: 22:33
Correct. We actually Covid years for us are record years because people wanted to get into the entrepreneurship and they’re looking for businesses to purchase. Also, we got blessed that most of our portfolio were construction or business service related businesses, and everybody wanted to be part of that. So for us, there are good years. The only problem is that I lost my staff.
You know, I had people like my manager, for example, she wanted to come to an office. She didn’t want to work out from her home. And she decided to leave just because she. She didn’t like the zoom approach. But we rehired.
I mean, we came back pretty strong from it. So, you know, everything went fine.
John Corcoran: 23:13
Yeah. You’ve been involved with Entrepreneurs’ Organization. Obviously we’re here at GLC, which is an EO conference. What has that served for you? How has EO helped you as a business leader?
Jon Roman: 23:24
Yeah. Great question John. So I joined EO right before Covid, right. So I signed up in September 2019 and then Covid hit and I didn’t know what to expect. Obviously I couldn’t do too many events, so I didn’t have that full understanding of EO.
And usually if you don’t have that, you tend to think about quitting. And I’m glad I didn’t. Yeah. So, you know, with that said, you know, you helped me first on the personal growth. You know, it did help with the way I was seeing things and helped with the family with actually even, you know, being a great father for my kids.
So that’s kind of how everything started, you know, everyone was telling me, yeah, but what’s your ROI? And I never thought about that because for me, the personal growth was very important at that time in time, we we managed to quadruple ourselves based on everything I learned from the year, based on, you know, what the other people shared with me, the learning activities, everything that is going on in the show helped me to become a business owner, a better business owner, as well as a good parent and a great, great husband.
John Corcoran: 24:29
And what about this beautiful event that we’ve been at for the last couple of days? What are your takeaways from this experience?
Jon Roman: 24:34
Awesome speakers. First of all, I think we had the greatest speakers so far. Deepak was awesome guy.
John Corcoran: 24:41
Deepak Chopra.
Jon Roman: 24:42
Deepak Chopra.
John Corcoran: 24:42
Guy Kawasaki.
Jon Roman: 24:44
Yeah. Great. Great people to to listen to. Obviously strong records and things of that nature. We also had, you know, the workshops that are going on right now.
You know, a lot of things that I didn’t know how to brand yourself, how to be a better, you know, speaker. Those are great as well.
John Corcoran: 25:00
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don’t want to take you too long from those workshops. Jon, where can people go to learn more about you and learn about your Transworld services?
Jon Roman: 25:08
Absolutely. Thank you. So the easiest way will be the phone number. I have a fully staffed office, and they always pick up the number. And the number is (404) 666-4486.
My email is jroman@tworld.com and the website is tworld.com.
John Corcoran: 25:25
Okay, great. Jon, thanks so much.
Jon Roman: 25:27
Thank you John.
Outro: 25:28
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