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What’s your backstory?
“My entrepreneurial journey started when I was 20, a sophomore in college. In the fall of 2014, I got 2 phone calls on the same day that would change my life forever. My roommate and father both asked me to help them with their social media marketing. I said “of course! but don’t hire me, hire my company.
On December 19, 2014, Gothard Enterprises was born. That turning point marked the beginning of my journey into entrepreneurship and personal development, and my entire way of life started changing. I started reading more, speaking at my college, and realizing that anybody can turn their dreams into reality. For a few years building my company was fulfilling enough, but soon the desire to reach more people directly, not just helping clients, took hold of me. I didn’t know what it was going to look like at first, but soon I just got started, and ended up writing.
After a year, on July 3, 2016, I published my first book. CEO at 20: A Little Book for Big Dreams. The purpose of the book was to help normal people, just like you and me, turn our dreams into reality with practical advice, anecdotes, and research. The next 5 days, I manually reached out to every single person I had ever met and asked them to support me. I quickly ran out of contacts (big surprise there!), and realized that I needed to build my network and influence for further books. So, I decided to launch a community for entrepreneurs.
July 8, 2016, I thought it would be cool to name this group Project EGG: Entrepreneurs Gathering for Growth. The plan was to bring together as many entrepreneurs as possible, listen to their problems, and solve them with my books. Naturally I wanted to attract the best entrepreneurs to the group that I could find.
What I didn’t realize was how accessible these people were if you asked the right way, and once I started to see the calibre of business owners who were becoming a part of the group, a cool idea popped into my head. What would happen if I tried to interview these rockstars? I started to ask, and to my delight, they started to accept.
The Project EGG Show was born on July 27, 2016. And let me tell you, in the beginning, I had absolutely NO idea what to do. I just had a single magic question that I would use to land every interview, and then I’d wing it from there. Over time, however, I started to hone my craft and refine my strategies, and eventually I figured out how to consistently book top notch interview guests any time I wanted.
I’ve had the great privilege of interviewing some truly incredible people. For a complete list, you’d have to visit the Project EGG website, but some of the guests I’m most proud of having on the show include Grant Cardone, Patrick Bet-David, Pat Flynn, Kim Garst, Nicholas Kusmich, Rachel Pedersen, Rob Dial, Dr. Ivan Misner, Ryan Stewman, Joel Comm, Craig Ballantyne, Christian Hageseth, Clinton Senkow, Matt Ganzak, Holly Homer, Jonathan Lacoste, Dr. Terri Levine, Swish Goswami, Dan Doty and many more.
Since 2016, The Project EGG Show has published well over 100+ episodes and has, as of April 28, 2019, over 5,000 listeners per month. New podcast episodes are published every morning at 8AM CST, and sporadically throughout the days M-F the latest episodes are live streamed to over 15+ platforms. In addition, my community on social media has grown to over 20,000+ people.
I’ve been busy outside of Project EGG too, including becoming a #1 Amazon Best Selling Author in 3 different categories, launching a music festival in New Orleans, publishing 10+ more books, helping hundreds of businesses with their social media marketing, and building 5 companies, the latest of which is revolutionizing the payment processing industry.
I’m 24 years old at the time of writing this. If there’s one thing I can say for sure, it’s that I’m just getting started.
‘Can you tell me the story of your prior successes, challenges, and major responsibilities?’
Of challenges, there have and I assume will continue to be a plethora. The life of an entrepreneur is one of challenge and uncertainty. I’d say the biggest challenges I’ve faced are completely my own doing. I’ve had to overcome my own inferior mindset and grow into the person who is capable of accomplishing what I am aiming to accomplish. Practically, this looked like a few things that held me back for a while. The first was a lack of focus. Clearly I have shiny object syndrome, and for a while I let it run rampant. There was a time when I was a senior in college that I was running my marketing agency, writing/publishing books, hosting new interviews, managing my ecommerce store, maintaining a respectable 3.6 GPA, partaking in a relatively active social life (work hard play hard, right?), and occasionally sleeping. That drove me nuts, so I had to make a really hard decision and focus on what I was most passionate about – Project EGG.
Once I decided to really focus all of my energies on Project EGG, I started to see some truly amazing results, including interviewing people who are running companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I got to travel to Miami and interview Grant Cardone in his professional studio. That was like a dream come true. In addition, I finally hit the best seller’s list on Amazon, which was incredible, and the show has really started to pick up a significant amount of traction. But I feel like my biggest success to date has been discovering my true life’s purpose and realizing that Project EGG is in fact the platform that I have always needed. And let’s just say, now that I’ve found it, even bigger things are coming, and the world isn’t ready.
‘Can you tell me about a time when you almost gave up, how you felt about that, and what you did instead of giving up?’
There was a moment right after I graduated from LSU, early in 2018, when I had shoulder surgery, that I found myself in a really unfulfilled space. I couldn’t do interviews because my dominant arm was out of commission and trying to man the steering wheel like that was close to impossible especially trying to run my show. I had closed down my agency and ecommerce store, stopped writing, and there was very little I felt that I could do to continue making progress in my life.
I don’t know about you, but when I feel like I’m wasting time, stagnant, trapped, or just chained down without a creative outlet, I get extraordinarily restless and feel like my quality of life drops significantly. It’s almost like living without a purpose, and feeling like a wandering soul that is trapped in unproductive purgatory. Point is – I almost gave up on my dreams because I felt like I physically couldn’t pursue them during the 6 month recovery period and it was driving me nuts. Not only that, but my healthy lifestyle of daily workouts and disciplined eating was totally shot because I was out of sync with my normal routine.
In times like these, however, I turn to reflection and introspection. It took a while, but I was able to reconnect with the passion I felt for Project EGG and realize that the only way to overcome this awful feeling was to get back on the saddle and ramp my operations back up. And the only way I would be able to do that would be to completely take care of my shoulder. So, I doubled down on physical therapy, and committed myself once again to healthy eating, slowly working back into full strength.
The shining moment of redemption for me was in August of 2018 – roughly 7 months after my surgery – when I hiked Pike’s Peak in Colorado Springs, a 14,000+ foot mountain that takes about 9 ½ hours to summit. It was after this feat of physical strength that I came back home rejuvenated and ready to kickstart my career back into action.
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