By  Joe Apfelbaum, EO Brooklyn member, Ajax Union

When I joined EO, I was 75 pounds heavier than I am today. I remember sitting at a Warren Rustand event with a beer in my hand thinking to myself, why are all these successful entrepreneurs in shape, and I’m the only fatso in the room?

The problem was that I was completely unaware that I was obese. Sure, I knew that I was fatter than I would like to be, but I focused on my business and I didn’t think that my health impacted the way I showed up in the business. Making my business the number-one priority before my personal well-being held us back.
What does my personal well-being have to do with the growth of our business, you might ask? Well, if you look at our company from the outside, we are one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S., #178 on the INC 500 before we joined EO. It was amazing that we accomplished that. The thing is that on the inside, we were not profitable, and we didn’t have great systems. We had no core values, and we hired based on instinct. We didn’t believe in meetings or planning or coaching. I didn’t have an admin, and our whole company was reactive. When we grew to 75 employees, we felt the pain, and we needed to change it all.

You can’t improve the quality of your company if you do not improve the quality of you. That means that I needed to get a coach to develop myself; I needed to take a good look in the mirror and ask myself, “Why am I doing this? Do I really want to have a 10 million dollar company that loses a million dollars a year, or would I rather have a 3 million dollar company that puts a million in the bottom line? Do I want to spend my every waking hour worrying about having the wrong employees, the wrong clients and the wrong business or do I want to create the life and business of my dreams?”

After working with a personal coach, a fitness coach and a writing coach for the past year, I came to realize that I want amazing results.

Our goal was set to decrease the amount of clients by 90% and 10x our revenue per client, CHECK! Our goal was to hire higher quality marketing professionals with the right core values and 3x per revenue per employee, CHECK! Our goal was to create a culture where people love coming to work and they get paid to work (not to come to work), CHECK! Two days a week, all our employees work from home now because we built a level of trust and accountability. Our goal is to be fully virtual so that people can work from anywhere.

That is how I lost 75 pounds, by focusing on quality foods, focusing on quality exercise that I love doing, like walking and surrounding myself with quality people that love to do the same. Making my goal public on my Facebook account and having hundreds of people cheer me on kept me going.

I am ready to make our vision a reality because I am healthier and have more energy than ever in 2016. Our vision in 2016 is: Amazing Clients and Amazing Employees to be an Amazing company. All our clients are proud of the ROI they get from our digital marketing agency, and all our employees are enthusiastic about working at our company. Our investors are super happy because they are part of a profitable enterprise, and people love to refer business to us because we make them look good.

The feeling of fitting into a skinny pair of pants is incredible, and having the energy to lead a company to do the same is simply amazing.

Not only did I finish the first draft of my book last year, but I developed the confidence to relaunch my Podcast “CEOmojo,” my TV show “Growtime.TV” and launch a learning academy for entrepreneurs that want more out of life. I call those amazing entrepreneurs Mojo Nation.

2016 is the year of amazing profit, happiness and peace for me, my business and my family because I am not looking for opportunity; I am looking for amazing.