Podcast Introduction
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Speaker 2: Hello everybody. Welcome to the first 100 podcast. This is the podcast where we’re going to be exploring the journey of entrepreneurs, business owners, agency leaders, and so many other people as they share with us the strategies, the challenges, and the triumphs that have led them to secure those first 100 customers, first 100 followers, first 100 people. So today I’m joined with a very special guest, John Quirk. Hi, John, How are you?
John Quirk (JQ): Hey, Daniel. Good. How are you?
Speaker 2: I’m great. So excited to have you here. You’re actually the first person that we have who has such an interesting business as yours. For context and for everybody who is listening or watching that doesn’t know what I’m talking about, doesn’t know about you, Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about so and what you do?
John Quirk’s Background and SOCO on the Streets
JQ: Yeah. So I run SOCO on the streets. It’s a business I started six years ago. We run a holistic-based wellness surgery. So for people that are really looking for a solution to stress. We get folks that are going through difficult times with breakups, job losses, general traumas. We get people that are coming with medical diagnoses, and a lot of folks who’ve tried, I think, Western model of things, be it medications or talk therapy. And we just, we give them an alternative in a way to come to an environment and to a situation where there’s a lot of love and there’s a lot of joy and laughter. And I’m also a huge proponent of giving people an opportunity to challenge themselves. So we have things like breathwork and cold plunging and stuff that really gets people out of their comfort zone. But my journey with this was sort of all the way back in 2014. It’s kind of crazy. It’s been ten years now, but I used to work as a journalist. I was a TV producer writer. I’ve done all kinds of things.
Speaker 2: You said it’s been ten years since 2014, right?
JQ: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I felt like that was yesterday.
JQ: It, yeah. I think especially with COVID, two or three years sort of disappeared there for a lot of us. It’s wild. I just got to say, I love all the Facebook memories that pop up sometimes. And I just got one the other day that seven years ago this week I was driving cross-country from New York to California. So I was kind of leaving one life and starting another life. Yeah. So I mean, I, I used to work pretty hectic jobs. I mean, if you’re a journalist, you’re on a deadline pretty much all the time. So it’s just a super high-stress environment. It’s like a pressure cooker all the time. And I don’t really have any coping mechanisms. I was an athlete growing up and I loved to work out. And that was one piece of the puzzle, but it was actually yoga that gave me sort of this other side of, you know, I got into breathwork and meditation and I started picking up books on yoga philosophy and that all the way into the rabbit holes of metaphysics and quantum mechanics and really just understanding that there’s a whole world of energy and things that sort of happened behind the scenes that we don’t see that really affect our wellbeing and how we interface with the world. And so, fundamentally, the retreats are an opportunity for people to learn a lot about themselves. But I also teach a lot of these things in a way that I think makes sense for a lot of people. I think it’s just a lot more practical and approachable for people who are wanting to understand, what are some of these things that are affecting us on a day-to-day level. And yeah, it’s really powerful. We just finished one yesterday and just had the most amazing group. We had a couple guys whose wives had come before, they sent them to come because they had such a great time. And a gal actually just reached out to us this morning. She brought two of her adult children, which we had never really had, like a full family of like three people come together and they just had an amazing time. And so it’s it’s really unique that I get to really love what I do every single day. I just I feel so grateful. And of course, it’s been a lot of work and a lot of challenges. I messed up a lot of things that I’m sure we’re going to dive into some of that stuff. But yeah, that’s that’s kind of the State of the Union right now for me.
Transition from Journalism to Wellness
JQ: I just I always felt like it was the first day of school and I didn’t have any friends. I just I didn’t like going to work. I was really having a tough time, you know, trying to do a good job at managing a lot of different aptitudes in the company and things that were just and my whole life was just starting to shift. You know, I picked up yoga about a year or two before that. So I was finding that I really was wanting to spend less time in the office and I was wanting to spend more time doing yoga and meditating. And so when I lost my job, it was pretty funny because I didn’t feel I think a lot of the normal emotions that you would feel. I wasn’t that upset. I mean, I was like, okay, I need to figure out how to make money. But I was like, other than that, I wasn’t that disappointed about not going to this job. And then of course, you have that feeling of, you know, am I not good enough? And all that stuff kind of creeps in. But pretty quickly, it was like a week later I was in a yoga teacher training and I was, you know, I was all in and I was the first teacher in our yoga teacher training to start teaching public classes. I started running around to try to find private clients. I figured out little tricks to kind of market myself on things like Thumbtack, and I would go to local events and just hand out business cards. So I was so impassioned by the idea of really spreading health and wellness to people that it just became, you know, kind of that natural progression to the next stop. And then retreats just really became an extension of that. You know, I really just wanted to find a way to to go deeper with people. You know, I think in our class was amazing, but I really didn’t want to stop. Like, I would stay after class and I would have these conversations and I would ask people like, are you intimidated? You know, anything about metaphysics and the universe picked up any of this stuff. And a lot of people were. And so even in my first retreat, I really have like, like a marketing plan or this kind of, you know, a no website, I had no I had no social media following. I had no nothing. I just had a dream to bring people for. Really started my robot in the spirit or sadness or at all.
Speaker 2: No, no, no worry.
JQ: So I really just I wanted to take people a little bit further and I was living in New York right outside New York City at the time, and it was very cold in the winters there. So I just decided to go to Costa Rica with a bunch of people. And I mean, I was literally taking payments in cash, checks, like I had no e-commerce, I had no nothing. It was just all like passion driven. That’s kind of how it was for the first few years that I ran the business, I really had no high level business plan. I just was just doing a bunch of stuff that seemed fun, you know, and that that seemed like stuff I would want to do. And then other people wanted to do it too, you know? So yeah, that’s, that’s really where it all it all started. Very interesting.
Credibility and Marketing Challenges
Speaker 2: And actually, I have sort of I obviously checked out your website, checked out your tweets, and I had a question about when you actually started putting all of this together. I’m assuming that, you know, you were learning throughout the process. Did you have to get any sort of other paper backing for this because you did tap into a lot of like modern medicine and sort of alternative strategies that I think a lot of us as like normal people in the world, we’re not completely in tune with. And I know that to become a yoga teacher, a lot of people have to go through courses and stuff like that. Did you have to sort of did you reach a point where you felt like, you know, I need to get something out of like to show credibility? Or do you think it was more just like happened through your results? How did that go through? Because I think it’s such an interesting and different world.
JQ: Yeah, Yeah, it is. It is kind of interesting where, you know, I even you look at like a lot of the folks that have come on our retreats are from the medical community. I think, you know, it’s doctors, it’s nurses, it’s people that are burnt out. And I look like I’m not seeing Western medicine. Is that a universally that It’s quite the opposite indeed. They just sort of meander in the middle. And, you know, if you look at, you know, Western medicine and doctors, they they are quite specialized, rightly. They just kind of look at one part of the whole. And so that from a mental health standpoint, it really falls short. It’s funny because one of the criticisms, one of the only criticisms in years of doing this and I’ve got was from a Western medicine doctor, because I think she was a little bit angry that I didn’t have more of the like, you know, certifications or the things on my wall. But, you know, I’ve learned through so many different mediums. I’ve gone to countless retreats. I’ve been to like six Doctor Joe Dispenser retreats, and he’s a neuroscientist and quantum physicist that, you know, he’s doing research that’s like literally turning the medical world upside down because it’s proving that a lot of your ability to think and feel good affects your ability to actually be healthy. And so but I mean, I’ve read countless books. I’ve been to so many workshops and I mean, even YouTube University and like I tell you what’s happening, there’s so many resources that are free out there that you could learn about so much of this stuff and it doesn’t even really cost much. So, you know, for me, I think some of it also too is just anecdotal. I’ve taken a a wide breadth of different things between breathwork and meditation movement, sunlight, cold exposure. But I’ve also just gotten in my own little laboratory and I’ve experimented and I’ve tried and played with different things, and I created some of my own systems. And, you know, that’s been that’s been really the loudest voice, you know, that evidence of my own transformation, my own ability to self-regulate, feel good without any kind of exterior stimulation or pills or food or, you know, that kind of stuff. And so that’s really what I share with people. And I tell people on retreats like, I don’t want people to dogmatically follow me in my system, but I want them to try a bunch of things that they become more sensitive to what works for them. Because again, it’s so layered, so nuanced, like what works for certain people, you know, like I was vegan for ten years and that was great for a period of my life. And then I went back to eating meat, and that really served me as I got older and, you know, so I would never try to tell people like, oh, this is the be all end all. You know, like way that you must do it. And that’s always been really important. And we’ve been really successful too, you know, because we don’t we come at it very authentically and we, I don’t I don’t try to pretend that I have all the answers for everybody. You know.
Speaker 2: That’s great. Yeah. And I think that’s also really important when it comes to things like wellness, because they’re very touchy subject. Right. And a lot of it is very I think people’s opinions and reactions are going to depend on their own experiences. I actually wanted to ask you about something that you mentioned earlier, which was how when you started, you didn’t really have a lot of marketing. You didn’t have like a sales funnel. A lot of this even within your industry. You know, like I think when you start businesses, that is important to start setting up. When you actually want to start measuring success, when to start seeing all of these things in, in your industry, in this retreat wellness world, how were you able to sort of start to walk into like, you know, websites e-commerce? How did you start to figure out how to do pricing lead generation? I think I’ve talked to so many people who always tell me like, yeah, like finding clients is always the most difficult thing. Obviously for you, it’s not necessarily a customer buy as much as it’s like a person who’s willing to go through this experience. And how did you go like, how did that process of creating the profile for the people that you’re targeting, all of these things go for you?
JQ: It’s such a good question and it’s quite well-timed because I’m actually in the process of hiring marketing help right now, like a devoted person just to do marketing for us. For me, it was a lot of throwing stuff against the wall and just seeing what stuck. You know, I think it was very passion driven and I tell people it was very intuitive driven, but it wasn’t like a it wasn’t a very calculated marketing strategy, let’s put it that way. And it’s still and it still isn’t in a lot of ways. And that’s why I finally reaching out for for help and support, you know? But as far as like website stuff, you know, I just would go online. I would just, you know, kind of watch videos and tutorials and, you know, something like Squarespace, right. Is something that if you’re relatively, I think, technically proficient, you can, you know, at least get started. And then there’s, you know, layers of how, you know, how how functional do you need it to be. Right. And so, like, you know, for me, it’s it’s really just presenting us in a way that looks clean, it looks polished, but it doesn’t need to have some like crazy amount of one eight, you know, integration with a CRM or anything like that. But we’re looking into doing some of that stuff now, right? So, you know, I think for me, a lot of my original attendees were coming out of my classes or just an email list that, you know, that’s always your low hanging fruit. I think the people that you’re interacting with that you’re already giving value to and whatever you’re doing, especially your service based industry like we are, you know, that’s just the biggest no brainer, right? It’s just you really, you know, talk to those people, see what they want, you know, really awesome. And that’s a mistake that, you know, I kind of made early on. Like I felt nervous, too. Like, you know, like, do you want to go on a retreat here? Would you want it to be this amount of days? Like, I think we kind of want to have our own vision sometimes.
JQ: I’ve hired PPC companies, I’ve hired private coaches, I’ve hired custom website builders. I’ve tried a lot of different things and I call it $100,000 education. It was like a graduate school, you know, because I learned the things that would work and I learned some of the things that were not work. I learned a lot of things that don’t work, mostly silver bullet solutions. If people tell you they have some kind of quick fix things for you, I just I would be very skeptical of that. As you know, marketing is, I’m sure you know, and talking to probably high-level people, it it takes time, right? It takes time to get a strategy. Get your client avatars in place and then, you know, unveil a strategy, see how it works, test a few different things, and then, you know, create your verticals and then kind of go down the paths that work. So, you know, I have learned a lot and I feel really well positioned to hopefully hire the most amazing rockstar person. We’re almost there. We got a couple people, we’re like the last little phase, the hiring process. But yeah, it’s it’s really it’s been a labor of love first and then sort of the business side of figuring things out second. But you know, at some point I want to start a property out here. When I have my own retreat center, I want to be able to help even more people by running more events so that vision has got more clear, you know, especially recently.
Speaker 2: So that’s great. Yeah. No, and I think like what you said, marketing does require us a lot of trial and error, which means a lot of failures. You’ll try a million strategies and they’ll suck until you find one and that one works.
JQ: Yeah. Yeah. And I don’t know and I’m sure you can speak to this, but I, I feel like it’s right at the edge of where people. It’s like anything that’s worthwhile is like. And when I say people, the ice bath, it’s like you want to get out right away, but if you can stay in for a couple minutes, you’ll feel so amazing when you get out. I think a lot of people, especially entrepreneurs, it’s it’s hard. You don’t have a steady paycheck and people in your circle might be telling you you’re crazy. And all these factors can kind of stack up against you. But it’s typical, I think, right at the edge of where we want to quit that right on the other side is that million one that you talked about. You know, it’s yeah, you know, any one more time, you know.
Speaker 2: You just have to stay consistent. I think like don’t lose hope and as long as you’re doing the right things, I think you’re you’re going to get to where you want to get.
JQ: You know, I reference this. I’ll tell the story really good. But I referenced a speech Jim Carrey had once where he talked about his dad and he said his dad could have been a great comedian, but he took the safe option, right, to be like an accountant. I think it was. And he ended up losing his job. And Jim Carrey grew up with very little money. And he and he learned from that that if you’re going to fail, right, in order to at least struggle, I guess would be a better word. But it’s like you might as well do it doing something you love, right? Our time is so precious here. It’s like, you know, so many people wait till 65 and they go to a job that they really don’t enjoy and they don’t have that. You know, somebody needs you out there. You know, somebody needs what you do, somebody needs what you’re good at. And you know, it doesn’t have to be an entrepreneurship. But, you know, if you’re stuck in something, you know, like a job or relationship, it’s like there’s there’s no better chance to explore other options than right now because we don’t get that much of it. So then I just I’m just thankful every day that I get to do what I do.
What to Expect at a Retreat
Speaker 2: So I also want to know, can you walk us through what a retreat looks like for you? You know, what kind of retreats you offer for what kind of people. I know you said there’s people who are going through tough times like breakups. I’m assuming like that, the people that they love, who that kind of thing. Can you walk us through that a little bit?
JQ: Yeah. You know, it looks so different for everybody. But, you know, what’s so funny is when we do like our group activities, we get people together and we get them to sort of share a little bit about their lives with each other and the universal language of retreats is that everybody’s kind of going through something. You know, we are all struggling, even the most polished people, even the, you know, the most financially well-off people, people that, you know, problems in the world is actually some of the most stressed people. And there was unhappy people that I’ve ever met. And so the process for us is, is, you know, it’s formulaic. It’s to really get people in a welcoming environment, but to tell them like, hey, you know, this isn’t a vacation with a little bit of like yoga thrown in. This is something that my ethos, my intention is to really make it transformative for people. And so when they walk through the doors of the retreat, you know, I tell them, look like if you just give us an effort, you show up. You never had to have done yoga in your life. You’ve never meditated a minute. It doesn’t matter if you just show up in your present with this, you give good effort. We can help you change your life. And you know, people are always a little bit, I think, skeptical at first. And, you know, but after four days, you literally look at people’s faces like they look different, you know, And we do take away their cell phones, which I think is such a huge, you know, we call them these digital detox retreats. And I think that gets people’s attention. That’s the one of the branding and marketing things that’s worked really well for us is I think especially in the West, there’s nobody that you can ask that It’s like, you know, if you say, Hey, you have to use a little less screen time, I think pretty much everybody’s like, Yeah, I could probably use a lot of screen time.
JQ: And when they leave, they are they’re changed. They’re fundamentally changed. Or are even working now and trying to get technology and research a place that we can actually show measurements. So but we can show, you know, what people look like day one versus what they look like before. And yeah, like by the time they leave, they’re like, oh, I was a little skeptical that this could be life changing, but, you know, it just keeps coming up. And they start talking about things like energy. They start talking about things like, you know, they’re able to really see people in a totally different way. Even just an optimist and like a general positivity about humanity. You know, I think if you look at the news which I worked in, you look at politics, it’s very divisive, it’s very toxic. And then they get in with somebody else and they, you know, both kind of support each other. And it’s almost like a little peer pressure just to survive, you know? And then they get out. They all have each other. It’s like, you know, look, you could do this with the help of somebody else, you know? So these are just all fundamental tenets and things that, you know, like I said, I’m really proud of that. You don’t have to be like a yogi. You don’t have to dress a certain way or look a certain way. That 17 to 81 year olds come on the street, that men and women, non-binary. I had, you know, just about anything you could imagine anybody and everything, you know, and we’ve we’ve been able to navigate most of that Pretty amazing. So that’s great.
Speaker 2: And how long are the retreats? Like usually how many days is it?
JQ: Yeah.
Speaker 2: People want it to be.
JQ: So we have set programs, so the minimum is four days and then we go to Indonesia for eight days, seven nights. And that one is obviously very far away and requires a lot of, you know, there’s just so much to do there. So we do, you know, like we go to surf camp and we go hiking up volcanoes and we have cooking classes with the locals and there’s a near celebration while we’re there. It’s like a totally fun, like carnival style celebration with the day of silence that follows afterwards. This very thing where the whole island, like, shuts down. And so, yeah, my goal is to, you know, before COVID, we were running seven-day retreats, and I really loved that. I loved the more immersive experience. But it takes us just four days to really change lives. So that’s our minimum, our digital detox, which is four days. But I dig by end of like next year or early 2026, I want to get back to doing the seven-day because to have people for that amount of time is just it’s really powerful. It’s really cool to see what we could do in that amount.
Retreat Frequency and Operations
Speaker 2: And how many like, I’m also curious, how many retreats can you hold like within a year’s time or I mean, I’m assuming you are the one that’s hosting it, organizing and so how often can you have a retreat or is it do you have other people doing this for you as well?
JQ: No, we’re into other facilitators at certain times. We do have like support staff, like people that come in and do massage and Reiki and hypnotherapy and we have amazing people that do acupuncture. But as far as like the program itself, I’ve always been very sensitive to. I have a very like distinct way that I want it to sort of flow. And so all of the classes, all the workshops, I start with people at seven in the morning, we go all the way to 8:00 at night. So I’m, you know, I run pretty much every single class or workshop that we do. My goal is to get back to doing eight local retreats here in San Diego every year and then two big international retreats. It’s normally like at most once a quarter, even like a guy like Jodie Spencer, who has like a probably thousand persons now, you know, they’re doing one retreat every other month, I think, or shows are probably six or seven a year. You know, Deepak Chopra, I think, is doing kind of the same sort of thing, like five or six years.
JQ: It’s very tricky. You know, I’ve had assistants at times, but it’s hard because it’s such a front facing business, right? Where like people are really at the end of the day, they’re investing in the retreat, but they’re deciding on it because they like me or they like what I have to bring to the table or offer. So, you know, this last year, for example, while we were running the retreat, you know, we have booking websites and other things that are running in the background. And so a lady that I’ve been talking to for a while, she finally pulled the trigger, bought her retreat. So right after I get off with you, I have to update our spreadsheets and her her welcome information, all that kind of stuff. You know, another lady yesterday booked the Rishi all the way for February, so I get her up to speed today. And then I even took a sales call while I was on break from one of the retreats. You know, a lady was booked me on Cowardly. So I, you know, set up a time with her.
Conclusion
JQ: But yeah and just you know feel free if you’re curious or interested in collaborating, I feel like, you know, like I said, we don’t do a lot of heavy marketing yet, but we love conversations. So an email, I think a phone call is just such a beautiful lost art to be able to talk on the phone with people. So I would love to chat with anybody who’s interested in anything holistic and we could support you in that journey. Yeah, reach out to us.
Speaker 2: Awesome. Yeah. And I will be adding the links to your website and all relevant things to the description of this video for the people watching and for the listener is go to the video to get the link. So thank you so much for doing this.
JQ: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Daniela, you’ve been listening to Fully Managed Brought to you by Penji. Check out the show notes to learn more about today’s guest and to learn more about Penji, the human first creative subscription service. Head over to Penji.co. And by the way, if you’re still listening, it would mean the absolute world to us. If you were to share this podcast with a friend and of course, subscribe.
