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The first week in December, we announced my resignation to the company. I began to make thirty-six of the most difficult coaching calls I had ever made. One at a time, I told my clients and dear friends that I was leaving the organization. After the first few calls, I realized this approach wouldn’t work because every client wanted to know where I was going and what time we would talk again next week. At my lunch break, I phoned MF and told him he would have to call the rest of the clients because they didn’t have any interest in another coach; they wanted to continue to work with me. I wanted MF to make it clear to the rest of my clients that continuing a relationship with me wasn’t an option. Frustrated, he slammed down the phone and made the calls. They were short and to the point. From what I was told, they went something like this:

“Hello, Bob? This is Mike Ferry. I’m calling to tell you that Tom is leaving the company, but I’ve selected the perfect coach for you to take his place. His name is John and he will be in touch. Goodbye.”

After he and I hung up the phone, I closed my files, turned off my computer, and realized I was no longer working for the Mike Ferry Organization. I was now free.

Shortly after I left the office that last day, my cellphone began ringing off the hook. I wasn’t ready to deal with the fallout that soon, so I let all of the calls go to my voice mail for the rest of the day. Six clients left me similar messages saying they wanted to be my first client. That was hard to ignore because six people would be enough business to get me up and running. My wife and I decided we had to honor the wishes of the people I had built up a relationship with, but I didn’t want to pilfer clients from MF. It didn’t feel right. So we decided to start a small business that we would run from our home. I called my mentor and good friend Bill Mitchell to ask his opinion. He summed things up, as only Bill could:

“Your dad’s business is going one direction and you are moving in another.” He told me I could go after an entirely different market than MF’s without jeopardizing my integrity.

I could live with that.

I decided to focus on high-end Realtors, a market that MF had never gained any serious traction in and that basically he didn’t work in. Shortly after leaving his company, I began marketing my services to the biggest and best Realtors in the business. There were 270,000 real estate brokers between Santa Barbara and San Diego, so I bootstrapped it up, went out there and began to sell my services and build my new company.

I turned away 350 of MF’s clients who came to me within the first year after I left his company. I decided that taking them on as clients wasn’t worth the money or the headache that surely would have come with having to fight against MF. I took the high road every step of the way.

• • •

I finished my first year in business with $2.19 million in revenue. In my first two years of business, I went from nonexistent to the third largest company in the real estate success coaching industry.

Seven years later, my company is thriving. I have expanded my services to include professionals beyond real estate. Today I personally coach CEOs of companies, the Hollywood elite, and other entrepreneurs. Other coaches in my firm are working with everyone from CEOs of start-up ventures to CEOs of the home. We work with schoolteachers and sales executives, everyday people just like you who are interested in shifting their lives from by default to By Design.

The goal of this book is to help you find balance and create purpose and passion in your life. Throughout our journey together, I will ask you the same challenging questions Mike asked of me, which helped me make one of the most difficult yet freeing decisions of my life and career. And if that isn’t enough to get you thinking, I will continue to push you to ask yourself several other questions designed to help you get a clear picture of what your life is like from the outside looking in. Your answers to