696 Gregg Champion: Founder of Start Up Recovery
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Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Golden Show. Super excited to have my next guest here. Greg Champion is the founder of Startup Recovery, and it's an incredible, incredible initiative with a great story, a journey that spans global branding for Greg. Over the past 30 years of personal recovery, Greg has been a great partner for Startup Recovery.

He has also helped shape household names like Nike, Mattel, The Gap, lots of incredible, incredible businesses that he's been involved in. And now he's stepped into the world of purpose-driven reinvention.

In 2017, he co-founded Startup Recovery, a high-impact wellness center that combines elite recovery programming, life reset, and business mentorship to help individuals not just get back on track, but also build something incredibly better. So I can't wait to hear more about how Greg has changed personal transformation for himself and

into a professional playbook and what it takes to lead through adversity and how startup recovery is helping founders, athletes, creatives, humans shift from maybe some have addiction issues, others don't even know they do, but to following their passion and really making progress. So Greg, welcome to the show. Thank you.

Thank you, Kara. Great to be here. It's funny when you said he's changed. For those in the audience, Kara and I went to a higher institution known as Arizona State in the late 80s. And so I definitely have done a major change since those days, Kara. That's for sure. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by Range Rover Sport.

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Hey everyone, Kara here. I've had an Apple Card for a few years now and honestly it's one of the best kept secrets out there. It's made managing my spending feel effortless because I can see what I spend when and where at a glance. And here's the best part, applying is so easy. You just go to the wallet on your iPhone to apply and see your credit limit offer in minutes.

Then start using your Apple Card with Apple Pay right away. No hassle, no waiting, just simple and fast. What I love most about my Apple Card, I get up to 3% daily cash back on the things I'm already buying. No points to keep track of. So if you're looking for a credit card that fits your lifestyle, Apple Card is it. Give it a try. Apply now in the Wallet app on your iPhone.

Subject to credit approval, Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

Well, it was, it was a lot of fun, uh, for sure. So it's, it's, um, but I love all that you've done throughout the years. So I'd love to have you start with what is startup recovery and wellness? Like when you look at the mission and the purpose of building the business that you have, can you talk about how to define it? So we originally built the business, um,

This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card.

Hey everyone, Kara here. I've had an Apple Card for a few years now and honestly it's one of the best kept secrets out there. It's made managing my spending feel effortless because I can see what I spend when and where at a glance. And here's the best part, applying is so easy. You just go to the wallet on your iPhone to apply and see your credit limit offer in minutes.

Then start using your Apple Card with Apple Pay right away. No hassle, no waiting, just simple and fast. What I love most about my Apple Card, I get up to 3% daily cash back on the things I'm already buying. No points to keep track of. So if you're looking for a credit card that fits your lifestyle, Apple Card is it. Give it a try. Apply now in the Wallet app on your iPhone.

Subject to credit approval, Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

called Startup Recovery. We built it to be a longer term care for people that were suffering from substance to use disorder or mental health issues. And the way the insurance programs are in the United States is most of them kind of give you 30 days or 45 days. And we just felt it wasn't enough. So we created a 90 day program that allowed people to come to these beautiful houses in Pacific Palisades

They would tap into executive coaching, 12-step meetings, community, great food. And then we brought in wellness. And we brought in a wellness director who brought in Reiki, cupping, sound bath, breath work. And then more recently, we brought in biohacking. So we have red bed therapy, pimp bed therapy, meditation dome, frequency medicine.

And what it does, it gives you an experience that is different from all other rehabs, treatment centers. And it really gives you an individual playbook. And here's the best part. My goal is,

is to allow whatever's going on in your life, whether it's addiction, escapism, and a lot of people are trying to escape from things, Kara, whether it's the phone or exercise or food. And so what we try to do at Startup is we say, stop doing this behavior and become addicted to something good in your life. And we have seen, that's our tagline, shifting addiction to passion. And so that's our mission, is we want you to come and heal yourself

One step at a time. Everybody has a different journey, but I definitely have enough Avengers to throw out you that allow you to really go and reset your life. I love how you've taken your careers and brought it into kind of a vision of here's what can happen, right? It's not like you're a...

coach that is telling people, I haven't been here before, right? You're telling people about these different stages of your life. You had multiple careers in brand strategy and an entrepreneur and now a recovery leader. Can you talk a little bit about how each phase kind of shaped your approach for startup recovery and wellness?

Yeah, I love that you asked that question because, again, I don't have a degree on the wall from a fancy university in terms of psychology. I don't have letters behind my name. But what I have is experience. And what I mean by that, most times I always feel like great mentors give you their mistakes. And so what I will tell you is I did not have a mentor in my 20s. And my career really stalled. And it wasn't until I got a mentor in my early 30s. And he says, hey, if you do X, Y and Z,

you can have your own company. And at first I didn't believe him because guess what? I suffer from imposter syndrome, you know? And so I didn't believe him, but eventually he stayed the course. And within a year, I had my own media company called Champion Media Entertainment, which

And one of the things in that company was I wanted to hire interns, right? And give them their first or second job. But I also wanted to mentor them to say, hey, this is how you get coached. This is how, this is how, this is the path of least resistance. Let me tell you the mistakes I made so you don't have to make those mistakes. And what's great about

I'll just sum it up like this. My coaching style, Kara, is this. I have 55 years on the planet, okay? And I have 30 years of sobriety. And if you come to me and go, hey, Greg, I'm going through this. I'm going to pull down that volume of book because I went through it.

So I went through my mother having Alzheimer's. I went through a sibling committing suicide. I went through a divorce on my first wife. So if you say to me, hey, can you talk to me about divorce? I'm pulling down that volume, giving you my experience, right? And maybe my solution is somewhere in the solution that you need. And that has been really my gift is, you know, I jokingly say, and it's not being egotistical here, but I get paid for being me.

I get paid for all that wisdom and all that knowledge and all those scraped knees and battle scars and firings and lost jobs and, you know, startups that didn't work and startups that did work. And you can't, you can't pay for that in a school. You know, as well as I, the best entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs. Definitely. And I love a lot of people view addiction as a liability. And I think that,

these bad traits, I guess, that you're trying to fix, you're really showing people how they can be an asset. Can you talk about, has there been any stories beyond your own where you've actually seen this really life-changing experience come to life? So, you know,

like i said the name of the company startup recovery and how we got the name was we thought that many of our clients needed to have the fundamentals of what a startup is you needed to rebrand you needed a pitch deck you needed a mission statement you need to know how to pivot right and you certainly need a board of directors right and so if we're going to push

Tim out into the world or Susan out in the world. We want them to have these sort of things around them, but individually about themselves. And so here's what would happen is someone would come in. I'll give you one example. We had a young man who was a graffiti artist in New York city, very talented graffiti artist, but he also went to a very prominent school in New York city for art, but he had a nine year heroin addiction. And what I did is I said, you are so talented. Okay. I've seen your work.

but I'm going to be your mentor. My other partners are going to be your mentors and you don't have to worry about all that other stuff, the business stuff, the invoicing, any of that kind of stuff. Just do your art. And so what we did at one of the houses, Kara, is we turned one of the garages into an art studio. Wow. And we said, hey, go in there,

And paint as much as you can. Okay. And really what I did is once he got his first painting done and I looked at it, I almost teared up. I said, his name is Jack. I said, Jack, take the needle out of your arm and put the paintbrush in your hand and watch what happens. And what I can tell you today is that his art is in major galleries everywhere.

He's married with a baby. He has three years of sobriety and he truly has shifted his addiction to his passion to really take off and create his own brand. And he's doing what he loves to do. That's amazing. All he needed was someone who wasn't his dad, someone who wasn't his baseball coach, some believer behind him to say, go do this. I believe in you.

And we've done that dozens of times. What's great, Kara, is that we've had people come and all of a sudden they have this aha moment. This one woman was with us for about 90 days and she used to make really nice flower arrangements around the house. And we kept saying, man, you should do this professionally. She started crying. She goes, I've always wanted to open up my own flower shop.

And I said, okay. I put together a 10-page pitch deck. We went to her husband and said, hey, forget writing checks to rehabs anymore. Write a check to help your wife start a business. And guess what? She opened up a flower shop in San Diego.

Wow. That's amazing. That's great. Now, do people come to your center? Do they stay there? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So we have two parts. We have two parts. We have people, when they come up to the houses, they're there for 90 days. They live there. They have their own room. We have a chef. We have coaches and staff around to take care of them and transport them.

And then they come down to a five-day program in Santa Monica called Startup Wellness. And that's where they actually see a therapist. They see a wellness director. They see a frequency doctor. They coach with me. And it's two parts. You can stay at the houses and fall into our five-day program. Or if you're a private citizen, you can just walk in off the street and take in the same amount of wellness opportunities. Some of the things I discussed with you off air.

That's amazing. So you're working with a vast number of people. It's not just all people with drug addiction, right? People are coming in and actually trying to change something. Do people typically stay for 90 days or is it all over the place? Well, it's funny. So one of the things we have advantage of, Kara, is Southern California weather.

And so I've had people come here from Toronto, New Jersey, Chicago. We had a woman here. She just got 22 months here in Los Angeles. She's from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Okay. She came out here for 90 days. She bought into California. She bought into sobriety. She bought into healing her inner child. Right.

working on herself. And eventually she goes to her husband, she goes, you know what? I really like it out here. Let's move the family out here. And so now the family has moved from Wisconsin to Los Angeles. Her kids go to local high schools and now she's got 22 months of sobriety. She's healed some of her inner child wounds, you know, trauma, drama, pain, and shame. And, and that's, that's a unique case, but that's what happens because here's, here's the thing. You can't just get sober.

That's not enough. You have to, once you get sober, you have to fill it with something that's meaningful. So whether that's going back to school, getting your degree, starting a business, taking up art class, you know, you have to fulfill it. That's the transfer of there goes the bad and here comes the good. And that's what we're really good at. We're really, really good at transforming people's lives.

So when you see these high performers coming to you or just in general, when you look at high performers, there's patterns or blind spots across many of these individuals. What do you see that maybe they don't see yet? Well,

Well, for me, the majority of the people that I have seen, Kara, have some sort of childhood trauma, drama, pain, or shame that they've never dealt with. And they've used workaholism to hide it. They've used exercise to hide it. They use gambling drugs. They've used people, you know, people, places, and things to, to hide it. And they can only hide for so long, you know? And so, yeah,

they may have had a narcissistic parent and they didn't know it. They may have been really affected by their parents' divorce and their behaviors are based upon that. I can give you my own story. My father was killed in a drunk-on-drunk car crash when I was four years old. And so for me, that trauma took me down a road of I feel different because you have a dad, you have a dad, you have a dad, right? And so what happened for me was I acted out in three ways.

A, I was angry. I was an angry little kid. Two, I loved attention.

Kara, I was the prettiest girl on the block. I had blonde curly hair, big blue eyes, and got a lot of attention. And the last but not least, fantasy. You know, you and I are both kids who grew up in the 70s and 80s. And I wanted to drive the black Trans Am. You know, I wanted to be Luke Skywalker. And I certainly was going to date all three Charlie's Angels, you know. And so as a kid, fantasy was a big thing. And so I was able to camp out with fantasy, anger, and attention. And

And those are all things that medicated me until I was 13 and puberty kicked in. And we can do a lot of data here. Most kids take their first or second, take their first drink or drug at 13 or 14 years old. Wow. Almost 70%. That's incredible. Like what is the process like then when people come to you and want to get better and

One of the things that, and I don't know, Kara, if you knew I was sober before we got on the podcast. No, no. Right. Okay. Well, one of the things I'm out there, I tell people I'm sober that I would not have the life if I wasn't sober. It's the foundation for me. So I'm out there. So a lot of times I get Facebook messages or Instagram messages. Hey, can you...

Can you help my son? Can you help my wife? Okay. I'm also part of a 12-step program here in Los Angeles. And a lot of people know that I own a business that does very good work. And so I may walk into a meeting and someone pulls me aside after a meeting and says, hey, listen, I have an uncle who's in Colorado. Can you go do an intervention on him? Okay. And then we also have a lot of good partners all over the country.

who know about the good work we do. And when there is a 911, when a family's in crisis, they put us on the phone and they say, hey, do you have a bed available? What's your program like? And I walk them through what our program is, how much it costs, what sort of things, why we're different. And so, you know, we are...

how should I put this? We are a program of attraction, if that makes sense. That between Southern California weather, the good programming that we have at Startup Recovery, all three founders, Patricia Myers, Jeff Bann, and myself, we're all in our own recovery. So we walk the walk. And if someone walks the walk, they talk the talk. Because here's why, I'm going to be real honest with you. 80% of my industry are crooks, thieves, and bad people.

There is a core 20% of my industry that is there. They are integrous. They have good ethics. They do good work. And best of all, they have meaningful outcomes. You know, my goal at Startup Recovery is to get everybody to a year of sobriety. Because if I get them to a year of sobriety, guess what? The odds of them getting to the second year go up way more. Yeah.

Definitely. You're also involved with university programs and young professionals. And really, I love how the mentorship side of, you know, what you've enjoyed doing has come into really your mission overall. Can you talk a little bit about those programs and kind of what you get out of that as well? Yeah, well, it's, you know, so if I can just, you know, I...

I want to be able to tell a story of connecting with college kids. I think it's such a very powerful why in the road in someone's life, you know, and it can go bad or it can go good, right? And for you and me, it went really good. Like we had a nice experience. We still have lifelong friends, right? And so...

With some of the programs that we're attached to, you know, I just recently reconnected with ASU and ASU alumni, Christine, Dr. Christine Wilkinson out there. And I've been part of the USC Greif Entrepreneurial Program as a mentor and coach for now going on nine years.

And what I want to tell you, Kira, is that, you know, like on the outside, I may look the part, I may sound the part, but I also, I have doubt as well. I have imposter syndrome as well. And what I want to share with your audience is that, you know, for many years, I was a guest lecturer at USC and I had this wonderful professor who kept asking me back to come in and what he wanted me to tell, he wanted me to talk about loss.

Greg, I want you to tell you about the startups that didn't work. My students need to know about that. And so I've come in and I tell them about loss. And then I tell them about a couple of wins I had. But back in about 2015, I didn't have any wins. And it was in December. It was a Christmas time. And my my role in my prior career around television production was was getting smaller.

The budgets were getting smaller and the headaches were getting bigger, Karen. And I kind of saw the writing on the wall, like, Greg, your time in this business is not going to be that long. And I go, you know, I'm a big believer in the universe. I'm a big believer in the ripple effect. What you put out, you get back, you know. And so I kind of said to the universe, tell me, show me something, what direction I need to go. So one of the things I did was in December 28th of 2015, I

I type up an email, dear Professor Henry, please take me off your guest lecture list. I no longer bring value to your class. I haven't had any success in a few years. Okay. And I, you know, I'm no, I'm no good to your students anymore. Kara. I, I don't present. I go on a ski trip with my family and I get back. I opened my, I opened my email on January 6th and an email coming back to me from Professor Henry says this.

Dear Champ, that's my nickname, Dear Champ, I took on three classes this semester for my 400 level entrepreneurship class. Okay. I'm only available to teach two. I need someone to teach my one that I can't teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And you're the first person I think of. And so here I was about to sabotage what we do, self-destruction. We get in our own way.

Here I was about to blow my own thing. My own perception of myself was I was a loser. I was not winning. There, you know, I was no value. And the complete opposite was true. That of all the people he has speaking over the years, he chose me to take. And what happened was that launched me into sort of a public speaker, a teacher, a confidant, a mentor. And I'm just grateful for that.

sort of cosmic moment, you know? And I'm a big believer that our only job, Kara, is when a door opens up, our only job is to walk through it, is to walk through it.

So how do you help people find meaning in failure? Maybe they, you know, don't feel worthy or they don't feel like they have that professor that you had that just had to write that simple note to you to say, come back in, right? They don't have that. I mean, how do you get people to get past that? So there's a couple of things I do. So I have a curriculum called the Recovery Playbook.

And really, Kara, you and I could do it. It has nothing to do with addiction. Yes, it's set up for I'm sober. Now what? But it's really the now what? And so I have I do this thing called the 10 intentions.

And you write 10 intentions down that you want to have happen in the next year, right? I have what I call the word of the year. And what it is, is you and I would meditate on a word that you want to either improve in an action or diminish in an action. So say you suffer from procrastination, right? You would put that word out there. So every morning, I have you put the post-it where you brush your teeth. So every morning you're looking at it.

And you're saying to yourself, I'm not going to procrastinate. I'm not going to. So all of a sudden that behavior goes down. Okay. But most of all, the number one thing you have to do is everybody has a superpower. Everybody has a superpower. And you have to get mentors. You have to go on a silent retreat. You have to get in a space to go, what do I really know how to do? And I do it good and naturally.

Right. And it's almost like I'm a good Catholic boy. And there's a great prayer called the St. Francis prayer. And the opening line of the St. Francis prayer is Lord, make me a channel. Right. And all you're doing, Kara, you do it. You've done it for 30 years. You've just been a channel of Kara. And yes, you've represented other companies. Right. When you were at AOL and these other places and time you're doing. And all of a sudden you've got your own little baby hint. And you're like, OK, I'm going to channel Kara through this brand hint. Right.

Right. And now you're doing your show. You've been obviously a mother, an entrepreneur, a wife. You're channeling stories that help other people see it. Because here's the thing. I can't tell anybody how to get sober. Yeah. I can't tell anybody how to get how to be successful. I have to show them. I have to show them. And so I feel when I show you that I'm vulnerable. Right. That I make mistakes.

that I don't have a whole lot. I don't have a great number of wins. I have probably have less wins, a lot of ties and maybe some losses. Right. But also I also heard this rejection is God's protection. And I always think about this. I think like,

I've dated this one girl way back when. And thank God that that didn't pan out, you know, because it was not what was meant to be. Right. I got fired from this job. Right. And that boss ended up going to prison because he was corrupt. And if I had been still working in the company there, I would have, you know, and so God protects you.

So rejection is God's protection. And I just give you these tools. And obviously there's other thought leaders who come up with the same sort of lingo, but you got to buy into it. You got to buy into that. A change is only going to happen if you're willing to change.

So true. Yeah, it's so true. Well, I love everything you're doing, Greg. Startup recovery and wellness is an amazing, amazing thing that you've built. You should be so proud. And we're going to put everything in the show notes. I love

want everyone to check out what you're doing because I think it's really amazing. And maybe also people have other people that they think could benefit from your center too. So another reason to check out what you're doing. So thank you so much for joining us on the show today. And thanks everyone for tuning in. So goodbye for now. Thanks, Greg.

Yeah. Thank you, Kara. Thanks again for listening to The Kara Golden Show. If you would, please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode of our podcast.

Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Golden. I would love to hear from you too, so feel free to DM me. And if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building Hint.com.

We are here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now.