EE447 - Mentor Moment - The Secret Sauce of Social with Nadia Adan & Michael Corcoran
This week’s Mentor Moment dives into how Nadia Adan built her brand through bold, disruptive content, and why testing, learning, and finding a repeatable format is the secret to scaling on social media. Michael Corcoran shares why standing out often means doing the opposite of everyone else, and how brand storytelling, even with its raw ups and downs, is what truly connects with audiences.
🎧 To hear the full conversation, search for Episode 396 of The Entrepreneur Experiment.
🎟 Early bird tickets for EE Live @ The Sugar Club — November 30th:
https://luma.com/6bwymzzt?fbclid=PAVE...
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EE446 - The Retreat Episode: Let This Be Your 30-Minute Reset
In this solo episode of The Entrepreneur Experiment, Gary Fox takes us behind the scenes of the very first Entrepreneur Experiment Retreat — a transformative five-day experience in Marbella, Spain that brought together a select group of founders to focus on their body, brain, and business.
Gary shares how a spontaneous idea in 2024 turned into a fully-fledged founder retreat, what went into designing the experience, and why moments of stillness, movement, and shared learning can create huge momentum in business and life.
From sunrise workouts and deep-dive masterclasses to shared dinners and accountability sessions, this is a blueprint for any founder looking to reset, realign, and reimagine what’s possible. If you’ve ever thought about joining a founder retreat, running one yourself, or simply carving out space to think — this one’s for you.
Show Notes
In this solo episode, Gary covers:
🔁 Why “done is better than perfect” sparked the idea for the retreat
🌅 The three pillars of the retreat: Reset, One Problem, Vision
🤯 What even 24 hours in a new environment can do for your next 24 months
🧠 The "Hot Seat" method for solving founder problems (without excuses)
📍How Barry Napier (Cubic) set the tone with a €500M lesson in roadmaps
⚡️ Why accountability, peer learning, and curated energy matter
📈 The importance of becoming the face of your business
📌 Why your retreat starts when you get home — not when it ends
🥂 Behind-the-scenes moments from Padel tournaments to seaside visualisation exercises
“Knowledge without action is useless. The retreat was about turning what we’ve all learned into real-world traction.” – Gary Fox
Resources & Mentions
🎟 Early bird tickets for EE Live @ The Sugar Club — November 30th:
👉 The Entrepreneur Experiment Sugar Club Event Tickets (Nov 30th)
Barry Napier – CEO of Cubic
📍Finca Naundrup, Marbella – Retreat location
🧠 Visualisation Challenge – Write a letter from your future self
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EE445 – Mentor Moment with Mary Sadlier: Nobody’s Coming (Ask the Right Questions)
This Mentor Moment with Mary Sadlier (from Episode 398) dives into why digital is the great equaliser for entrepreneurs. Mary shares the art of getting products on and off shelves, why persistence matters, and the hard truth that nobody’s coming — unless you ask the right questions. A powerful reminder that value creation and resourcefulness win in business.
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EE444: Paul Buckley (Multi-Exit Founder): $0 to $84M in 3 Years and The Exit That Nearly Broke Me
In this episode of The Entrepreneur Experiment, Gary Fox sits down with Paul Buckley — the fiercely honest and deeply reflective founder behind C2O Group. From nearly going pro in golf to blowing his savings in a poker room, to scaling and selling one of Australia’s fastest-growing engineering companies, Paul shares his rollercoaster journey through ambition, burnout, and bold reinvention.
You’ll hear how Paul built EPS Group Australia from the ground up, scaled it to $84M in revenue in just three years, and exited in a major acquisition — only to find himself mentally and emotionally depleted in the aftermath. What followed was a two-year reset, a $14M relaunch, and a second act that’s bigger, sharper, and backed by one of the world’s leading private equity funds.
If you're a founder who's exited (or wants to), this episode is your blueprint for navigating what comes next — the highs, the regrets, and the resilience it takes to start again.
🧠 Show Notes
In this episode, we cover:
💡 Starting with Nothing: From selling Christmas trees out of a van in Cork to leading billion-dollar infrastructure projects across Australia
🏌️♂️ Sliding Doors: What it felt like to lose to Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry — and walk away from golf for good
💸 From Broke to Boardroom: Blowing $30k in 7 weeks... then managing 30+ workers on a $3.5B desalination project in Victoria
🚀 Scaling Fast: How Paul co-founded EPS Group Australia and scaled it from $0 to $84M turnover within 3 years
🧨 Burnout After the Exit: The emotional toll of selling his company and staying on through a high-pressure earnout
🧱 Rebuilding From Scratch: How Paul raised $14M to acquire two businesses in the US and Australia — and build C2O Group 2.0
🧭 What He’d Do Differently: The tax incentives, legal lessons, and partnerships he wishes he'd understood the first time around
👨👧👦 On Legacy: Why he won’t hand the business to his kids — and what succession means to him now
“It brought me to the lowest point in my life by far… I was totally broken, barely able to stand up. It probably took me 12 months — probably 24 — to get my feet back underneath me properly.”
— Paul Buckley
Links & Resources
C2O Group: https://c2ogroup.com/
Follow Paul Buckley on LinkedIn
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EE443 - From Side Hustle to €10M: The Mystery Shirt Story
In this episode of The Entrepreneur Experiment, Gary Fox sits down with Rory, the 22-year-old founder of Shirt in a Box, the mystery jersey startup on track to hit €10 million in revenue. What began as a lockdown side hustle selling vintage shirts has exploded into a full-blown e-commerce machine — with 200,000 shirts sold, 2,500 US subscribers, and viral moments like a surprise shoutout from Gary Neville on the UK’s biggest football podcast, The Overlap.
Rory breaks down how that single moment led to a 5x revenue day, why influencer marketing only works when it’s authentic, and how he's pivoted from student entrepreneur to full-time CEO building a creative agency within his business to produce 400+ ad creatives a month.
From boxing mishaps and marketing fails to future expansion plans in the US and new sports like basketball, this is an unfiltered look at what it really takes to build and scale a modern DTC brand.
“That Gary Neville shoutout was probably worth £150,000 to us… and we didn’t even ask him to do it.”
🧠 Show Notes – In this episode, we cover:
📦 How Shirt in a Box works — and why the mystery model taps into childhood nostalgia
🎯 The Gary Neville effect: a €150k shoutout from The Overlap
💥 The power (and problems) of viral growth: stock delays, customer service chaos & staff turnover
🧠 Why managing people is the hardest founder skill to master
🇺🇸 How Rory identified the US as a key market & grew subscriptions 100% from Ireland
👕 New sports, new supply chains: launching mystery basketball jerseys
🎥 Why they now produce 400+ pieces of ad creative every month
🧪 The best performing ad formats right now (including “fake podcast” ads)
🔄 From TikTok to Meta: what’s working (and what they’ve given up on)
🏪 Bricks & mortar dreams: future pop-ups and immersive retail experiences
Resources & Links
🎽 Shop Shirt in a Box
🎧 Listen to Gary Neville mention the brand on The Overlap
📚 The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss
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Every week, I sit down with extraordinary founders to explore how they build thriving businesses, maintain peak physical health, and cultivate sharp, resilient minds.
This is your journey to learn from the best—world-class entrepreneurs, elite thinkers, and peak performers who have mastered success in business, body, and brain.
This isn’t just a podcast; it’s a blueprint for a new kind of founder—one who balances ambition with wellness, hard work with mental fitness, and success with purpose.
Together, we’ll discover the habits, systems, and strategies they use to create their unique formulas for success.
Join me as you learn how to build like a founder, train like an athlete, and think like an artist—so we can all find our formula for success.
Ireland