Dr. John Fulwider is the founder and head coach of DRIVE Growth Now, where he helps founding business owners reclaim the freedom they started their businesses to create—without burning out, blowing up relationships, or selling before they’re ready.

John’s work centers on a simple but overlooked truth: most founders don’t have a strategy problem or a discipline problem. They have an identity problem. Success pulls them away from the creative work they’re uniquely designed to do and traps them in management, firefighting, and over-responsibility. John calls this trap The Freedom Gap™—the space between energized growth and exhausted success.

Through private coaching, masterminds, and proprietary tools, John helps founders close that gap by clarifying what only they should be responsible for, exiting everything else, and building a Freedom-Generating Business™ they can grow aggressively, exit day-to-day management of, or sell on favorable terms. John’s fifth book, The Freedom Gap: Let Go of Control, Trust God’s Design, and Build a Business That Thrives Without You, describes how to do this. It’s set for release on the National Entrepreneurial Holiday: March 4, 2027. (1)

John co-founded Exit Advisor Coalition, a group of professional advisors who want to collaborate to help business owners exit when they want, to whom they want, on the terms they want, for the price they want. He is a Certified Exit Planning Adviser trained by Exit Planning Institute, and a Value Builder licensee trained by The Value Builder System.

John is the creator and so far sole user of The 10-13-16 System for Epic Dad-Kid Memory Creation, or 101316SEDKMC for short. (Ask him to pronounce that ... and maybe don’t ask him if it’s one of his passwords.) John takes each of his kids on epic two-week, just the two of us trips:

• At 10, John chooses where to go

• At 13, John and kid decide together where to go

• At 16, kid decides where to go

Before founding DRIVE Growth Now, John helped 40 business owners install business operating systems like EOS and Pinnacle. He was Founding Guide #007 (2) at Pinnacle Business Guides, a system launched in 2020 that combines the power of Scaling Up with the simplicity of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). Before that, he was a Professional EOS Implementer trained by Gino Wickman and his team.

Before focusing his coaching on business owners, John worked for seven years as an executive coach to visionary not-for-profit CEOs. During that time he wrote four books for not-for-profit professionals, including Better Together, a how-to guide for developing the crucial CEO-board chair relationship. It’s big in Canada. (Seriously.)

When he’s not advising and coaching business owners, you can most often find John rock climbing, bicycling with his kids, or cooking for a crowd, the bigger the better. He was never more satisfied than the day 150 people came through his backyard and he had to pull out the emergency lasagnas he keeps in the deep freeze so he never runs out of food.

Five things you might not otherwise know about John:

1. He’s an infertile dad with three beautiful children, who advocates for understanding men’s experience of infertility. His TEDx speech “Infertile Dad” is here: https://youtu.be/U5tK0iM8390

2. His favorite cuisines are Ethiopian, Indian, and German, in that order.

3. He once completed a five-rappel descent off Cat in the Hat in the dark, without a headlamp.

4. He’s a redhead whose hair has gone brown. (Sad.)

5. He adores functional public transportation systems.

Other tidbits and bullet points:

• TEDx speaker on understanding men’s experience of infertility; wide experience speaking on other topics such as exit planning, business operating systems, leadership team development, and nonprofit board development.

• Leadership team coach and executive coach for the owners, CEOs, and leadership teams of more than 50 business and not-for-profit organizations.

• Author of four books on not-for-profit organization leadership and management:

  • Better Together: How Top Nonprofit CEOs and Board Chairs Get Happy, Fall in Love, and Change Their World

  • Better Together: The Companion Workbook

  • Advance Your Career through Nonprofit Board Service

  • The Nonprofit Book of Awesome

• Co-author of a book on rural economic development:

  • Energizing Entrepreneurial Communities: A Pathway to Prosperity (third author, with Don Macke and Deborah Markley)

• Client company size has ranged from $1.5 billion in revenue and 6,500 employees to $600,000 in revenue and 4 employees.

• Group decision-making expert. John has 16 years’ experience facilitating small- and large-group decision making. Since 2017, he has facilitated more than 300 full-day business strategy and execution planning sessions.

• John has written thousands of news articles about group decision-making—he wrote for newspapers in his first career, specializing in legislative politics.

• Group decision-making was the focus of his academic research, as well:

  • His master’s degree thesis was on a group decision making process often used by medical advisory groups to create standard-of-care policies.

  • His doctoral dissertation examined state policies regarding insurance coverage for infertility care.

• Taught nonprofit management courses for the corporate university of NeighborWorks America.

• Taught political science for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

• Avid acquirer of acronyms and advocate of alliteration.

Notes

(1): March 4th is the only date on the calendar that’s a complete sentence: “March Forth.” My past client Dave Alburty, founder of InnovaPrep, challenges himself to take a big step or make a big decision every March Forth. So I’ve declared March 4th the National Entrepreneurial Holiday, and that declaration’s gotten about as much traction as The 10-13-16 System for Epic Dad-Kid Memory Creation, or 101316SEDKMC for short.

(2):  John’s most proud of three titles he’s earned over the years, in this order: A. Cookie Dad (for his daughter’s Girl Scouts troop) B. Founding Guide #007 C. Sergeant-at-Arms (of his Rotary Club).