Growing up too quickly and not knowing exactly where your life is headed can be distressing for any teenager, much more for one that’s two years away from graduating high school. When UK-born entrepreneur, business coach, and investor, Ed JC Smith was 16, he took up a cleaning job at a gym as a way to get a free membership. He wanted to build his confidence talking to people and elevate his self-esteem by working on his physical appearance. Ed hadn’t imagined he would be steered toward a path of professionally helping people – in a way that would change his life forever.
Today, while traveling the world and coaching business enthusiasts and other entrepreneurs through his company, The Champion Academy, Ed works to inspire thousands of people wherever he goes to take charge of their lives and create their own success stories.
Pivotal moments
Before taking up that gym job, Ed has spent most of his life battling self-esteem issues and questioning the purpose of his existence. He should have been a thriving kid enjoying the middle child position in his North-London-based family. However, his reality was far from happy.
“Growing up in my house was tough,” Ed recalls his early days in the UK. “Even though we were defined as middle class and we lived in a nice area, I wasn’t happy and was very lost in life. My father and I just didn’t quite see eye to eye, he expected more from life and he worked night and day to achieve it – but he always felt short-changed. We all felt his frustrations. I am the middle child in my family and somehow much of his anger was directed at me.”
Coupled with poor grades at school, a spinal curvature that affected his posture, and terrible acne that tore at his confidence, Ed’s problems at home eventually pushed him over the edge and he wanted to take his life.
That day, at the railway station where he wanted to end it all, a stranger saved his life and offered words that empowered him forever.
“This guy who looked like he was homeless reached out and pulled me back from the edge,” says Ed. “I owe him my life. He wrestled me to the ground and made me repeat again and again, ‘never give up’.”
Despite the many problems Ed continued to face as he got older, he never went close to the tipping edge again. At school, his grades weren’t getting any better. However, Ed believes he simply couldn’t resonate with the teaching methods.
“It wasn’t because I wasn’t putting the effort in or because I was lazy, but it just didn’t seem to really work,” he recalls. “It was like my brain just didn’t seem to work like everyone else’s.”
Several years down the line, this conviction later formed the foundation for his unique coaching methods.
“I left school with three big fat E’s,” Ed narrates. “Being able to identify different ways of learning has made me a better teacher – and this is one of the very few things I brag about. It’s a game-changer for me. I help thousands of people realize their dreams because I was a bad learner. I can relate to so many of them as I speak from my own experiences.”
Scaling his side hustle to a full-fledged business
Ed’s climb to success began at his gym cleaning job when he was 16. He started with cleaning up after the clients and maintaining equipment, but things quickly graduated to helping people with equipment and workouts.
“People started asking me if I could help them and so I started taking on more clients,” Ed says. “My first niche was helping people with bad backs. I loved this niche and then, as my knowledge deepened, I expanded into helping women lose weight in the gym.”
With time, he began helping men who battled depression and counseling couples looking to re-ignite their relationships, all in a one-to-one setting. Ed discovered how much he enjoyed this work and it began to feel as though he’d found his purpose.
As the years sped by, he enrolled himself in classes on psychology, healing modalities including NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and fast-action coaching.
He continued his business but discovered that while things were going well, the one-on-one approach left him constantly stressed and stagnated his progress. Eventually, when he came up with the idea of group coaching, he hit another stone wall – he was always a nervous wreck in front of a camera and large groups of people.
“My first presentations were horrible experiences,” he recalled. “I was so nervous and my hands shook the whole way. The first presentation I put on was, ‘How to Make Changes in Your Life in the Fastest Time Period’. I got my friends and a lot of people I knew to attend. I remember thinking that if just five people joined my program, ‘then that would be amazing’. I did the pitch. I thought I had done a great job but not one person bought it.”
Ed had resolved to give up on coaching that day, but luckily, he was pushed to give it one more try. People ridiculed him and tried to beat down his efforts, but he continued working on himself. He learned, read, practiced, and worked hard at building his confidence – this time, for the long run.
He came up with a system called Clients on Automation to improve the quality of his programs.
“I put the client first: the client’s results, fulfilling what they want, and creating it with them. I taught it to them live and in real-time. I answered all their questions fully. I made sure I fully understood their thinking and I made sure they got all their answers. I broke down everything I taught and split it into modules in rapid time. If they did not understand what I taught, I stayed as long as they needed until they got it. By the end, my belief went through the roof.”
The next time he launched a program, the outcome was remarkably different. A ton of clients joined the program. Since then, Clients on Automation has grown to become the foundation of all his coaching programs, and according to Ed, most of his success is based on the excellence of the method.
Building a legacy
Coupled with a YouTube channel and a podcast where he reaches thousands of people on a wide range of business, lifestyle, and coaching-related topics, Ed also runs The Champion Academy, an international platform for educating coaches, consultants, and course creators across various niches of business. The Academy also integrates the Clients on Automation method to teach coaches and consultants how to quickly sign paying participants to their programs and help them achieve genuine results. Ed also shares the driving tips to his own coaching business with his participants through a seven-week intensive program.
“The program starts with identifying your niche, identifying your target clients, and learning how to capture them through all the various methods I have used myself,” he explains. “You learn how to automate your business using a host of modern tools. Participants have weekly tasks to complete and access to our support systems for a full six months after completion. The end outcome being that the client is left with a fully automated online business that allows them enough time on their hands.”
Also, every year, Ed organizes a 10-day high end retreat in Bali, Indonesia, where hundreds of entrepreneurs come to participate in life-changing programs to learn how to channel positive energy into their hustles and scale their businesses efficiently. At the end of the retreats, the participants are enjoined to spend quality time with local less-privileged children, as a way to learn the importance of giving back.
Finally, Ed affirms that he owes everything to the stranger who saved his life at the station that day, a man he has never been able to find again.
“When he pulled me back from the tracks and wrestled me to the ground, I promised him, over and over, that I would never give up on myself or my dreams. And I never have,” he said.