About Steve Eriksen

A boy with two computers

Steve was born in 1967 and grew up in Mandal, a small town on the southern coast of Norway. He started with computers in 1977, when he was ten years old, at a time when hardly anyone had one at home. His passion really took hold in 1981, when he got his own Sinclair ZX81.

On 18 September 1982, the local newspaper featured an article about 14-year-old Steve and his dad, who were starting a local computer club. By then Steve had two computers of his own, a Commodore VIC-20 and a Sinclair ZX81. The club didn't last. There were only about five children in the whole of Mandal who owned a computer. But the article shows who he already was: someone who wanted to bring people together around technology.

A year later, in 1983, he sold his first commercial program at the early age of 16.

Engineer, MBA and first business

Steve earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and then an MBA from Manchester Business School. He believed his business education had taught him everything he needed to know.

In 1996, with Jennie and a small team, he started a UK internet service provider. A technical director joined a year later. This was the era of dial-up modems and 33.6K connections, when most people didn't yet know what the internet was. The company was voted the top internet service provider in the UK five times, and it also took the top spot for the best six-month average. Steve is still proud of what they achieved, and the company is still running today.

But the business was hard. The market was young, their child was very young, and the marketing Steve had learned at business school didn't work. It was big-business marketing, the kind Sony or Ford could use. It didn't teach how to get the attention of a target audience or how to present an irresistible offer.

In 1998 he sold the company to his technical director for tens of thousands of dollars, not the hundreds of thousands or millions it could have been worth. Years later he found out that people who sold similar businesses got exactly that.

Steve is clear that this wasn't a failure. The company was a success: it won awards, it found a buyer, and it outlived his time there. What he calls it is his failure to succeed. He built something good and walked away without the reward it should have brought his family, because he didn't yet know how to market and sell it.

The epiphany: the MBA made him a good employee

After selling the company, Steve became a consultant, and his income quadrupled almost overnight. But the question kept nagging at him: why hadn't he succeeded?

His answer changed the direction of his life. His MBA had taught him to be a good corporate employee, not an entrepreneur.

So he started studying harder than he ever had at school or university. He devoured everything he could find on persuasion, hypnosis, neurolinguistic programming, sales, marketing and, above all, direct response marketing. Between 2000 and 2005 he invested more than $100,000 in his own education. Jennie doesn't like him mentioning that number, but he earned it back by learning to sell effectively. He has kept learning ever since.

The local directories and the lesson about scale

Steve and Jennie put what he had learned to work in a local directory, a magazine of local business advertising. The directory was Jennie's idea, and she was the one who made it happen. Residents loved it, and the ads Steve wrote produced real results:

• An alarm company whose ad was getting almost nothing started gaining one or two new customers every week, which more than paid for the ad.
• A lawyer advertising inheritance services went from one inquiry a month, which rarely became a client, to twelve inquiries a month, each one potentially worth thousands of dollars.

They grew from one directory to four, together reaching around 8,500 households, and they did everything themselves. Every month they spent two weeks selling door to door, one week designing and one week delivering, walking up to eight hours a day across large, wealthy neighbourhoods. It was exhausting. Even now, talking about it brings back a feeling of anxiety.

It gave Steve the question he still asks every business owner: can you scale it without exhausting yourself? If you can't, you need to change what you're doing and how you're doing it.

Chief Technology Officer at Brave Thinking Institute

Steve and Jennie stepped back, moved and changed their environment. Steve took on projects for other companies, including CTO roles.

In 2014 he joined Mary Morrissey's Brave Thinking Institute as "the tech guy." Over six years the company grew from 25 staff to 120, and Steve rose to Chief Technology Officer, leading a team of seven. He was responsible for the technology behind everything the company sold:

• Webinars with up to 5,000 attendees, where the pages simply had to stay up.
• Launches every two months, each generating $500,000 to $1 million, promoted almost entirely by email to a list of about 350,000 people and through partners.
• Live events with 1,000 to 1,200 people, including all the registration, check-in and follow-up emails.
• When COVID hit, a virtual event with 2,200 people across ten Zoom rooms.

He also sat in marketing and executive discussions and saw from the inside how an eight-figure coaching business is built. Two lessons stayed with him.

The stage sells. Mary Morrissey could sell millions of dollars from the stage in a single event. Paid ads were a different story. Steve remembers the day a marketing team of 16 or 17 people finally produced an ad that made more money than it cost. The whole company was told, because it was so rare.

Information isn't implementation. The company certified life coaches, and its programme included more than 40 hours of marketing training. Selling the certification was easy. Afterwards, though, many coaches struggled to go out, coach and attract clients, and some gave up within six months. A few built million-dollar businesses with exactly the same information. The difference wasn't knowledge. Most of them couldn't implement it all on their own, and a training company isn't a marketing company. That gap between knowing and doing became Steve's mission: helping solopreneurs with the doing, especially the technology.

The fear of speaking

Steve knew from those years that being on stage was the key to sales. He also knew he was terrified of it.

As the CTO and head of the IT department for Brave Thinking Institute, he had to speak for four minutes at every monthly company meeting, in front of 70 to 90 colleagues. He would freeze. He wrote out every word, printed it and taped it to the side of his monitor in case the document failed to scroll, just so he could get through what he calls "these horrific four minutes." He hated being on camera.

He knew he'd have to face it anyway.

Going solo: the Midlife Solopreneur

On 6 July 2020, at the start of the pandemic, Steve left his job to start his own coaching business. He could have stayed where he was and kept earning a six-figure salary. Instead he decided it was time to go out on his own. He started the business while working a three-month handover.

He became the Midlife Solopreneur, teaching client attraction to solopreneurs and coaches and showing them why they needed to lead from the front. He started with no list to speak of, no credibility in his new field, no connections and no audience. All he had was his knowledge and a six-week course priced at $497.

Building his own stage: the first summit

About six weeks into the business, Steve told Jennie and Jake, who was home from his work as a business consultant in the Middle East because of COVID, that he was going to run a virtual summit. They thought he was mad: too much work in too little time. He told them they could support him or he would do it on his own, because he had to be on stage.

Steve had no team of his own. He paid a speakers bureau $2,000 to handle the speaker outreach. There was no summit system on the market that did what he needed, so while they found speakers, he wrote scripts to build the agenda, send email reminders and take care of everything else that would make the summit manageable. The summit came together in two weeks. He doesn't recommend that timeline to anyone.

The Solopreneur Accelerator Summit started on 31 August 2020, eight weeks after he started the business: 27 speakers over four days, with Steve on camera for all of it.

For the first two days he barely introduced himself. "Thank you very much, speaker. Here's the next speaker." Then off camera to recover for forty minutes before doing it again. When one speaker finished early, he had to fill 20 minutes with an interview, and he was literally shaking.

On day three he started to push through his fear. He began saying, "Hi, I'm Steve, and here's what I do," and explaining what he does in a few short sentences. It wasn't the end of the fear, but it was the start of a long process of overcoming it.

The results changed everything:

• His list grew from about 100 people to 750, with 650 new leads from a single summit.
• He sold four places on his $497 six-week course. That was everything he had to offer.
• He also sold $3,500 in VIP tickets.
• Together that came to about $5,500, eight weeks into a brand-new business.

The second summit

In January 2021 he ran the summit again. This time 37 speakers took part, and some of them approached him rather than the other way round. The first summit had started to establish him as an authority and a leader in this space. The summit added another 863 people to his list. By now Steve had created a group coaching programme. He sold VIP tickets again, and the summit promoted a three-day event where he sold the group coaching, taking more than $30,000 in orders.

Seven months into a brand-new business, with no audience, list, authority or followers at the start, the two summits had added about 1,500 people to his list and generated more than $40,000 in sales. They were cash-positive, and Steve was becoming more comfortable on stage. The results had been worth facing the fear.

Every coach needs a virtual summit

By February 2021, Steve held the belief that has shaped everything since: every coach needs a virtual summit. It is the fastest path to building authority and getting clients.

He saw the need in his own group coaching clients. They needed summits to sell their services, and he knew there was still no system on the market that would work for them. So Steve, Jennie and Jake sat down and asked how they could help people run virtual summits. The answer was to build the platform themselves. They called it EventRaptor.

They designed it around a real person: a 70-year-old group coaching client who wanted to run a summit and had only been using computers for two or three years. Steve had once spent five hours with her setting up a single form, opt-in page and lead magnet in a CRM. EventRaptor had to be something she could use on her own. It was the passion for technology that began with a Sinclair ZX81 in 1981, now aimed at the solopreneurs he wanted to help.

Launching EventRaptor

Steve hired a professional development company to build the first version, because it would get the platform to market far faster than building it alone. He funded it the way he now teaches others to grow: by being visible.

Between March and July 2021 he spoke on other people's stages, made offers, held one-on-one conversations and promoted EventRaptor to the list his two summits had built. Many of those subscribers became EventRaptor's first buyers. Before the official launch, EventRaptor took $140,000 in pre-orders for a lifetime version of the platform, at a time when customers couldn't even log in to it yet. People were buying the promise, because they had heard Steve speak and trusted him to deliver.

June 2021 was the biggest month, with more than $60,000 in sales, most of it from speaking. His calendar was almost fully booked from speaking alone.

In July 2021, EventRaptor went live, and the first client published an event on the platform.

Twelve months earlier, Steve had been an introvert taping a four-minute script to his monitor. He had left a secure job and started a business with nothing but a $497 course. Now he had built his own stage twice, begun to find his voice on it, and turned what he learned into a platform so other solopreneurs could build theirs.

The month his voice went

In June 2021, in the middle of that record month, Steve started coughing. It got steadily worse. Every 10 to 30 seconds he spoke, he would cough violently, sometimes for a minute or two, before he could go on. He couldn't give presentations, and he couldn't hold a sales call.

It turned out he had pulmonary embolisms in both lungs. Usually an embolism develops within hours. His developed slowly over several weeks, which is why it took so long to diagnose. He was treated in hospital with a heavy course of medication and told he'd be well again within a few weeks.

He wasn't. He was exhausted all the time, and he stopped holding meetings because each one wiped him out. Because of COVID travel rules, he and Jennie had to spend two weeks in Mexico City before they could travel on to Florida for the Marketers Cruise, where they went to meet coaches, speakers and partners. He was exhausted the whole trip and assumed it was the aftermath of the embolisms.

Without his voice, the business felt it straight away. By July he could barely speak, and sales fell from more than $60,000 in June to under $10,000 in July. They stayed that low through August. In October, refunds made it a negative month. Most of the June sales had come from speaking on other people's stages, and without the stage they were gone.

Meanwhile, the platform did what it was designed to do. In December 2021, the 70-year-old group coaching client EventRaptor had been designed around ran a virtual summit with twelve speakers, without help from anyone else.

Two blocked arteries

In January 2022, doctors found the real cause of his exhaustion: two blocked arteries, one 95% blocked and the other 98%. Steve was lucky not to have had a heart attack.

He was treated that month, and the effect on the business was immediate. January's sales were the highest since June. For Steve it was the clearest proof of what he now teaches: when he was visible, the business grew, and when he couldn't speak, it stalled. The stage wasn't an optional extra. It was the fuel for the engine.

Own Your Stage

In February 2022, Steve and Jennie ran the first Own Your Stage Summit. It was the first summit they ran themselves on EventRaptor. They had dropped the Midlife Solopreneur brand and now ran everything as EventRaptor, because they had seen how powerful events and virtual summits could be.

It took about 20 hours of admin, and the results showed what a well-run summit can do:

• 109 VIP tickets sold at $47.
• 466 new people added to their list.
• About 600 registrations, 134 of them from their own audience.
• $1,350 in affiliate commission from one speaker's presentation.
• Valuing the 20 hours of admin at $50 an hour ($1,000), the summit made $5,473 before any other sales, more than $9 per registration.
• More than $24,000 in sales within two weeks of the event, including a $5,000 done-for-you summit. That sale came from someone who wasn't even at the event. An attendee heard what Steve had to say and told one of their own clients to speak to him.
• More than $50,000 in sales from that one summit by February 2024, as the new subscribers went on to buy low-ticket and high-ticket offers.
• The running total: a further $19,013 in sales took it to $24,486 (more than $40 per registration), then a further $26,316 took it to $50,802 (more than $84 per registration).
• A second $5,000 sale, for the software, came from someone Steve had spoken to before who hadn't bought at the time. They had decided to go with a competitor, but delayed their purchase when they heard about the summit. They attended Steve's talk, the EventRaptor software demo in the last session on day three, and decided to go with EventRaptor instead.

Own Your Stage became a recurring event and has run at least six times.

Still unwell, still showing up

Recovery wasn't a straight line. Steve was ill for half of 2021 and again through 2022, and it was 2023 before doctors understood what was going on. Complications after an appendectomy added more pain and meant more surgery before he was back to good health. On top of the embolisms and the blocked arteries, it made for years of low energy.

He's honest about what that cost. At one summit in that period, he and the team were so stretched that he was too exhausted to put a proper offer together. The speakers and attendees loved the event, and it added 476 new people to the list, but it made only about $1,800 during the event. He shares it as his "low-performance" example, a lesson in what happens when the host takes his eye off the offer. Even so, he counts it as a success. Those 476 new people would go on buying from them for years afterwards, and that long-term effect is where much of a summit's value lies.

The figures from that summit: 638 registrations and 61 VIP tickets at $47 ($2,867). Valuing about 20 hours of admin at $50 an hour, that left $1,867. Sales after the event came to more than $3,000, taking the total to more than $4,867, or more than $7.60 per registration.

From software to service

Along the way, Steve noticed something he'd seen before at Brave Thinking Institute. EventRaptor made running a summit easy, yet many customers were still struggling. The problem wasn't the event. Most coaches had no process or system for turning registrants and attendees into clients. They would add hundreds of people to their list and convert few or none of them, when a good follow-up process might turn 10 to 15% into clients.

He likes to say that "build it and they will come" is a myth. Nobody comes unless they know about it and it meets their need. Selling software wasn't enough.

Jennie and Jake had been telling him for some time that the business needed to expand its services, but he had been too ill to lead it. EventRaptor had offered done-for-you and done-with-you summit design and production since February 2022. In October 2023 he felt ready, and they expanded into building lead magnets, landing pages, funnels, marketing automation and more, using CRMRaptor, their white-labelled GoHighLevel CRM. They also started offering coaching and implementation programmes for coaches who want the whole client-attraction system built with them. When they first mentioned the done-for-you services at the end of a free six-hour community training, they made more than $5,000 from that event.

The business was thriving, and that success put Steve and Jennie in a position to grow in a new way. In November 2023 they acquired VirtualSummits.com, a competing virtual summit platform.

What speaking has proven

Steve kept going back on stage: other people's summits, podcasts, networking events and his own events. Over five years, speaking and hosting their own events brought in more than $300,000 in sales.

Summits have been just as powerful for the business. They have now hosted 13 summits of their own, with more than 6,450 registrants. Taken together, their summits have led to more than $250,000 in sales as people who joined through a summit bought over time. In October 2025 they brought back the summit that started it all, the Solopreneur Accelerator Summit, which made $13,000 directly and more in sales in the months after.

They don't need a big list of their own to fill a summit, because the speakers promote to theirs. More than 5,000 people on the EventRaptor list came from other speakers' promotion.

Speaker Connections

Because getting on stages matters so much, Steve and Jennie started Speaker Connections in February 2022. It was Jennie's idea, and she's been the heart and soul of it ever since. It began as a networking session for those who bought the VIP upgrade for Own Your Stage. They then opened it up as a free networking event that meets on Zoom twice a month, on the first and third Tuesday of each month, for about two hours. Speakers looking for all kinds of stages meet the hosts who have them: summit organisers, podcasters, Facebook Live hosts and in-person event producers. Usually 70 to 110 speakers and hosts attend. There's also a Speaker Connections Facebook group and an EventRaptor speaker directory, where speakers can list themselves to be invited to events.

EventRaptor today

EventRaptor has grown from its first published event in July 2021 to a platform that has hosted more than 575 summits.

EventRaptor is now three things:

• A platform: summit and virtual event software designed to be easy enough for someone who's new to technology.
• A service: event design and production, done-for-you summit management and CRMRaptor.
• A community: Speaker Connections and the audiences built through summits like Own Your Stage, the Solopreneur Accelerator Summit and the Coaching Client Attraction Summit.

Steve is still a tech and automation nerd. He now puts much of that energy into AI, teaching coaches how to use tools like Claude to get results they can use in their marketing.

Speaking

Steve's message as a speaker is helping coaches become known for their expertise. He speaks to coaches, consultants, speakers and other experts who want to become better known and create more consistent client opportunities. His topics include authority-driven client attraction, speaking that leads to conversations, virtual summits, relationship-focused follow-up and using AI effectively in marketing.

His talks include:

• The Fastest Path to Authority and Clients
• Why good coaches still get patchy client inquiries
• Turn your next talk into client conversations
• Use AI to attract clients while sounding like yourself
• How good follow-up helps people feel ready to work with you
• How To Craft Profitable Virtual Events

As well as hosting his own summits, he has spoken at events including The Profitable Speaker's Summit, the Virtual Stage Summit, the Wealthy Healers Conference, Leverage 2024, Speaker Impact Summit 2025, AI Engaged and The Speak to Profits Summit.

See Steve's speaker profile →

Who Steve is

Steve is still an introvert. He is also a summit host, speaker and platform founder who speaks on other people's stages and runs his own. The fear didn't disappear on its own. He began facing it on day three of his first summit and has kept facing it ever since, because the results made it worth it.

His message to coaches and solopreneurs comes from everything he has lived through: you can't be the best-kept secret. Build your own stage, lead from the front, have a system that turns attention into clients, and let technology carry the work you shouldn't have to do alone.

He does all of it with Jennie beside him, their son Jake as co-founder, and a clear mission: helping coaches become known and get clients without exhausting themselves the way he once did.