Lessons from a Thriving Power Couple, With Dr Travis Fox and Michelle S Fox of Ultimate Business Quest
An Interview With Candice Georgiadis
We always stayed calm, cool, and collective, which would be the second one. Stay calm, cool, and collective within your communication, and remove the tit for tat because the tit for tat is where you start keeping score of everything your partner isn’t doing. As opposed to our model,, we do a tit for tat differently. We look at wow, here are all the things you have done for me or have done, and I appreciate and thank you.
As a part of our series about lessons from Thriving Power Couples, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Travis Fox and Michelle S. Fox of Ultimate Business Quest.
Ultimate Business Quest is in the business of igniting transformative change. Their proprietary platform delivers business basics, blueprints and practical coaching, presented in a world of immersive fantasy gameplay. Those willing to embark on the quest will find that blurring fantasy with reality is a powerful tool for stoking imagination, inspiration, and impact, empowering entrepreneurs to level-up business and life. The company was founded in 2020 and has additional learning gamification apps planned for release this year.
Emmy-award winner Dr. Travis Fox has been architecting lives and uplifting entrepreneurs onstage for 30 years. Holding doctorates in both psychology and clinical hypnotherapy, his mission is to help move entrepreneurs from founder to funding to fortune, and because of this, he was named by Yahoo Finance as a Top 20 entrepreneur for 2020 and a Top 10 Instagram influencer by BuzzFeed. As a business coach, entrepreneurial advisor, and trainer, he has spoken to more than 1M attendees, spent tens of thousands of hours on stage, and has 28 years of CEO-level experience.
Michelle S. Fox has a diverse corporate and entrepreneurial career, having sat on multiple Boards before the age of 30. As the Co-Founder and CEO at Ultimate Business Quest, she’s the first female tech CEO in their headquarters of St. George. Instead of being educated by a traditional institution, Michelle chose to go the mentorship route, and she became a mentee of a Harvard Grad billionaire. This mentor offered her an opportunity to build out the C-Suite at their company, where she oversaw everything from breaking ground to the successful acquisition exit strategy. The move led Michelle to become a serial entrepreneur through investing, business consulting, and her own mentoring. Outside of the office, she is an award-winning competitive bodybuilder who loves challenging herself in new ways.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you two to your respective career paths?
Dr. Travis: When I was five years old, my father put a golf club in my hand and I just took to it; it was natural.From that moment on, pretty much all the way through high school, I thought I was going to be a professional golfer. Everybody knew it; that’s what my father wanted me to be. And I adopted that philosophy intensely from a conscious perspective because I wanted my father’s attention, love, and approval. And after a subconscious realization my first year in college, I decided to have a meltdown. I also ended up becoming a a first-time father, and having my heart completely broken.
I was ill-prepared for all three of those things simultaneously, but thankfully that’s when I met my mentor Dr. Neves and my life changed. I realized from learning under him that I wanted to be involved with psychology. I wanted to be involved with the subconscious mind, I wanted to be involved with how we actually transform. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 31 years. working with every kind of entrepreneur corporation, multilevel marketing, solopreneur, online and offline, on how we transform ourselves and do that in business. And then ultimately, how do we do that for our body and ultimately with our relationship, and that’s how I arrived here three-plus decades years later.
Michelle: I applied for a position that was an Office Manager position. When I was hired, the entrepreneur was traveling so much, they just gave me a concept versus systems already in place. So it felt as though I was an entrepreneur because I was building and creating everything from the ground up. After I left that position, I became an employee. It was actually the individuals who purchased the first original business and I had escalated into that company to the COO of their tech company. I stayed in the C-suite Executive role for quite some time, until I was approached by an individual that asked for a side project.
That was when I got a taste of, wow, I can be an entrepreneur, I can consult businesses and it was that first step to entrepreneurship. So I moved away from Corporate America and started my entrepreneurial journey. It was client after client after client that I began to obtain based on referrals and word of mouth. That is how I originally started getting into entrepreneurship and building my businesses. From there, it expanded based on the knowledge and experience and the new people that I had met, and more opportunities were created organically.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened since you two got together?
Dr. Travis: Well, I’d say it’s kind of like you saw an Indiana Jones movie meets some secret super spy agent meets natural disaster movie: you slam those all together, and you’ll come to watch one of the most interesting periods since Michelle & I have known each other and been working together. We were in the Philippines working on a corporate turnaround at the time and establishing deeper offices and a larger employee base there. We got caught in the eruption that happened in 2020, which sent the entire country of the Philippines into disarray. We had to make preparations to help not only our office but also the Filipino people that were working for us at the time. While we’re doing all of that, and going into this near-emergency situation, Michelle ultimately started to get this symptom called vog, which I had never heard of before. I thought it was some strange thing from Mars, but sure eenough, it’s an actual situation where you get a bronchitis type of scenario in your lungs from the volcanic ash in the air. So it started to worsen over a 24 to 48-hour period, and we had to get out of there. Simultaneously and concurrently, I was racing back to get back for the premiere of “Beyond Rhe Secret, The Awakening” at Universal Studios. We thought, how are we going to do this? We can’t fly out of Manila because it’s covered under volcanic ash. So we flew on every plane possible, got down to Dumaguete and then Dumaguete to Cebu (both are in the Philippines), and then jumped a plane over to Bangkok going the other way away from volcanic ash, and we ended up spending three days in Thailand.
We flew from Bangkok to Manila, jumped on another flight, flew all the way back overnight, and landed in Las Vegas. I got up the next day to fly down to LA, and as I’m getting ready to go to the premiere and I got a call from my ex-wife. She said, hey, I need to let you know your father died. I said oh, okay, and I start doing the first part of the press and interviews for what we were doing for “The Secret” film. And the first podcast I was on was David Meltzer’s podcast, David and I had been friends for a long time. On the show, I announced right then that I had just found out my father had passed. And that entire experience between the two of us — if you could survive that over a three to four-day period and do that all over the world, you can survive anything.
We knew we were going to be able to work together as a team, it was almost intuitive and innate that we just knew each other’s next move. We knew when that person needed to step in the lead and guide the couple, and it was always done smooth as silk. And that’s been the craziest situation,we knew when we got through that experience, we were going to be in a great partnership.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting out in entrepreneurship? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Michelle: I was consulting a Med Spa, and had no idea about Botox, fillers, nothing of the sort. The staff was asking for more product to stock up on. So me, not being the wiser, started Googling and looking online for places to buy Botox and Fillers and found a bunch of different sources. Well, I came to find out that where I was trying to source from was highly illegal. I had no idea until I was told, it was very embarrassing.
What I learned though is that you really need to understand the industry before you get into it, especially what the rules and regulations are. Do your due diligence before you jump in to helping a client, or if you jump into a new industry make sure you have mentors or do the work and understand the industry that you’re getting into.
What do you think makes Ultimate Business Quest stand out? Can you share a story?
Dr. Travis: I think what makes Ultimate Business Quest stands out is that it’s entirely based on fun. It’s real, it’s relatable, it’s not just a game that you play to kill time and distract yourself from that what you want. And yet it simultaneously gives you all the steps in a blueprint kind of way to go from the founder, to funding, to fortune, rooted in experiences that we all have experienced. I think that makes it stand out because it’s easy to understand yet so rooted in common sense principle, but beyond, hey, here’s a couple of ideas or going to the extreme on a spiritual side. Two, we have fun doing it, and three, our culture is about fun. And every step that you see us doing as a company and whatnot is exactly what you get in the quest. So we’re moving through each map right along with you; it’s not, hey, let’s stand on a stage and tell you how great we are, and then you go figure it out on your own.
We’re questing too; we’re building in a completely fantastic company and doing it exactly as you do it in the quest. And I think that rule is still a more profound sense of connection and confidence in what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and why they’re doing it with us. We’re building a community, we all speak the same language and as a collective we’re making business fun again.
Michelle: Why Ultimate Business Quest stands out is that it is the very first full gamified way of learning entrepreneurship for free. There’s nothing out there that gives you the whole blueprint, the map on how to start your business from the moment of conception or idea to implementation and how to move through even expanding your business. Along with what fears come up as being an entrepreneur or a business owner or moving up the ranks in an organization as an employee. When I was in business consulting, it was sad to see how many businesses had launched, but they really didn’t have any of the fundamentals.
How will the launch of this app help people to uncover their true passions and take the first step toward them?
Michelle: The sequence that we positioned all of the training within the app in really gives individuals a beautiful look at what is deep down there — that burning passion, a burning desire? Whether it’s starting a new company, expanding, pivoting, wherever someone may be in their current entrepreneurial journey, we can provide them the tools to mitigate the stress, the fear, the anxiety around those passions to really bring them to life. We help entrepreneurs bring ideas to life in a system that makes it fun and exciting to learn and grow their business, as opposed to, hey, here’s just some enthusiasm but no step by step guide of actually how to do it.
Dr. Travis: I actually think that’s the biggest misnomer when people say, well, how do I find my passion? Or, as the question was asked, how do I uncover my passion? That implies that you need to go out and find it, which means you never had it, or that someone’s got to give it to you, or uncover it as though it was buried. And uncovering it is, because it is an uncovering.
You’re supposed to just kind of innately know it, okay. That model doesn’t work, we’ve tried that for decades now, and it still hasn’t happened, so let’s do this differently. The UBQ app is going to help you not just uncover your passion but more important, reignite that spark in you — that was once there that has been diminished and dulled and shut down. And not from a motivational point of view or an inspirational, although that’s there, from a depth within you. Because that’s what it takes for the visionaries, for the adventurers, for the entrepreneurs, the onliners, the influencers, they’ve got a burning passion, and they’re willing to keep it flamed, and the rest of us out there have let ours be dull and this app is going to walk you through that. It’s going to do it in an adventure style because the truth is we’re all deep visionaries, we’re all deep adventurers, we’re all explorers, and we all want to experience all the zest of life.
What advice would you give to other CEOs or founders to help their employees to thrive?
Dr. Travis: Well, I’m not one to give advice, but if I were to give someone a guidepost and help them through their own quest, I would say that to make your employees thrive it’s about figuring out the puzzle of who are the archetypes within your organization. Who are the wizards and the warriors and the barge and the jesters? If you don’t know what that means, go through the Ultimate Business Quest app and learn so that you can make it fun for them too. Because we’re all programmed that work equals not fun, work equals necessity, and work equals what you got to do to live a fun life. So when we look at it from that perspective, it’s one of the things that a founder and a CEO or an entrepreneur can do.
Employees wants to be a part of something bigger than themselves; they want to feel like they’re on point in passion and purpose. And most importantly, people want to feel like they’re playing and it’s fun so that the time that they’re investing in as an employee or a partner, or a senior manager or a sales director. Whatever their role is; it’s not just being given away for a paycheck, but is something that they can feel a part of. That’s that deeper sense of vision that really comes from the CEO to ignite those parts of them and let them fly with it.
How do you define leadership?
Michelle: Leadership to me is understanding who is on your team to lead. Do you genuinely have a relationship with them? Do you understand them? Then the next piece is where are you teaching them — do you know what your company culture is? Do you know what your mission-vision is for the company, and are you staying true to that? And last but not least, a powerful leader is not leading from I’m the CEO, and everybody is beneath me. On the contrary, it is I’m the CEO. I’m at the bottom of the funnel, and I’m lifting everybody and guiding them out because that’s what starts to create that substantial wide span outward, as opposed to your bottleneck. You can’t expand that leadership, because your team doesn’t grow. It’s a very different concept from leading from the bottom up.
Dr. Travis: I define leadership as not just, I go first or I’m the last one. I think it’s about being with the entire team, getting to know the team and understanding them at a deeper level, moving from “I” to “We.” I think good leadership is always thinking from a “We” perspective and not necessarily without the I involved, but when you really look at leaders take the time to connect with every one of their senior executives or salespeople, their senior customers, you essentially see masters at inviting people to become the better version of themselves, not telling them how to do it.
Guiding them to say why not, guiding them to go have fun, guiding them to make better choices for themselves based on what they know and the instincts and knowledge they have possessed to be in the position they’re in. And yet, at the same time, allowing them to learn and learn new skills and techniques and ways of doing it. It’s about bringing out that beautiful unrealized potential sitting on the bench of their subconscious asking the right questions for them to unlock themselves and become the leaders that they are finally born to be.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person you are grateful for who helped you get to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Dr. Travis: There have definitely been people who have helped me. I always go back to Doc Reeves, because Doc has the one that kind of guided me through my entire journey. He was always kind of that rock in the river, so kudos to him. Another person is my ex-wife Jessica — I learned so much from her, and she’s one of the people who have made me who I am and I will always love and cherish for that.
Michelle: My very first mentor, his name was Glen and I’m very, very grateful for him. He taught me how to be an entrepreneur, but I was still an employee. How he helped me achieve success was by putting me into this big role and then stepped back and said, create it, figure it out. But not in a dismissal way, but in an invitation. That invitation was one of the best experiences for me to really understand what it took to build a business from start to finish. And then my stepfather, my stepfather when I really stepped into business, was my mentor.
Every single day I talked to him so many different times and I’m extremely grateful for how much he mentored and taught me. Now in my life, I have Travis. I am extremely grateful for his patience, teaching, love, guidance, and most importantly, the partnership that I have with him and how we can create together.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
Michelle: How I have been bringing goodness to the world is with everything we do within our companies. I test and implement everything, whether that be our products, all of our business tools, the foundation, everything that we do and creates, I test. The reason why I test is I want to honestly know that it works before it gets brought out to the world because I don’t want to put out anything that I really can stand true behind.
Dr. Travis: I think I’m just beginning to use our success and my success personally to bring good to the world. The free app and communities across the world that are starting to jump into the quest are also beginning a whole new piece of “good global work” for me. I’ve been preparing my entire life for this company. I’ve been preparing my entire life for this team; I’ve been preparing my entire life for this relationship, I’ve been preparing my entire life for me to get to this space. So I would say my successes in the past have all taught me different versions of it.
What are the five things you need to thrive as a couple? Please share a story or an example for each.
Michelle: Communication is extremely vital. We have been in the most stressful situations as a couple and the very first one was a company turnaround, there was so much stress and pressure. There was a huge lawsuit involved, and our job together was to mitigate the risk for this particular company. How we did that together is through our communication. Our communication was so on point that we didn’t have any friction or frustration because we were constantly communicating together, but it was all done in a healthy and productive manner.
We always stayed calm, cool, and collective, which would be the second one. Stay calm, cool, and collective within your communication, and remove the tit for tat because the tit for tat is where you start keeping score of everything your partner isn’t doing. As opposed to our model,, we do a tit for tat differently. We look at wow, here are all the things you have done for me or have done, and I appreciate and thank you.
Now the third thing is taking time for each other. Taking time to take care of each other. Because we’re both working together as a couple, it can get so easy as one is supposed to take care of the other. In our relationship, we’re constantly checking in with each other, especially when one of us is maybe going through a hard week. Travis will come to me and say, hey, you need a bath. He’ll turn on a bath for me, put on some music, and gives me that time to relax because he knows and he can feel that I’m stressed or that I’m having a hard day. And the same goes in reverse.
Dr. Travis Fox: The fourth is laughter by far, and I mean, I don’t think that’s anything I need to go too deep into, most people get it. But to laugh with each other and, most importantly, laugh at yourself. I mean, I have been guilty of being caught up in an image and thinking I was supposed to look this way or act this way or talk this way. ‘m sure many others have been as well, but realistically, come to laugh at yourself, man. Life is short, we all know that, but I think we often hypnotize ourselves to believe that we have time, and we get examples every single day where that is just not true. So laugh your butt off, have a great time, laugh at each other, laugh at yourself and let it go. There’s such healing us in laughter, and it keeps the relationship alive on another level.
The last, and certainly not least, is to keep the adventure in the relationship. It doesn’t have to be going on a worldwide trip and spending a bazillion dollars, although that’s great, and it’s one of the experiences everyone should have while they’re here on planet earth. Instead think of new things you can do every single day that are within ten miles of where you are, but could give you a new perspective that you never thought of before. Because that’s essentially what constitutes an adventure, otherwise it would be called a memory or an experience of the past that you’re repeating. Keep the adventure alive and learn new things, see the monuments out there, explore the geography and how the planet is constantly changing. Go into the water and mountains and experience everything with the sense of awe that you did when you were a kid. Because everything, when you were a kid was new and it was amazing, it was exciting and you didn’t have to be inspired or motivated, you just naturally were on fire and that came from that sense of adventure.
You are people of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what idea you can trigger.
Michelle: I would say BPR, and that stands for Business Personal and Relationship Ratio. So the times that we talk about the work life balance, there’s no blueprint out there. There’s no “how do I do this?” There’s no secret sauce. So I created a formula that really helps individuals with the blueprint on how to really balance your business, your personal and your relationships simultaneously throughout the day. The movement that I would love to see is that everybody starts utilizing the terminology, have you balanced your BPR? What’s your BPR percentage? Or wow, you really got that BPR down. Everybody is really present in every moment of their day and experiencing it and enjoying it.That’s what the BPR helps balance, is truly living your life on a daily basis.
Dr. Travis Fox: I’m going to be a bit of a dork here and say I would be exactly what I am because I believe that’s exactly what the quest and the all realms company are doing. We’re bringing true entrepreneurial and self-transformation together simultaneously in a fun way where we can make business fun again, and we’re giving the app away, so everybody can have it on a global scale: to me, that is the movement. The movement of cooperation and creating a fun environment and living and chasing your dreams in a fun blueprinted kind of way, just like the game of Life that we all played as a young kids.
Can you please give us your favorite life lesson quote? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Michelle: My life lesson quote is actually one that I created and it is fear is excitement without breathing. Now, there was a time in my life that I was very afraid of so many different things and it was based off of trauma. I devoted myself to conquering all my fears or battling all my fears in one day. While I was going through that process I would freeze, and when I felt that freeze, I noticed that I stopped breathing, literally stopped breathing, and then it took me into that fight or flight. That’s when it triggered for me, fear is excitement without breathing.
As soon as I started to breathe, I was able to turn that fear into excitement and really move through all of my fear. I started using that about seven years ago and it has significantly helped me throughout difficult business choices or situations in personal and in so many relationships where, when I feel myself starting to hold my breath, I start to consciously breathe. With that, I’ve been able to move through my fear and really take that fear and move it into excitement.
Dr. Travis: Ellen Watts has a famous quote that says life doesn’t define death; death defines life and that impacted me, it still impacts me to this day to be honest. Candidly, we all have a date with destiny and it’s something that, you know, I have been my own way for the last three decades, inviting people to look at. And I always say, hey, if you only had 30 days left to live, would you be doing anything in any part of your life that you’re doing right now? And if any part of your answer is no, I wouldn’t be, and then you owe it to yourself to transform.You can’t take it with you, but you can leave an amazing legacy behind; an amazing adventure that you experience as you go on to the great beyond.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in business, VC Funding, Sports and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with and why?
Michelle: I would ike to have a meeting with Donald Trump. I am not a political person in any way, shape or form, but what I am interested in is how he still takes two hours a day to plan his day out. What about that process works for him? How does he do it? What does he do during those two hours? What is his step by step blueprint? Because of the BPR and how passionate I am about that work life balance. How does he fit everything in his day? And are there things that are out of balance and what would he do differently? That’s why I would want to sit down with him and have lunch.
Dr. Travis: Believe it or not I’ve always wanted to meet Shaquille O’Neal. Shaquille O’Neal to me is truly someone who has balanced life and relationship and himself and his business, and he is still very good managing all the wealth that he has and all the reach and the fame that he has acquired. He never forgot who he was and where he came from and always has time for the people, he laughs at himself, he makes fun of himself. He can be serious when he needs to be, he’s never a bully. He’s always polite, he stands up for the underdog and he’s a good, smart businessman who’s willing to do things that people weren’t willing to do. And so for me sitting down with Shaquille O’Neal and hearing his story and learning some more lessons from him or having him be a part of the quest in some form another. I think that would be absolutely, you know, the best half court, three point shot I could ever do at least in the near foreseeable future. Hey, Shaq, if you’re out there, man, I’d love to do lunch.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
Lessons from a Thriving Power Couple, With Dr Travis Fox and Michelle S Fox of Ultimate Business… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.