Welcome to Sober Ventures, a podcast that brings together inspiring entrepreneurs combining the worlds of recovery and business. My name is Will Bradwell, and I will be your host. So pick up your favorite zero-proof beverage, turn up the volume, and let’s get down to business. Today’s episode is numero zero. This is a quick little intro to the podcast to let you know what to expect to hear down the line, and a little bit about myself. -– After nearly a decade of drinking and doing drugs, I got sober in November of 2015. Podcasts were instrumental in my recovery, and having voices like Paul of Recovery Elevator, Shane of That Sober Guy, and the team behind the Recovered Podcast, helped me be able to quit and stay sober from that moment on. All of my previous attempts at sobriety never lasted beyond 2 weeks, so I knew that these daily doses of audio were a key to a successful sober life. After almost a year sober, I got the idea for what’s now become this podcast. I started an Instagram account, @soberventures, to be a contact point for those people in recovery that are also running businesses. I grew up in an entrepreneurial home, and after graduating college in 2007, I returned home to operate our tropical fish farm in Miami, Florida. In this time, I got to experience first-hand how easy it is to fall into bad habits when you don’t have a boss or manager keeping you honest. While I now have a full-time position working for a local hospital, I can appreciate even more the challenge to stay sober while self-employed. So when I would hear stories of people running businesses while maintaining their sobriety on other podcasts, I wanted to learn more from them. After I started the page, I created the Sober Ventures Summit in March of this year, where I got to talk to some of the biggest names in the sobriety community on Instagram, hear how they’ve made it all happen, and their journeys that led them to this path. Some of the first episodes you’ll hear here are taken from that Summit. -– After releasing these conversations, and realizing that there are so many more stories out there from people across the country just getting started in their sober life, with many of them having a lot of time freed up from quitting drinking and doing drugs, I knew the next step would be to build a podcast as a platform for all these inspirational individuals to share their stories with each other and build a community around it. Our episodes will focus on our guests, their histories of drug or alcohol use, how they got into recovery, and how they’ve built their business while balancing the added stress of maintaining their sobriety. The goal is to provide a helpful and hopeful dose of experience every week that will inspire you to stay on your own path of recovery and to give you insights that will help you in business and in life. So stay tuned (in other words, please subscribe in iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app) and join our private community on Facebook, The Sober Venture Club to stay in touch in between episodes and to ask advice from others going through the same journey as yourself. -– I look forward to being of service through this podcast, and if you have any questions or thoughts on how I can make this better or more helpful, email me anytime at soberventures@gmail.com. Thanks for listening, and I hope you join me again next time on Sober Ventures.
