Today we’d like to introduce you to Joseph Abell.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Joseph. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I started competitive speech and debate in high school and was instantly captivated. It was unlike any other academic activity I’d pursued. Other school subjects taught me what to think; sports taught me what to do. Debate taught me HOW to think. It unlocked a new world of opportunity and growth for me.
I wanted to learn everything I could, so I started working with the top coach in the country. I learned the leading strategies and arguments and started winning tournaments. But I wasn’t satisfied. I started developing my own theory. I practiced difficult speaking drills every day. Within just two years, I won the national championship.
Then I became homeless. I was still in high school, and I was struggling to survive on my own. Nevertheless, debate had become a passion. I was determined not to quit. I took odd jobs to pay for travel and tournament expenses. I wrote a speech about my experience in homelessness. That year, I became the first person ever to win a national championship in two different high school leagues.
I moved to Dallas for college and started an online coaching business called Ace Peak. I had plenty of established competitors in the coaching business, but my high school experience had given me a different perspective. I emphasized personal excellence in all areas of life. I saw debate as an efficient format to improve yourself – not just as a thinker and speaker, but as a citizen with character.
My character-first approach to coaching, combined with my innovative strategies and theories, set Ace Peak apart in the field. My students started winning tournaments. Demand for sessions grew. I expanded the company by turning my most dedicated students into exceptional coaches.
The Ace Peak philosophy led to near-exponential growth. I ended my homelessness three years after starting the company. Today, we’ve trained 24 national champions (and counting), offer a full staff of coaches that work with hundreds of students, and travel the country running educational workshops. We’re now among the top debate coaching companies in the country. I’m continuing to train new coaches to meet demand. At the same time, my coaching has caught the attention of people outside the speech & debate world. I’m working with people from all walks of life, from parents to business executives.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
I started an online business while I was living in my car. One of my biggest challenges was finding ways to charge my computer so I could work and study business and learn to code. I had no idea what I was doing, and I made a lot of mistakes. I spent hours every week writing blog posts for a website that no one was visiting. I lost thousands of dollars that first year.
Telling the story now, it seems like I should have gotten discouraged and thought about quitting. But I didn’t. It never occurred to me that I might fail. I didn’t have time for such thoughts. I read everything I could and got advice from successful entrepreneurs. The harder things got, the harder I worked.
My second year, I brought a second coach to Ace Peak. I worked closely with him while taking six college classes on-campus. On the side, I taught myself human resources management, contract law, excel, and business accounting. I also took up a disciplined sleeping schedule and started exercising every single day.
By my third year, Ace Peak was taking up at least 65 hours a week. I was administrating, marketing, writing, mentoring a larger staff, and organizing camp events. I still had a full schedule of my own students and a full college course load. On a typical day, I would wake up just before sunrise and work non-stop until 1 am. Many days I didn’t make it back to my bed; I’d just collapse at my desk or on the floor.
Those years tested the limits of my physical and mental endurance. But again, I never thought about quitting. I had chosen to build a coaching company, and now my staff and hundreds of students were counting on me. I had chosen to pursue a degree, and I was going to finish it. I never asked if I could succeed; I had to. I never asked if it was worth it; I embraced the chance to work and grow. Those early years transformed me. I left with straight As, a booming company, excellent health, and the certainty that I could handle anything.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Ace Peak – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of and what sets you apart from others.
Pursuing excellence in debate is important. You should want to win and work your hardest to do so. But debate is a unique opportunity to improve every aspect of yourself. Done correctly, it makes you stronger, smarter, kinder, wiser, more honest, more hard-working. You don’t just improve, you learn how to improve. This creates a virtuous cycle which can continue for the rest of your life.
Debate is unlike any other activity in this regard. There are plenty of worthy ways to spend your time in high school. You could play soccer or chess, or do charity work, or join the math team, or get a part-time job. Those activities are all positive, but they don’t have the transformational potential of debate. Students emerge from student government as better versions of the same person. Students emerge from debate deeply changed.
This is why good coaching is so important. Instead of pulling kids on the shortest route to victory, we encourage them to take a long way. We demand that they take responsibility for their choices. We’d rather see them lose and learn from it than blindly follow our advice and get a trophy they don’t understand. We know that high school will be over in a blink, and the technical stuff will eventually fade from memory. The only thing that really matters is becoming a self-generating person, someone with integrity and humility, someone who constantly improves.
Ace Peak is not a mere coaching platform. I maintain a close working relationship with each coach and even listen in on their sessions periodically to give them tips. The coaches all started out as my students. While we now have a business relationship, they are still my students. It is one of my greatest joys to see them grow into adults who can pass on their passion and knowledge to the next generation.
We see coaching not just as an opportunity to give to the students, but also as an opportunity to improve ourselves. We want to be the best coaches in the world. That means we have to push ourselves constantly to find better strategies, better arguments, better ways to explain and relate to and inspire our students.
Ace Peak is an incredible job for a recent high school graduate: great compensation, flexible hours, working mostly from home. Many people twice the age of my coaches, people with expensive degrees and long resumes, would gladly trade places. I’m proud to have created the opportunity for these exceptional young adults to flourish.
I saved this part for the end because it’s the least important, but I’m still proud of it. The strategies, theories, and techniques Ace Peak teaches are unique. I invented many of them by synthesizing ideas from a vast range of other disciplines. We get a lot of flak from traditional coaches who want to keep doing things the way they’ve always been done. But they can’t dismiss us, because their students keep losing to ours. Like it or not, Ace Peak’s theory is a step forward for the debate world. I’m proud to be a part of that and have that effect on a community that has done so much for me.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
About a hundred years ago, Dallas was inundated with migrants and money because of the oil boom. There was petroleum so close to the surface that people would strike it accidentally. Sometimes they would start drilling a well and tap into a reserve with so much pressure that the oil would gush high up into the sky. Those Texas geysers became a symbol of the march of technology, recognized all over the world.
Sometimes I feel like one of those Dallas oilers, standing next to a well with oil literally falling from the sky. I knew Ace Peak was going to be a success, but I had no idea it was going to take off the way it has. The demand for character-first coaching is bigger than I could have imagined.
Our philosophy has already informed some big moves for Ace Peak, like expanding the staff, hosting camps all over the country, and branching out into new disciplines beyond speech & debate. I don’t want to plan the future too carefully. Instead, I want to pay close attention to what our clients need and see what we can do to fill that need.
We treat every activity as an opportunity to grow first and an opportunity to succeed second. That theory is starting to spark something larger. We’re looking at growing to offer academic coaching (which is character-focused), as an alternative to tutoring (which is test-focused). We’re also looking at ways to support our students after graduation: life coaching, business coaching. I’ve been asked about creating a private academy. I would only pursue that if I was convinced we could create the most valuable high school diploma in the world.
The world is changing very quickly. People are going to technical high schools to learn a profession that will be automated before they graduate. They’re memorizing facts that you can look up in seconds with your phone. The oncoming information age won’t make education obsolete – just the opposite. Education is more important than ever before. But we have to adapt. We need to focus on things that can’t be automated and give students tools that they can use to thrive in the future. Communication and critical thinking are skyrocketing in importance, and Ace Peak is right in the center of that.
Ace Peak is still a very small company. We’re not changing the world. But we are doing our best to make a positive impact and help our students participate in the changes the best they can. I hope our students will look back on our mountain logo as a symbol of the march of technology, and the firm belief that people of integrity who can think and speak will never be outdated.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.acepeak.org
- Email: joseph@acepeak.org
- Instagram: @acepeakcoaching
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/acepeakcoaching
Image Credit:
Demi Cole
Fixe Daniel
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