Helping Leaders Convert Complexity Into Capacity

The Question That Changed Everything

In 2004, Aaron Brown learned the state planned to acquire his wellness center through eminent domain to build a highway. He thought he was losing a business. He was about to discover the work he had actually been doing all along.

Aaron earned his degree from Cal State Fullerton, then opened a brick-and-mortar wellness center in Yorba Linda in 2000. As founder and physiologist, he led his team in helping thousands of individuals and groups transform their health, work that was featured in major media outlets.

But while negotiating the transition with the state, a mentor asked him a simple question that changed everything: “Have you ever thought about becoming a life coach?”

Aaron had never heard the term. As he researched it, he realized his clients had never been coming to him for better health. They were coming to change how they thought and behaved. They brought marriage problems, business challenges, parenting struggles, leadership issues, stress, and more.

Health was merely the presenting problem. Transformation was the real work.

40 Clients in Four Months

In 2005, Aaron became certified as an executive and life coach. Within four months, he had 40 clients, 35 of them business owners.

Then he noticed another pattern. Many of these owners quickly became stuck because their businesses controlled their time, consumed their energy, and owned their identities. Aaron began coaching three of them on their businesses instead. Within months, all three experienced dramatic growth.

That revealed two things: Aaron had a gift for helping businesses grow, and business could become a vehicle for creating a larger impact in the world.

He pivoted into business coaching and consulting. Over the next several years, he worked with hundreds of companies. The results were real, but not yet consistent. Some clients experienced breakthroughs. Others made only modest progress. That inconsistency bothered him. He didn’t want to deliver advice that occasionally worked. He wanted to understand what made lasting transformation repeatable.

A Breakthrough of His Own

Eventually, Aaron became the one who needed help. His marriage was struggling. Over two decades, he had invested more than six figures working with respected professionals, but nothing had produced the change he needed.

Then he sat down with Chris Williams, a psychotherapist using a neuroscience-based approach to change. In a single conversation, something shifted that years of effort had never reached.

Aaron already understood many of the X’s and O’s of achieving personal goals, building teams, and growing organizations. Chris helped him understand what to do when someone is not merely uninformed or unmotivated, but neurologically stuck. That approach became the foundation of what Chris calls the Empowered Model.

Aaron not only brought it into his marriage but his work with clients as well, and it changed everything that followed.

The Problem Beneath the Problem

The proof surfaced in a hotel lobby after a conference. Aaron was speaking with a senior executive who’d spent four years struggling with a problem. According to her, her CEO was the problem, an external, presenting problem, and she had tried everything.

Within minutes, their conversation uncovered a decades-old belief beneath the conflict. That belief shifted, and so did her behavior. Within weeks, it had transformed the relationship. She went from being someone her CEO was managing out of the organization to someone he invited to become his business partner in his next venture.

That experience captured what would become central to our work: lasting transformation requires more than solving the problem someone brings us. We must find and solve the problem underneath it.

It takes trust to reach the truth. And truth makes transformation possible. That is not merely a slogan. It is why we are called True Increase.

Where We Are Today

True Increase grew the same way it began: one transformed leader telling another. What started with individuals and smaller businesses eventually expanded to include teams and multibillion-dollar organizations, brand names, governments, and professional sports franchises. The approach continued evolving through hundreds of engagements into the ACE Unified Transformation Framework, an integrated system for creating transformation at the individual, team, and organizational levels.

Today, our work spans individual and group coaching, team and organizational assessments, team and organizational transformation, and strategic advisory and consulting. That same framework is now available through ACE+, our platform designed to bring these tools to individuals and enterprises at scale.

Methods have evolved. The scope has expanded. But the principle remains the same: start with a trusted advisor, get to the deeper truth, and achieve lasting transformation, for individuals, teams, and organizations. Because there is always a better way.