Why I Left Evryman

An open letter to members of the Evryman community

As many people reading this know, a year and half ago, Owen Marcus, Mike Sagun and I left Evryman – a job I had for 4.5 years. The narrative around our departure was tightly controlled and purposefully vague, and I intentionally did not want to bring unprocessed bitterness into the launch of our new venture, MELD, so I chose not to speak about it publicly.

If you visit the MELD site, you can see that we continue to offer science-based somatic trainings and retreats for men. Our mission – to support men getting out of their heads and into their bodies, to heal, grow, and contribute to making a better world – remains steadfast and continues to gain strength. But it had become painfully clear that this foundational connection I once shared with Evryman had eroded beyond repair.

Now that MELD’s footing is stable, I’d like to offer a more complete picture to the men of the Evryman community by way of sharing my story.

I have no desire for a beef with Evryman, and I’m very happy for everything I learned, most of my experiences, and all the amazing men that I met during my time there. But I do feel it’s necessary to speak the truth on something that has implications for this culture that I’m a part of, and the paradigm I’m seeking to shift.

When I started at Evryman, in the summer of 2019, at first I had trouble believing that such an ideal job could exist. With a background in large-scale creative cultural event production, and a newly discovered (but long-sought) enthusiasm for somatic men’s work, I had struck gold when I was asked to join the Evryman team to organize and produce their growing number of retreats. In some ways it was the easiest job I ever had, between my excitement to be on the front lines of men’s work and their real appreciation for my skillset. It was exhilarating.

I take film photos with my dad’s ae1 from the 70s - this I took at one of our retreats in Joshua Tree.

But a few months in I started to notice cracks in the foundation. The organizational structure was unclear, there were trust issues between the founders, and big egos with a lot to prove. In a side room at one of our retreats in February 2020, I overheard a conversation between two of the founders: one founder urging the self-appointed “CEO” to sell his shares and step away – to allow himself to be bought out and to get out of the way – the “CEO” pleading for another chance and promising that he could get his act together and deliver.

(I’m putting “CEO” in quotes here because it was a self-appointed and rather misleading title. I won’t do that for the entire story.)

I ignored the anxious feeling this sparked. Coming from a DIY background, yet romanticizing the stability and potential of a corporate setting, I assumed “that’s just how it is in business, this is a start-up, we have to move fast and break things,” etc. How exciting.

Two weeks later, the Coronavirus pandemic exploded into the US consciousness. I cancelled 20 retreats that I had begun booking for the remainder of the year, and laid myself off at the end of March 2020. Two of the three founders withdrew from the company, leaving the CEO, who I had just overheard being asked to step down (see above), and Owen Marcus to navigate Evryman’s “transition to online”, as many experiential companies were forced to do at the time.

You might be asking, “Three founders? Weren’t there four? Wasn’t Owen a founder of Evryman?” That’s a fair question, given that Owen’s life’s work served as the basis for almost the entire Evryman catalogue and vernacular, including “The Evryman Method”. Owen was the creator of all of the courses and trainings Evryman has offered over the years, from Fundamentals, to the MELT retreats, the Group Launch Training, Principles course, the Foundations Training, the format for the group meetings and the methodology employed by all of these programs.

But Owen was never an owner of Evryman. He was never even an official employee. There was never an employment contract, licensing agreement, equity arrangement… nothing.

That always struck me as off. But “what did I know?”, I would think to myself. I was, and still am, a firm believer that traditional structures were often flawed – and we were creating something new.

In July, I arranged to return to Evryman as the Head of Operations, to build out and refine all of the online offerings, and manage all of the events and content on the new Evryman virtual membership network. I could see the goal and I was excited to take on the challenge, one that was new to pretty much the whole world.

I negotiated a contract with the CEO that was agreed, in person and via email, but even after much back and forth it was never executed on paper. Nevertheless, there was a lot of work to do, and a lot of uncertainty, and I eventually let it slip to the back burner. I was used to having no safety net, trusting people to do right by me, and the added risk intensified my efforts for the company.

That was the first big manipulation, and I was nearly as complicit as anyone involved. I could have made more of it, but I let it slide. I ignored the insecurity it brought up, for the sake of the mission and the men we were serving, and because confrontation, especially when it came to standing up for myself, was not my thing.

I grew up in Boston in the 80s and 90s, and in the 00s I toured in a band, before the Youtube age. We converted a 66 passenger school bus into a vegetable oil-powered camper so we could play as many shows as possible even if the money wasn’t sustainable. The concept of paying your dues was so deeply ingrained, it was pretty much my identity. I chalked my (lack of) arrangement with Evryman up to paying dues in the corporate world, and I doubled down, committing to working my way to safety.

Junius and Constants, and our buses, 2006 - I'm the guy in the black

For the next two years Owen, the CEO, and I (as well as a team of talented, largely volunteer facilitators) made incremental and scattered progress toward achieving what everyone agreed was Evryman’s massive potential. We kept the ship above water, but there were a lot of holes and never more than a few grand in the bank. At one point I proposed another employment agreement, this time verbally agreed upon, but similarly deprioritized and dishonored. I was frustrated, but like so many other times in my life I wouldn’t dare allow myself to feel it for fear that it pointed to a structural flaw in my path. So I continued to show up, accepting platitudes in place of payment.

I should mention that I would periodically demand some pay in order to keep my family afloat, which I would eventually receive after weeks of hounding. This totaled $25k-$30k per year in each year from 2020-2023.

In summer 2022, a friend connected us to a marketing partner who went through our finances and revealed to me that Evryman had grossed almost half a million dollars in the previous 12 months. That was quite the eye-opener, and started me down a new path - realizing the story that “we didn’t have enough money for employee compensation,” was not true.

So where did all that money go?

If the money we generated had been used to grow the company in some form, any form, I would have seen it and been a part of those initiatives. I immediately, and with great opposition, forced my way into the company’s books and discovered absurd and profound mismanagement. Wild-goose-chase-style projects, either aimless or abandoned – $40k here, $40k there – all while the CEO tactfully avoided signing a contract with me for the job I was already doing, and I avoided confronting him about it.

It had become so Owen and I were running the company from day to day, and the CEO continued to drift further and further away, until early 2023 when he got himself another job in a different industry.

With the CEO completely absent (but still controlling the finances and maintaining executive access to key accounts), and earning himself a salary elsewhere while we ran his company, I, and a few others began working on an offer to give us a controlling stake in Evryman. Our offer would have relieved the CEO of hundreds of thousands of dollars in debts, bills, and past-due loans.

The CEO entertained this offer for a few months, stipulating that we couldn’t tell the truth about his mismanagement, and that if the deal went through, we would center him as the hero in a fabricated narrative of the transition, one that was irreconcilable with my lived experience.

Then, the CEO used our offer to start a bidding war with other investors. In July, Owen, Mike Sagun, and I were banned from all Evryman platforms (including email) while in the middle of leading a training. He told the community that he asked us to “take a step back”. A man Owen had trained for 18 years had arranged with the CEO to step in and take Owen’s place.

In August, we were able to raise even more money, enough to put some in the CEO’s pocket, in addition to relieving him of the debt – and negotiations recommenced as our deal came back into favor. Our access was restored, and we did our best to salvage the remainder of the training. Owen’s replacement immediately resigned without speaking to any of us.

We went back and forth, up and down and roundabout on this rollercoaster for a few more months. There would be long delays when we wouldn’t receive any response, which I always assumed was the CEO playing the other side of the bidding war, although he assured us that was not the case. After all, it would have violated the term sheet he’d signed. Still, we would need to concede more and more ground in the deal to get him to write us back.

Then, at last, on the first Sunday evening of December 2023, after 10 months of negotiating, the CEO wrote to us and said the terms were finally agreeable. He thanked us, and said we’d have his signature in the morning.

It worked. Everything we had worked and fought for, every concession we’d made, every partnership we had forged to bring this deal to fruition, and most importantly, all the work that I had put into this company over the last 4.5 years, I was at last going to have something to show for all of it. I was relieved. My path had been justified after all.

And we never heard from the CEO or his lawyer again.

To use an Owen-ism, I was “shocked, but not surprised.” This was a textbook move for the CEO, but my nervous system was still reeling all the same. Being involved with Evryman meant to hope for the best and prepare for the worst. We’d all come to understand that if the CEO was involved, that initiative, big or small, was going to be half baked or abandoned, and need to be redone completely. I’d well learned not to believe anything he said. I can feel my heart beating and the pit in my gut as I write this, the panic, and the anger. And the helplessness. Everything I had poured into the company over those four and a half years had been taken and sold to someone else. Owen had given seven years, and his life’s work.

And so, days before the new year, we left and launched MELD, in order to do what we had not been able to do at Evryman: create a thriving business out of helping men. We soon confirmed that the CEO had sold the assets, of a company built on Owen’s life’s work, to another investor.

It was a grueling experience, but infinitely illuminating. I didn’t dwell in hurt. I learned to trust my instincts – those feelings I’d ignored – and to process and release my anger in violent rage ceremonies. I began the thaw of a lifetime’s worth of frozen feelings about all the times I’d been taken advantage of, and how I’d let it happen, or even encouraged it. I began to understand setting boundaries and prioritizing my well-being. I lost 25 lbs, stress that had parked itself on my body. I had physically and psychically broken free from an abusive and ruinous relationship, and in doing so restored my self-worth; now I know what it’s like to act in my own self-interest alongside people I trust.

Leaving Evryman is among the best things that I have ever done in my entire life.

my son enamored with a freshly torn-down house, West Tisbury, MA, summer 2024

So that’s my story. What’s the larger significance to consider?

A phrase that I think about all the time, from my mentor and business partner, Owen Marcus, is “You cannot lead a man somewhere that you yourself have not been.” Any company, but especially one that deals in integrity, must lead by example. An organization aspiring to draw out the inner truths of an entire gender, and challenge the deeply rooted, traditional paradigm, must exemplify those principles in its actions and in its operations. It’s not enough to preach integrity; it must be lived. It’s not something that you know, it’s something that you embody.

Another tenet that we live by at MELD is take imperfect action. We cannot let the absence of what feels like a perfect option, or fear of failure, paralyze us into doing nothing. It’s okay to make a mess along the way if you’re acting with integrity, because operating with honor and openness makes it a generative act to own your mistakes, make repairs, and clean up afterwards.

Yet in the majority of my time at Evryman, I experienced a striking lack of transparency, a fear of the messiness of truth, and a strong controlling grip over the narrative. I came to realize that, at the very top, narrative was all there was.

In a world of endless choices, opinions, and information (and misinformation), dishonest organizations only add hurdles to the heap of what we’re needing to overcome, reinforcing that it’s okay to be fake and full of shit. When organizations that lack authenticity thrive, it contributes to the noise and confusion, making it difficult to discern what is genuine and what is a facade. The person I was working for, whose company I was running, didn’t understand the importance of integrity. His actions undermine not only his business, but the movement that he claims to support.

So there you have it. That’s my story. Despite the frustration, I will always be grateful for the challenges and growth that came from my time at Evryman, as well the many incredible and inspiring men who are there doing their work for the right reasons. I feel sad that I’ve lost touch with so many of you guys, I miss you, and I would love to reconnect. duncan@meld.community

MELD operates under the core philosophy that the traditional model of masculinity needs a few tweaks - it doesn't allow men to fully express themselves or thrive. Our approach focuses on helping men get out of their heads and into their bodies, using somatic practices to reconnect with their felt senses. We believe that much of modern men's struggles stem from frozen or shut-down parts of themselves, often due to past experiences and societal conditioning that discourages vulnerability and emotional expression. MELD’s method continues to be wildly successful at reawakening these parts, helping men integrate them and live more fully and authentically from the "bottom up."

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I’d love to reconnect and show you what we’ve been up to.

PS - If you’ve been looking for a place to speak openly about your experience with Evryman, feel free to do so in the comments. I’m listening, and you may create some resonance with other readers.

a pool-shaped structure that served a purpose once, Twentynine Palms, CA, Feb 2025