Since moving to Collingwood, Dan Fotopoulos has rolled up his sleeves to build a community around men’s work.
For this week’s edition of People of Collingwood, we spoke with Fotopoulos, 35, co-owner of Everlove Healing & Yoga and a Realtor.
Q: Where did you grow up?
A: I grew up in Kitchener, Ont.
I was there my whole life up until three years ago, when we relocated here.
Q: What schools did you attend?
A: I went to a Catholic grade school and high school. When I got out of high school, I wanted to be either a police officer, a firefighter or an architect. I applied for those but got rejected because I didn't attach my transcripts.
Q: What did you do after that?
A: I worked at a moving company for a year and basically realized I didn't want to do hard labour. I looked around saw a lot of people that weren’t happy. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this can’t be my life.’
I got an interview at Sun Life Financial for their call centre. I was 19 or 20, and I lucked out. My salary was $30,000 a year, plus benefits, which felt huge to me at the time.
I started climbing the corporate ladder and I ended up being at Sun Life for 10 years, filling 12 different roles in that time.
I was really good at defusing things, so I was on the escalations team. I developed a really good skill for listening, having people feel heard and then working through it.
In my mid-20s, Sun Life sent me to school for business at Wilfrid Laurier and Waterloo. I always had this feeling like I wasn’t worthy because I didn’t go to post-secondary. It was something I needed to do to prove to myself that I could.
Throughout my 20s, I became really obsessed with real-estate investing. I bought my first house when I was 21. I kept living with my parents and rented that out and bought another house.
I wasn’t making much money at Sun Life, but I was really obsessed with making my money work for me.
Then, my girlfriend (now fiancée), Ariana, and I got an opportunity.
We met a couple of people that were opening up a business called Hustle and Flow in Waterloo. It was a spin yoga boxing studio.
We ended up investing and co-owning this fitness studio in Waterloo, and we did that for three years, until COVID came along.
COVID, for us, was kind of like the Great Pause.
We were so busy that we had never actually taken the time to pause and wonder, ‘Do we actually enjoy our life?’
There was a point where we had eight properties and 16 units. I was managing them all. I had also become a Realtor.
When COVID happened, we went to Costa Rica and it was supposed to be for one week.
With the lockdowns, we kind of voluntarily got stuck. We ended up staying for three months, and it was the first time in my life that I had ever even been out of Kitchener for longer than two weeks.
It was just beautiful.
There was water, there were trees, there were really active people, and I felt a sense of community.
That was the first time I actually entertained relocating.
Q: What made you choose Collingwood?
A: Honestly, our list was B.C., Alberta, Costa Rica and Austin, Texas. Our plan was to spend a year basically travelling to those places and testing them out.
Ariana just said, “What about Collingwood?”
I had been up to Blue, maybe a couple of times for a bachelor party, but never seriously considered it. Her parents have a cottage up here, and she spent a lot of time coming up here growing up. We decided to come up for a weekend.
Being a Realtor, I’m always poking around looking at properties.
I found this property and it was just this beautiful century home in downtown Collingwood. I love old homes and I love renovations.
We thought, ‘Oh, what the heck? Let’s just go look at it for fun.’ I booked a showing and I walked through it. Immediately, we just felt like, ‘wow.’
This was such a beautiful space and it’s good energy. Like, maybe we should start a community here.
We wanted to create a community that was totally centred on inspiring each other and growing.
Ariana said, “If this is meant to be, show me stars.”
During COVID, we started binge watching Survivor. That night, we were watching it and the group wanted to rename their tribe. The name they chose, it meant stars, and then there was this huge montage of stars.
It was pretty obvious.
The financing worked out and we ended up taking a massive risk. We sold five of our properties and moved two hours away to a town where we didn’t know a single person.
We wanted to start a community.
We started talking about our idea to some other friends and one or two of them decided to move up with us.
Q: Why did you call it Everlove?
A: We had so many bad names before that.
Ariana has been teaching yoga for, like, 15 years.
She was teaching a class one day, looking out at the class and felt an immense amount of love in the space and it felt like she would feel it forever. It just hit her, like Forever Love, or Ever Love. We were like, ‘Yes, that’s the one.’
Q: What does Everlove do?
A: We have 10 fitness instructors who lead 40 or more classes per week. We have eight healers upstairs, like practitioners, massage, osteotherapy, tarot and astrology.
Two weeks after we went firm on the purchase of this building, we found out Ariana was pregnant, which was not a part of the plan.
Our daughter, Atlantis – we’re obsessed. She’s two-and-a-half years old now, but that triggered me down a path.
When we found out she was pregnant, I went and did a men’s-only retreat and it was completely different (from) anything I had experienced.
That got me into “men’s work,” preparing myself to be a better father and a better husband, because we also got engaged.
I joined virtual men’s circles, but all the men were in the U.S. I really wanted an in-person group.
Typically, a studio that has yoga is 99 per cent female. When we opened the studio, I was absolutely determined that it was not going to be all women.
Any time a guy walked through the doors, I made it my personal mission to be like, ‘Who are you? What’s your story?’ — to build that relationship. In doing that, I made some good connections.
I had the idea of starting this in-person men’s circle every week. We gather. We sit in a circle. There’s breath work, and I ask a powerful prompt.
Like, what are you struggling with in your life? Or, what something you want to celebrate about yourself? We’re going to grow. We’re going to listen. We’re choosing curiosity and not judgment.
Anything said in the space stays in the space. We hold each other accountable.
It was really powerful. Then other men heard about it and we opened a second one, a third and a fourth. Now we have five weekly circles with 40-plus men and there’s a wait list. We’ll probably start two more in January.
I’ve seen the power that can happen when men sit in a circle and talk.
Q: Why is men’s work, or male friendship, so important to you?
A: Eight men die of suicide every single day in Canada. Men dominate in being alcoholics, drugs, incarceration, homelessness — every single category that you would not want to be winning in, men are winning in by a large margin.
I’ve heard all these statistics and I wondered how this is possible, and why.
My theory was that it’s because men, by and large, don’t tend to talk. They tend to lone-wolf it, myself included. I have friends, but I’m always trying to figure out myself. I don’t ask for help.
One day, you just break, and then you can insert any one of those vices into that mid-life crisis.
I thought I knew what the problem was, and I had the space to help and I had the connections.
About a year into it, I realized it’s also me wanting to save my own father. I feel like my dad has so many gifts, and so much more potential to offer the world.
Having my daughter now, the question I’m asking myself is, how do I actually be the man that I want my father to be? Or, how do I become a man that I would be happy giving my daughter away to some day?
Q: After living in Collingwood for two-and-a-half years, what are your impressions of the town as an outsider moving here?
A: We love it. I think I always felt really overwhelmed in the big city. There’s just so many people doing so many things, it’s hard to have an impact. There’s so much community here.
It feels like people actually care. People seem genuinely happier.
Most of the people I meet are not locals. They moved here at some point.
Having the water, having the mountain, all the trails — it feels like people genuinely want to live a healthier life.
I just feel more connected here to other people.
Q: What do you like to do your spare time?
A: I am almost always focused on either being super present with my daughter, or facilitating and growing the men’s circles.
I’ve been doing real estate up here and 10 per cent of all my commissions go to My Friend’s House. I ask my client what charity they’d like to donate the 10 per cent to, but I always pitch My Friend’s House. I just gave them $15,000 from four months of commissions.
I love the idea that we can be really successful business-wise, but then also have a really big community impact.
I did the Spartan Race at Blue Mountain last weekend. I had never done triathlons before until this year. I want to do the half-Iron Man next year. I have just an invisible ceiling and I’m (discovering) I’m actually capable of so much more.
Next year, we are running the Everlove Festival July 4 to 6. It will be a full-blown wellness festival, with talent from all over Ontario coming to do classes, workshops and mindset talks.
Q: Is there anything else you want people in Collingwood to know about you?
A: I hear all the time when people find out what we’re doing here with men’s circles and fitness classes, they’ll say, “I thought you guys were just a yoga studio.”
It’s just a community of people that are growth-minded and want to be better in their lives, in any area, and want to be surrounded by other people that are also lifting them up.
I’ve also heard people joke around that we’re a cult, which I think is so funny. I’ve leaned into it and said we’re a really nice cult. (laughs)
I think people have this idea of a spiritual person being a certain type of person and then people convinced themselves that they don’t align.
I would just encourage them to try it once because they’ll be really surprised.
For our feature People of Collingwood, we speak with interesting people who are either from or are contributing to the Collingwood community in some way, letting them tell their own stories in their own words. This feature runs on CollingwoodToday every weekend. If you’d like to nominate or suggest someone to be featured in People of Collingwood, email [email protected].
