Amy Peters, Co-Owner of Secret Knock The Room Where Nobody Performs
By Jules Lavallee
Amy Peters is co-owner of Secret Knock Global, a partner in Joint Venture Publishing, and founding partner of House of Higher, where she is preparing to launch Happy Hire, an employee engagement platform. With her husband and business partner Paul, she acquired Secret Knock, Secret Knock Women, Prosperity Camp, Manchester Media, Mastermind Association, and Joint Venture Publishing, weaving them into a connected powerhouse where every platform fuels the growth, reach, and success of the rest. A twenty-year veteran of business operations and talent, and the creator of the Happy Hire Method, she also serves on the executive team of a company supporting people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and on the board of a nonprofit for at-risk youth and survivors of domestic violence. She and Paul have five children. Her career, in her own words, comes down to one question: who gets let into the room — and who is holding the door.
Tell us about what you have enjoyed the most about being in business operations and talent.
What I’ve enjoyed most is learning how companies work, and I’ve learned it from every seat at the table: as a consultant, an employee, an advisor, and now from inside the companies Paul and I are building together. What I loved was the connections — between people, industries, trends, ways of doing business and ways of leading. Sit in enough rooms and the patterns emerge, and once you can see the pattern, you can change it. Twenty years of building teams for hundreds of companies earned me a reputation for the assignment nobody wanted: the team that had lost its way. I loved it. And I can tell you exactly where profit leaks out of a company. Assumptions. Assumptions are the root of most lost profit, and the cure is a room where people tell each other the truth.
The gift of seeing how a thing works, and the nerve to transform it, I got from both of my parents. Before I was born, they couldn’t make rent, so my father sold insurance door to door while my mother studied in the car, inching it along the curb as he walked from house to house. He went on to do the impossible, a country boy from Louisiana building a career across Asia and Australia, and I watched him do it in Singapore, Bangkok, Sydney and Seoul — eleven homes before I finished high school. I don’t speak Korean or Thai, but I learned one language from him. I’m fluent in culture. Years later he came to speak to my team in Los Angeles, and I walked out with the thing I have been building toward ever since: that a life fully lived is the one worth building, and that mine was still mine to choose. But the sound that started all of it was my mother’s heels on a Sunday morning, when I was in elementary school. I didn’t have the words for it then. I only knew I wanted to walk into rooms the way she did — that I was made for business, and she is where I first heard it.
I began my career cold calling. When someone picked up, I would slide under my desk with the phone so I could concentrate, because I was so nervous I’d forget the whole conversation by the time I hung up — and I usually did. That is the woman who went on to build a career in talent, and who learned that the hardest thing to see in someone is what they’ve been told they are. I built the Happy Hire Method around that idea, because an employer brand should never be a sales pitch. It should be a true picture of who you are, so the right people recognize themselves in it and stay. Hire happy, work happy.
What has been your experience when it comes to events?
The honest answer is that I didn’t come to this from the events industry, and I’ve come to believe that’s the point. Larry Namer told me once that it’s sometimes good not to be in the middle of an industry, because you don’t know all the things you’re not supposed to do. I came to this as a builder, a talent person, and a woman who once needed a room like this and couldn’t find one. I’ll tell you something truer than that: I get anxious before company comes over for dinner. So I don’t measure Secret Knock against other events. I’m a collaborator, not a competitor, and I want us to be so different that the comparison never comes up.
What I do know about rooms, I learned over twenty years of walking into them, and the rare ones have one thing in common: nobody in them is working an angle. Secret Knock built that in before I ever walked in, with four rules everyone agrees to before they arrive: the room is never sold to; give before you ask; what happens here stays here; show up and give it your all. That’s the whole business model. A room built that way is a room where people tell the truth, and the room is capped — by invitation or application only — because that is how you protect a promise.
What Paul and I brought to Secret Knock isn’t event experience. It’s everything else. Our whole lives — the careers, the personal growth, the creative side, the way we were each raised — intersect at exactly this spot, and that is how you know a thing is a calling and not a job. I believe I am living in my purpose. I’ve never been able to say that before.
Greg came into our lives the way the best things at Secret Knock happen: through someone who gave before she asked. Paul and I met him at different times, in different places — Paul years before I did, and years before Paul and I ever met. My own first meeting I remember precisely, because I walked away with a single thought: that’s what I want to do. Authentic time with Greg changes your frequency. You leave more positive than you arrived, and you notice it for days. We came as guests, then to Prosperity Camp, and somewhere in there we stopped being attendees and started being the people Greg asked to stay after. When he was deciding who should carry Secret Knock next, Vica made the case for us. This summer, Paul and I signed. There was a season of my life when nothing was in my name, and signing for six brands is not something I get to call just business. I know exactly what it means to be let into a room. Now I’m the one who gets to say yes.
Tell us about Secret Knock Global and why does Secret Knock belong on every entrepreneur’s must-attend list?
Secret Knock Global is the house Paul and I built around the room: Secret Knock, Secret Knock Women, Prosperity Camp, Manchester Media, Mastermind Association and Joint Venture Publishing. We never thought of it as buying a portfolio. We thought of it as being entrusted with something special and asked to grow it. They aren’t six businesses that happen to share a name at the top; they’re one community, rooted in purpose and prosperity, and whichever door you come through, the room keeps its promises.
Why should Secret Knock be on every entrepreneur’s list? Because it is the one room where you don’t have to perform — and because a room worth being in elevates everyone in it, not only the person on stage. Every founder I know has the same wish: to be in a room full of people who are already doing what she’s trying to do, and who are glad she showed up. That’s what this room is. I would have given anything to walk into it years earlier than I did.
What do you admire the most about Greg S. Reid?
That he built a room where nobody gets sold to, and then had the discipline to keep it that way for twenty-one years. Anyone can write a rule. Greg protected one, gathering after gathering, when the easier thing would have been to let the room be sold to. Two decades of trust live in that room, and he earned all of it one gathering at a time.
I admire the way he thinks. He co-wrote Three Feet from Gold, about the people who stop digging just short of the breakthrough, and he told us Secret Knock is that book built into a room. He put a copy in our hands and told us it was to be our blueprint. It is. He also has the single most useful sentence about attitude I’ve ever heard from a stage: “I don’t have bad days. There’s a thousand things that went right today.”
And I admire how he chose to do it: by staying close. He’s mentoring us through the transition one gathering at a time, which frees him to build the next thing and, for the first time in twenty years, to enjoy Secret Knock as its guest of honor rather than its host. Greg did the unseen work for two decades, and then he trusted two people to carry it. I intend to be worthy of that every single day.
The iconic Larry Namer, Founder of E! Network, has been a speaker at your event. He says, “For only $5K per ticket this is the greatest value proposition in personal development.” What could happen at Secret Knock?
Larry is kind to say it. What I can add is what I’ve watched happen beside the stage, at the tables.
This year I hosted a table, filled it with women in the process of becoming, and seated them beside people who had already become. One went to lunch with someone she’d only ever seen on a screen, and by dessert it had turned into a career opportunity for her son. Another sat down next to a stranger who turned out to be exactly the patent attorney she’d been unable to find. Dr. Remina Panjwani, a physician in our community whose novel won an International Impact Book Award this year, told our stage that she had been told her whole life, “No, you can’t.” Every person in that room was told the same thing by someone. That is the whole reason it exists.
Eileen Galbraith, an author and coach who now sits on our council, said it in two sentences I couldn’t improve: “I originally came to Secret Knock thinking I was attending a networking event. Instead I found my people.” That’s what could happen. It happens every time.
What is the philosophy behind the brand?
The name says it. The purpose of a secret knock is to give, not to take. When you knock, a door opens and you are allowed in, and every door in this community opens onto six more. Secret Knock has always been part modern-day circus, part glitz and glam, part mind-expanding personal development — and none of it works unless the room is safe. So the philosophy starts with the four rules and never leaves them.
Underneath the rules is one conviction: we rise through raising others. People arrive carrying more than they realize, set it down in front of people who understand how heavy it was, and what lifts them is being seen — and then discovering they no longer need to ask. That’s why a Grammy-winning vocalist, a longevity scientist and a sword swallower share our stage: the point was never the résumés. The point is what you can see about yourself once the room has expanded what’s possible.
It all builds toward authentic prosperity — purpose and profit together, because a business that does good has to sustain itself to keep doing it. Paul said it from the stage this year better than I’ve managed in a hundred meetings: “When you unite purpose and service, you truly change the world.” We intend to build an empire for good. And we fully intend for it to still be cool.
Tell us about Joint Venture Publishing.
Joint Venture Publishing is where the room becomes a bookshelf. It’s a luxury publishing house, boutique on purpose, built for people who have lived something worth writing down and want a partner to bring it to life the way it deserves. The book comes out under your name, and it stays there. It works by application, because we protect the standard the way we protect the room. You’re not hiring a publisher. You’re becoming an author.
My favorite part is the box. I have stood beside enough authors opening the first copy of their own book to know exactly what that moment is — the sharp breath, the hand on the cover, the second when someone who was told “no, you can’t” is holding the proof — and I never get tired of it. The question I ask every author is the one I ask of everything we build: will it still be working in forty years? It’s not a small thing to be the people who get to say yes.
Share your vision for Secret Knock Women.
Secret Knock Women is a two-day retreat for women who are already shaping something — a company, a city, a field, a family — and who need a circle they don’t have to perform for. Camaraderie rather than competition. No stage, no hierarchy. Come as you are; leave as who you’re meant to be. Of everything we do, it is the part I would have done for free.
I know what it is to be a capable woman with nowhere to bring it. Our networks get bigger every year and our real circles get smaller, and the women carrying the most are the last to admit they need one. The vision is a circle that doesn’t end when the retreat does, built around one question we ask every woman in it: is your younger self proud of you? Here is the teaser I’ll allow myself. In 2027 Secret Knock Women grows from two days a year into a year: a circle that meets between retreats, where women in the process of becoming sit beside women who have already arrived. You apply, and the door opens for the women who came to give. Every woman’s story stays her own. The first circle forms next year, and it’s being built the way everything I care about has been built: on purpose, and by hand. This is a place I need, and now every woman who needs it has it.
What is next?
March 23–25, 2027, in San Diego, the first Secret Knock Paul and I will run. The first decision we made was what we would refuse to change, and the answer was the heart of it: the sense of community and connection Greg created. What we’re adding is depth: three days that move from learning to celebration to connection, including an evening that honors the authors this community has produced. The room stays capped, the four rules stay, and the trust that twenty-one years earned stays.
Expect the unexpected has always been the house promise, and it means something specific. It means the newest practice in business taught in the same hour as a fire-breather. It means whatever is cutting-edge in the culture this year seated beside a discipline that is thousands of years old, with a sword swallower on hand to remind you which of the two has lasted. It means a hypnotist-comedian whose show, you realize somewhere around the second laugh, has been a lesson in how your own mind works. None of it is there for the spectacle. All of it is designed so that by the third day you cannot see your business, or yourself, the way you did when you walked in. The rest I’m not going to spoil.
Beyond March, the question we keep asking ourselves is a simple one: what if the room never closed? We’re building a way for this community to keep going after the doors do, so that anyone in it can rise with us and around us. And at House of Higher, Lauren Beam and I are launching Happy Hire, the platform that makes twenty years of the Happy Hire Method measurable. Company or community, it’s the same mechanism. People who are seen build things — and then they turn around and lift the next person.
None of what I have was luck. It was made, deliberately, out of the wreckage, with the help of people who refused to let me disappear — and the pen has been in my own hand ever since. Take the You that you have, and love her. You are so much more than you think you are. I know, because I finally get to say something I waited a long time to say: I’ve built the version of me my younger self would be proud of.
