About Tony
“I never wanted to be a Roshi.”
Tony Bonnici was raised in a Zen temple and trained on the Judo mat. Then he left the cushion to build companies. For thirty years he chased the vision the way most founders do, at full speed, until life cracked him open and showed him another way to lead. Today he is a Zen Roshi, an entrepreneur, and a guide to founders and CEOs at the edge of their next chapter.
“Becoming a Roshi took nothing from the entrepreneur. It gave me another way of seeing him.”
I · Growing up Zen
The bell rang at 5:55 every morning.
Tony's father would wake him with a quiet click of the tongue. They bowed to each other, walked out to the redwood bell house, and struck the temple bell eight times to greet the day. Both of his parents were Zen priests, and the house he grew up in was a temple, with incense in the hallway, chanting at night, and a dozen day care children running through the meditation hall by day.
School was harder. Tony was dyslexic and had ADD long before anyone had names for either, and he was held back in third grade. He learned the way he still learns best, through the body. The silence of the temple taught him to trust his intuition before he could put it into words.
II · The mat
Discipline, and the cost of armor.
At six he stepped onto the Judo mat and found something that came naturally. He fought in national competitions and was invited to the Junior Olympics. The training gave him focus and a body that knew how to hold under pressure.
It also taught him to shut his feelings down. Winning became a way to hide the shame of being the kid who struggled to read. That armor would serve him in business for years, and it would cost him almost everything that mattered.
III · The builder
Seven companies, and a life he was missing.
Tony opened his first business at nineteen. He visualized his companies the way he had visualized winning a match before stepping onto the mat, and then he built them. Over three decades he started seven companies across California and Hawaii, made a great deal of money, lost some of it, and kept moving forward.
By the outside measure he was living the dream: the house on the water, the boat, the growth targets. On the inside his practice had gone quiet, and his wife and sons were paying for his absence.
IV · The wake up call
February 7, 2008.
The economy was collapsing. At five in the morning his bookkeeper called to say they could not make payroll. Ten minutes later, his wife went into labor at home. Tony did what he had trained himself to do: he shut down, worked the phones, and kept it together. He found the money.
Then he found himself in the birthing tub, soaked to the skin, lifting his newborn son out of the water. For the first time in thirty years, he could feel everything at once. That morning he decided there had to be another way to lead a company without leaving your life behind. He closed his California businesses, came home, and began building the method he now teaches as Integrated Leadership.
V · The teacher
Two lineages, one path.
For nearly two decades since, Tony has worked with founders, CEOs and senior leaders as a coach and, at times, an equity partner. He wrote The Dojo over six and a half years, as a dyslexic author who refused to let the vision go. He leads the DojoX Mastermind and a weekly online meditation Sangha that welcomes anyone.
At Thanksgiving of 2025 his parents invited him to receive Roshi ordination, the next step in their lineage. Everything in his head said no. What came out of his mouth was yes. In April 2026 he was ordained, and discovered that the companies, the failures, the marriage, the children and the years on the mat were never separate lives. They were the training.
He lives in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, where he starts each day on the cushion and still trains like an athlete, in the ocean, on the bike and in the sauna.
How Tony works
Stillness before strategy.
When a leader sits down with Tony, they do not begin with the business plan. They begin with the body, and with how the person carrying the vision is actually living. Pressure in a leader always finds its way into the company, and then it comes home. So they get still first. From there the strategy gets simpler, the decisions get cleaner, and the vision gets larger.
The body
Read your nervous system and settle it on purpose.
Spiritual practice
A daily sit that takes minutes and cannot be done wrong.
Relationships
Your team, your marriage, your home, led from presence.
Work and legacy
Tend the first three, and the fourth follows because of them.