Cory Bergeron | AS SEEN ON TV Take 1 For Anxiety

I don’t always drink peach whiskey, but when I do, I drink it with the most capable man on the planet. You are absolutely going to love this podcast with Cory Bergeron because it is rich with perseverance, passion, and perfectly aligned with priorities.

Cory Bergeron comes loaded with credentials, credited for grossing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales on national television, a bestselling author, and a highly pursued keynote speaker. Because inside, all that success is a real, authentic human, who has earned his stripes as a resourceful entrepreneur.

You are going to hear some painful moments in this podcast, but I want you to hear the passion and grace in the way Cory Bergeron tells his story. From a global pandemic destroying a mountain of momentum and a successful business, how massive health challenges in their family challenged Cory and his wife, Elizabeth to completely refocus. They sold everything to save the life of their son and in doing so, discovered what may be the cure for anxiety. Now that has yet to be evaluated by the FDA, but you’ll find a pattern in his story that just might save you or someone you love.

And now, the wild stories of Cory Bergeron. Buckle Up!

Thank you for listening!

Link to Special Guest:

https://corybergeron.com/

For Video versions of podcast:

https://youtube.com/@worleyrealestatenetwork

Connect with Jeramie and our business

https://www.linkedin.com/company/worleyrealestatenetwork

Copy of Jeramie’s Book, Workbook or Audiobook

https://worleyconsulting.textretailer.com/qc/tlkA3RcG9W

Link to our website

https://worleyrealestatenetwork.com/

For a free trial to the best investment grade Short Term Rental Data tool for locating the best deals out there and to help Investors and Agents achieve mastery in their real estate business:

https://vrolio.typeform.com/worleynetwork

—

Listen to the podcast here

Cory Bergeron | AS SEEN ON TV Take 1 For Anxiety

I don’t drink peach whiskey, but when I do, I drink it with the most capable man on the planet. Cory Bergeron comes loaded with credentials. He’s known for grossing over hundreds of millions of dollars on national television both on his own and with Kevin Harrington, one of the original sharks from the hit TV show Shark Tank. Cory is a best-selling author and a highly pursued keynote speaker because inside all of that success is a real authentic human who’s earned his rights as a resourceful entrepreneur.

From a global pandemic destroying a mountain of momentum and successful business to how massive health challenges in their family challenge Corey and his wife Elizabeth to completely refocus. They sold everything to save the life of their son and, in doing so, may have found the cure for anxiety. That statement has not been evaluated by the FDA.-

You’re absolutely going to love this show because it’s rich with perseverance, passion, and perfectly aligned priorities. Please reach out to us. We always want to hear your good news because, frankly, we all need more now. Now, the wild stories of Cory Bergeron are coming right up. In that, we’re going to take you to Montana where there’s a wild and adventurous real estate opportunity brewing now.

I’ve been wanting to get you on this show for a long time because you are a very special and unique human being.

Thank you.

Not only are you incredibly productive. You have a very powerful business mind. It’s very rare to find people that have that and the level of passion that you have not just for your family but for the people you serve. You’re definitely a servant leader and you’re an extremely successful businessman. It would be just a crying shame to not share your story with people.

I appreciate you asking. It’s been quite a journey. What’s really interesting about my journey is although I’ve always been extremely driven, I don’t feel like I’ve ever done anything I didn’t want to do. When I was fifteen years old, I spent six months as a janitor in a nursing home. All of my friends were making minimum wage at that time. It was $3.25 an hour in rural Pennsylvania in the late ‘80s. I had a buddy of mine whose mother ran the kitchen in a nursing home.

She put in a good word for me. I could tell the stories all day long about how he’s riding my bike in the middle of winter and it was twenty below and all that stuff. A simple fact of the matter is regardless of how hard it was for me to get to the nursing home, once I was there, I was working indoors, which not all of my friends could say. During the winter, I was making $7.20 an hour. They had a PA system and the PA system would go off. They’d say, “There’s a code green in room 305 on the third floor. Code green.” Code green meant somebody had had something come out of their body and it was all over the floor and that was my cue to come clean it up.

You were the code green guy. Talk about building character.

It did. It built a lot of character.

Was the person in the room while you were cleaning it up?

Yes, I would say about half the time.

They had to watch you clean it up too. Was there a conversation that happened during that time like, “I’m sorry?”

It’s amazing and sad so I ended up getting close to a number of the people who were residents there. I would buy them birthday presents and spend time.

It doesn’t surprise me.

Some of those people hadn’t had family come to visit them. It’s like they were forgotten. Look around some of their rooms and it’s so stark. There’s no decoration. There’s no love around them. I wanted to be that light in their day and I would do things for them. Some people, I would have conversations with and I’d gotten very friendly with. Other people, very sad. They weren’t able to have conversations because they hit that point where they couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t anymore. It was very sad.

A lot of times that I had a code green was because it was one of those rooms because they lost control of their bodily functions. They couldn’t do what they wanted to do anymore or they didn’t know what they were doing. It was very sad. When I say I’ve never done anything I didn’t want to do, that is never going to be completely. That’s a good example of that.

Even though you were doing something you may not have wanted to do, you were doing something that you were naturally inclined to do because, in addition to cleaning up the mess, which was your job, you were building relationships with people there. Let me ask you. What was it that drove the compassion in you at that young age? What grew that compassion at a young age?

I heard somebody say one time that your brain is this hard drive that records between the ages of 3 and 7 the way you are going to feel about everything around you for the rest of your life. Basically, you decide between the ages of 3 to 7 how you are going to interpret your world, how the world affects you, how you handle your emotions, and how to interact with that world. You just decide how you’re going to feel about everything, which is why you can go to any mall, sit down, watch people come and go, and you see a bunch of 7-year-olds and 50-year-old bodies still trying to figure out how to manage themselves.

That’s all we are. I look at myself and say, “I can point back to a time in my life between ages 3 and 7 that directly corresponds to the way I’m feeling about this right now.” At the ages of 3 and 7, I was raised entirely by my mother. When I wrote my book, I dedicated it to my mother. There’s no monument I could build high enough for my mother. The best way I can put it is if you’re a person of faith, then she is the closest thing to Jesus I’ve ever met in my life.

She is so compassionate, so giving, so servant-oriented, so intent on listening to others, lifting them up, and wanting to help them. People have described my mother as just being around her as a place of healing for everybody. My mother and father were divorced when I was two. My dad worked in hospitality. He had an offer to go work at this huge resort here in Florida.

My mother was living in Pennsylvania at the time and he decided he was going to take that job at that resort and moved to Florida. I got to see my dad, but I only saw him a couple of times a year. I would fly down and see him. In the meantime, I was raised by my mom until she remarried when I was seven years old. During that gap of time between ages 2 and 7, I lived under the direct daily influence of my mother. That had a lot to do with the compassion that is in me and the empathy that I have for others

It definitely carries over because I’ve only known you for less than a year now and I felt like you’re one of those people I could open up to. You’re one of those people that I felt really cares. Some people I feel like they truly do care, and some people, I feel like, “Are they fooling me into thinking they care?” There’s a little bit of uncertainty because their motives are still unclear to me yet it feels good. There are certain people who are obviously just not fit to be around. With you, I felt pretty phenomenal. Even in the very beginning the first time I met you.

I was on a phone call. I was on a layover in the Houston Airport and Maureen had recommended me for BA. We were trying to schedule a call and I’m like, “I’m on this long layover. Can we just chat now?” You are digging for compassion. You are digging for people who are giving, which is the nature of the mastermind that we’re in. You are the chief cook and bottle washer. I’ve even seen your position grow here. Not only do you do a phenomenal job, but it seems to come alive around the people. You seem to care and that’s just super rare. I don’t think it would run really well without you. This is me being a first-time member. This has been going on for years. What is your title?

Officially, I am the Chief Experience Officer of the company, which means that although I do dabble a little bit in front of the house when it comes to systems and processes because I’m a pretty solid operator, most of what I do for the company is membership fulfillment and the entire member experience. Once somebody decides to become a member, they’re handed off to me and I ensure that their experience with the mastermind from there on out was hitting every point. We need to hit for that person.

We’re continuing to evolve that experience so that we’re always providing something better for our members. I don’t ever want to stop evolving. I don’t want to ever feel like I’ve got the formula and it’s working because, for me, it’s not about the bottom line. For me, it is about the impact that I’m able to have. I know that I can affect 150 people and that’s about how many people are in our membership now.

I can affect 150 people directly or I can affect 150 thought leaders who are running businesses that employ dozens or even hundreds of others. Just by affecting 150 really driven, passionate, and motivated visionaries, I know that I can impact millions beyond that just through the 150 I have access to. That is part of my drive and part of what gives me a passion for what I do, which is why I enjoy being in charge of fulfilling that entire member experience.

The first time that I was here, I was very introverted. I don’t know why. I just am. It takes me a while to warm up to people. Your wife was one of the first people that sat next to me at the bar. I’m sitting there trying to have a little drink. I didn’t realize the importance of going out to dinner with people. If you ask me in any setting if I want to go out to dinner, I’ll be like, “Not really.”

In my first quarter here, I didn’t go out to dinner with anybody. We rented a room off-site because I didn’t know what to expect. Here I am doing my best to get to know people a little bit. Conversations like that in a non-controlled environment are usually very exhaustive for me because I’m always looking for nuggets. I’m always looking for interesting things and a lot of people don’t really go for that. They just want to talk about others.

I totally get that about you. It’s one of the things I love about you.

Your wife seem to, too, because we talked for an hour. Just so you know, she talked about you most of the time. Also, your children and the fun things that you do. She’s so passionately in love with you. The way you have structured everything that you’ve done here in BA and all of the things that you’ve achieved in your life, I learned those from Elizabeth because she is so passionate about you.

She is my biggest cheerleader.

That is why I connected with her because I’ve got a very similar relationship with my wife and my children. We just talked about our spouses and our children the whole time. It was cool and she made me feel very comfortable. Once I got here and learned the way of the land, I realized that I needed to begin to open up, give people a chance, and ask more questions. There is no pressure here. The pressure is is I’ve made it up because of the expectations of the caliber of people that are in this room. It took me a while to realize where my place was inside the room. It’s been a fun journey. I haven’t said I figured it out, but I’m starting to figure it out.

Overall on a journey, we’re all figuring everything out along the way. Nobody’s got anything figured out ever. I surround myself with 150 people that others look to as thought leaders like, “Tell me what to think. Tell me what to feel. Tell me how to act.” They look to others to feed them. What’s funny is those other people extracted some nuggets of wisdom throughout their lives, but nobody’s got it all figured out. They don’t either. Tony Robbins doesn’t have it figured out either, but he has learned how to speak in such a way to inspire others where he can ask the right questions so that you can figure out what’s right for you. That’s the most powerful form of mentorship.

No doubt about it. I’m more comfortable in a room with a mission. I’m with an ensemble of people who want the same goal and we can literally accomplish anything. That’s where I come alive in those moments. It is being stretched in this environment. Thank you for creating an environment of comfort and learning education. It’s really powerful. Also, getting to know you, Elizabeth, and some of these settings. I’ve gotten a taste of what some of the unrequited loves are in your life and the things that you want, too, just go out and annihilate. I want to talk about some of those things. I think they’ll be more impactful to the audience if we find out a little bit more about you. Talk about that part of a prestigious career in front of the camera and commercial world.

I did. It’s interesting because, as I said, I feel as though I never really did anything that I didn’t want to do. I’ve always been an extremely driven person. I always found a way to somehow make money for myself in a way that stretched me, made me think bigger, and expanded my mind. I sought out people who knew more than I did. I relied on their mentorship and their insight. My own career was no different. I graduated from college with a degree in Broadcast Productions and Programming.

When I graduated from college, my girlfriend, who you have met, my wife Elizabeth, at the time, and I have been going out for about a year. I was planning on hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. It had been a goal for so much of my life. I’ve been an outdoorsman. I’ve been a backpacker, camper, and long-distance hiker for a long time. My parents used to laugh because when I was 13 to 14 years old, people would call the house looking for me and they’d say, “I know it doesn’t sound very motherly or fatherly, but we haven’t seen our son in four days.” It’s because I was in the mountains.

Total Gen-Xer.

Exactly. I didn’t spend a lot of time around the Nintendo or the Atari. I was more in the woods.

Wholly unsupervised.

It had been a goal of mine for a long time to do that 2,200 5.5-mile hike from Springer Mountain Georgia all the way up to northern Maine. I prepared for that hike during the entire time I was going out with Elizabeth. She knew I was going to leave for five and a half months, so I reduced my entire life down to a backpack. I got rid of everything I owned except for my car, which I gave to her to drive until I came back. She dropped me off in Springer Mountain Georgia on the Appalachian Trail. I was committed. I was going. I hiked for eight days.

I did over 100 miles to the Georgian North Carolina border and I hitchhiked 3 or 4 miles into a little town right there on the border called Hiawassee. I got myself a hotel room and I sat in a hotel room thinking for two days, “What do I want to do?” I’d spent two years saving money for this trip so that I could pay for myself to do this hike. I had people who were going to do mail drops to me along the way and drop me new pairs of boots because I knew mine would wear out and everything along the way.

It was a total support system. I wasn’t married. I had no mortgage. I had no career started. It was the perfect time. After eight days, I realized a couple of things. I realized that I really only had three options in my life. Number one was I could continue this hike all the way to Maine and I could miss Elizabeth the entire time I was going because I never planned on meeting her before I went up there.

How long were you guys together before it?

About a year and two months.

It is a significant amount of time. You pretty much know if you’re going to choose someone for the rest of their life after six months.

Elizabeth and I were very serious because she came packaged deal with two young children. It’s not like you casually date someone who’s a mom. I took this very seriously. I had known them at that point for about six months. We waited six months before I was introduced to the kids. I didn’t want to fall in love with kids that I was going to, all of a sudden, disappear from the scene. Obviously, she wanted to be careful as a mom. We’re a year and two months into this. I’ve known the kids for eight months now. She and I have been dating for quite some time.

It’s a much longer story. I asked her out when she was 17 and I was 20 as a DJ on a cruise ship. We went out on one date and then she left, got married, moved out of town, had two children, moved back and was celebrating her divorce, and walked into the nightclub that I was DJing at. I like to say it took me five years to get a second date, but that’s how it worked out. Now I’m hiking the trail and I realize everyone that’s around me because a lot of people attempt to hike every year. Thousands of people attempted and only a few made it. All the people around me were looking for something in their lives. They didn’t know what their next career would be or their wife had just divorced them.

You were talking along the trail.

I’m meeting people because we’re getting together and camping in the same areas every night. It’s funny. They say the Appalachian Trail is one community that is 2,200 miles long and 12 inches wide. It’s true. You run across the same people. They overtake you, you overtake them, and you camp in the same spot at night. You meet people. Everyone was out there looking for something, but I wasn’t looking for anything. I got out there and I stretched myself. I did some long days.

Were you not looking for something?

I wasn’t. I was looking to experience the beauty of nature and the isolation that I love so much about long-distance backpacking. It is incredibly refreshing to the soul to be in that environment in the perfection of nature surrounded by pure wilderness. When your day is reduced to, “I eat when I’m hungry. I sleep when I’m tired. I walk when I have energy,” and you don’t have a watch, cell phone, nothing, your life is reduced to that. It also means that you keep your own counsel because no one else is there to whisper in your ear. You are just talking to yourself the whole time.

When you reduce your life to that, you usually come back from it with an immense amount of clarity when things have been confusing up until that. I’ve seen entrepreneurs go on wilderness hikes like that and then come back and know exactly what they want to do with their business and exactly what they want to do with their lives. There’s an immense amount of clarity there, so I went out and hiked for eight days. I had clarity.

I went and sat in a hotel room for two days making sure that I was correct about my clarity. I could hike for five months and I could miss Elizabeth the entire time. I could hike for five months and I could blunt my feelings for Elizabeth and do my best to suppress them and push them down. If that ever happened and I returned, nothing would ever be the same between us again. That was it, or I could turn around and go back. I called her on the phone and I said I’m coming home. She was right in the middle of college finals.

She said, “Don’t mess with me, Cory.” She knew I’d been preparing for this for years. I said, “No, I’m coming home. I’ve written in a journal every day and that’ll explain to you why I’m coming home. I’m coming home.” She left her finals and dropped out. The teacher wouldn’t forgive her for walking out of class and giving up her finals. She drove all the way to Hiawassee, Georgia straight to pick me up because she was so excited for me coming back. Three weeks later, I spent two years of saved money on a ring and we were married shortly after.

You weren’t looking for clarity, but you got it. What was the clarity?

The clarity was that there was absolutely no adventure that I was going to be able to take myself on alone in the mountains that was going to be bigger and more rewarding than the adventure that was waiting for me right here in Tampa, Florida. I came back and went on that adventure instead. It led to me adopting her two children and them becoming Bergerons and then us having two children on top of that. Now we’ve been married for many years and we are loaded with incredible memories. We have amazing relationships with all of our kids.

For my kids, I’m their best friend. They would rather spend time with me than anyone else. Do you know how amazing that feels to be their dad and have that be the case? My wife and I have been through hard stuff. On the other side of it, we are more in love. We are more complimentary to each other. We were we are more respectful than we’ve ever been in our lives. It gets better every day. We are best friends and we can’t wait to spend time together. There’s no one that comes to us and says, “Do you want to go out with me tonight?” that is better than spending time with my wife. Honestly, my wife and I don’t do anything that the other person is not automatically invited. If my wife isn’t invited to be there, then I’m not going.

That’s the same with me. I’ve got a very similar relationship with Kelly. I used to bus tables when I was in college. She wasn’t my girlfriend yet. I just wanted to talk to her. She was a classmate. What I would do is I was the self-proclaimed fastest busboy in the state of Missouri. I would hate it when another busboy or busgirl wouldn’t show up because that meant I had to do everything faster because all I wanted to do was get back to my college dorm, because we didn’t have cell phones back then, in time to be able to call her, so it wasn’t socially acceptable to be too late. If it was 11:00, you don’t really call a girl at 11:00 clock out of respect in the Midwest. That’s the way I was raised. If it was 10:00, I could call her and talk for an hour or something like that.

That’s all that I wanted to do. I just wanted to get back to my room and talk to her. My roommate was a precious dude. He was the quintessential college roommate that I’ll be telling stories about for the rest of my life. Whenever I would talk to her, he knew how deeply I felt about her. I knew I couldn’t share the same feelings that I had with her because I knew she would be scared off by then. I would just talk to her and I would hang up the phone. I had all of these feelings for her, but I had to keep them hidden from her. Every time I would get off the phone, he would pat me on the back because he knew what I was going through. I just wanted to talk to her and be around her.

That feeling has never changed. I know what you mean when you have those decisions. I had the great privilege to be given the opportunity to go to a conservatory called the National Theater Institute, which is very hard to get into. It’s the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. I had this opportunity to go, perform, and be taught by the greatest acting professors of the day. I had no idea. We got trained by soap opera directors who were actually directors on Days of Our Lives. We traveled to Stratford-upon-Avon and studied with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

I got a personal Royal Shakespeare Academy member who looked at me. He gave me a monologue and then we worked on that monologue with him along with the restoration comedy monologue and also a contemporary monologue. We did all of those things and I was miserable the entire time because I had fallen deeply in love with Kelly at that point in time. I missed the opportunity to be present because I wanted to be with her. Now I know that that muscle has strengthened. Now I’m able to come here without her, but the best quarter I had was the one where she was here. We have responsibilities together. We’re still together because she’s at home with the kids and doing those things. I know you know what it’s like.

I do. Those roles were reversed for me for a little while because, as you know, my wife is a professional singer and has been for a very long time. There was a chapter of our lives where I was a national television director. This was before I went around the other side of the camera and became talent. I was a national television director. I had a lot of success in my career and Elizabeth came to me. She had been flying back and forth to Nashville every two weeks recording in the studio and her producer said, “I’ve got a ton of studio work for you, but I can’t keep telling people you’re out of town. You have to live here if you want it.” She came to me and said, “Corey, listen. You’ve had a chance to do your career. You can get back to it at some point, but I would love a chance to pursue what I want to do.”

At this point, we just had a child. Our youngest child was two months old. She said, “Would you be willing to become a stay-at-home dad with these kids while I pursue my dream?” We talked about it for about 30 days. We came to the decision to do that. When my youngest, Aiden, was four months old, we sold our house here in North Tampa and packed up a truck in the middle of winter. We moved up to Nashville, Tennessee into a town where I knew nobody down here. The full support system of friends, grandparents, and everything right up in Nashville, nobody.

We moved into a townhouse sight unseen and I took over raising a four-month-old, a year-and-a-half-old, a five-year-old, and a seven-year-old. Because I’m an overachiever and extremely driven, I felt I needed to homeschool the older children. I tried to do that simultaneously. My wife was my hero. I would go two days without changing out of my pajamas because I couldn’t even find time for personal hygiene by taking care of these kids. I would feel like everything was just completely exploding in our house.

Everything was out of control. The kids are running wild. The place is a mess. I can’t get anybody to do anything that I’m asking them to do. The baby’s got a messy diaper and screaming. My son, Ethan, is climbing the staircase and if he falls, he’s going to kill himself. I’m trying to stay in charge of all and my wife would come through the door after being out networking during the day with other producers, record labels, and stuff like that. In ten minutes, she’d have our whole house running like a well-oiled machine. I would collapse on the couch like, “I have no idea how you just did that but thank God you’re home.”

Were you having to work at that time also or were you completely dedicated to kids?

I was completely dedicated to the children. I started freelancing again about a year and a half later. I was a full-time stay-at-home dad with four kids for about a year and a half. I stepped back into television production because I missed it and I was really good at it. I started directing television again. I started doing camera work. I started traveling as a producer and a director for large conventions. I was working for several different production companies out of New York and we were doing shows anywhere from 500 to 5,000 people at a time, everywhere from Boston all the way to Hawaii producing large conferences, sales conventions, and events for people like Motorola, Walmart, Dunkin’ Donuts, and big pharmaceutical companies. That was a cool experience that fed me for that time. I would leave home for three days, go out and do this big event, and then come back

Were you with somebody who delivered the script to you and then you would have to shoot the script or were you on the creative side of it as well? Were you following a blueprint?

The blueprint had already been hammered out well in advance. I was there to run the production side of things, everything from 60-foot projection screens in front of 5,000 people with line array audio systems and cameras with lenses this long that are half a football field away picking up speakers on stage. Setting up all of that and running it like a well-oiled machine was what I did. I was able to step into that role because I had such a strong background in national television directing. It allowed me to go into a live environment.

Was it just before the infomercial career?

Yes. The national television network that I work for is television retail. I did do a little bit of infomercial but an infomercial is almost its own beast that is a pre-recorded, 15-minute, 30-minute, or 60-minute commercial where they take you in, introduce you to a product, and give you the three top features as to why that product is something that you absolutely can’t live without and then they stack on top of that a whole bunch of rapid-fire testimonials that tell you, “If you’re not on this bandwagon, then you’re missing out because all these other people have their lives have been transformed by having this product, so you should too,” and then they take you into a close, they close you on the product, and then they recycle and do it all over again every ten minutes.

There’s a call center somewhere taking calls.

There is a call center taking calls. This is before people ordering online. That’s an infomercial. I’ve done a couple of dozen infomercials as the primary talent in my life, but my real bread and butter were completely unscripted television retail, HSN+ and QVC+. I was hired by 350 different brands to be the face of their brand on television in the US.

They would put you on camera, give you the product, and then say go.

Yes, but they handed you the product weeks in advance. I got to use every product in my own home or in my own family. I invented every demonstration that was going to be used for that product. I hired the people to set up those demonstrations for me. In some cases, I set up the demonstrations personally because I knew that they were nuanced and they had to be done just right. The most expensive thing any television retail network pays for is their satellite time. It is incredibly pricey. Success on the air on any of those stations is measured in thousands of dollars per minute.

If you’re making $1,000 a minute, chances are you’ll get one airing and no one will ever see that product again because it never made enough to be liable. If you’re making $5,000 in a minute, that’s worth giving that product repeat airings. I’m only speaking about one network because there’s a smaller network and one that’s three times the size. They both have different parameters as far as thousands per minute, but I’m giving you some minimums here just so you understand. That’s $5,000 per minute. Now it’s a viable product. They will give you repeat airings. If you’re up to $10,000 a minute, now you’re going to get prime time. You’re going to get 7:00 PM to midnight on weekdays or Saturday mornings. That’s when most people are watching and when those networks are making the most money.

That’s when my wife’s mom was on. Clearly, there were products that just didn’t make it. Give me an idea. What products would make it and what wouldn’t?

It’s funny that you would say that. I get a lot of people who ask me, “Have you ever sold anything that you didn’t like?” Yes, I did, but what I learned was that I can’t possibly predict what somebody else likes. I sold one time the most useless artificial plant that had LED lights woven through it. There was no way you could take this plant, bend the leaves, and form it to look full and look like a real plant. It just looked like scraggly twigs with ten leaves on it, which was like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree and maybe had five LED lights on it. It was battery-powered and the batteries wouldn’t even last very long.

To me, I would never buy this in a million years. This is a waste of money. I thought, “If the Dollar Store had this, I don’t think I would take it off the shelves.” We’re selling it for $40. There’s no way. Not only did it fly off the shelves, but people then went to the dot-com for that network and gave it five-star reviews over and over. We sold it out. People asked for more inventory. I’d be on the air and people would be calling and giving testimonials on how this was the best thing since sliced bread. I wouldn’t have given this away to somebody because I thought I would be plaguing them with something awful.

I learned that I can’t possibly predict what somebody else is going to love. The advantage of working for a large network like that was that they had a 30-day unconditional money-back guarantee. If you got it home and you didn’t like it, they even gave you the return label and the tape to reseal the box. They said, “Send it back to us. We’ll pay for everything. We’ll put every dime back in your shorts.” Having that kind of quality assurance backing me up on the air, I knew that I could sell things based on their strengths, not upon what was questionable about them but what was great about them.

I could sell you a $600 Dyson or I could send you sell you a $200 Hoover and there are things the $200 Hoover could do that the Dyson could not do. I could sell you a Ferrari, but if trunk space is important to you, it’s probably not the best car. I could give you a Buick and you’d be a lot happier. It depends upon what the strengths of a product are. I learned to position products by their strengths and then people would do their research, go online, and figure out if this was for them, and if they bought it and it wasn’t, they could send it back and every dime would be put right back in their pocket. With that kind of backup, I felt good about it.

It seems like a similar formula for digital marketing too. You’ve got a product that you do not know if it’s going to sell or not and you don’t know who’s going to really buy it. You’ve got some features that seem to work. Earlier, you described it as positioning the product and talking about all the strengths and benefits of it, testimonials, and then some kind of taking the risk off the table for the buyer. It seems like the sales process hasn’t changed, but the format in which we do it has.

It absolutely has. It says that in my book. My book is called Thousands Per Minute: The Art of Pitching Products on Internet, Video, and Television. I wrote it back when I was on the air all the time. I was literally writing that book at the same time that I was building my own video production company at the same time that I was traveling and speaking on stage doing keynotes, at the same time that I was on the air anywhere between 60 and 70 airings a month and sometimes living in a green room for days at a time. My family would bring meals to me and feed me because I didn’t even have time to leave the studio to eat. I was sleeping on couches between airings.

It was when you were working with Kevin Harrington from Shark Tank. It seems like he does a lot of product marketing still.

That’s his thing. Kevin understands intimately how to look at a product and, with 10 to 15 questions, knows whether that product will make it or not. If it will make it, then Kevin has all of the relationships and resources to leverage in order to make that product a huge success. Kevin and I had run in the same circles for quite some time. The first infomercial I ever hosted was one of his infomercials. He’s the inventor of the infomercial. He came out with the first one in 1980. It was the Ginsu knife. Everybody knows Ginsu knife infomercials.

Every other big name since then, you name it, like Jack Lalanne, George Foreman, Billy Mays, he discovered all those guys. They were his products. When I built my video production company, I was looking for a partner with a huge network that I could leverage their relationships in order to draw business into my company to help launch it in a big way. Kevin and I knew each other from television retail. He’d seen me, as I was growing my business, enter some pitch competitions and always took first place.

It was a little bit of an unfair advantage of thousands of hours of camera practice. Kevin came in and he was missing a video production component to his product success machine where he takes products that are unheard of, takes them to market, and makes some huge successes. He needed a content production partner right at the time I was launching my business and it made sense. We did a deal and he became my partner for seven years until I sold that company in March of 2021.

Back when I was just getting signed up for BA, we were doing our initial interview. You were like, “Now we’re going to populate your page here.” I’ve had regional success in private. That’s the way I would describe myself. My dad is an electrical repairman. He is retired now. My mom was the executive secretary for the chairman of pediatrics at Washington University. What they taught me was to work and work hard and work overtime if you need more money.

It sounds like my father. He was a bricklayer and a pastor.

Hard work earns you money at the end of the day. You better be exhausted and starving because you’ve earned your dinner and you’ve earned your bed. I started my real estate career right around 2008, which is the worst real estate market in history. The only thing I knew how to do was put my head down and work and I’m psychologically unemployable. I cannot be employed by anybody. What I did was I just worked. In six year’s time, I had accidentally built the largest vacation rental-focused brokerage in the nation. We’ve gone from $6 million to $256 million in about four and a half years. I didn’t even realize it. By the time I looked up and somebody told me, “Jeramie, this is what you’ve done,” I was like, “It’s time to scale this.”

I got to the point where I needed to put myself in a new environment with people who were smarter than me and a peer group at another level, which is how I ended up at BA, but I’ll never forget. I’m populating the thing and you’re like, “Jeramie, let’s talk about some of your accomplishments. What have you done?” I’m like, “I sold a lot of real estate. I wrote a book.” I’m trying to think of things that I did and you’re like, “Jeremie, everybody here has written a book. Everybody here did a lot of stuff. What have you done?” I’m like, “That’s a great question. What have I done?” It was fascinating to me.

That’s where my Imposter syndrome started a little bit because. I joined BA in an effort to help Yakov Smirnoff get his real estate development funded. I showed up in an act of service to help him. He paused on that for a minute, “I still had a membership to BA,” and I’m like, “Okay, I better start learning fast.” I’ve always learned fast. It sounds like you have too. One of the things that I want to share with everybody here is I want to go back to your relationship. There are some powerful things here. I would have done all of these listeners a disservice if they couldn’t read this story about you, Elizabeth, and your passion for your son and all of this happening right during COVID.

You’re bringing this up and I’m getting teary in the eyes because this is very close to my heart.

Do you want to tell the story?

I would be happy to tell a story. I have four children. My oldest child, Dominic, suffered from very bad anxiety in his mid-teens. At that time, I didn’t know what to do about it. I remember it being 2:00 the morning and him being in the fetal position sobbing on my bedroom floor and having no idea how to help him. We walked the path of traditional medicine. We went to neurologists and psychiatrists. Dominic ended up on a cocktail of medications. He had nine different medications in his body every single day, one to help regulate his moods and one to help him with compulsive behavior.

That one would ramp him up too much, so one to settle him down and another one to help him go to sleep at night because he had insomnia. He’d be awake 3 to 5 days at a time. That was so powerful that he couldn’t wake up in the morning so you had to arouse him enough that he could take another pill just to get him out of bed in the morning. There was weight gain as a result of this. He was a teenager with all of this medication in his body. It was horrific. He moved out of the house. He moved to California and then he moved from California back home for a very short time and then moved to Washington State.

It was in Washington state when he was of legal age that he began using medical cannabis. In doing that, he came off nine different medications and had what you and I would consider a normal life after about six months. At that time, he was taking oil in capsules. You wouldn’t even know it was in his body, but he was taking just a little bit like three times a day. He had an appetite and started eating again. His weight gain stopped. He had energy and he was exercising. He began attending college. He was the youngest person ever voted on the council. He was voted County Treasurer. He started his own political consulting firm, helping somebody get elected to state government.

All of this happened within six months of him getting on medical cannabis. We saw the impact of a natural homeopathic approach to his healing that doctors and medication were not able to provide. When Dominic finally got on the other side of this, we thought, “Thank goodness.” We have three other children, but no one else has suffered from this thing like Dominic has. My youngest child, Aiden, ended up with the same thing happening to him at age twelve. It was at that point that it clicked for us that this is happening when puberty sets in because hormones start going crazy in the body. If you have a predisposition to general anxiety, then it spikes during these years due to hormone changes.

That’s the best we could come up with and it has been verified since then by other professionals that are smarter than me. When this happened to Aiden, we didn’t want to take the traditional medical approach that we had taken with Dominic because it almost destroyed Dominic. Dominic was in and out of the hospital throughout his teens with episodes. He was taken to the hospital in an ambulance after dropping unconscious and no one could wake him up for two days because his body had been awake for 5 or 6 days.

It finally quit on him and couldn’t be woken up. We didn’t want to see that happen to Aiden. We tried everything, you name it, like biofeedback therapy, neurofeedback therapy, breathing techniques, nutritional counseling, and special massage. Aiden got to the point where his stomach had contracted up inside his rib cage and we had to get him a massage that would massage the stomach back down so he could eat because he couldn’t even swallow water without throwing it back up again. It was his stomach in a knot right up inside his diaphragm and unable to loosen. We were trying nutritional supplements and oils.

You did a sensory deprivation tank.

We did. We found out he got great results from being in a separate sensory deprivation float tank. If you’re unfamiliar, one of those float tanks is water that’s about 9 inches deep, about the size of your body. It’s about 4 feet wide and about 7 feet long. The water is heated to exactly 98.6 degrees and 1,200 pounds of Epsom salts in it so that your body will float on top of the water. It is sealed so it is soundproof and it is completely dark inside. It takes away the sense of touch and feeling.

It takes away hearing. It takes away sight. It takes away the smell. It takes away everything other than just being inside your own mind. People have used it for very deep meditation and various other things, but it is extremely calming. The problem is this. I installed a shed in my backyard. I soundproofed it. I drove to Tennessee. I bought a float tank. I brought it back to Florida. I ran electric. I installed the whole thing in my backyard.

I had a sensory deprivation soundproof float tank in my backyard for Aiden, but he couldn’t spend his life floating in a tank. It only worked for a few hours and then he needed to go back in the tank again. He got to the point where he lost 30 pounds in 30 days. My son went from 120 pounds to 90 pounds as a 15-year-old teenager. We didn’t know what to do. We thought he was dying like, “What could we do?” Elizabeth booked an Airbnb in a very remote part of Costa Rica. She did this because she did research and found out that there are National Geographic study that established what are called blue zones in the world and there are five blue zones.

There’s an island somewhere off of Spain. There’s a place in Okinawa. There are various places and one of them is the Nicoya Peninsula of Northern Costa Rica on the Pacific side. Blue zones are places where people are living an extraordinarily high quality of life to well over 100 years old. They’re looking at the culture, the diet, and what causes people to live this long. They established five blue zones and Costa Rica was one of the healthiest places on Earth. Elizabeth took Aiden there and there was something about that environment that completely shifted Aiden’s reality.

Aiden had separation anxiety from Elizabeth toward the end. Separation anxiety is so bad that I remember one point in time when Aiden was upstairs and he was confident that his mom was at the bottom of the stairs. Elizabeth had gone to the bathroom and found out we didn’t have any toilet paper left, so she decided to take ten minutes thinking nobody would miss her, run next door to the gas station, get a two-roll pack of toilet paper, and bring it back to the house. I heard Aiden’s voice go, “Mom.” I heard panic in his voice when there wasn’t an answer. “Mom,” and he came running down the stairs.

By the time I got to Aiden, he had made it out through the screen door onto our back deck, looked over at the driveway, saw mom’s car missing, and he was flat on his back hyperventilating, sweating out of every pore in his body, vision blurring, hands and feet going numb, and mumbling, almost unable to speak. I put my hand on his neck. His pulse was over 180. It was a full-blown hospitalization panic attack.

On a scale of 1 to 10, let’s call that a 9 and 10 being your heart stopped. He would have a nine three times a week and he would be hovering between a 5 and a 6 just barely able to be in his own skin every other moment. When he went to Costa Rica, he came down to about 2 within 48 hours and was able to walk the beaches alone by himself, go surfing by himself, and be apart from Elizabeth. He was calm. He started eating again. He started gaining weight. It was like a miracle happened.

What do you tribute all that to?

Costa Rica has a saying, which has turned into a tourist saying where people get it on their license plates and baseball hats and stuff. It’s Pura Vida, which means Pure Life in Spanish. It’s all over the place on t-shirts, but for the native people who are there, it’s more than that to them. There is respect for the land. There is respect for nature and its beauty. There is respect for spirituality. There is a different way that people eat down there. You can get garbage to eat if you want.

You can eat crap food, but quite honestly, the most readily available and the most inexpensive food there is, is all fresh stuff that somebody pulls right out of the ground that day, fish out of the oceans, vegetables, and fruit. People by the roadside lop in the top of coconuts that they’ve had on ice and hand it to you and you’re drinking fresh coconut water out of the coconuts. People prioritize their days differently. They handle their relationships differently. Everything in that environment was extremely emotionally and physically nurturing for Aiden in a way that we could not replicate in the United States. They went down there for a month for the first time. He stayed for a month and came home just before Christmas. This is 2019.

We know it’s about to happen.

They were home for two weeks. When Aiden came home, he was healthy. I thought, “Silver bullet. It’s happened. Aiden’s fixed. Great. Now we can move on with our lives.” Within two weeks of being back here in the United States, he went right off a cliff again. It was at that point that I turned to Elizabeth. At this point, I had a very rapidly growing video production company in a digital marketing agency, one of the largest in my area. We were going to 2X and maybe even 3X in 2020. We had spent three years on a business plan building our company to the point of launch in early 2020 when we were going to go to the moon and every indication said we had already crushed every benchmark we had for ourselves along the way. My investors were jumping out of their pants excited.

They couldn’t believe what had happened. Their return was huge. They were so excited. This was late 2019. Elizabeth and I just had to make the decision. We’re like, “Just because we built a business here does not mean we can tell our son that we’re going to take away his best chance at life.” We packed 10 suitcases with 70 pounds because that’s as much as the airlines would allow and moved her and Aiden to Costa Rica with the idea that every six weeks, they would come visit me and every six weeks in between, I would visit them. We’d only be apart for three weeks at a time.

It was a crazy moment in your life where this is the case scenario for you. You have to be away from your wife. You’re splitting up your family. You told me at one point that you had spent almost all of your money on all of these different things.

I emptied the coffers. We not only had our own savings and some smaller investments, but I had put a ton of seed money into the business and the business owed me a ton of money. In order to save my son, I emptied everything including whatever the business owed me. I pulled it right out of the business and just used it. There were times that I was paying up to $10,000 a month for homeopathic treatments to try and help him. This went on for two years. It was rough. We just drained everything. We got to the point where my two older children were out of the house already. They had moved on with their lives. My daughter was married. My son, Dominic, was living in Washington. My two younger boys, Ethan, was out of high school.

He’s spending most of his time hanging out with his friends. He still lived at home, but I didn’t see him very often every couple of days. Quite honestly, we’d converted the garage, which was a detached garage from the house. We converted it into a whole apartment. He lived out there anyway. I’m in this big old historic home that I’ve spent years renovating for a family, and it’s me in the Labrador. That’s it. The Labrador is old. They moved to Costa Rica and ended up living there for about seven months after that point. In the middle of that, COVID dropped. All the borders got locked down. They couldn’t leave the country. I couldn’t get to them and they couldn’t get to me. That was it. There’s nothing we could do. I was on the phone.

The whole six-week idea that you had just kind of went out the window. Not to mention the fact that your business got shut down. There went your income when you’ve got investors. Now you have no income and you’re separated from your wife. I was separated from my wife once. She had to go to Springfield Missouri for a final, which I encouraged her not to go to and got snowed in while she was up there. She was like, “There’s going to be some snow. I’ve got to go take this final.” I was like, “It’s going to get snowed out.” She went there and got snowed out. We were apart from each other for one day and I’m writing poetry, songs, and stuff. Here you are separated in this situation. Corey, I know what it felt like for one day. The resilience that you have is amazing.

I thank God for creating Apple that created FaceTime because we video conferenced for hours on a daily basis. It was something. I was on the phone with the US consulate 2 or 3 times a week trying to get them out of the country, trying to get them back on US soil because I didn’t know how long COVID would last. It was completely unpredictable. You’re right. I went from a guy who was working 40 to 50 hours a week to a guy that maybe if I tried really hard, I could find an hour’s worth of stuff to do every day on my laptop. I had a 6,500-square-foot studio custom-built out with corporate offices and editing suites.

I had a full-time staff of 10 and had 40 to 50 contractors I was using on a weekly basis. We were shooting all over the place. The production vehicle is going on location all over the Tampa Bay area and shooting. Everyone was laid off except for my marketing director. The only reason he was still working was because we had two contracts with people who had not yet pulled the plug like everyone else had and he was still fulfilling on those. I kept him on payroll, but outside of that, in May of 2020, my business made just over $8,000. The first year I was in business, I made more than that. My first month was very difficult.

Because I was a non-essential business, my studios were closed. I wasn’t even allowed to go there. I went there at one point just to check in and make sure all of our million dollars worth of equipment was there. I was making sure it was okay. The cop caught me in the parking lot, gave me five minutes to check on my business, and kicked me out of my own office for two weeks. There was a mandatory lockdown in my town.

I wasn’t allowed to leave my property unless I was getting gas or groceries. It was the only two reasons I could go. There were only two days a week that I was allowed to do that. Other than that, I’d be at home. Nobody could get together in groups of more than six by law. I certainly couldn’t put together a video production. It was a time for a lot of thinking. I learned to walk the slackline during that time. I bought a slackline. Amazon was still delivering, so I had one delivered to my house. I stretched it between two trees in my backyard.

You learned to focus and balance.

Yes, it was really awesome. I can’t do it nearly as good now as I could do it in 2020.

I learned to smoke meat at that time. I learned to make ribs, brisket, and things like that. Kelly and I, at one point in our lives, she was running a cleaning business for short-term rentals. When I first got into the short-term rental world, I was selling quite a few of them. The first thing that people need on their power team when they get a short-term rental is someone to clean the property. Kelly was at home raising kids and we needed the money. We needed about an extra thousand dollars a month for groceries, gas, and that thing.

I would quickly volunteer to clean properties. She did a great job and within a year, she had 80 accounts and was making so many accounts that she had always cash for because she wasn’t making enough money yet on her billing to pay the payroll on what she owed so we were always poor, even though her business was growing that fast. We had three kids at home and we needed that thousand dollars a month. She worked her butt off and worked herself to the point where she almost had a nervous breakdown.

It’s a tough racket.

It is. Imagine raising the kids that you had at home with all of that going on and having a cleaning business on top of that. That was Kelly. She got to the point where, through multiple conversations with me, saying, “Just stick it out.” It was to the point where she couldn’t work another day. We had to transition those accounts to somebody else and we had to sell an investment property. I had gone into business with my grandparents. They had given us equity in one of the properties. Grandpa bought it, but because I had found the property and was managing the property, he gave me some equity in the property.

We had to encourage Grandpa to sell the property at that time. I took my money out of that property and lived off of it so Kelly could stay at home with the kids. I had, for the longest time, this philosophy that, “I had spent the money.” I told the story in such a way that, “I had to spend the money on life.” Someone corrected me and said, “No, you invested that money in your family.” I see that in your case, too.

I see that you’ve invested a tremendous amount of money in your family and there’s a return on that. It may not even be in your lifetime. Think about that. That return might be you have probably broken the generational curse because you equipped your family with the tools to be able to beat it because you and Elizabeth had the brain power, strength, and passion to be protectors for your family.

Thank you for that. I’ve never heard anybody phrase it that way. It’s incredibly insightful. I’ll carry that with me. Thank you.

Let’s finish with this. I think you are uniquely equipped to help other people have that kind of strength and passion in their lives and beautiful places. Originally, you had wanted to create a development in Costa Rica. That dream is not dead for me. We’re going to do that. We’re going to own property in Costa Rica together. It might be a little bit easier to do a development in Montana and you started that. Let’s talk a little bit about that. I don’t want to keep people too long. This has been a wild ride for them, but I want to talk about what’s going on in Montana and how you’re going to bring some of the most beautiful opportunities to people so that they can live on a mountaintop with views of Glacier National Park.

Let me offer a little bit of context here real quick. I told the story of Aiden and Elizabeth in Costa Rica. The part of it that we did not tell is the fact that I sold everything that we owned when it got to the point where I knew that I was no longer going to accept that I was apart from my wife and child for an unpredictable amount of time. It could have lasted forever or another week. I didn’t know, but I decided that was the end of it. I bought an old Jeep Wrangler. I bought it because my research told me that in Central and South America, that particular model of Jeep, there were a lot of parts available for it so if it broke down, I’d be okay. I spent three months reconditioning it.

I spent three months selling everything that we owned. I liquidated my entire life, the house, all the furniture in it, every tool that I had that I’d used to build over my lifetime, everything, you name it. I gave stuff to local thrift stores and the Salvation Army. They couldn’t believe I was handing it to them just to get it out of my life. I reduced everything down to what would fit in the back of that old Jeep Wrangler. If you’ve ever driven a Jeep Wrangler, you know there’s very little room in the back. Basically, it was my camping tent, my backpack, three changes of clothes, my guitar, and some tools to fix the Jeep on the road if I needed to. That was all I owned. When I pulled out of my property knowing that that was all I owned it was one of the most freeing experiences of my life.

You were going to do a border run.

I was. The plan I had already mapped out four-wheel trails through the mountains that were going to avoid border crossings. I was going to make it through Mexico. I was going to make it all the way down through Guatemala, Nicaragua, and all the way to Costa Rica. I was going to make it to my family. One week before I was going to leave for that trip, I was wrapping up the final details of it. Local police didn’t know this, but I was living in my video production studio because we had a bedroom set with a bed on it. I was sleeping in that bed. I was living there because I had a shower in the building. I didn’t own a home anymore. I was getting ready to leave on that trip.

The US Consulate, after me bugging them for months, called me and said, “We’ve got two charter flights to repatriate people back into the US. One on Monday and one on Wednesday. About three weeks from now, we can get your wife on Monday, and we can get your son out on Wednesday. Take these seats because you probably won’t get another chance.” I did and I took those seats. There were no connecting flights. They flew them into Houston. I had to drive from Tampa Bay to Houston to pick them up and bring them back.

When I brought them back, we didn’t have any place to live. We began considering, “What was it about Costa Rica that worked for our son Aiden and helped him with his anxiety?” We want to continue to multiply that success if we can here in the United States. We began looking at the beautiful natural surroundings, small-town feel, slower pace of life, and lots of outdoor adventures and activities. We started looking at it and thinking, “Where can we go in this country that has that same type? We might not be able to replicate Costa Rica, but how close can we get?”

Talk about a little place called Aspen. It’s too expensive because the billionaires are pushing out, so where else is there?

My mother had moved to Montana many years ago and we’d been up there a couple times to visit her. Since then, my brothers and sisters have gravitated up there. We just decided that’s it. Why not go where there’s also family and put ourselves within striking distance of them? We know how beautiful Montana is and we feel that it could meet all of these other things. We made the decision to move there on a Friday and, by Monday, we were driving. It took us an hour to pack. We all had what would fit in the back of the jeep. That was it.

We drove 3,000 miles across the country and moved to Northwestern Montana just outside Glacier National Park in the Flathead Valley. What we didn’t know when we moved there is that this place was a very well-kept secret among high-net-worth people for a long time. It has only really been discovered over the past few years since COVID caused people to want to exit urban areas and find beautiful, remote places where they can work from laptops.

This place became the fastest-growing county in Montana over the next few years, which it still is now. We fell in love with it. My son’s anxiety has virtually disappeared in that place. We understand the healing impact of having extreme natural beauty, an environment that encourages daily adventure right outside people’s front doors. That is what we want to put our hearts into. We want to help bring other people into that environment and help them experience the same kind of healing if they need it or the same kind of nurturing of your soul that we understand exists in these wild places in our world.

We want to do that for people. We have spent two years searching for exactly the right property. After we found it, we spent almost a year building out the plan for the property. We now have 440 acres that we have profiled that we have done some light platting of that is in a little town called Lakeside Montana. The county commissioner calls it the Sleeping Giant in his particular district. It’s about 45 minutes from the Western entrance to Glacier National Park, which is called the Alps of the West. It is the crown of the continent. It has the most beautiful mountain we have in our country. Lakeside, Montana is about 35 minutes from the number three ski resort in the country, which is outside of Whitefish, Montana.

It is right on the shores of the largest freshwater lake, West of the Mississippi. It’s huge. It is surrounded by mountains that are snow-capped three-quarters of the year. The lake is home to people who are kayaking, cliff jumping, landing planes on the water, and sailing. We have wild rivers that are loaded with trout. Fly fishermen are all over the place. Kayakers are everywhere. It is an outdoor enthusiast paradise. It is hands down the most beautiful place in our country as far as I have seen. I’ve been all over our country. We are going to develop 440 acres into 110 lots, all between 2 and 4.5 acres in size. We want each person to have a lot that feels far enough away from their neighbor that they have their own little piece of paradise.

We are on the verge of launching this entire development. We’re in the earliest ages now. My wife and I have done fix and flips. We’ve done single-family rentals. We’ve been involved in other deals in a small way. I was a guy who was born with tools in my hand. I can fix or build anything. The land itself is a medium I have not yet worked with. I’ve worked with metal. I’ve worked with wood. I’ve built everything from beautiful custom furniture right down to framing houses, but I am genuinely excited about the opportunity to evolve the land into a place that invites community, adventure, and natural beauty for homeowners.

You’re already equipped to build communities because it’s what you do on a daily basis with BA. You’re naturally equipped to build a community and it is your legacy. I can’t wait to help introduce people to this place and to do anything that I possibly can. It’s not even a dream to make this endeavor succeed. If anybody reading this has an interest in owning a lot in this beautiful place, connect with us. We’ll make sure to get them to you so we can get some lot reservations.

I would absolutely love that. The stage we’re at now is we are putting the property under contract in about two weeks. We already have a letter of intent that is signed by the owner. He’s agreed to our terms. We’re good to go with the development deal. I have a pre-commitment. Although the money has not been put in my account. I learned from selling a business that you never count the money until the money is actually there.

We have a pre-commitment for our pre-development funds, what it’s going to take for earnest money to get the property under contract, what it’s going to take to start lidar mapping, drone mapping of the topography of the property, get the engineering team underway, and get the legal in place and that kind of stuff. All of that will probably be taking form within the next few weeks. After that, our goal is that the property will be fully platted and approved.

The county commissioner has already told us that he is going to streamline this operation because he needs big development to happen in his district. Otherwise, it’s going to put him in a tax deficit with the state. He must continue to pass updated property taxes on new property owners so he wants to get us in there and get it done. He’ll work with planning and zoning to make sure that happens quickly. The goal is to have pre-plat approval by April 2024 and be able to break ground in April 2024 and have the engineering done.

Over the next few months, we’ll be doing a raise somewhere around $8 million is what we’ll need to be able to secure the property, get all of the engineering done, and initiate excavation. Ultimately, it’s going to be about a $13.5 million investment, but it is a two-phase project. Phase one completely pays for the entire development. We don’t expect to have to hold investor funds for more than 24 months. We are now exploring what the best structure is for the financing that we put in place. Should we do this as a syndication? Should we do this through private equity? There are a lot of different ways to do it, and we have not yet landed on, “This is the way we’re going to do it.”

You’ll find it. If I know anybody that can do it, it’s you. Like I said, if there are any resources that I have that can help you get that done, they’re yours. Thanks for the interview, my friend. Thank you for sharing your story. I don’t think that I don’t realize how hard it is to relive that. Thank you for sharing it here.

I’m grateful for it because it transformed who I am in different stages along the way. I look in the mirror and I’m thankful for who I am.

There’s somebody else out there that’s probably reading this that needs hope and we’ve just given them some of that. Thanks again.

Thank you.

Important Links

• Cory Bergeron
• Thousands Per Minute: The Art of Pitching Products on Internet, Video, and Television
• Worley Real Estate Network – YouTube
• Worley Real Estate Network – LinkedIn
• Myths, Management & Mastery of Vacation Rentals
• https://Vrolio.Typeform.com/worleynetwork