Systems Over Hustle

I grew up in an abusive household. There is no sugarcoating that. It was the kind of childhood that either breaks you or makes you dangerously resourceful. At 14, I left home on a motorcycle with nothing but what I could carry.

The bike broke down in Bakersfield.

So there I was — a kid with no money, no family, no safety net, stranded in the Central Valley. Most people would tell you that is a tragedy. I would tell you that is where the real education started. I learned how to survive. I learned how to rebuild. And I learned that grit without a system will only get you so far.

I took that grit and poured it into building something massive. I founded DirectLender.com and grew it into one of the largest privately-held mortgage brokerages in the United States. 280 offices. 3,000 employees. Multi-million dollar revenue.

Bear Stearns came knocking with an acquisition offer. I turned them down. When one of the biggest investment banks on Wall Street wants to buy your company, you feel invincible. You think you have it all figured out.

I did not have it figured out.

2008 did not knock on the door. It kicked the door down and burned the house. The financial crisis destroyed everything. The company. The money. The identity I had built around being the guy who ran 280 offices.

My father died at the same time. My wife Debbie received 17 summonses in a single day. Seventeen. We went from running an empire to eating off a plate with a plastic fork because everything had been sold or seized.

That is rock bottom. Not the Hollywood version where you have a dramatic moment and bounce back in a montage. The real version where you sit in silence and wonder if there is anything left.

Nepal changed everything.

Debbie and I witnessed two young girls fighting over scraps of food in a trash heap. Not leftovers — trash. That image does not leave you. It rewires something fundamental about what you think matters.

Then came the words that broke us open: “Debbie ma'am, will you please be our mom?”

We spent the next 10 years running medical camps in the Himalayas, serving 5,000+ people through the Center for Global Change (c4gc.org). We did not go to Nepal to find ourselves. We went because two girls in a trash heap asked for a mom. Everything else followed.