Forty years of hard lessons, condensed.
No blueprint. No safety net. An absent father, a stepfather who left the wrong kind of marks, a mother who couldn't run interference. He learned to cook for himself, earn for himself, and solve things for himself before most kids were thinking about any of it. He didn't call it hardship at the time. It was just Tuesday. But it built the instincts he's still running on.
Married at 19. Three kids by 23. No formal education — a year and a half of school before life took over. By every statistic, this story ends in a trailer park. It didn't. He built an executive recruiting firm, launched a clothing line. Then found George — a private equity operator who became the real classroom. Balance sheets, credit structures, M&A, what's broken and how to fix it. A foundation still in use today. When George died, the network collapsed — it had all run through one man. The lesson: always build your own net worth.
Seventeen years. Two hundred days a year building pathways across Asia — every city, every room, every connection. He loved it. September 11 changed the calculation overnight. Revenue dropped from $700K a month to $150K. Ninety-five percent of the staff had to go. The hardest business decision he'd ever faced. The harder reckoning came later: what he'd traded away at home during those years couldn't be bought back. Youth is wasted on the young.
In 2008, he opened ChindAsia Club — named by CNN Travel as the #1 private members club in Thailand. Two degrees of separation from anyone worth meeting in the country. The lease ended in 2017. Around it: Whisgars, a premium whisky and cigar lounge with product personally sourced in Scotland and across Central America. CRAFT — the largest craft taphouse in Southeast Asia, 140 beers rotating on 40 taps. Slanted Taco. -13° Ice Bar. Belle's Room. The Little Wine Bar. He wasn't building a portfolio. He was building a world.
Moderate to severe — a six out of ten. Lost the brain-to-mouth connection. Lost the ability to snap his fingers. The focus he had built over decades — gone. Took three years to fully return. The body calling bullshit on the grind. He listened.
The scapula is one of the rarest bones in the body to break. His broke through. Clavicle broken. Nine ribs. The helmet is the only reason we're having this conversation. The kind of accident that resets everything — and did.