Mm.

"You have to leave.

I'm sorry." And so I ended up walking out, and it was p- early, early hours of the morning, and I had met this girl, uh, her name was Lindsay Healy.

And I, I think she sold me drugs or I sold her drugs.

I just met her on the street, and I called her and she's like, "Yeah, come to my apartment." And so I went to her apartment at, like, 6:00 in the morning, and I was getting high, and I ran out of coke.

And as I was running out of coke, I swallowed a bunch of Xanax to come down off the coke high.

And I got impatient for the Xanax to work to kinda take me down off of, you know, the feening for the coke, and so I was in the bathroom and I, uh, I loaded up a, a dose of heroin, a shot of heroin, and that was the last thing I remember.

Damn

When you were getting to that first venture, did you get the idea for the rehab center from your own experiences with rehabilitation?

I had been out of state and gone to rehab out of state because my home area lacked resources, despite being one of the most affected places by the addiction crisis in America.

So when I returned to my home state, I had seen the model that had been successful in other areas that did not exist where I was.

I took that, and I started volunteering for free at local state-funded rehabs, meaning that they treated indigent, poor, and homeless folks that were addicts and alcoholics.

In the beginning of my entrepreneurial, legitimate entrepreneurial jury- journey, there wasn't a single thought in my head that I was like, "I'm gonna make millions of dollars." Which seems crazy now, but literally I thought, I was like, "I'm gonna start a little business.

If it brings in a little bit of money on the side from my job, and I can live a little better than I do as a result, that's great." But the main driving force was the fact that I saw a problem, and I was passionate about fixing that.

And I didn't make any money for the first few years.

And when you say going to market for them, this is like meaning trying to sell the company

Yep.

Got caught up in addiction, OxyContin, turned heroin addict.

100 tried and failed attempts at sobriety and changing my life.

December 7th, 2006, uh, finally find recovery and sobriety for, God willing, the last time.

Went on the run, uh, for some criminal stuff after a drug deal gone bad.

Um, crawled into recovery 135, 140 pounds, high school dropout, without a, a single dollar left to my name, unemployable, you know, worst credit score.

Just, I mean, as bad of a shape as a human could be in was me at that period of time.

Mm-hmm.