RECESSION PROOF EXTREME · MICHIGAN · FEATURE
I never had a big brother to show me the way. So I built the room I wish I'd walked into.
Founding Chapter President, Recession Proof Extreme · Michigan. Grew it from 19 members to 125-plus and led it to Chapter of the Year and Model Chapter of the Year in May 2022.
WHY I BUILT IT
Why I Built It
I came up under bad leadership. The kind that teaches you exactly what not to do. I watched people with the title fail the people who trusted them, and it lit something in me. I knew I could do it better, and I knew what I would have wanted if it were me looking up.
Because that's the truth underneath all of it. I never had a big brother. I never had somebody my age, a few steps ahead, that I could learn leadership from. So when the chance came to lead the Michigan chapter, I took it, even though I was the only one who ran. Nobody else stepped up for a single board seat. They asked me if I really wanted to keep Michigan alive and do it by myself. I said yes. I believed in what we could build more than I feared building it alone.
I had no blueprint and no plan. What I had was a clear picture of the room I wished somebody had built for me, and the will to build it for the next person.
THE ROOM
The Room I Built
Recession Proof is about financial literacy and wealth-building, but what I built in Michigan was bigger than information. I built a safe space.
Here's what most people don't understand about chasing something. When you finally get excited about a vision, the people around you can get scared of it. Your dream doesn't fit in their picture of you, so they hand you fear and guilt, sometimes without even meaning to, because they can't see what you see. I built a room where that doesn't happen. A place where dreaming bigger gets you pushed forward, not pulled back.
So we became a real community, not a mailing list. We fundraised year after year. We brought our families around. I took opportunities I earned in other rooms and routed them straight to my members. When two people in the chapter would make a good team, I put them together. When somebody had an idea but no platform to test it, I built them one. That's the work. Connect the people, create the chances, protect the culture.
DECEMBER 8, 2021
The Night It Became Real
About 100 of us at Little Caesars Arena, and the staff kept asking who we were.
We started in September 2021. By December 8th, I was standing inside Little Caesars Arena, the home of the Pistons and the Red Wings, at our inauguration, with about 100 people in the room.
Think about that timeline. September to one of the biggest arenas in the city. We handled our business in the largest community room they had, then took the whole group up for club access while a live game ran below us.
I'll never forget the event staff. As they ushered us around the arena, they kept stopping to ask, who are you guys, what do you do? They had never seen that many Black people of excellence moving together, handling business, and having that good a time. That night was the beginning of me trusting myself. I had always played the background and taken the backseat. This was the first time I was the one in front, making the calls, with everyone looking to me to lead it right. And I did.
THE PROOF
The Proof
I led the chapter to Chapter of the Year and Model Chapter of the Year. We won them both at the same time, in May 2022, at the organization's Memorial Day weekend conference.
The next year we ran twenty to twenty-two events, a major jump, and collaborated across the network with chapters in the Carolinas, Mississippi, Arizona, and Ohio, plus high-profile sessions with names like MG The Mortgage Guy, Earn Your Leisure (EYL), and Marcus Him500. On one fundraising push, our Legacy Tour, I raised close to ten thousand dollars to put the event on, and I used AI to build the campaign, automate it, and get the message out before most people in my space were even touching the tools.
I design every flyer that leaves our organization. I learned graphic design because we didn't have the money to hire anyone, and I refused to put out anything that looked cheap. I taught myself Canva and got better every month, because I knew exactly what I wanted our name to look like.
And I built our own internal systems from day one, our contacts, our data, our pipeline, so we never depended on a social media platform or anybody else's tools. When the national organization went through its own changes, chapters that relied on outside systems lost ground. We didn't lose a thing. I still had every contact, every system, every connection. We could go quiet and then show up and show out the second it was time.
Every flyer here, designed in house by me.
ACROSS THE NETWORK
When the Other Chapters Called
What we built in Michigan didn't stay in Michigan. Recession Proof had chapters across the country, and when ours started winning, people wanted to know how. I started getting calls. I advised national presidents and national board members, and I became an advocate inside the President's community. When a chapter was in turmoil, struggling to get its team to cooperate or pull in the same direction, I was one of the people they sent in to help.
The chapter I love the most is Arizona. I was on a family vacation out there, and I made the time to sit with their whole leadership team. They took me to dinner and picked my brain, and I gave them everything I had. The one thing I kept telling them was this: trust yourselves. Nobody knows your community better than you do. Stop asking for permission, and stop waiting for it. Just go do it. What happened after that still makes me proud every time I see it. They exploded. And they are still building to this day.
Across all of it, my message to other leaders never changed. Don't get caught up in the noise, the toxicity, the titles, or who's getting what. People can feel when leadership is about attention instead of service, and it costs you. The secret is simpler and harder than all of that. Pour into your people. Genuinely. Listen to what's really going on in their lives, and find a way to show up for them, whether that's a phone call, a pull-up, or just being in the room at their thing. Do that, and they'll pull up for you every single time.
WHAT IT TAUGHT ME
What It Taught Me
The biggest lesson wasn't about events or money. It was about people. Early on I grabbed whoever was willing. Over time I learned the real skill: finding the right people for the right seats, and developing the ones who needed guidance to grow into their roles. And I learned to trust myself out front, not just behind the scenes. I built the thing I never had, and it made me the leader I never had either.
The wall
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STILL STANDING
Still Standing
I took a chapter nobody else would run, with no blueprint and no plan, and built it into a national award winner and a community that still shows up for each other years later.
I'm proud of this one. Not because of the awards, though we earned them. I'm proud because somewhere out there is a person who walked into the room I built and felt, maybe for the first time, that it was safe to dream bigger. That's the whole reason I did it.