About Me
My Personal Story
I was born in Miami, Florida on April 12th, 1985. My parents were both immigrants form Cuba. Growing up I lived a very fortunate and blessed life. My parents were entrepreneurs and shared ownership in a medical business. I saw and experienced the beauty of America while still having the roots and foundations of a Hispanic family from Cuba.
By the age of 13 I had started my first business. I started a DeeJaying company between myself and a few friends. We would DJ parties on the weekends and made ourselves some pretty decent income for our age. During that journey, I learned many lessons about life and business.
A few years later, I met the woman I would spend the rest of my days with. Jess and I met, and I knew there was something different there. We married in 2007 and had our first daughter in 2009. Shortly after our oldest daughter was born, we decided to leave Miami’s fun and adventurous life to live a more calm and family focused life in Chattanooga, TN. A few years later we had our next daughter. Then we had our next daughter 15 months later. Our journey didn’t end there. We got pregnant with our son a couple of years after our last daughter. The journey has been amazing and fun. I am grateful everyday for the privilege to be a husband and a father to my wife and 4 kids.
In 2021, a crazy accident on Chattanooga river cause me to have open heart surgery. I had to get my mitral valve replaced. While I am fully healthy now, it was definitely one of the scariest times in my life. I became even more grateful for the things that I have and every day I am alive.
My Professional Story
As mentioned before, I began my journey as an entrepreneur. Starting my first business at 13 showed me many things. I learned many lessons about business and about work ethic.
During college, while studying Business, I had decided to take a course to be certified in AutoCAD. I always enjoyed graphic arts, web development, and CAD. I had already started HTML coding websites in middle school, in 1997. I had also taken classes in my eighth grade year, in 1998, for graphic arts. So when the opportunity to learn CAD came up, I jumped on it. This decision led me to my first career job.
After college, I worked with a company called Emjac Industries in Hialeah, FL. I was a drafting engineer for them. The company focuses on manufacturing stainless steel counter tops and walk-in coolers for commercial kitchen’s. I thoroughly enjoyed that role, however our move to Chattanooga, TN. made it where I had to leave the company.
Once I moved to Chattanooga, I worked as a freelance website developer and graphic artist.
However, while I worked on my freelance work, My wife and I began investing in Real Estate. We started flipping houses in 2010. To this day we still invest in Real Estate.
In 2013 the natural order of progression led me to get my General Contractor’s license. It was a tool that was very helpful at the time. We had transitioned to full-time real estate investment. We not only worked on our investment properties, but we began to help others build wealth through real estate investment.
Then 2020 (COVID) hit. It shifted everything for us. Everything stopped, and the uncertainty of what was happening, created a pause in real estate investing.
During that pause I took advantage of “down time” and got my Real Estate license. This was another natural step into progression of our industry. I did not expect what was coming next.
While transitioning from Contractor to Realtor, something happened that I was not expecting… My brokerage began to ask me to help lead develop agents. I started teaching classes on many topics, but focused specifically within online marketing. Anything from SEO to even some AI tools. The classes consisted of helping agents that might be great at sales, also have an understanding of digital marketing. As I led my own team of agents and became a mentor to many, I took on a role of a digital marketing consultant. I helped many agents on this journey. All this while still running operations for my own team and leading them to success.
Within that time, I had my open heart surgery. This took me down a path of figuring out what mattered most. While I love being an entrepreneur, I discovered the word “intrepreneur”. I began to explore positions within a company that needed someone like that. United States Stove Company was the perfect fit. They had a new brand they wanted to launch, and I provided the skillset and ability to do just that. The role later changed to a promotion where I led all of our direct-to-consumer eCommerce across all brands own by US Stove Co.
That brings us to today. After tariff issues caused a good percentage of the company to be laid off, I unfortunately was a layer they needed to cut. I left grateful and I made it clear that I understood, and was not bitter. Before we get into my next step in my professional journey, I want to bring up my book.
Experiencing Growth was a book that I was trying to create for years, but never really had the chance to put “pen to paper” so to speak. After getting laid off, I went full throttle into completing my book. It is now published by Foresight Publisher Co. and available on Amazon.
Back to the regular scheduled programming… The next step of the journey took me back to my old roots. I began to do freelance work for digital marketing while flipping a couple houses here and there.
If you have read this far, then I am grateful, but what you probably want to know is what my goals are moving forward. I have instantly been continuing to hunt for the role of “intrepreneur” with a company. It may not look the same as it did with US Stove, but my goal is help a company build, develop, and grow using online resources.
What Drives Me
I often feel that this question gets asked during interviews or in engagements. Drive for me is understanding that there is a problem, and the process of resolving it. Problem solving can be both creative and analytical. I tend to have a little bit of both. I lean towards analytical, but it is that analytical side of my brain that allows me to be creative.
I’ll elaborate. I do not have a natural gift for art. In graphic arts, my best work was not work I created from my thoughts. While I can be creative and have some very unconventional ideas, I mainly use data from things that work to create something for my project.
A great example of this is with US Stove. We were in the process of redesigning our websites. While our graphic artist had some great ideas, I looked up companies that had great websites and were consumer based products. We used those sites as inspiration for ours. The truth is that many companies do not have the time or resources to do their own studies.
So my creative side stems from modifying ideas that already work. That’s where my creative side comes in. It’s not building from scratch, it’s redefining based on proven ideas without stealing those ideas. I would argue that using someone else’s work as inspiration is how most art is created anyways.
In conclusion, I am driven by the ability to create things and redefine things. Not just starting from scratch, but sometimes executing pivots, or simply perfecting what already works. Getting data, and figuring out methods to achieve greatness.
Leadership Style
My leadership style can be classified as traditional. I am a big follower or the “old school” business mentors. Guys like, Zig Ziglar and Bryan Tracy. In a world where technology has began to trump most forms of leadership. I think it is key to take a step back and see that what changed was technology, not people.
There has been a trend in replacing relationships for productivity. While productivity is important, motivated colleagues and employees will outpace overly technical workers. People need to know why they do what they do. A check is only the outcome of their labor. It’s not their why. They can get a check anywhere, however they are passionate about something.
My leadership style is to understand motivations. What drives other people. Developing relationships where everyone is aware that they are cared for and about. Obviously, this is solely limited to professional environments, but it doesn’t mean a colleague cannot be a friend.
That leads me to my next leadership style. My mentor has always told me that; “Good fences make good neighbors.” While I believe in a people first style of leadership, I also know that boundaries must be set and respected. That applies both ways. As someone who has led teams, I have always been very forward about my boundaries. I do not want my demeanor and friendly style to be misconstrued with passiveness, or a lack of discipline. I have always said that decisions have consequences. Sometimes those consequences are good and other times they are bad. It is all based on the choices that were made.
Beyond The Professional
I guess we’ll start with the obvious. As you can see by my photo, I like hiking. I enjoy doing it with my family, but not opposed to some hiking dates with just my wife.
I also enjoying what I call tinkering. I love building things, and creating things. Engineering is fun to me.
I like to go golfing as often as I can. It is great way to stay connected with friends, while trying to master the difficulties of a sport that is very complex to master.
I enjoying be “in motion” as much as possible. While golfing is great, I am the coach for my son’s flag football team. It’s a blast working with 4th and 5th graders.
I am an early riser and I regularly go to the gym in the mornings. It is a great way to start my day.
Beyond that, I enjoy the basic things of watching some TV here and there and listening to 90s music (mostly country).