Investing—and Living—with Purpose

Let’s start by addressing the following obvious question: Why, as a business founder and chairman as well as an investor, do I have such passion for Qualified Opportunity Zones (which we’ll refer to as QOZs) and Qualified Opportunity Funds (which we’ll refer to as QOFs)?

The answer is simple: I care about people. I care about helping those who have been dealt a bad hand and face economic hardships. I care about improving companies that are struggling. I care about giving new life to distressed communities.

Why am I so interested in helping distressed communities? Because I was raised in one of them myself.

To paraphrase a line I once heard: I was born in Georgia, raised in South Carolina, and grew up in Vietnam. I came from an abusive, low-income rural environment. I began my life in a sharecropper cabin and was a high school dropout. My first job was operating heavy construction machinery. I gained a number of invaluable leadership lessons from having first endured hardships during my childhood and then from having faced such challenging conditions in wartime. These lessons prepared me well for leadership roles down the road.

Throughout my life and career I’ve had to work my way from the ground up. I had a number of jobs until I was able to pave a lucrative career for myself in a number of corporate areas. I eventually earned three college degrees: a B.S. in Civil Engineering; an MBA; and a Ph.D. in Psychology and Organizational Behavior. As mentioned, I’ve spent a lot of time revitalizing companies that had been floundering. I have devoted over a quarter of a century to coaching, mentoring, and leading individuals to become peak performers while acquiring and running several multi-million dollar companies.

So, now that you know who I am, we can return to answering the second question that opened this Introduction. Why do I have such passion for Qualified Opportunity Zones and Qualified Opportunity Funds?

It all connects back to one central ingredient: my purpose.

The most important thing I learned in my life was the answer to the question, “What is my purpose?” Until I was able to pinpoint this, I couldn’t resolve any of the other important questions in my life.

People often confuse purpose with reason. We may work at a specific job simply because we need to make a living. There is nothing wrong with that. We all have to pay our bills.

However, our purpose for working should be to make a life. Over the years, I’ve come to know exactly what those three words truly mean and how to apply them to everything I do.

From my earliest memories, I imagined that I was on some kind of mission. I had an implacable unwillingness to allow anything else to interfere with what my destiny was directing me towards. The definition of my purpose has evolved and become clearer over the years. My life’s purpose is a never-ending mission.

We all need to find our own individual purpose. I came to clarify mine through a remarkable set of circumstances. It happens I grew up having to deal with pain and hardship. Through a series of chance circumstances and while developing my purpose, I learned how to make the invisible visible. I’ve always had great empathy for the underdog. Using my life path as a guidepost, I sought to identify struggling companies and give them a boost to become high-performing entities. I believed in the people at those companies and the products and/or services they produced. Most importantly, I believed in the communities around these companies that would become improved by my assistance in helping turn them around.

My eyes opened wide when the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was signed on December 22, 2017. Suddenly, here was a brand new path that fit directly into my purpose. Through Qualified Opportunity Zones (QOZs) and Qualified Opportunity Funds (QOFs), we have a chance to work together to: 1) benefit from the capital gains tax breaks; 2) make money; and 3) positively impact low-income urban and rural communities and the lives of millions of people. This is a win-win-win for everyone concerned.

In a nutshell, Opportunity Investing is about finding and creating opportunities in these QOZs and improving the quality of life for their residents by helping the companies in those areas succeed. If the businesses thrive, the communities will have more jobs and better salaries to offer. More people will want to relocate to these places, which will increase real estate values and breathe new life into local shops and stores. When residents and business owners are doing well, they spend more money on beautifying their homes, storefronts, public buildings, streets, parks, and monuments.

I deeply appreciate your curiosity in learning about how QOFs can help turn these QOZs around, which will restore financial health and pride to these communities. Spread out over dozens, hundreds, and perhaps even thousands of communities, QOFs can help our nation flourish as a whole. Thank you for being part of my life’s purpose, which hopefully intersects with yours.

Purpose is out there for everyone who will find his or her way to it. In 1899 politician William Jennings Bryan aptly stated, “Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.”

Let’s achieve a great destiny together.