He Stole Food to Survive. Then Built $450M in Revenue. Jerry Brazie on Street Smarts Over Degrees

Jerry Brazie stole food to eat as a kid. At 15 he dropped out of school. At 17 he was living in a $25 a week flop house with heroin addicts and hookers, holding down a full-time job. He has been shot at, beaten within an inch of his life, and stabbed with a 10-inch screwdriver that he pulled out himself over a weekend and went back to work Monday morning. He has also built $450 million in revenue across a dozen businesses over 30 years. Transportation, commercial real estate, gas stations, car washes, convenience stores, investment companies. No college degree. No safety net. No conventional playbook. In this conversation, Dave Gulas and Jerry go through the whole arc. The transportation company he built to $4 million in year one and watched his partners fire him on the one-year anniversary. The moment he went to his six biggest customers and asked them to prepay him a quarter million dollars a month to fund a brand new company from scratch. He went six for six because he did not know that was an unreasonable request. The $14 million loss. The $10 million loss that took six years to climb out of. The $200,000 payroll due Monday with nothing in the bank Friday. And how he stayed even-keeled through all of it because the streets had already shown him what the actual bottom looks like. He also gets into why doing what you love is the wrong advice for most entrepreneurs, what actually drove every dollar he ever made, and the mastermind group a retired Fortune 500 CEO invited him into at 30 that changed how he thought about business entirely. Jerry Brazie is 57, married 30 years, three kids, still building. The bottom he crawled out of would have finished most people. It did not finish him. ____________________________________________________ Learn more about the Kronos Group: https://www.thechronosgroup.org Connect with Jerry: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerrybrazie/?skipRedirect=true Learn more about our episode sponsor, Max Capital Hub: https://maxcapitalhub.com/ #beyondfulfillment #entrepreneurship #founderstory #JerryBrazie #KronosGroup #entrepreneur #businesspodcast #smallbusiness #mindset #resilience