I was in graduate school training to become a military chaplain when they found it.
A small brain tumor. Nothing dramatic on the outside — just dizzy spells and one-sided hearing loss that wouldn't go away. But when you're sitting in a doctor's office hearing that word for the first time, the noise of everything you've been building gets very quiet, very fast.
My wife Olivia had just finished her own fight. In November 2020 she was diagnosed with a rare form of appendix cancer. A 14-hour surgery in December. Months of recovery. She is still cancer free today.
We barely had time to exhale before I received my own news — a small brain tumor, confirmed in February 2022.
I'm not telling you this for sympathy. I'm telling you this because those two moments — back to back — did something to my priorities that years of discipline, ambition, and hard work never could.
They made me honest.
Up until that point I had been building the right things for mostly the right reasons — but with a low-grade anxiety underneath all of it that I rarely named out loud. The mobile home park was cash flow. Graduate school was a credential. The plan was the plan, and I was executing it.
But sitting with a tumor in my head and a wife who had just cheated death, I started asking different questions.
Not "how do I grow this?" but "what is this actually for?"
Not "what's the return?" but "what's the legacy?"
Not "am I winning?" but "am I faithful?"
The decisions that followed probably looked insane from the outside.
While Olivia was still recovering, we sold our home — a new build we'd only lived in for two years. We sold the cars. Hers was a Lexus GX. Mine was a big F250. We paid off our debt, bought a fifth wheel RV, and moved onto 11 acres of raw land we'd purchased just a year earlier.
No house. No fancy cars. Electricity and a water well freshly installed. Just land, a trailer, and a decision to stop performing a life we weren't sure we believed in anymore.
People had to think we were crazy.
Maybe we were. But we raised chickens. We raised goats. We went organic for a while. We saved our money, marketed the mobile home park for sale, and spent the next few years quietly rebuilding — not just our finances, but our sense of what we were actually building toward. We eventually bought the neighboring 11 acres too, because once you stop pretending, you start expanding in the right directions.
In 2023 we sold the park.
In January 2024, alongside my sister and her husband, we purchased frozen yogurt stores. By October 2025 we had acquired the intellectual property outright — the brand, the logo, the web presence. In December 2025 we began building our own franchise system from the ground up, writing our own FDD and preparing to offer others the opportunity to operate under what we built. What started as buying two stores became building a brand.
That last part probably sounds anticlimactic. Frozen yogurt after all that?
But here's what I know now that I didn't know when I was managing tenants and chasing rent payments: there's a difference between owning something and serving someone. The mobile home park owned us — our stress, our weekends, our peace of mind. The yogurt stores let us show up in a community, watch families come in after little league games, see college students sit down alone and leave a little lighter.
We went from stressed landlords to community-invested business owners. The income was similar. The weight was completely different.
The tumor is still there.
I don't say that for drama. I say it because I want you to know I'm not writing from the other side of a resolved story. I'm writing from the middle of one — and from the middle I can tell you that the frailty of life is not a problem to be solved. It's a gift to be received.
Every day I wake up and get to steward something — a business, a family, 22 acres in the country, a community — is a day I don't take lightly anymore. Not because I'm afraid, but because I finally understand what it's for.
That's what Valor to Virtue is built on. Not hustle. Not hype. Not another framework for scaling your revenue.
Just men who are serious about building things that matter — with the time they actually have.