About

Life gave me a shot and I grabbed it with both hands. It took 30 years to claw myself up from being practically homeless to Entrepreneur of the Year (an EY special award for 2013), a man who made hundreds of thousands and led a small army of souls.

 

My companies sprawled like kingdoms across 12 countries, from the Old World of Europe to the new frontiers of America. They abounded like wildflowers that refused to die, even when a drought strikes or a surprise frost comes along. For those thirty years, I dragged myself out of the mud and up to the summit.

 

The house I built was my own hacienda, where my Arabian horses danced in the wind, my three sons riding them like princes in a fairytale that was never supposed to end.

Many admired me, invited to prestigious events all over the globe, and I walked alongside presidents as a symbol of success and adventure. 

 

I traveled to more than eighty countries, for vacations, business trips, and conferences. I scuba-dived with tiger sharks without a cage and got to know cultures so different they seemed like they were from another planet. I met extraordinary people in all sorts of places. 

 

From Bedouins wandering the endless desert sands to cannibals hidden in the green hell of the jungle; from celebrities wrapped in the tinsel of fame to politicians pulling the strings of power behind the scenes; from glittering palaces where champagne flowed freely to the wilderness where only the laws of nature ruled. 

 

I saw palaces of gold and huts of mud; I met saints and I met sinners. 

 

Then my luck turned against me.
It came fast, like a lightning strike, like an earthquake that levels everything you've ever built. 
Political intrigue, crooked business partners, and a few twists of fate took everything I had.
Everything I had ever achieved, everything I had built, vanished like smoke, like a morning fog blown away by the wind. Betrayal tasted like ash in my mouth. 

 

And Fate, that cruel jester, laughed in my face as I plummeted back to earth like Icarus, my wax-glued wings melting from the very sun I’d dared to touch.

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I used to joke that if it all crashed down, I’d return to herding horses in Normandy, right back to where I started as a broke kid. That’s exactly what happened. Except this time, I wasn’t alone, free of attachments and worries. And it wasn’t Normandy.

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With my steadfast wife Evie, through every circle of hell we must pass through, we drove our old car toward one last hope: Switzerland. The land where salaries reach as high as the Matterhorn and an enterprising person can find more second chances than holes in a wheel of Swiss cheese.

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Yet our dream of salvation shatters on arrival. Instead of the financial St. Bernard we desperately seek to rescue us in this Alpine heaven, we endure one setback after another: toiling on a horse farm from dawn to evening for pocket change; begging for a dishwasher job at a St. Moritz luxury hotel where we were once a welcomed VIP guests; we will survive the suffering in the "green hell" of a vegetable farm among inhumane conditions, with meals so meager that malnutrition is a constant danger.

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Join us on our journey, taking you from one dazzling adventure to another, to hopeless misery and back again to bittersweet glory. Discover the price of success and witness the spirit of a husband and wife whose devotion to one another keeps them fighting onward, determined to never surrender.

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This book will shock you, move you, and inspire you to never stop believing and fighting for a better life.