From Ypsilanti to the Stage: How Growing Up in Poverty Became My Greatest Competitive Advantage

I'm from Ypsilanti, Michigan. Most people who aren't from the Midwest have never heard of it. Those who have know exactly what it means to be from there.

Ypsilanti has one of the highest poverty rates in the state of Michigan. The crime rate is one of the highest per capita in the country. When you grow up in a place like that, you develop a very specific skill: you learn to calculate risk in real time. You learn who to trust, when to move, when to stay still. You learn that the choices in front of you are often harder than the choices other people talk about in self-help books.

For a long time, I thought of where I came from as something to escape. Something to get past. An obstacle between me and the life I was trying to build.

I was wrong.

What Growing Up in Poverty Actually Teaches You

When you don't have the safety net, you develop instincts that people who grew up with safety nets spend years, sometimes entire careers, trying to develop artificially.

You learn to operate in uncertainty. You learn to work harder than you thought possible because there is no fallback. You learn to read people accurately and quickly because misreading them can cost you more than money. You learn that motivation that depends on external conditions is unreliable, because external conditions in a place like Ypsilanti are rarely favorable.

These are not soft skills. These are competitive advantages. I didn't know they were advantages when I was fifteen. I know it now.

The Moment I Decided

I remember telling my mom, when I was still a kid, that I was going to be the one to make it out. Not just survive, make it out. There was no specific plan attached to that statement. There was just a decision. A line in my mind on one side of which was the path the environment was pointing me toward, and on the other side of which was everything else.

That decision is available to anyone. It doesn't require resources. It doesn't require connections. It requires one thing: the belief that the story being written about you by your zip code is not the only story available.

The Army: Learning to Perform Under Real Pressure

I served eight years in the United States Army Reserves. The Army takes the instincts you developed growing up in a hard place and gives them structure. It teaches you that discipline isn't something that happens when you feel like it, it's something that happens on a schedule, regardless of how you feel.

In the Army, you learn what it means to have a standard that doesn't negotiate with your mood, your energy, or your circumstances. You perform. You show up. You complete the mission. That framework transferred directly into everything I built afterward.

Age 19, Quicken Loans

I started at Quicken Loans at nineteen years old. Quicken was the largest mortgage lender in the country at the time. I had no connections in the industry, no financial background, and exactly two things: the work ethic I'd built growing up with nothing, and the discipline I'd sharpened in the Army.

I became one of their top producers. Not because I was the most educated person in the building. Because I outworked everyone in the building, and I did it consistently, not just on the days when I felt like it.

Building the Company

In 2021, I founded Porch Point Mortgage. We became one of the fastest-growing African American-owned mortgage companies in the country. People who followed the conventional narrative would say this happened despite where I came from. I'd argue it happened because of where I came from.

The skill set that poverty builds, hunger, resilience, risk calibration, the ability to operate without a net, is the skill set that builds companies. The people who've never had to fight for things tend to stop fighting when the first big obstacle arrives. The people who grew up fighting rarely do.

Why I Speak

I stand on stages because I was once sitting in the same seats I'm now standing in front of. I know what it feels like to wonder if anyone who looks like you, came from where you came from, has ever made it anywhere worth going.

The answer is yes. And when you're the one who makes it, you don't get to take your foot out of the door. You hold it open. You turn around and you say to everyone coming behind you: I know the road. I know how hard it is. And I know it leads somewhere.

That's why I speak. That's the message I carry to every stage I'm invited onto. And I'm not done yet.