The Opportunity That Seemed Too Good to Pass Up

In 1999, Jody was about 35 years old, married with four young children, and struggling with both his farm and his marriage. A friend approached him with an opportunity to get involved in a telemarketing call center.

Jody knew nothing about call centers. But his friend knew how to sell the opportunity to him.

He emphasized Jody’s personality, his ability to connect with people, and the fact that he “knew everybody.” He also told Jody about three other successful call centers and offered him the chance to become a shareholder.

The price of admission was $120,000—a huge amount of money at the time.

Jody borrowed the money from family at high interest and invested everything he had.

He would later realize that he had entered an industry he didn’t understand without doing the due diligence necessary to understand what he was actually buying into.

The Business Had a Much Bigger Problem Than Sales

The call center sold cellular phones to customers in the United States, using Canadian employees because their Ontario accents were relatively neutral.

On paper, the economics looked fantastic. The company could make 30–50 per sale while paying representatives around $8 an hour.

But there was a problem Jody didn’t discover until later: the company effectively had only one source of leads.

That meant the entire business depended on CMS, a Florida intermediary that connected the call center to major brands.

There was another problem, too.

The company wasn’t getting paid for all the sales it generated.

Jody remembers submitting dozens of sales and discovering that only some of them were actually paid. By the end of the first year, roughly $100,000 worth of sales had gone unpaid.

The explanation was customer churn and product returns—something that hadn’t been made clear to Jody beforehand.

The result was devastating: the company had grossed hundreds of thousands of dollars, but after all the unpaid sales, Jody felt as though they had effectively made nothing.

When the People Problems Started

Instead of recognizing the underlying business model problem, the partners focused their attention on the employees.

Salespeople were monitored. Some were told they weren’t good enough. Employees were fired. Turnover reached roughly 400%.

Eventually, the company ran out of people.

Jody moved the operation from a small town to London, Ontario, hoping that a larger city would give them access to a bigger labor pool. The business briefly appeared to improve.

They picked up additional contracts, including political campaign work.

But the fundamental problem remained: they were still dependent on CMS.

And CMS still wasn’t paying them properly.

In the second year, Jody says CMS stiffed them for approximately another $160,000.

By then, Jody had exhausted his personal equity and started using his retirement savings to keep the business alive.

The Cost Became Personal

The business crisis wasn’t happening in isolation.

Jody’s mother died in a car accident. His marriage was already in serious trouble. Bills were piling up, and Jody began taking cash advances on credit cards to keep going.

He even asked his sister for money from their mother’s estate.

Eventually, the partners fired Jody as manager and brought in someone else to run operations.

But Jody returned about two weeks later because, despite everything, he still owned and had personally funded the business.

The deeper problem was that Jody had reached the point where he couldn’t convince the people on the other side of the deal to behave differently.

He even flew to Florida to confront the situation directly, only to be effectively ignored.

The Moment He Realized He Could Walk Away

After years of putting more and more into the company, Jody’s financial planner came to help him cash out his final retirement account.

And she told him something incredibly simple: he didn’t have to keep doing it.

Nobody was forcing him to put more money into the business.

For the first time, Jody realized he could actually walk away.

He knew he’d walk away with nothing, but that was still better than continuing to pour money into something that wasn’t going to recover.

The business ultimately ended in bankruptcy.

Within two years, Jody was divorced and starting his life over.

Finding His Way Back to His Roots

But that wasn’t the end of the story.

Years earlier, Jody had been offered a sales position at a feed company that is now known as Cargill Canada. He had rejected it because his father had convinced him that sales wasn’t the right career for him.

About ten years later, Jody finally took the job.

Within his first six months, he sold eight new accounts—something an administrator who had worked at the company for 23 years told him she had never seen a salesperson accomplish before.

Jody’s reaction was wonderfully practical: he wanted to know when he could collect his $50 bonus for each new account.

He eventually became extremely successful and began coaching other people.

And the skills that made him successful weren’t completely new. They were rooted in the life he’d already lived.

He understood farmers. He understood their businesses. He had spent years listening to sales calls and learning products. He knew how to work hard because he’d grown up doing it.

The experience he had tried to escape had actually given him some of the skills he needed most.

Turning the Story Into Something That Could Help Other People

Jody eventually wrote Country Boy Soul: Pastor to Prosperity about his experiences.

He didn’t write it because he expected to become wealthy or famous from the book. He wrote it because he wanted people who were struggling to see that someone else had struggled, too—and eventually found his way out.

The book also created an unexpected effect: people began opening up to Jody about their own struggles.

Friends and acquaintances who read his story started sharing painful experiences from their own lives.

For Jody, that became part of the purpose of telling the story in the first place.

His business failure had taken years from his life, his money, his marriage, and his sense of security. But eventually, telling the truth about that failure became a way to help other people feel less alone.

And perhaps the biggest lesson wasn’t that Jody found a better business opportunity.

It was that, after losing almost everything, he finally found his way back to himself.