Darren Vinnett

Darren started his first business at 12 years old with the dream to travel the world, speak and inspire people, and of course get paid to do it. By God's grace I've never had to work a job to make it in life because of entrepreneurship. He's done a lot of things right and he's done a lot of things wrong, but most importantly, he's learned to turn losses into lessons! 

It was August 29th, of 2005, when hurricane Katrina hit landfall in south Louisiana. It roared in as one of the most deadly hurricanes in history and definitely became the most memorable of all hurricanes in New Orleans, Louisiana history. 

Life was grand for Darren until then. The owner of a thriving promotional printing and marketing company with working relationships with the “who's who” in both the spiritual, religious and secular arenas of business. He was occasionally be given the opportunity to use his most passionate gift of speaking to inspire others and was well on his way to fulfilling his childhood dream of retiring by age 45 from a business that he had launched and grown from the bottom up on his own. 

Hurricane Katrina changed all of that in ways he would have never imagined. The short version is that Katrina's landfall ushered in a season of great loss for him. Major contracts and many business relationships vanished overnight. Much like the covid 19 pandemic, so many adjustments in life and business became the new norm.

Things were not only bad in business, but they got worse when his wife of 16 years was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer and passed onto heaven only months later, leaving him the only parent of three pre-adolescent children.

In addition to that, things got even worse because, with the loss of his once thriving business, now his home and cars were all being threatened to be seized due to financial difficulties. 

Describing these most challenging and difficult times of his life, he will tell you that even though he would never want to experience those days again, he wouldn't trade the lessons learned for anything!

It was during that season that he learned to face fears head on— not because he was always strong or fearless, but because in most cases he simply had no choice.