00:00:14:09 – 00:00:51:06
Greg Wyatt
A lot of you folks think you know me, but you really don’t know me. And it’s my goal through these videos. As long as I’m alive and I’m long as I’m breathing that you know the most information that’s correct about me, I have had a blessed life. And I’d like to acknowledge the man above my savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, for all of the blessing, victories and also defeats that have come my way.
00:00:52:00 – 00:01:24:04
Greg Wyatt
It’s been a very difficult journey. My saying in life is a Bible verse that’s so important through adversity I find strength. Things shouldn’t be quick and easy because if they are, it’s too easy. You don’t learn. You learn through adversity and you find the strength through that. I wanted to talk a little bit about my personal life and my business life and what I’ve done and where I’m going.
00:01:25:25 – 00:02:12:05
Greg Wyatt
Well, here’s my career, my business experience, and it started when I was nine years old. You guys know about my eugenic conception. I was exactly what Adolf Hitler wanted. Blond hair, green eyes, intelligent, outgoing, handsome. That’s debatable, but here I was born in 1955, and I was born into a very, very poor family unknowingly. My real father, my my genetic father was a university professor, and my father raised me into this poor family.
00:02:12:19 – 00:02:49:21
Greg Wyatt
He I will say this. He was a modern day Jesus Christ. He was wounded for my ability to live. He was sterilized and put in a work farm in Beatrice, Nebraska. Enough of that. You can tell it’s important to me. So with this genetic component, that was part of me, my sperm donor father and my mother, who had nothing in common, created quite a bit of paradox within my mind.
00:02:51:16 – 00:03:33:03
Greg Wyatt
I couldn’t figure out where I came from, Why was I the way that I was? My father was a concrete finisher for a common labor who worked 60 hours a week for minimum wage. And like I said, we were very poor, and you could see why. But I wanted the cool things in life. I was a kid. I was ten years old, 11 years old, and I wanted things like candy, bowling, pinball machines, comic books, pop, all this stuff that would make a difference for someone a kid in the 1960s.
00:03:34:21 – 00:04:05:05
Greg Wyatt
Well, in 1964, I kind of got tired of waiting for my nickel and dime allowance. And there was a guy down the street that I noticed and there was a sign and it said Nightcrawlers $0.25 a dozen. And I thought, Night, that’s a good idea. My entrepreneurial mind kicked in and I went down there and talked to him, and I lived in a very, very poor neighborhood.
00:04:05:05 – 00:04:30:09
Greg Wyatt
And it was a mixed race neighborhood. That’s where all the poor white people would live, unfortunately, And all the poor black people lived in this neighborhood in southwest Nebraska, ninth and South. So I decided to ride my bike down there. And he was a good old guy. I knew everybody in the neighborhood. He says, Greg, what do you do?
00:04:30:09 – 00:04:53:28
Greg Wyatt
And I says, What are you doing? And got to remember, I’m like, nine, ten years old. I was, for some reason, just had the acumen for what I was doing. He says, Well, he said, I’m selling worms. I said, Selling words. I says, You sell many, you know. And instead of saying, Do you sell many? I said, How many worms does a place like this sell?
00:04:53:29 – 00:05:16:10
Greg Wyatt
I never asked direct questions. I kind of wanted him to give me the answer, not knowing he was giving me the answer. He says, Well, I do real well. He says, You know, the lakes outside the south of town. He says there’s tons of fishermen that come by here and they need worms. I said, That’s great. I says, Well, where do you get them?
00:05:17:06 – 00:05:44:00
Greg Wyatt
Where do you get those worms? He was so cool. He says, Greg. He said, I’ll tell you. He says, Go out in your backyard with a flashlight about 9:00 at night and shine it in the grass and you’ll see them. I never paid attention to that. And my gosh, he says, you got to be careful. You sneak up on them and then you grab them.
00:05:45:15 – 00:06:12:28
Greg Wyatt
But you can’t pull them because you’ll break them. So what you do is you grab them, pull just a little bit where they’re under stress and then they relax and you can pull them right out of the ground. I go, Wow, I might be able to make some money at this. So that night I went out. The next day I put my sign up Nightcrawlers $0.25 a dozen is Saturday morning.
00:06:12:28 – 00:06:43:17
Greg Wyatt
And I made I sold six dozen worms nightcrawlers for a dollar 50 total. And I had money for those pop bottles. I mean, for pop, you know, candy bowling and pinball. And that was just the beginning of my entrepreneurial career. I knew I had a knack for something. So that was the first thing that I did. That was the first thing I did.
00:06:43:29 – 00:07:10:29
Greg Wyatt
And that expanded because once I had that making money and I had that change in my pocket, guess what? I wanted more. It was only natural. So what I did is I became a door to door salesman at the age of 11. I loved people and people loved me. I was that blond haired kid living in that black neighborhood.
00:07:11:06 – 00:07:42:28
Greg Wyatt
And I never had one problem with those people. Racism did not exist. We were color blind. So I sold all occasion cards in the hot summer to supplement my worm income. Then I decided to sell YMCA Thin Mints. As both of these were door to door operations. That worked out really good. 1965 to 1968, I started a lawn mowing service.
00:07:43:16 – 00:08:06:27
Greg Wyatt
People were going door to door. Sir, can I. Can I mow your lawn? Average lawn was $0.50. Sometimes you get a bigger lawn for a buck or two bucks. $5 lawns didn’t exist, but it was great. Me and my dad did it together. He helped me. He take me and my lawn mower around in the back of his car, in the trunk of his car.
00:08:07:09 – 00:08:34:22
Greg Wyatt
And help me. My dad was the best encouragement of a father Any son could ask for. So the lawn mowing service, my dad would help me. As I mentioned, after he got off working 12 hours a day to help his son. He’d go out with me on Saturdays, and if I remember right, it was about average of about $0.50 per lawn.
00:08:36:07 – 00:08:59:01
Greg Wyatt
And let me back up a little bit further. In 1964, my first real job was for $0.25 an hour. First real job. My dad hung out at this gas station every weekend, which he dragged me with him and he got me my first job for $0.25 would take me about an hour and I clean the bathrooms every Saturday.
00:09:00:11 – 00:09:36:24
Greg Wyatt
Their name, the name was Coffee. Skelley Coffee was their last name. They were a black family, lived around the corner from us and ran that local gas station. Then I decided I need a real job. I’m 12 years old. I need a real job. So I got a newspaper out. I love my newspaper out that went on for a couple of years and afforded me $30 a month in income, delivering about 30 newspapers, which I spend about an hour and 15 minutes.
00:09:37:04 – 00:10:01:08
Greg Wyatt
Things were a lot less then in 1965. Let me back up just a little bit more. What was fun is I would go door to door asking for pop bottles. That was an easy job. There was this little blond haired boy, Sir, is it? Could I take you? Do you have any extra pop bottles laying around that I could take and redeem for you?
00:10:01:08 – 00:10:28:29
Greg Wyatt
Then you don’t have to bother taking them to the store yourself. They knew I was going to keep the $0.02 a bottle, and they liked helping this little blond haired kid with a beautiful smile out. Pop bottles were worth $0.02 redeemable at people. Just let them stack up. Nobody wanted to mess with pop bottles. And again, I knock on the door and say, Hi, my name is Greg.
00:10:29:08 – 00:10:57:29
Greg Wyatt
Do you have any pop bottles I could take into the store and redeem for you? And again, of course, they knew I’d keep the money, but who would turn down a cute little toe haired, blond haired kid with the great smile? Let me tell you, very, very few people. So my entrepreneurial skills were honed in by a lot of success, and I was proud of what I accomplished.
00:10:58:06 – 00:11:23:25
Greg Wyatt
And I wanted to expand on it and keep making money in a good and honest way. 1969, I became a taxpaying citizen as it was required. I became I worked at the Nebraska State Fair. You know, those little trains that go around. I was a conductor that took the tickets on that little train as it went around the state fair.
00:11:24:03 – 00:11:35:17
Greg Wyatt
I thought, Man, this is a great job. It only lasted for two weeks. I cried. I missed that job. Next summer, I tried it again. It was fantastic.
00:11:37:27 – 00:11:59:08
Greg Wyatt
Then after that, I needed another job. I needed some more money. So I got a job in 1970 at Vine Street, Car Wash, when all the muscle cars were out, remember? And everybody had had a muscle car. They wanted to keep it clean, cost $0.50. They’d run it through the car wash. I’d be the window guy. I’d be in all these brand new muscle cars cleaning the windows.
00:11:59:08 – 00:12:30:07
Greg Wyatt
It was like, Holy cow, this is what I want. When I turn 16, I want this barracuda, I want this Malibu. I want all this really cool stuff. I do the inside of the windows and hook it up to the chain and always give them back the keys. Yeah. Now you know why I have notes. This is. This is really in-depth and how I remember all this stuff is I had notes.
00:12:30:07 – 00:12:53:05
Greg Wyatt
To have the notes, I would document my life. Everything that I’ve done in my life, every day I’ve done in my life. It was like a diary of everything I accomplished. Well, after that, I got a job at McDonald’s who hasn’t worked at McDonald’s. I was the sheet man and I was at the bottom of the totem pole.
00:12:53:11 – 00:13:17:07
Greg Wyatt
But it was a lot of fun. They give you a free meal every day. You know, those were $0.69. I was on work study program. So I got to get out of school, which was boring, and go work at McDonald’s, which I thought was really cool. Then in 1971, I quit school. I quit high school. My junior year.
00:13:20:16 – 00:13:46:19
Greg Wyatt
I wanted to help my family out. We didn’t have enough money and I didn’t want to go to school anyway. So it was really a good excuse. Not to go to school. So I got a job at Miss Lee Chevrolet in 1971. Miss Lee Chevrolet. Lincoln, Nebraska is a lot. Boy, that’s when all that year, 1971. Does anybody remember the GM cars that came out?
00:13:46:19 – 00:14:10:23
Greg Wyatt
Come on, show your age a little bit. That’s when all the new muscle cars came out, Every single one of them. And everybody was buying these. You could buy a new Corvette for 40 $500. And I was a lot boy. And when they needed somebody to do a dealer trade, I’ll do it. I’ll drive. I’ll drive to Omaha and trade that.
00:14:11:08 – 00:14:40:28
Greg Wyatt
El Camino SS 396 for want of a different color. I mean, they needed to be broken in right when they came back, they were had a good start. Remember the movie Gone in 60 seconds? Well, I did. I’d run those cars 100 miles an hour down Interstate 80 at the age of 56, six years old. But after six months of that, I missed my friends and I decided I should go back to school.
00:14:42:12 – 00:15:17:26
Greg Wyatt
I only missed really quit high school for one semester. And I actually got caught up and I graduated with my class as I made up, which all this stuff I missed out on, which wasn’t much. I graduated. So this is a I’ve kind of kind of had a moment of thinking, I shouldn’t mention this, but I’m going to, because it’s part of me really doesn’t diminish who I am.
00:15:17:26 – 00:15:40:26
Greg Wyatt
It might give you an idea on who I am. My first day in high school, when I went back, I met my beautiful high school sweetheart. She was a sophomore and, well, I guess I was a senior the first day at my at high school my senior year. And it was love at first sight. We went together for the next three years.
00:15:41:17 – 00:16:09:07
Greg Wyatt
She adored me and I adored her. Well, I was very against marijuana. I was 16 years old, 15 years old, somewhere there. And that stuff’s bad for you. I seen it on the news. I seen the police officers come to our school and I said, I’ll never do that. Well, that year a friend of mine turned me on to some pot and I declined.
00:16:10:08 – 00:16:32:24
Greg Wyatt
They later turned me on to some pot. I declined. A week later, he said, Greg, you got to try this. And I was watching all my friends take a hit and oh God, it didn’t look like much fun, but they were all smile and afterwards and I thought, Hmm, well, maybe I should try it. Maybe I should. And I did.
00:16:33:16 – 00:17:00:09
Greg Wyatt
You know what it did to me? Nothing. So I tried it again because it didn’t work. A little something. Then my friend who turned me on to it, I noticed all my friends were wanting to find a place to buy it. And here I was with a lot of friends and allowed motorcycle. I was a motorcycle. I got my first motorcycle at the age of 14 and I.
00:17:00:26 – 00:17:27:18
Greg Wyatt
I was known for my loud motorcycle, my long hair and my pot smoking. My friend told me that I could take an ounce of pot and split it into four bags. An ounce was 20 bucks. I could sell those bags for seven $8 each, sell three, keep one and get it for free. Greg, you can get your pot for free.
00:17:27:18 – 00:17:49:27
Greg Wyatt
I go, Okay. Well, it only took me a couple of hours to figure it out, and before I knew it, I had a pot root. It was a little better than door to door. I was just too popular my senior year and two months before graduation. This is unreal. The very guy that turned me on to pot. This is unreal.
00:17:51:08 – 00:18:29:06
Greg Wyatt
They got me started in it. He got in trouble. He turned a narc. He turned into a state, a government city informant. And guess who got busted? Greg, 17 years old, senior year. And it was terrible. I got a bad judge, and I had. I was a rebel without a cause. I went in and stood in the federal jail with my mirrored sunglasses on and a rash of dig indignation across my face.
00:18:30:00 – 00:18:59:14
Greg Wyatt
And he looked at me at time of sentencing and says, Mr. Wyatt, he says, You haven’t learned a thing. I’m going to see you again in my courtroom. And next time it’s going to be twice as bad. And I thought twice as bad, he said, I hereby fined you $250. And I thought, Yes, $250. It’s only going to be twice as bad.
00:18:59:14 – 00:19:39:07
Greg Wyatt
The second felony, that’s 500 bucks. I make that in a short period of time. So I left the left the courtroom, City-County building and it didn’t take me long at all to pick up where I left off. I was a young, stupid kid. I was young. I didn’t think so. During this whole period, in this period of time, my weed pot crowd, I had as many jobs as I wanted and it was getting a lot and I was getting a lot of experience.
00:19:39:07 – 00:20:14:23
Greg Wyatt
I was a gas jockey at Canova’s, APCO Assistant Mechanic’s Helper. I quit these jobs when I was bored and they’d always hire me back. And in between I sold Filter Queen vacuums door to door, Fuller Brush door to door, and I was a long haired hippie going door to door. And for some reason, all these elderly people you thought they didn’t like hippies or not, the ones that I waited on, I was a long, blond, long haired hippie going door to door.
00:20:14:28 – 00:20:51:27
Greg Wyatt
And for some reason people just loved me and I loved them back. So the next thing I wanted to make more money. I was out of high school now, and I loved automobiles. I was a light boy and I answered in, This is this is so critical. This changed my life. I answered a small ad in the Lincoln newspaper that said, Auto detailer wanted to earn like $500 a week detailing my cars.
00:20:51:27 – 00:21:22:13
Greg Wyatt
Everything’s provided where Wally’s used cars 23 $0.23 street, and I knew that he opened up at 10:00 and I knew that I had to get there at 8:00 to beat him there at 9:00 because there would be a line of people wanting that job. And I went in there and I’d never really detailed cars professionally outside of my own cars, but I really wanted the job.
00:21:22:13 – 00:21:45:24
Greg Wyatt
Give me a chance. Just give me a chance. I said, I’ll tell you what, I’ll I’ll detail your first couple cars for free to show you how good I am that sealed the deal. And for the next three years, I did. All of his cars matter of fact, Weird. Wally was the number one used car dealer in in Lincoln, Nebraska.
00:21:46:05 – 00:22:10:08
Greg Wyatt
He had a pot lot. He’d buy a car for $35, sell it for $85, buy a car for $125, sell it for $275. How did I know that I became his right hand man in a very short period of time? He was my hero. And the thing with Weird Wally was he was honest. He was the most honest person I’d ever met.
00:22:10:15 – 00:22:45:03
Greg Wyatt
And he selling cars. He was honest. What has happened to honesty? I don’t know. I was a lot of money. Oh, I forgot something really important. In 1976, I. I got busted again for another felony. My second felony at the age of 21. And it was rough. The judge looked at me and told me I didn’t learn anything the first time.
00:22:45:03 – 00:23:19:00
Greg Wyatt
It was my second felony and I needed to go to prison. I’d never been in trouble before. I was a long haired hippie with soft facial features, a baby face. He suggested 3 to 5 years in prison, and he was known in Nebraska as a hanging judge. Judge Richard Farnsworth sentenced Charles Starkweather in the fifties to die for his murder spree.
00:23:19:08 – 00:23:50:00
Greg Wyatt
And it happened to be my judge. I lost it. I got on my motorcycle. I got in a minor accident. I ended up in the hospital, and I spent the 4th of July, 1976, in a dark hospital room, contemplating many things I’d never thought of before. I called my mom. I said, Mom, you got to come down. You got to help me.
00:23:50:01 – 00:24:20:21
Greg Wyatt
My mom was in tears. She walked in the hospital room and was stunned. She says, Greg, I hate seeing you like this. Why or what can I do? What can I do? Greg, This isn’t what I wanted for you. I said, Mom, call the minister of the church. Only God can help me. Only God can help me. And we’ve been going to St Andrew’s Lutheran Church in Metal Lane for a number of years.
00:24:20:21 – 00:24:55:07
Greg Wyatt
We knew the pastor well, knew the assistant pastor well. She called him The assistant pastor came to Pastor Schroder, 81 years old, little old guy, and he consoled me in ways that only God could have intervened using. Then the main minister came in because he knew it was a serious, serious, serious situation. And he says, Greg, I can see you’re in no, you are no candidate for prison.
00:24:55:07 – 00:25:20:17
Greg Wyatt
You wouldn’t last. I know you. I know your family. I know you don’t deserve this. And I says, What can I do? He says, I’m going to tell you something. I am personal friends with the judge. We go out and play golf several times a month and he says, I will go to bat for you. I couldn’t believe it.
00:25:21:24 – 00:25:50:06
Greg Wyatt
At my sentencing, I thought I didn’t have those glasses on. I didn’t have that attitude on. I was scared. All I could think of was the Nebraska state penitentiary and what went on behind those closed doors. So it was my turn. I stood up at the front of the courtroom, he says, How do you play? I said, I plead guilty, sir.
00:25:52:17 – 00:26:21:03
Greg Wyatt
And he says, Well, I’ve read the reports and you have quite a few people that have came to your defense. And he said, I don’t believe at this point it would be in the best interest of the court or you or the situation to spend time in prison. Oh, God. He said, I give you three years probation, strict probation.
00:26:23:10 – 00:26:51:04
Greg Wyatt
And I completed that probation, never got in trouble, never got in trouble again. I learned my lesson well, now it was time. I’m off probation and praise God, I made it only by the blood of Jesus. Honestly, am I even here right now? Which brings up the next part of the story. I know the video is kind of long.
00:26:51:04 – 00:27:20:28
Greg Wyatt
I try to keep it under 10 minutes. Ha. I moved to Boulder, Colorado. Boulder, Colorado. I was. How old was I? I was 25 years old. I was taking care of my disabled father, who my mother had divorced and he had a stroke. He had a broken heart. And I looked at this man that I had nothing in common with, but I felt this love that was so sincere.
00:27:21:05 – 00:27:47:14
Greg Wyatt
All I wanted to do was make sure he was well loved and provided for. I said, Dad, come with me. Come with me to Boulder, Colorado. I’ll take care of you. And he did. And there in Boulder, Colorado, I checked out several churches, and one I went to was Unity of Boulder. And guess who the minister was? Dale Big trees, Father Jack Grover.
00:27:47:14 – 00:28:27:13
Greg Wyatt
Leonard Dale Big Tree was nine and his sister was eight. Approximately at the time. And I met Dale Big Tree in that church in 1981, along with his father and his wife and his sister. Amazing. I’d never dreamed that 25, 30 years later that it would have such an important role, not only of where I came from and where I was going, but in my story today under the black bus on every holy cow.
00:28:27:13 – 00:28:55:09
Greg Wyatt
So I moved to Boulder, Colorado, with my father, went to Jack Grover Lynn’s church at Unity of Boulder and bought into the New Age. Religion felt good. Everything was good. Matt Dale, Big Tree. Dale won’t remember me, but I sure remember him. I remember the two kids that we play up at the podium. Well, being the entrepreneur I was and I had to find another gig and I went to Boulder and I had to find a roommate because I couldn’t afford a house.
00:28:56:11 – 00:29:18:10
Greg Wyatt
And there was roommate ads. It was a college town, Boulder, Colorado. There must have been 250 roommate ads. And all I thought of, I could see dollar signs because all these people were paying 50 bucks a week for the ad. So why don’t I try to help them and make some money myself? I always wanted to make money, but I wanted to help people.
00:29:18:14 – 00:29:45:12
Greg Wyatt
I didn’t want to help people by stealing it or doing a nefarious operation that couldn’t provide what was promised. So I started a company was called Find a Roommate of Boulder, Colorado, and I’d place small classified ads in the newspaper, find a roommate. I put my number down and I would get calls from day one. People wanting to find a roommate.
00:29:45:12 – 00:30:17:01
Greg Wyatt
They were frustrated. Well, how is your company work? I says, Well, this how it works. You come in and you go through my profiles. In my book, I have a profile book. I’ve always been into books, and they fill them out. Let’s see here, Sarah. Sarah is 21. She’s a graduate. He’s this. He wants to be this. And they they’d find somebody that they were interested in meeting and they write down the phone number and I get a call a day or two later, hopefully they says, Well, we found a roommate.
00:30:17:17 – 00:30:44:27
Greg Wyatt
And how I made my money is I charge $35 for the person that had the house. It was already paying $50 a week and most of them would cancel the ad because I was a much better deal and I’d field the calls and get them to come in. And I was running the business out of my house. I was kind of on a busy street and my disabled father was in the next room, but I didn’t have to work a regular job, which was great because I never of liked working for other people.
00:30:46:13 – 00:31:05:24
Greg Wyatt
Well, that ended. I got kind of bored with it. I think I sold it. I don’t remember. It’s been so long ago. It’s like 40 years ago. How could I remember all this stuff? So I found an ad in the newspaper and it said, Become a car salesman, sell cars for boulevard dots. And I thought being a car guy.
00:31:06:04 – 00:31:26:01
Greg Wyatt
Yeah. The 280 Z, the Maxima, the 310, the 210, the pickups. I already knew the whole line. And at the time it was Toyota or Dot’s and they were the two best cars. So I went down there and I became one of their top men in a very, very short period of time. Had a brand new car to drive gas.
00:31:26:08 – 00:31:51:13
Greg Wyatt
Life was fantastic. Although the problem is when you’re at the top, everybody that’s lower than you remember this, folks. If you watch my stuff, they come gunning for you. They want to make you look bad. They don’t want anyone to knock you off the top. Remember that? Do you think I would have learned so? I did that for a while and I got bored working bell.
00:31:51:13 – 00:32:24:28
Greg Wyatt
The bell 99, six days a week. I was making great money. But you could be a hero. One week and a zero the next week. So I decided to start another business. I got an idea. I’m going to start a company called Cars on Call. This is 1981, a computerized car locating service, kind of like what they do right now with Carvana and all the other myriad of cars finding services, locating services.
00:32:25:06 – 00:32:56:04
Greg Wyatt
So I started this this computer rise, car locating service in 1981 called Cars on Call, which I tried the car you were looking for. Problem was there was no Internet. So how did that work? Well, guess what they came out with in 1980, 1981, the fax machine. Oh, yeah. So people would call me one call finds them all, call cars on call.
00:32:57:09 – 00:33:22:06
Greg Wyatt
I ran a little newspaper ads in the in the local newspaper and I get calls from people. They want a specific car. They wanted a specific model mileage. And I’d write it down and I’d have my secretary put it in the computer and then make a copy of it. And I would fax it out to dealers that subscribe to my service, which it costs $300 a month.
00:33:23:19 – 00:33:44:07
Greg Wyatt
And all they had to do is sell one car and it paid for itself. It caught on pretty fast. And of course, I hired my backup personnel so I could go out and swim and play volleyball during the day and ride my motorcycle and maybe do some jog and go to the gym. And everyone else was doing the work.
00:33:44:07 – 00:34:07:01
Greg Wyatt
That’s the key to success. That was a key to my success. Always have trained someone else to do the work and monitor how they do it. Well, I had ten dealers in a short period of time. I think the first months I was making three grand a month in the 1980. That was probably more like seven, eight grand a month.
00:34:07:01 – 00:34:43:09
Greg Wyatt
Now, life was grand. So I sold my business to my partner, which I regretted for a while, until I was able to make my past and forget about it. So guess what? I’m in need of a job. Where do I go? Pick up the newspaper. There’s a classified ad in there under sales. Promote recycling. Well, this is 19 early 1990s.
00:34:43:20 – 00:35:14:27
Greg Wyatt
Excuse me. All this blends in. So in the nineties I seen this ad, I’ve done other projects in between that I haven’t even mentioned. Mostly everything that I did though, turned to gold. I don’t know why. I just had a business back. So I went down to best trash promote recycling and it said Earn $100 an hour. I go, Holy cow, I’m for that.
00:35:16:03 – 00:35:37:08
Greg Wyatt
So I call him up on the phone. It was ten in the morning and I said I wanted to do an interview. And he told me, he says, Well, it’s going to be next week sometime. He said, I’m just booked up. I’m running three trash routes, mostly by myself. I got people that help me and I go to work really early in the morning and I don’t get back until noon and I’m so tired.
00:35:37:08 – 00:35:55:21
Greg Wyatt
He said, Just make it next week. I says, Well, what time can I get there? He says, Well, I get in at 4:00. I says, Do you have time to meet me at 4:00 for 5 minutes? So I could just make a presentation and see what it’s about. He said, If you want to come in at 4:00, he said, I’ll make a point of seeing you.
00:35:56:21 – 00:36:21:07
Greg Wyatt
His name was Dick Ross, Best Trash Littleton, Colorado. Well, Dick and I hit it off quite well, and I told him my visions. I says, Well, how big of a company are you right now? He says, Well, we’re well capitalized. If that answers your question, I says, Well, how many guys do you have working for you? How many salesmen making $100 an hour?
00:36:21:29 – 00:36:45:28
Greg Wyatt
He says, Well, I got just a couple salesmen. I says, Well, how many new customers are they getting? He says, Oh, you know, maybe 100 every week or two. And I looked at him in the eye and I seen a gold mine. And I said, Dick, what if I could get you 100 customers a day? And he looked at me and laughed.
00:36:47:12 – 00:37:16:29
Greg Wyatt
I says, Well, the reason I’m asking that is can you pay me? Because he was paying me $30 a customer. Can you pay me 30 $500 a day? He says, Well, we’re well-capitalized. We’re financed by Denver restaurateurs, and it’s a great business model. Red trash trucks. So he hired me. I went out the first couple of days, did the pinch myself, knocked on the door.
00:37:16:29 – 00:37:40:28
Greg Wyatt
Hi, my name’s Greg with best trash. Do you know about a recycling program? Everybody want to hear about it. So I get into my product manual, and I had the old Ben Franklin clothes in there. This is us. This is them. They’re a national company. We’re the local company. They charge extra for recycling is free with us. This is their price.
00:37:41:06 – 00:38:04:09
Greg Wyatt
This is my price. And I had like eight different things on each side. And I said, We’d like to have you try us out. I’d pull out the book eight here, eight here, and they’d always want to go with my side. I says, Well, that’s a that’s a fairly easy decision, isn’t it? I’ll tell you, the program’s great.
00:38:05:02 – 00:38:28:27
Greg Wyatt
We’d like to have you try us out. That was my magic clothes. And 90%, at least 80% of the people signed up and I had a bigger vision than that. I thought, Wow, maybe I could train other people because I knew a lot of people that were doing door to door sales that were in the car business. All the, you know, the fine jobs.
00:38:30:00 – 00:38:53:24
Greg Wyatt
And before I knew it, I had a team of six guys out doing what I was doing, and they’d come over to my apartment downtown at 88. Logan Look it up across from Governor’s Mansion down in Denver, Colorado. And before I knew it, they were doing at least half as good as me. But I wanted to make it fun.
00:38:54:01 – 00:39:20:21
Greg Wyatt
So I got them each a pager, and every time they’d make a sale, they’d be inside and they’d ask the people they wanted to, you know, they had to call the boss to get everything going. And all of a sudden beep, beep, beep, beep. And I was taking those those $35 that I got and I was giving them half and I was keeping half and I was making several hundred dollars a night sitting at home.
00:39:22:00 – 00:39:52:14
Greg Wyatt
But alas, it came to an end after I got him. So many customers, so many customers converted, so many customers from Laidlaw, BFI and some other one Waste Management that he said, I can’t, I don’t need any more customers. We’ve got like 15 trucks now and you did a great job and I ended up getting unemployment for a while because I was laid off.
00:39:53:19 – 00:40:16:21
Greg Wyatt
And then six months later I found out that he took the very customer base that he had that I had taken from the Big three and sold it back to him for millions. Was I jealous? No. Did I feel bad? No. I just found it amusing. I was happy for him. He did all the work. He deserved it.
00:40:17:05 – 00:40:47:20
Greg Wyatt
He paid me well. He didn’t screw me over. And that’s the way business should be run. So, anyway, it was time to move out of Boulder, Colorado. I found out my mother was dying. My father had died in 1983. It was 1985. And I remember I drive from Denver to Lincoln and back and forth to make sure my mom was okay.
00:40:47:20 – 00:41:19:19
Greg Wyatt
She was living by herself. She actually was my age. She was the same age as I am right now. But she smoked a lot of her life but had quit ten years before. But it was too late and she developed emphysema. And I remember taking her to her doctor’s appointment and I went to pick her up and I could hear this screaming like a young baby.
00:41:20:14 – 00:41:50:08
Greg Wyatt
Oh, it was just I thought, Wow, what is that? So I’m waiting out front. My mom comes through the door and I said to I says, Mom, I said, Did you hear that screaming? And she looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, That was me. They were trying to find a vein to measure her oxygen level because back then they didn’t have the finger stuff they do now.
00:41:51:17 – 00:42:20:05
Greg Wyatt
And I thought, how much longer, how much more suffering is she going to go through? How many more opportunities am I going to have to give her a hug and tell her I love her and to be the son that she created me to be? That was an easy decision. I went back and I talked to the doctor a week later and I says, I he he knew my mom well.
00:42:20:05 – 00:42:51:11
Greg Wyatt
She’d been seeing him for years. I asked him how much longer can my mother live? And he says, typically. So it’s easy to figure out when they’re at this stage. Stage for emphysema. There’s less than a year. I knew I had to move back, and I did. And I bought a little tiny house in western Nebraska. Wow. Wonder where I got the idea for that name.
00:42:51:28 – 00:43:14:18
Greg Wyatt
Small Czechoslovakian town on a railroad spur 30 miles miles north of Lincoln. And there was this house, $7,500. And I figured it out. This is no kidding. I figured it out that I could basically do my own thing for the rest of my life. I require very little income. I’m not frivolous. I don’t just go out and blow money.
00:43:15:04 – 00:43:42:24
Greg Wyatt
And with my house payment, which didn’t exist, I had two crappy cars, no payments. There. Utilities were cheap, food was cheap. I could live and I still have the paper because I write down everything. My monthly expenses were less than $600 a month and I was happy there. I loved living in Weston. I love going down the bar and sitting with the locals and listening to them just absorb it.
00:43:42:24 – 00:44:10:29
Greg Wyatt
It was just so great, so pristine. Unlike downtown Denver, Colorado, and all the hubbub that went down there. And I drive to see my mother and then I drive back to Weston, drive to see her. It was great. So unfortunately, no, not unfortunately. Excuse me. It was unfortunate that I met Joyce so quickly, but it was very fortunate that I met her.
00:44:11:08 – 00:44:34:21
Greg Wyatt
God has his hands on everything and I lived in West and loving West and thinking I was going to stay there forever and ever. And even my sisters just, you know, told me. Greg were really concerned about you turning into a hermit, because I’m sometimes I’m either an all or nothing guy. I either want to be the center of the crowd or I want to be away from the crowd.
00:44:35:01 – 00:45:11:00
Greg Wyatt
So the way I’ve been well, I went on a blind date. I went on a blind date, and I met this woman at a video store in Columbus, Nebraska, on a cold winter night, December 27th, 1994. And I walked in and I said to myself, Well, I know she works there. I know she’s tall, she’s blond. I said, I’m going to walk in.
00:45:11:12 – 00:45:43:00
Greg Wyatt
And if I don’t like the situation, I’ll just turn around and walk out. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. She’ll never even know if I turn went there. So I walk in and there’s this blond haired woman, beautiful blond haired woman. And so I said, Yeah, let’s go. Well, yeah. Hi, I’m Greg. I drove down from Columbus, says, Hi, I’m Joyce, and says, if you’d like to, you know, it’s snowing out.
00:45:43:00 – 00:46:07:13
Greg Wyatt
If you’d like to come over, we can have a hot chocolate, she says, But don’t get any ideas. I got a hammer and a can of mace right in the front room, and I thought she screwing around. That wasn’t my that wasn’t my focus. Anyway. So we spent the next several months. We were inseparable. We had so much in common.
00:46:07:26 – 00:46:33:27
Greg Wyatt
She was such a fascinating, creative person like myself. We had so much in common. We talked about having babies and we talked about getting married. Of course you get married first. We even started looking at names after a couple of weeks, what are we going to name our kid? So he started looking at Nebraska names. There was Lindsey in Nebraska, there was, Oh, I can’t even remember them all there.
00:46:34:02 – 00:47:05:24
Greg Wyatt
There’s Madison, Nebraska, if it’s a girl. Well, if it’s a boy, we’ll call him West in Nebraska. It was just something really romantic. Wife was just kept dealing me royal flushes. So I didn’t know that that woman that was in that video store working as a quarterback, I didn’t know that she owned the video store. I had no idea.
00:47:06:11 – 00:47:33:09
Greg Wyatt
And it really wasn’t important to me at the time. I’ve never been really I’m motivated by money, but it’s money I want to make. I don’t want to ride on anybody’s coattails. So anyway, I didn’t know that that was her video store, nor did I know that she was like a mini blockbuster and had video stores in quite a few places.
00:47:34:22 – 00:48:01:01
Greg Wyatt
So we went on our honeymoon and we came back. She opened the mailbox and there was a check from one of the big three conglomerate video stores that wanted to buy all of her stores. And I thought she showed me the amount and she says, Greg, where do you want to move to? We can move wherever you want to go.
00:48:01:01 – 00:48:31:26
Greg Wyatt
I says, Well, let’s go check out some place as well. Joyce was from the Southwest, so we gravitated towards Arizona and looked at Flagstaff, looked at Prescot, looked at Payson, looked at Phenix. We came to Prescott first. We went over the hill. And it’s beautiful here. I mean, I can see why everybody wants to move here. And I said, Honey, I think this is it.
00:48:33:25 – 00:48:59:25
Greg Wyatt
Within a couple of days we were buying a house. Within a week, we found another location for a video store, which happened to be one of the most profitable video stores that we ever had open. But this one was special because it was mine and Joyce’s, and it made me feel like I was contributing something. The most successful video store period.
00:49:02:15 – 00:49:25:20
Greg Wyatt
So we wanted kids. Of course, we hired people to work the video store, which afforded us time to do what we wanted. Like most entrepreneurs, and we were done with the video store, we thought we were never going to open another one after Nebraska. But then Prescot came up Prescot Valley and it was the most successful video store that we ever, ever opened.
00:49:25:27 – 00:49:48:27
Greg Wyatt
Five movies, five days, $5. And I did the radio ads, and I remember I was nervous. I never opened up one. And the very first day that we were open, the first night, 6:00, there was a line of people around the building and I thought, This is going to be successful. And all my stress and anxiety just went away.
00:49:50:01 – 00:50:19:00
Greg Wyatt
Well, after a couple of months started running smoothly, we decided, hey, let’s, you know, let’s let’s let’s fly to Denver and do some fertilization. It’s expensive. It’s like 25 grand. We flew to Denver, tried it, came back to Prescot, didn’t work. And I mean, it was like the baby died. We had all of our hopes. Can you imagine, Greg and Joyce having a kid?
00:50:20:16 – 00:50:55:07
Greg Wyatt
Wow. I mean, incredible. So we went. We tried it again and it failed again. And I said to Joyce, What are we going to do? She says, Well, let’s adopt. And I thought, Yeah, we both decided we’re going to adopt. There’s no other choice. So we found a private attorney and I wrote up the pitch on who we are, what we do, why you should pick Greg and Joyce for your unborn child.
00:50:56:23 – 00:51:25:08
Greg Wyatt
Unborn child, Of course, with abortion now, there aren’t a lot of unborn children available for adoption. So took us about there was over 200 families on file. I remember that. And they did like 20 adoptions a year. And he said, Don’t get your hopes up. Never forget that. So it could be ten years, could be two years, could be never.
00:51:27:10 – 00:51:51:05
Greg Wyatt
So that’s when I went home and put together our profile. Because when you go to the for some reason, these books are always important. So you go to the attorneys office and there be this person and this person and the birth mother would be there. And they keep, you know, their 200 birth parents of various success stories and sizes and ages.
00:51:52:07 – 00:52:25:04
Greg Wyatt
And the first first month we were chosen, and it was between us and another couple. But they decided that they only wanted a girl. And we take either. And that’s why the birth mother chose us. That’s what she told us. Then Weston was born. We met the birth parents. We became very good friends with them. It was more or less an open adoption, by the way.
00:52:25:07 – 00:53:02:00
Greg Wyatt
Haven’t had contact with them for over 20 years. They were an unmarried couple. She was 16 and he was 17, so everything was great. We got our baby, of course, started taking them to the pediatrician, which you know, that story. Then about another year later, we get a call that you’ve been chosen again for adoption. We looked at each other and said we weren’t looking.
00:53:04:00 – 00:53:37:14
Greg Wyatt
Says, Well, are you sitting down? Yeah. It’s the same birth boy and same birth girl. It was New Year’s Eve. They went out and had a fling one time. They didn’t get along very well, Fought a lot, but didn’t use drugs. No drugs, no meth, no pot, no beer. They were a clean Catholic, Hispanic couple. And then Emily was born little 19 months after Weston, and we had her two little babies.
00:53:38:25 – 00:54:02:05
Greg Wyatt
And my life was just so blessed. But I want to back up to one little point when we were applying for, you know, for these kids. One thing, it was important you got to fill out the paperwork for the attorney and it says, Have you ever been convicted of a felony? Well, Joyce, no, I was totally transparent with Joyce.
00:54:02:05 – 00:54:23:00
Greg Wyatt
After I told her my life story, I didn’t think she’d want anything to do with me. All this eugenics stuff and sterilization and evil government stuff. And so I said, Yeah, and Joyce, is Greg for us to be chosen, you’re going to have to get that off your record. I thought, Well, how do I do that? Of course, Joyce figures it out.
00:54:23:00 – 00:54:51:18
Greg Wyatt
Well, I have to schedule it with the secretaries of State of Nebraska, the attorney general and the the state prosecutor. And you go in front of a tribunal and they look at your record, they look at what happened, and they say they they grilled me. And I knew that for us to adopt West and I had to remove the sins of my past.
00:54:57:01 – 00:55:17:15
Greg Wyatt
And the first guy gets up there, he was a real prick. He was a real prick, I thought. He says, No, Mr. Wyatt. He says, I don’t like it. When I got up there, I said, Listen, I’ve never gotten arrested for anything. I don’t use drugs. I haven’t even had a traffic ticket because we applied for an expungement.
00:55:18:01 – 00:55:50:14
Greg Wyatt
It’s kind of like when your sins are wiped free, like what Jesus does. And he was kind of, like I said, a prick. And he said, I don’t think you’ve learned anything. He says, These drug cases really, really against the grain of who I am. He said, I never vote for any drug offenses to be expunged. And then he added, He says, But my two friends here, I know how they’re going to vote, so my vote doesn’t matter.
00:55:51:24 – 00:56:18:12
Greg Wyatt
They voted for expungement. The next guy voted for expungement. I walked out of there. A month later, I get a document that says My civil rights have been restored, that I can vote again, I can carry a gun, and that my past was wiped free. It was a God thing. So anyway, this is kind of a long segment.
00:56:19:18 – 00:56:46:04
Greg Wyatt
I appreciate you guys allowing me to share my life and hopefully that you can you can glean some important messages that are not written, that aren’t spoken, things that touch your heart not only for who you really are, but who I really am. God bless you all.