Ebunoluwa Akinola
Patrick Aime shares his journey around the world that helped him go from bankruptcy to millionaire in a decade in the midst of a recession.
Patrick Aime saw his future in the United States and was convinced that if he was able to get there, he would succeed in life and to make this happen, he decided to work hard and engage in sports.
He registered and became a collegiate athlete at the University of California Santa Cruz. While hoping to go professional, he sustained an injury and he could no longer play basketball. He determined to remain in sports, but this time around, on the commercial side of it.
After college, he relocated to San Diego and started working in the sports industry. He was in charge of putting together travel packages that major corporations used to entertain their top accounts. These packages arranged are used for logistics at major events, such as the US Open and the Masters Tournament.
Within four years, he became very used to the operations side of his industry and decided to start up his own . The first six months he started was very shaky and firms he had trusted to patronize him didn’t show up as they said.
After those first six months, Aime weathered the storm and began doing business with big corporations like IBN and Coca Cola. Soon, other big deals came along. Eventually, he went from basically $0 to $5 million in four years.
“I had a whole event planning team on site,” he said. “I had two event planners. I had an accounting team onsite. So we had a bunch of accounts at that point and everything was rolling. And of course, with money coming in and I hadn’t seen that much money in my lifetime.”
He began spending lavishly. He spent on a townhouse in a wealthy area in San Diego and bought a Mercedes CLS500 in the same month. “The car alone set him back over $1,000 a month,” he said. He also got involved in real estate and purchased four rental properties. He did all these without having any savings left.
By 2008, it all came to a halt when the recession hit. The Lehman Brothers, which happens to be one of his biggest clients, went bankrupt and it affected his revenue flow. He ended the year without making any sales. By December of that year, he closed his company, foreclosed on his rental properties and filed for bankruptcy.
With all that happened, Aime was determined to regrow his success, he knew his pitfalls. He was committed to fiscal responsibility and also listened to Financial influencers like JL Collins and JD Roth. He started his recovery by investing in the stock market again because everybody was talking about index fund investing.
He founded a second company in the same industry he knew but at a smaller scale and committed to saving. He catered to a handful of accounts but gave such high-quality service that his rebooking percentage stayed above 80%. By March of 2019, he had become a millionaire
