I am a lifelong entrepreneur who built my businesses on the belief that helping people thrive and building a profitable company go together. I have come to see that this only holds when the rules require it of everyone, not just the willing.
In 2019 I co-founded Esler Family Foundation with my wife Jeanne. It is dedicated to healing minds and strengthening spirits through work in mental health, youth opportunity, and economic mobility. Before turning my full attention to philanthropy and advocacy, I was the founder and CEO of Esler Companies, the largest affiliate of Renewal by Andersen.
My journey to wealth began at a horse racetrack. When I was 17 years old, I sold souvenirs at the Saratoga Springs Horse Racetrack. During the one-month racing season, I grew this business to $300,000, giving me my first glimpse into the world of the wealthy. Saratoga was not a random place to get that glimpse. The racetrack was built in 1863 as the playground of America’s first oligarchs. The Vanderbilts and the Whitneys summered there to gamble and to race. It survives today as one of the oldest sporting venues in the country, and it still fills every summer with the newly gilded rich.
This shaped my life goal that I formed at the age of 18: to make $1,000,000. I thought that would create certain happiness. I was young enough to believe money alone could do it. The more I made, the more I understood it could not. The goal was too small, and happiness was never in the money. I found it instead in love and purpose. And I would come to see the place itself for what it is, a monument to the concentration of wealth across two gilded ages, the one that made Saratoga famous and the one we live in now. It is that concentration I am working to reverse.
My Career
After graduating college, I spent several years in the Macy’s retail training program. In 1989, I opened two Subway franchises. Running them was a good challenge, and I loved it, mostly for the young, entry-level crew I managed as they headed off to college and careers of their own. That experience showed me what I wanted to build: a company where people could have lifelong careers.
In 2004, I founded Esler Companies with a single location and a belief that there was a better way to run a business. Over the next two decades, we grew into the largest affiliate of Renewal by Andersen, building a national home improvement company which today employs over 3,800 teammates across 15 states. We created initiatives like Window of Giving to connect our success to the communities around us. But what I am most proud of isn’t the headcount or the footprint. It’s the culture we built.
I made a conscious decision to build the company around a single core value: love. I didn’t want our teammates to simply survive. I wanted them and their families to thrive, build a life with us and retire with enough to live a fulfilling life beyond their working years.
I deeply believed in lowering taxes and in trickle-down economics. As my taxes were cut, I put the money back into the business and paid our people well above market. They thrived. For years I took that as proof that supply-side, trickle-down economic theory was right.
My Awakening Moment
In 2019 I sold the majority of the company and, for the first time, had the time to look up and study the state of the country. What I found stopped me cold. Trickle-down economics had failed because most of the people who received the tax cuts kept them. The idea wasn’t impossible; I was living proof it could work. The policy counted on voluntary generosity yet built in no mechanism to require it, so generosity is exactly what did not happen. The whole thing was left to conscience, and conscience is not a plan.
In 1978, CEOs of public companies made about 30 times what their workers made. Today they make nearly 300 times as much (Economic Policy Institute). In 1982, the first Forbes 400 list counted 13 billionaires in America. Today there are more than 900 (Forbes). The top 1 percent now owns nearly 31 percent of the country’s wealth (Federal Reserve), while the bottom half owns 2.5 percent. I was shocked and ashamed when I realized what had been happening under my nose across my entire adult life. While I voted for it and counted my success as evidence of it working, others grew their personal wealth exponentially on the backs of their employees.
My Pivot
I became convicted that my real calling is not running a company. It is investing my money and my time in reversing the concentration of wealth, and I feel a moral urgency to act. The Esler Family Foundation believes in giving while we are living, in a “sunset foundation,” because the one who made the money is the one best equipped to give it away wisely. Handing that opportunity to the next generation, or waiting until you are gone, is a way of avoiding the challenge rather than rising to it. As Andrew Carnegie put it, “the man who dies rich dies disgraced.”
I spent the first half of my life proving the system could work. I intend to spend the rest making sure it does, for everyone, not only for the few of us the rules were written to protect. At 18, I was certain a million dollars would make me happy. Today, as a Massachusetts resident, I pay the state’s Fair Share surtax on every dollar I earn over that same million, and I wish it asked more of me.
My Mission Now
I cannot do this alone. No one can. No single person, however committed, can match the money the billionaires are spending to bend our politics, keep the tax code tilted in their favor, and pay for an army of lawyers and lobbyists to protect their fortunes. They can outspend us. They cannot outnumber us. So, we grow Patriotic Millionaires from 200 members to 1,000+, and we turn our resources and our voices into the kind of influence that changes the rules. That is why this has my time, my money, and my name behind it. I am a member of Patriotic Millionaires, and I founded and chair its Membership at Scale initiative. The certain happiness I once expected from a million dollars never came. I have found it in this work instead.
I hold a Bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Albany, an MBA from Babson College, and an Advanced Leadership Initiative certificate from Harvard University (2021). I live in Massachusetts with my wife Jeanne.