About his days before EcoQuest...

I worked nights (10:30 pm until 7:00 am) in a big postal facility for 25 years. My wife Lisa and I had seven children in that period, now eight. I realized we were in financial trouble but had few options to increase our income. We home-schooled our children, so having my wife work was not possible. We were making less than $40,000 a year, which was not enough.

I worried every day. What would happen in 8 years when I retired from the Postal Service and had less than half of what I was making and had to pay for my own medical benefits? I wasn't going to stick around for that. My kids were still young and we had a lot of expenses ahead of us. I decided the only answer was to become an entrepreneur.

We opened a Christian bookstore in Allentown, PA. In 2 years we were instrumental in seeing 50 souls saved in our store. But financially we were in trouble—$65,000 in debt. We lost the store, our home, and our car was repossessed.

We were forced to move into the inner city, into a row home that was run down with a waterfall through the center of the house. I used to joke about the fact that people pay a lot of money to build waterfalls in their home but we had one for free, all natural. Every time it rained hard the water would come through the rotted wood on the roof and flow down the wall through the center of our narrow 3-floor home. We always had mice and there was always a line on Sunday mornings to get to our 1 bathroom.

As bad as things were inside, it was much worse beyond the walls. Gunshots would ring out at night. At one time a young man of 23 was gunned down and killed in front of our house. We came home from shopping to find the front of our house was sealed off with yellow police crime tape while they washed the blood off the sidewalk with a hose. Our streets were full of drug dealers, broken homes and broken dreams. I had to do something to get my family out of there.

During this time a preacher friend brought the EcoQuest business to me. I had been praying that God would get my family into a nice big house in a safe area where we could have a more abundant life. I believed EcoQuest was an answer to prayer. Without any real marketing knowledge or previous sales success I started an EcoQuest business. It always amazes me when someone says they can’t do this after trying so little. I think if some people did not have it so good they would try harder to make EcoQuest work.

It was rough in the beginning. I got a security job at night because we had no income. Even with that we had to get food from the food pantries in Churches. There were many challenges. I started without a car. After a couple of months a friend gave me a used van that we had to get repaired to get it going. Even though it didn't look like much, 6 months later it was stolen from the front of our house. The air conditioner that was given to us by a brother at church was stolen from our front porch that same week.

When I was making enough with EcoQuest to put a big down payment on another van, it was broken into twice. My portable air purifier in the van was stolen, along with a box that held all my EcoQuest info. I'm waiting for the day a Manager gets up at an EcoQuest convention and says he got started in the business when he broke into a van and found out about EcoQuest!

Persistence and hard work paid off. In our second year we became Sales Managers and started to make more money than we ever had in our lives. That was 5 years ago.

Since then we bought a new van and EcoQuest makes the payments. We have a new, big beautiful house to park the van in front of. Yes, we achieved our dreams. Against all odds we went from living below the poverty level in a terrible place to a fantastic suburb of Jacksonville, FL, in a huge home with a giant yard for the kids to play in. Our life is much different now with world-class vacations compliments of EcoQuest and a business we love. We’re debt free and we’re doing what we want, when we want. No more working nights! As a matter of fact, I only work 20 hours a week enjoying and loving life!

This is how Bob Colasanti feels...

How would you like to feel the same way?