Reid Zeising: The Courage to Surrender, Recover, and Rebuild

Reid Zeising is an entrepreneur, healthcare executive, and founder of Cherokee Funding and Gain Servicing, which now operate together as Gain, an AI-powered healthcare-finance and servicing platform that helps injured people access medical care when they may not be able to pay up front. Born in Detroit and raised internationally in Adelaide, Australia, and Tokyo, Reid developed an early sense that the world was both accessible and full of possibility, eventually studying international economics at the University of Michigan before building a career in investment banking, hedge funds, and entrepreneurship. His professional rise was dramatic, but so was his fall: an aggressive, highly leveraged acquisition collided with the 2008 financial crisis, leaving Reid personally facing roughly $22 million in contingent liabilities. In January 2009, amid that collapse and a growing recognition that alcohol, ego, and self-reliance were destroying his life, Reid walked into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and began a journey of recovery, accountability, faith, and service that would fundamentally reshape both his life and his leadership. Over the next six years, he repaid every creditor, rebuilt his life, and gradually exchanged what he describes as a self-centered, zero-sum approach to success for one rooted in honesty, abundance, humility, and doing “the next right thing.” Today, Reid leads Gain, a company serving healthcare providers and injured patients across all 50 states, and has been recognized as a Georgia Titan 100 in both 2025 and 2026. In this unusually candid episode of Courageous Crossroads, Reid reflects on failure, addiction, financial collapse, broken relationships, recovery, faith, and the danger of allowing ego to reclaim control. His story leads to a compelling understanding of courage: not the absence of fear, but the willingness to move forward when the outcome is uncertain—to ask for help, surrender the illusion of control, accept the possibility of failure, and take the next right step. As Reid puts it, “Fear and faith are both beliefs in the unknown,” and his encouragement to anyone standing at a crossroads is equally straightforward: be smart, be measured, pray, and then “just do it.”

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Full Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Courageous by Crossroads Apologetics, a look into what motivates us to step out in courage and the everyday bravery of men and women like you. In each episode, we hear a personal story of bravery centered around this question What’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done? And now your host, founder of Crossroads Apologetics, Jeff Johnson.

JEFF JOHNSON: Hey everybody, this is Jeff. Welcome back to another edition of the Courageous Crossroads Podcast, where we ask that question What’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done? Or do we? Or do we? This might be the one interview where I don’t ask that question because this is such a beautiful excursion into the life and times of my next guest, Reed Zising. What a beautiful interview. Reed graced me so much by being so transparent and so upfront about amazing life experiences and what he really values in life around the topic of courage for sure, but it touches on so much else. I just think you’re gonna get so much encouragement and so much wisdom out of this interview. You know, when somebody cares enough to really open up and share about things that they’ve dealt with in their life and experiences that they’ve had, and they do it in, like I say, such a transparent way, and you can’t help but be enriched and encouraged by that. The truth, I’ve heard it said before, is the most powerful thing in the universe. And this interview is nothing if not truth, and you’re absolutely gonna love my next guest, Reed’s Icing. So without further ado, here he is. So I am over the moon excited about introducing my friend Reed’s Icing this morning. Am I pronouncing that correctly? Sizing, Zising, Sizing, Sizing, you got it, sizing. What’s the root of that?

REID ZEISING: It’s German, and so if you really did it, it’s sizing, right? But in English, we just say sizing almost as if the size of your shoe.

JEFF JOHNSON: Okay, like the Z isn’t even there.

REID ZEISING: Yeah, the Z is an S, the S is a Z.

JEFF JOHNSON: Well, Reed, when did we we met each other long time ago, didn’t we? Correct. Correct. And this was through the cre the young presidents organization and all of that kind of stuff. So it’s fun when you come full circle with people and you come you come back around. And um I’ve been chasing after Reed for a while to get you on the podcast to answer the question, what’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done? And I finally nailed you down because you’re a busy man. Um so thank you, Reed, for coming on.

REID ZEISING: Thanks, Jeff.

JEFF JOHNSON: So we’re gonna we’re gonna approach this topic of courage. But the thing that I’m thinking about with you, Reed, because you’ve got such an amazing background, and you can just you share whatever you want to share while you introduce yourself to the listeners here. But one of my favorite quotes is, and I can’t attribute it because there’s too many people that have said it and repeated it, but one of my favorite quotes is if you want somebody to know the truth, you tell them the truth. But if you want somebody to love the truth, you tell them a story. And so I endeavor to invite people that have stories to tell. And read, you’re that kind of person to me. You know, you’ve got a story, and so I think people are gonna love the truth that you have to share in your testimony because of the story of who you are. So would you take us wherever you want to take us? But I would like to put you in context with the audience who is read sizing.

REID ZEISING: Well, Jeff, thanks. Um, I don’t have a pre-packaged story, and I haven’t done this very much. So I’m just gonna share with you a couple things. So today I run a healthcare organization that’s focused on providing care for people in need, right? So it’s a real mission-driven business. But how I got there is I’m gonna talk out of both sides of my mouth. Some of it’s incredibly blessed and incredibly, I mean, just amazing opportunities that took no courage, that were put on my plate, that allowed me to experience life in the grandest form that I can imagine. And there were some pretty tough interludes along the way, mostly tough interludes that I caused. Mostly if I look at the the you know, courageous things that I had to do, which is something that you hit on so well with so many people, the courage was needed because of the things that I’d screwed up. So, really, there’s there’s this overall like overriding, juxtaposed journey that I’ve had in life between gifts that I’ve consistently tried to screw up, and then perhaps needed a little courage to bail myself out. So, my overriding lesson in life that I want to share, and and brutal honesty is something that I live with. I live with it every day. I am not smart enough to not tell the truth anymore. It got me into too much trouble, it got me into too many situations. And when I say I’m not smart enough, I’m just not smart enough to remember all the lies and who I’ve told what to, and it just gets exhausting. So I don’t have any interest in that. So I’m gonna just back up and kind of run through a life that has given me so many opportunities, some of which I’ve taken advantage of and some of which I’ve screwed up. I’m born in Detroit, I’ve got a younger sister, I am uh two kids of parents who are high school sweethearts in Detroit, who come from absolutely nothing. Both are the first to be college educated in their entire extended families. They have no guidance, they have no mentors. And my dad has the wonderful opportunity because of a best friend’s mother who is a counselor who insists that he go to college, had no guidance from his father, his mother had passed away, had no guidance from his father, insists that he take some aptitude tests. And it tells him he should go into this new industry called advertising. And he jumps in and says, okay, and he goes to Wayne State University, which is a Detroit City school. My mom goes to the University of Michigan, and he jumps into advertising. And what happens there is just a quick story because he’s so iconic. What year is this? Early late 60s is when he goes into advertising and graduates from college.

JEFF JOHNSON: Okay.

REID ZEISING: And this is civil rights times in Detroit. These are riots going on. It’s a very interesting time. He goes into a new industry, of course, for the auto industry, right? Because he’s in Detroit. And in the early 70s, he works for Jay Walter Thompson. He works with a guy named Lee Ayacoka, who’s at Ford. He does some really cool stuff. Iacoca gets the boot. Chrysler goes under in the early 70s. Iacoca gets put in charge. US government, it’s the largest bailout until TARP decades later, hires Young and Rubicam to launch a Japanese joint venture in Australia because the demographics are the same. And if it works, they’re going to bring it to the US. And if it doesn’t, they’re just going to bury everybody involved in the project and say it never happened. And my dad says, that sounds like a great project. And Iacoka says, You’re the guy. And he sends, I’m seven, my sister’s five. My dad says, Great. My dad hasn’t been overseas. My dad hasn’t been in an airplane.

JEFF JOHNSON: Wow.

REID ZEISING: We land in Adelaide, Australia, and it is absolutely wonderful. There are more sheep than people. There are wide open spaces. There are ranches that are acres beyond acres that I couldn’t even imagine.

JEFF JOHNSON: Adelaide, so that’s down south.

REID ZEISING: Yes, capital of South Australia. They wanted, they did not want high profile. They did not want this project going on in Sydney or Melbourne. And it was really under the radar. And so, by the way, the breakthrough commercial, which became famous, won a Clio, imports the products. Chrysler pays off its debts in three years instead of never. Iacoca becomes an icon. My dad gets all sorts of credit for the project. And that’s what ultimately takes us after Australia to Tokyo. But I’m just going to, for a second, two things that my father did that benefited me so amazingly that didn’t require any courage. And I know that’s not what you’re asking, but I just want to tell the story that so many of my experiences are gifts. And gifts that I had to have my eyes open for, gifts that I had to participate in, but gifts that were given to me. And a couple of those things, the my experience in Adelaide initially was very violent. And I had been highly trained from an age of five because I was hyperactive. My mom didn’t want to put me on Ritalin. And so they had me in dojos and wrestling rooms since the age of five. So I was I was kind of already pretty well trained when I was seven, very young. And Australian at public school wanted to fight me every day.

JEFF JOHNSON: What martial arts?

REID ZEISING: Judo and Taekwondo.

JEFF JOHNSON: Judo. Judo. Wow.

REID ZEISING: And so I fought my way out, and eventually they find somebody bigger and better and badder and so on. And so then I start showing up at home with bruises, and my parents are like, what the heck’s going on? And that got me moved to a British boarding school. And British boarding school was called Scotch College, absolutely magnificent. And what it exposed me to were the gifts. My parents didn’t have any money. We were living as expats, so our lifestyle was wonderful. But I was simply exposed to families and people that had been successful and were doing interesting things and were focused on education. And I was like, wow, these people aren’t actually any different than me. Like they just have different experiences, but like they’re not wired differently because they have things or have achieved things. Like it wasn’t fundamentally a different person. And the second thing that my father did was he negotiated, and this is brilliant. He told me he has never negotiated a salary in a contract in his life. He took whatever he was offered. But what he did negotiate was a home leave every summer that had no route restriction. And so think about that. My summer of when I’m eight, we go Adelaide to Perth, Perth to Mauritius, Mauritius to uh Johannesburg, Johannesburg to Pretoria, Pretoria to Cape Town, Cape Town to Athens, Athens to Hedra, Hedra to London, London to New York, New York to Detroit. And so my point is only that before I was 16, when you fast forward that through my experience in Tokyo, before I was 16, I’d been to every continent except Antarctica. And so the world keeps shrinking. Wow. Right? The world keeps shrinking. And what I got was culturally curious because everywhere that I went, throughout Asia and throughout Africa and throughout various, various continents, I realized we looked different, but we were fundamentally the same. It was our cultures that were different. So I became very culturally curious, but very accepting of people and our common needs. And so my point is I had some unfortunate violence that influenced me negatively early on. We moved to Tokyo. I have some more violence that occurs that really gets me kind of off track. I don’t tell anybody about a lot of it. And oh, by the way, let’s also add that Tokyo doesn’t have a drinking age. So you want to start kind of covering up some insecurities or some issues. Like that’s a prime place to do it. So that doesn’t really help my experiences. But I go to a magnificent high school, international, a third Japanese, a third international, a third American. Again, all of these families and parents running huge corporations for multi, multi, multi-country regions and incredibly successful and focused on education. And again, it was like they’re no different than me. And so I go to the University of Michigan. Ironically, this is kind of funny because in those days you could claim a state of residency. And so my parents claimed Michigan because when I said, oh, I’d like to go see Stanford or I’d like to go see Northwestern or the University of Chicago, like they laughed at me because they didn’t have money, but they lived an expat lifestyle, right? They didn’t come from anything. They didn’t have any savings. And our kind of lifestyle was paid for, but they didn’t have the ability to send me to school in California or send me to school. They just said you can go to any state school in Michigan.

JEFF JOHNSON: Well, let me ask a question about that. So they you’ve your dad has been sent to Australia, Dadelaid. You’ve experienced some bullying and some violence and all that kind of stuff there. And then you did a circuitous travel back to Tokyo to live in Tokyo for a while. But there’s not a there’s not a tremendous, it sounds like your your father was very successful with the business, but there wasn’t a financial correct.

REID ZEISING: It was in those days, like he got his salary and took the salary, and that was all good. And he became a very senior executive, but he spent that he didn’t have financial guidance. Okay, he didn’t have a mentor, and so he loved experiences. So he would do things and experience things, and I lived a life full of experiences, yeah, but I didn’t live a life I don’t think he knew, and it’s not his fault. I don’t think he’s a great human being. I don’t think he knew what a 529 plan was if they existed in those days.

JEFF JOHNSON: Yeah, right.

REID ZEISING: So I got to go, I could go to any school that I wanted as long as it was in Michigan. And so I applied to one school. And I got in. And my point is I get juxtaposed back and forth between success and failure in university. I am doing really well and find a way to screw it up, and doing really well and find a way to screw it up. And I work my way to Wall Street as an analyst, and I love it, and I love the grind. I just want to put my head down and you’re modeling out businesses and you’re seeing deals get done, and you’re getting experience in multiple industries, and it is just an education on steroids. And I am in love with it. And it’s 9:30 at night in New York, and I walk around the corner after probably a year of being there as an analyst, and there’s a guy in New York that ultimately I report to, but there’s lots of layers in between me and him, and a guy who’s running their office in Paris. And I’m just walking to the bathroom and he says, Take somebody like Reed, because he can be more than your assistant. And he says, No, no, no, Reed’s doing too well here. He wouldn’t want to go. And I just stopped and I said, Go where? He said, We’re opening an office in London. I said, I’ll go. Because again, world’s a very small place. I’d go anywhere. I didn’t have any hesitation ever going anywhere. And a week later, I was living in London with a letter that said, Set up an office, figure it out. And so I got not only to be an analyst, but I got to find real estate and get work permits and structure the way that those were to be done. And I did a reverse triangular merger with a company that was off the shelf in the UK, that was clean, like that I could got us five-year work papers. Like, so I had some analytical capabilities that allowed me to structure things and do things that otherwise I might not have known. But I had to find my boss a driver. I had to find a place to live, I had to find telephone and computer equipment and get it all set up. And, you know, you’re not used to how those things are done. So you’re told no a lot. And I you I learned to never accept no. I just figured out how to do this stuff, and it was the greatest experience ever. And my boss was an absolute maniac. He believed in rhinoceros success. Literally run through that wall. It doesn’t matter, just run through that wall. And he would yell and scream and and and berate and so on and so forth. Not the greatest example, but absolutely fine for me. I was very disciplined. Japan had given me that discipline. I love Japan. I was there all of junior high and high school. It was absolutely phenomenal. So responding to that, that today people talk about as abusive and so on and so forth, I am not going to go there. It is absolutely fine. I got the shit beat out of me, excuse my language, often and regularly, uh, you know, verbally, and I could take it and I could deliver. And I’ll tell one quick story. Ultimately, my um customer interaction, going from kind of analysts to kind of bringing in deals and doing things, he had screamed so loud that he imploded his wisdom teeth. And yes, he was so stressed and so loud and so screaming, and I won’t get, I won’t give everybody his name, uh, that he imploded his wisdom teeth. And this was when I’d been working on a deal for two or three months in the telecom space. We had the buyer, potential buyers lined up in the UK or lead investors. It fit their profile. They’d been working on it. I’ve been working on the model, they’d been doing due diligence. We’d been doing all of this. We’d had the management, we’re gonna have the management meetings, and we were doing the presentations. And he was all ready to go, and he comes home having impacted wisdom teeth taken out, and his face is as large as a pumpkin, and he says, can’t cancel those meetings. And I said, I’m not canceling those meetings. They’ve been we’ve been working on this for months. This is like the investment committee at these four firms, they’re all potential lead investors, including the largest kind of early stage investor in telecom at the time in the entire UK. And we’re not doing it. And he screams at me so loud. If you walk out, I said, I’ll just do the presentations. It’s okay. I’ve been communicating, I know everybody. I mean, this was your show, it still is your show. It doesn’t matter, it all goes to you anyway. I just I don’t have any like client compensation in my, I’m just uh, you know, now an associate. And he screams at me as I uh am preparing like the presentations that were prepared for him and putting them together. And he says, if you walk out that door, you’re fired. And I walk out the door with the presentations and he screams, uh, don’t come back. You hear me, you’re fired. And I get in the car, his driver’s waiting for me, having heard all of that. He’s like, Are you okay? I’m like, I’m fine, let’s go do this. These four presentations go incredibly well. And I come back and I open up the door, and he screams all sorts of profanity, tells me that I was fired, et cetera, et cetera. And I just open my briefcase and I toss out onto the desk a signed term sheet from a lead investor for the deal. And I got unfired. Of course you did. So I’m not sure if any of that was courageous, uh, but it was uh all about kind of uh perseverance and one foot in front of the other, etc. etc. I’ll fast forward a little bit. Ironically, the guy in Paris who had told him to hire me to open the office in London, switches firms to another investment bank in Paris, offers to hire me. I go. I spend the next two years running around Europe in Switzerland, Germany, the Ben Lux countries. And then I end up up in Scandinavia. I am on the road all the time. I am absolutely loving life. I am just doing, I’m working on deals and I’m talking to institutional buyers. I’m working on US deals, I’m talking to institutional buyers. I am absolutely in love with my life. It is so much fun, and there is no hardship in that, right? Other than me trying to make it hard, because I am burning it at both ends and I am running hard. And so that gift leads to lots of business and lots of customers, and that gets me recruited by an investment bank in Atlanta, just at a time in which I want to find a home. Because when you’re overseas for that many years, what happens is you can live an expat life. It’s very transient, it’s very wonderful. It’s what I grew up doing, but doesn’t have deep roots. People are coming in and out of cities all the time. I could have married or found a partner in one of those countries and become Swedish or Swiss or German, right? Which is a very different choice. Or I had to return to the US and find a home. And the timing was absolutely perfect. And I came uh to Atlanta, absolutely loved it. It was an incredible gift. The investment bank that I worked for was absolutely wonderful. And I went back and forth to Europe two weeks, every two weeks for the next eight years. Wow. Every two weeks. I lived on European time. I was in the office every day at four o’clock in the morning, which was already late in Europe, first year at three, after that at four, at uh four, which was 10 a.m. on continental Europe, and for most of the year. And I went back and forth. I absolutely loved it. It was the time of my life, but I was an egocentric jerk. And I was so self-serving. I would pump my fist in the air walking across the trading floor when we had closed big deals and they were about to trade and so on and so forth. I would literally scream, T H E K I D, the kid, the kid, the kid.

JEFF JOHNSON: And then you’re that guy.

REID ZEISING: What an asshole. Like, come on. Like, I am so full of self. It is pathetic. And it leads to lots of good things and lots of alienation of people because I have no grace. I have no grace. I don’t know how to reach down and bring people along with me. I’m using people along the way. I’m so self-serving that if it doesn’t serve me, I’m not interested. Right? It is just disgusting. But I don’t know that. And when the firm finally, because I am so self-serving, is like, we are not interested in your business growing anymore. You are not the kind of team player that we want. And they didn’t say that in so many words because they were a long-established investment bank and a white shoe firm that just kind of stopped supporting you. And I got the message two years before I left. And I could feel that isolation. But my ego wasn’t conscious enough to change. So I jump out into the world, I launch a hedge fund in the statistics arbitrage world. If you want to put me in a box, I’m a quant. And that goes well. I have the fortune of taking a company public. That’s not a great public company performance, but from zero to public was beneficial. That gives me some freedom. Like my ego does not need freedom. My ego needs a guardrail. And so I get these freedoms. And now what do I want to do? I want to experience a hostile takeover, right? That’s the perfect thing for an egomaniac with investment banking experience. Let me become an activist shareholder so that my ridiculous ego can tell you what you should be doing. And I do that. And it takes me two years to kind of wrestle control of this company. And I take the public company private. And at the signing kind of ceremony, right, with a different pen at every stage, at the Jones Day offices with a 70-person, beautiful, beautiful solid wood conference table and each station signing new documents and all the pomped and circumstance. I looked around that room. There wasn’t a single person in that room that I hadn’t paid. Oh sure, in a zero-sum game world, because if I win, you have to lose. I’d done lots of that along the way. And that was probably the loneliest day of my life. And it should have told me what was going to happen. Because what happened two years later in the biggest downturn and greatest recession that we’ve experienced since the Great Depression of the 30s is I got my ass handed to me. And you know why? Because my ego said this company’s never had negative same store sales, so my downside deviation in modeling is going to model a worst-case scenario of minus 5%. And the Great Recession delivered minus 13. And I had over-levered that business, and franchisees during the good times had over-levered themselves. So I got the double whammy in a made-to-order food business that was now having people buy 99 cent meals. Our costs were higher than that. We couldn’t deliver in that environment. And our same source sales, as I said, dropped 13%, and our franchisees were over-levered, and some of those dropped even more on build-to-suits that they had large fixed costs. So they were upside down and stopped paying royalties. So the double whammy turned that from an eight-figure equity number to $22 million in contingent liabilities hanging around my neck.

JEFF JOHNSON: It was all yours.

REID ZEISING: All me. Here you go, bud. Now I had the corporate assets that were tied to it, and I was guaranteeing some of it, and others were contingent, and so on and so forth. Adds up to 22 million bucks that I’m responsible for taking care of.

JEFF JOHNSON: Yeah.

REID ZEISING: And I have no idea what I’m going to do. And everybody says, or many people said, you know what, bankruptcy, that’s what it’s for. And something told me I had met a guy on a celebratory retreat a year before. It was a year delayed. I told you it was two years later. So a year delayed after the close of the deal, the bankers and the lawyers and so on and so forth organized a trip out to Bandon Dunes. And I get into a car in Portland, and a guy who I don’t know, who’s a banker at Bank of America, who I had not worked with on this transaction, but was invited because there were lots of people that were kind of invited, in addition to our deal team. And somehow I’m drawn to him. And I don’t know what it is, but we have a five-hour car ride. And I know everybody else on the trip almost, except the guy. And I’m sitting in the front seat. And I start asking him what he does, and so on and so forth. And I don’t know what it is, but somehow it comes up that he doesn’t drink and he’s been in recovery for over a decade. And he’s an extremely successful banker at Bank of America. And Bank of America had made that opportunity possible and had stayed with him as he went through his recovery and his journey. And he was now there to pay it forward. I said, you know what, that sounds like something that I need. He said, Well, you have my contact information. I’m on those emails. If you ever want to reach out, you know, feel free. Now, of course, I go on with my self-serving, egotistical. I’m running this business. I think I’m my, you know, nothing stinks, etc., etc. Great recession hits in the fall of 08. This, by the way, was May of 2008. And that hits, you know, Lehman goes under, Bear goes under, hedge fund unwinds because we were running Stat Arb and Bernie Madoff was a fraud, and that caused all sorts of redemptions, even though we had never had a down year. And everything starts to unwind, and I’m stuck with $22 million in contingent liabilities. And I went looking, I said, I got to stop, stop using, stop drinking, clean up my life, do something. There’s something else out there. It’s bigger than me. I don’t know what it is. I’ve always been searching and I got to figure this out. And I was just beaten down. And oh, by the way, I had three kids under the age of six. And uh it was time that something had to change. And so I don’t know if that takes courage, but it’s certainly the most beneficial thing that’s ever happened in my life. And that was that on uh January 10th of 2009, I looked up online because I was shaking, because I had stopped drinking a couple days before, and I was starting to shake and sweat. And I looked up online to find a meeting because I remember that guy had told me about this, and I didn’t really know what it was. And somebody had said, Oh, look for the smokers, and I went to this church and I looked around. I was about to leave, and I saw these two guys smoking. I walked up to them and they said, Hey, you looking for a meeting? I said, Yep. And I walked in and I was a mess and I didn’t know what was going on and I didn’t know what the program was. And a guy followed me out after that meeting, and he said, Hey, hey, hey, can I get your contact information? Do you have a card? And I said, Yeah. He said, Listen, man, I don’t want anything from you. I just want to make sure you’re okay. He’s like, Do you eat sweets? And I was like, No. And he said, Who the hell are you kidding? I said, What do you mean? He said, You know how much sugar you’ve given up? Go to the store, get some chocolate and orange juice, put it in your refrigerator, it’ll get you through the first couple weeks. And that was 17 years and nine months ago. And through that process, in those first six years, I called that guy that I was in the car with in May from Portland to Bandon, and he became my first sponsor. And I hit my knees every morning and every night, and he was militant. And he told me every single day I had to call him every single day. I had to go to meetings when I was in town, and then on the road, you can find meetings. And I put my head down and I knocked off every single liability. And six years later, every person I was completely wiped out and every single person was paid off. Wow. And I didn’t think there was a chance in hell. And the only thing that did that, and I don’t want to put anybody off by religious conversation. I do not care what your higher power is. But if you don’t understand that there is a power bigger than you, then you don’t get it. So whatever that is, that can be a collective group, that can be anything. I am not telling you what your God is. I am telling you that there is a higher power out there that is bigger than us. And make it whatever you want. And when I gave my life up to that and ask for his will and his guidance in everything that I did, it’s still my job. I gotta put my next foot forward. I gotta do the next right thing. And let me tell you, Jeff, that is not a clean path that is finished at year six when I pay everybody off, and now it all goes off to the races. That is actually not what happened because my ego wouldn’t let that happen. Why? Because I am that ego maniacal that for six years I knew every day that the gifts that I had received from the work that I was doing were due to God. And somewhere around six years and one month, my ego took over. And I believed that I had done those things. And I stopped calling my sponsor. And when I called him after two weeks, he said, What the heck are you doing? I told you the deal. I said, Dude, you’re really uptight. This is the same guy I’ve talked to every day for six years that I’m now telling is uptight. When everything he told me to do and everything he guided me through worked, and I have the gall to tell him he’s uptight. He said, I told you how this works. And I told you it’s a sneaky disease. And I told you, if you don’t continue it, it’s not 10, 11, 12, paying it forward, hitting your knees, making amends, cleaning your slate, going back and being of service to others and getting out of your own way is the key to maintaining this. And I literally said, Don’t you know what I’ve done? Right? As if somehow paying off all of that, somehow getting out of that, somehow being a phoenix to some extent and being allowed to rebuild and the gift that my children had never seen me a mess, emotionally a mess, but not as a result of substances or alcohol. Yeah. And my ego took over and I bumped along, Jeff. And I bumped along and I bumped along and I bumped along. And of course, things start coming unwound. Because I again believe that I’m the puppeteer, that I’m in control, that if you will only do what I would like, things will work out just fine. And it does not work that way. And so four years ago, I know that this is coming to an end. I know that things are going to get ugly. Business has gone great. I’ve started a new business. All of that’s fine. It’s bumping along, it’s heading in the right direction. But I am morally bankrupt. And I am lying. And I am cheating. And I am not doing the next right thing. And I know that. This is Belushi in Animal House with the angel on one side and the devil on the other side. Do it, don’t do it. Do it, don’t do it, do it, don’t do it.

JEFF JOHNSON: Yeah.

REID ZEISING: And I am juxtaposed, and I am having the itty bitty shitty committee in my head talking to me all the time, telling me things that are not good. And I know that. And I reach out to a guy who has 30 plus years at the time, 35 years at the time, and I know him, and I know that he’s rock solid, and I know that he’s taken lots of guys through the steps who have kind of already been sober for a while. And I said, Will you please sponsor me? And he said, Fuck you, go to meetings. And I I was like, What? You mean I can’t control how I’m gonna be sponsored? You mean you won’t do what I he said, go to meetings. And now, in fairness, he didn’t abandon me. He actually introduced me to four really solid meetings here in Atlanta and encouraged me. He introduced me to some guys in those meetings. And I started working. And I went through it again and again and again and again, and I kept working and I kept working. But I asked him the next quarter, same answer. I asked him the next quarter, same answer. I asked him the fourth quarter. This is a year into going back to meetings. And he said, I’ll see you after the awakening group Saturday morning at 10:30. We’ll start working. He rejected me for an entire year, but he got me back into the habit of going to meetings, hitting my knees in the morning, hitting my knees at night, trying to do the next right thing. But on my own, you’re not gonna do it. You gotta have a sponsor, you gotta be doing this, you gotta be working the program. And so these last three years, I destroyed a lot of things again. I destroyed um the cohesion of my family, and I am deeply sorry for that. I’ve made amends with my ex-wife and my children, and they are incredibly gracious. Um, those relationships have been rebuilt only because of God. And I have simply gone back to the first six years of every day and every week, hitting my knees morning and night, being grateful, expressing gratitude, sharing gratitude, doing that with a group of about 60 guys when I’m in Atlanta, probably seven to ten meetings a week. And it’s really part of paying it forward and it being available for others that has allowed me to maintain and benefit from all the gifts that are available. So I’m not sure how courageous it is to walk in the rooms when you’ve had your ass kicked. You know? I just don’t know that that qualifies as courageous. And I just don’t know when you’re that beaten and you realize that you’re such an asshole and that your ego does you no good when it’s run rampant. Is it really courageous to give up your will and your life to the care of God? I am beaten and I am exhausted. And I don’t know if that took courage or not. But it’s the single most beneficial thing that’s ever happened to me. And it’s happened a couple times. And my goal and my prayer today is not that I receive anything. I ask for I say the serenity prayer, the third step prayer, the seventh step prayer, and I ask for his guidance with my thoughts, my words, and my actions every day. If I pray for anything in particular, I also ask it only contingent on that it be his will. And I just pray more than anything that I never hit that six-year and one-month time period again where somehow I believe that the gifts that I’ve been given are due to me and not him.

JEFF JOHNSON: Reed, you have totally ruined my podcast. I love this. So this is why I said to you, can we just be best friends for the rest of our lives? Some people, you know, you get you get a background story, and it’s all to the glory of God. It’s all, you know, everybody’s story is unique, and it’s and it, and that’s what I love about this. But some people you’ll get a picture of their background, and it’ll be a it’ll be a beautiful panoramic kind of a painting, you know, nice stillness, and there’s a house and a business and a lake and a whatever, and this is how my life has gone, whatever. Your your experience, what you have been through in your life, is more like the Pollock painting. It’s all over the place and intense everywhere that you look. And the way that you presented that is such a blessing. I don’t, I I this might be the only courageous crossroads podcast where I don’t ask you the question, what’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done? Because I think it’s implied, and I think people just heard it, and it’s wonderful, and it’s and it’s beautiful. Let me ask you this is how is it similar or how is it different? The courage that it takes to defend yourself against a bully when you’re seven years old in Adelaide, versus the courage with $22 million in unfunded liabilities, holding your ass in your hands, walking into a recovery meeting for the first time. How are those similar or how are those different?

REID ZEISING: They’re both terrifying. You know, you’re just they’re both lonely. Like it’s incredibly lonely. My father had at that same time in Adelaide when I was kind of having lots of violent encounters. My father, who was a fish, by the way, and a lifeguard and an all-American swimmer and a national championship water polo player, and like just an incredible uh aqua athlete. He said to me at the beach, Do you see that riptide? And I said, Yeah, I see it. Is that what’s going through? You know, going that way, and everything else is coming in. He said, Yeah. He said, You understand when you get stuck in one of those, and I’m seven years old, I might have just turned eight, but I think I’m seven at the time. And he said, uh, when you encounter those, Mother Nature is bigger than we are, and it’s gonna take you out, and you have to let it suck you out until it subsides, then you have to swim perpendicular as far off as that is. Is that 100 meters, 200 meters, 300 meters? It can sometimes take you pretty far out, and then you’ll have to swim perpendicular and you’ll have to swim back in. And he said, and if you fight that, you’ll die. And he said, So go. Like that’s terrifying, right? Being alone in a ring, they would do these concrete tubes, the big underground construction tubes. They were working on a project, and so there were four of them kind of put into a ring formation, and we would crawl under the corner, and people would sit on the top to watch these fights after school. And you know, it’s a very lonely feeling. Now, I I’d been competing in wrestling and martial arts, and I was, you know, so I mean, I kind of had some, but that’s just a very lonely and terrifying feeling. When you are signing a document having just destroyed a bunch of people thinking that you won, it’s a very lonely feeling. When you’re wrapped with $22 million in contingent liabilities, it’s a very lonely feeling. Like I today, I’m headed tonight to Fiji to do some uh spear fishing. I love kind of underwater adventure. And you know, last week I was in Cabo shark diving, and like people say, Oh my God, that’s you know, aren’t you scared? And it’s so courageous. I’m like, absolutely not. That’s the most peaceful being in somebody else’s domain where I know that they’re more powerful than me. I know that I’m the visitor. I know and am truly humbled and thankful just to be there. So I’m starting to transform some of those experiences from terror to peace. And what I mean by that is that’s possible because when my ego is the only thing in control, which is what it was when I faced those liabilities, or when I faced those bullies, or when I faced any of the other situations, I had gotten myself into those situations. My ego had delivered me there. And in those times, it’s terrifying and it’s lonely. But in the times of shark diving last weekend, or in praying this morning, or in asking for guidance, or asking for help in growing the business if it’s his will, when I do that, not with me at the center, but with him in the lead, it’s actually very peaceful.

JEFF JOHNSON: What a testimony, Reed. What a test. Praise God. And I thank you. I’m so grateful for your transparency with all of this. It’s so valuable to me and everybody else who’s listening. Are your parents living?

REID ZEISING: Both. And I am so thankful. They’re 85 years old. My dad lives in Santa Fe. He loves Santa Fe because he loves to hike and he loves art. And both of those things are there in abundance. He hikes almost every day still today. Um, and my mother is remarried for 20 years. She lives uh in Griffin, Georgia, about an hour south of me here in Atlanta. I get to see her often. She and her husband, my stepfather. That’s another thing, just to tell people, it’s totally off-subject and requires no courage whatsoever. But I was in my 30s when I got a stepfather and I got two stepbrothers and a stepsister. And I’m just telling people, it was the most blessed and wonderful experience because I didn’t know if I’d ever have a relationship with those people, right? Stepbrothers and stepsisters, we all have families, we’re all young and doing stuff and in our 30s and so on and so forth. Are we really and we started getting together and all of our kids have grown up together? And that bond and that family, and my father’s included in those events, and everybody gets along, and we’ve all grown up together, and it’s created this big, wonderful, extended kind of step family, and it’s been an absolute gift. And so my mother and stepfather, very active, just celebrated, I think, their 20th anniversary three days ago. And that’s been an absolute gift. So both alive, both incredibly healthy. I am unbelievably thankful for that, that I get to talk to them multiple times a week, and I get to see them often, my father less so being in Santa Fe, but um both alive, both healthy, and I’m I’m incredibly thankful.

JEFF JOHNSON: And you’re a successful businessman now.

REID ZEISING: I’ve gotten lucky.

JEFF JOHNSON: You’re a very successful businessman, Reed. And entrepreneurial courage is something else that we can talk about maybe at part two or part seven of my interviews with Reed Zeizing for crying out loud. But you’re very successful. I’m curious what your parents make of your recovery and your success right now. What is their perspective on that?

REID ZEISING: So my mother is completely faith-centered. So faith is the biggest and most important part of her life. And her and I talking about this, she is proud that I have finally come around. And uh she’s encouraging of it, and she doesn’t make me feel bad for the mistakes that I’ve made. And she was there with me and for me in during all of it, and she never oh, she’d tell me when she disagreed, or she’d tell me when she thought I was screwing up, or she’d tell me. I mean, she’s very honest, but she always maintained that relationship and she never cut me off, no matter how bad the decisions were that I made. And my father actually is an atheist, and uh we have very interesting conversations about that, and it’s my hope that he finds God someday, but it’s not for me to um push that on him. And he is um wonderfully available to talk, and my kids visit him and he visits us, and you know, that is all just fantastic. And you know, the the quote unquote kind of success stuff, like again, that didn’t come, none of those accolades, right? We’re I don’t know, we’re a seven-time, eight-time Inc. 5000 company, we’re a you know, tag award winner, uh EY entrepreneur of the year for the you know Southeast, all this stuff, right? But my point isn’t, you know, the Cody Awards and the technology healthcare stuff, blah, blah, blah. Uh my point is that’s all team based. Some of those awards they just need an individual name for. And so mine gets put on it as CEO of the business. But like, that’s just not true. Like, it is just not true. I will tell you where self got me. Self got me to loneliness, self got me to abandonment, self got me to friendlessness. So the only thing, the only thing that gets me to awards, success. Success is today providing health care for millions of people that otherwise wouldn’t receive it at Gain Servicing, right? Gain provides care and access for those in need, regardless of payer source. So these are people that have been involved in accidents, there’s 30 million Americans who are uninsured, there’s 100 million Americans that have less than four weeks of savings in their bank account, who insurance companies are just trying to screw. And so all of this, like frivolous lawsuits and ambulance chasers, all that BS is billions of dollars in advertising money and lobbying money by the insurance world. And so my gift today is helping those in need. Right? My gift today is doing something more than selling widgets or pushing money, right? Or paper shuffling. My gift is the ability to serve others at scale. Right? That business has 150 teammates. It is quite large, it operates in all 50 states. We’re the largest servicer of these liens for healthcare providers in the country. We provide more financing to this industry than anybody else in the country. I am absolutely blessed. And the only reason that that happens is because of God and our team and none of those awards. And don’t tell me that this is some humble, like, oh, deflection of success and so on. Because remember, the minute that I claim credit for any of these, I’m done. We already know how that finishes. Right. We already know how that comes unwound. We already know what the next step is there. So that’s his will, and that’s our teammates, all focusing on a greater mission than ourselves.

JEFF JOHNSON: My best efforts are filthy rags. That’s what it says in the Bible. Another way to put that is my best efforts are $22 million in unfunded liabilities sitting on a cold folding chair in the basement of a church. Not even realizing that my life’s about to be saved. Wow. Can I can I can I make this about me for a second? Absolutely. Um so you and I share the recovery thing in common, which is why I’m so attracted to to you and your story resonates. It doesn’t just resonate with me, it resonates with people. You don’t have to be in recovery to hear this story and go, I can see the truth for what it is, you know. But I remember I got invited to do a wedding one time, and I’ve done a few of them, and what a blessing. And as a recovering person, I remember standing there with the Bible open in my hand, and here comes the the beautiful couple about to start their happily ever after, right? God’s about to do a miracle and take two people and turn them into one person right in front of me, and I’ve got a front row seat. And I did have a selfish thought when they walked up. I thought to myself, man, if they only knew. Now, here you are with this kind of experience. The only time you talked about using was when you talked about going to Tokyo, and it was, you know, you didn’t they didn’t have an age restriction for you. So that really lit the fire. But I mean, we get it. And then that’s how you kind of fueled that and took care of that. You even talked very poignantly about, you know, not doing that in front of your kids and stuff like that. So I understand, you know, over after a hard day, you know, you’re throwing some back and you’re just kind of, but it becomes the panacea, it becomes everything and it becomes the God, you know. So now I’m curious when you’re running that big company to the glory of God and helping out so many people, do you have that those moments where you think to yourself, man, if they only knew? And you’re pinching yourself.

REID ZEISING: Oh, imposter syndrome is is very real, and anybody that doesn’t experience it, I’d say, you know, is lying. I mean, if you you you know you’re the best, and you know you’re the smartest, and you’ve done. I mean, maybe there’s some folks, but like we all suffer from imposter syndrome, or I just speak for myself. I absolutely do. And even with God, like you understand that my only disbelief in gifts and miracles coming to me is because I know that God knows all. So if He knows all about what I have done, how could He possibly bless me?

JEFF JOHNSON: Right.

REID ZEISING: So imposter syndromes real, imposter syndrome’s real when you’re sitting with lenders or investment bankers, or you’re working on large transactions, or you’re testifying as a quote unquote expert in a variety of scenarios, right? If you are it eats through, and that is where my ego used to override, and I’d want to control everything and be the puppeteer of the play, and today I know it’s his play. And so I also don’t have a problem with saying I don’t know. Right? Today, whatever it is, when I don’t know, I would rather say it, and I would love to learn what I can do better or more. But if I don’t know, I don’t know, as opposed to being so insecure that I have to pretend. And so imposter syndrome’s real. And I’m far more comfortable with it today because I’m far more comfortable saying what I don’t know, doing what I do know, paying it forward, and simply doing the best I can and putting next foot forward.

JEFF JOHNSON: I got I got two final questions for you, Reed, and then I’ll leave you alone. Um, what would you say to somebody? I haven’t even asked you the question, what’s the most courageous thing? Because you’ve done a better job of answering that than if I asked you directly. All right. What so I’m curious what you would say to the person that is facing a courageous endeavor? How would you encourage somebody to take that next step, whatever that might be?

REID ZEISING: Yeah, so hesitancy and and and getting frozen by fear is the worst thing that can ever do. Literally, if it, whatever it is, fill in the blank, does not kill you, it will benefit you. I can’t say it’s all gonna go swimmingly exactly as you like it, and exactly as you thought. I mean, I just went spearfishing for giant tuna in uh off the coast of California. It’s a very hard endeavor, it’s very risky, there’s lots of stuff happening and going on. You have to be, and it was an epic fail. But my point is, I did it. I went 50 feet down, I, you know, I free dive, I sat there in a school of giant tuna, I tried to do the et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I did it. I was absolutely scared in the moment, but it’s wonderfully peaceful. And I would just say, doing it and failing, right? I failed the uh object of catching a spearing a 200 pound tuna and somehow reeling them in and braining them and so on and so forth. Like all of that, none of it happened, right? It all failed. That’s the worst thing that could happen. It just didn’t happen. Now, worst thing that could happen is, you know, I spear it in the tail, it runs with my line, it drags me, you know, 100 feet down, and I die, right? I mean, that I guess could have happened. But that didn’t. And my point is if it doesn’t kill you, it is gonna make you stronger, and you are certainly gonna learn from it. So just do it. Like Nike’s tagline is as good as it gets. Like, just do it. Be smart, be measured, take a deep breath, hit your knees, say a prayer, and do it. Just do it. You want to start that business, but you’re not like it’s the you know, the landmark education, folks, right? Which some people say is, you know, kind of cultish. And my point is they there’s a good message there, right? The woman who was a leader in that I did kind of years and years and years ago, said, Well, I’m just gonna wait because as soon as I graduate, you know, I have my degree and then I’ll be able to get the job that I want. And I’m just, but I when I get the job that I want, if I just wait and I can do two years and I’ll go to grad school, and then I’ll get the job that I really want, because if I just wait a little longer to save a little more money and then I can get married, and if we just wait a little longer to have a little more savings before we have kids, and I just wait, and if I just wait for, and I’m dead. Like, just do it. There’s never, there’s never a right time to get married. There’s never a right time to have a child. There’s never a right time to start a business. Oh, I need this and I need this. Yeah, you need a savings buffer, and you need to plan that that business will take longer and cost more so that you’re not just forced into bankruptcy on the verge of it succeeding, right? So you got to create some level of buffer. You don’t need comfort, you don’t need extravagance, you don’t need anything. You need what I mean by that bumper is so that you can eat. Can you have a roof over your head of some form? Can you clothe yourself and can you eat? If you can survive, go do it.

JEFF JOHNSON: Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. Okay. Last one. This comes straight from the Bible, my favorite book in the world. Romans chapter 11, verse 29 says, God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable. Which is a powerful phrase, and I believe it wholeheartedly, that God sent each and every one of us here with something to do, something, some amazing gift, something to express, something to get done. And it says it right there, God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable. So we can run away from it if we want to, but it’s irrevocable, it’s still there. So read, why did God send you here? Why did he unleash you on this world?

REID ZEISING: And Jeff, it is not what you want to hear, but I am gonna push back on that hard. I have no grandiose, God has not set me in motion for anything grandiose. And the minute that I think that I have already tried something grandiose led by ego, I am simply here to be his servant. I am gonna try and do the next right thing. I am gonna put one foot in front of the other, I am gonna pray every day. I’d like to, you know, continue to benefit lots and lots and lots of people who are in serious, serious need. But I am not claiming that grandiose goal as mine. If that is the goal that God chooses to use me as the puppet that I am for him, not the leader that is the grandiose goal setter who says that God has put me on this earth to do these things. Absolutely not. My ego got me in so much trouble, and I am reminded of that every time I have a conversation or a thought like this, that I could do this or I could do that, or I could change healthcare, or I could change the insurance industry, or I could do this, or I could lobby for that, or I could legislate for that, or I could, I could, I could disaster. That is nothing short of disastrous for me. And so I am simply hit my knees this morning, we’ll do it again this afternoon. I’m on a plane this evening, I’m going to Fiji to the middle of nowhere, steer fish, and I will eat what I kill for 10 days. And if I don’t kill, I won’t eat. And I am excited about that, and I will pray every day to ask God what it is that He would like me to do. And if I pray for anything in particular that has anything to do with me, I will put the caveat only that if it is His will. So I apologize in answer to your question. I will not be the grandiose carrier of any torch. I will simply be the servant of something that I am guided towards.

JEFF JOHNSON: Thank you for that beautiful answer, Reed. And I’d like to have it on tape as we wrap up the interview. We do get to be best friends now forever, right?

REID ZEISING: We do.

JEFF JOHNSON: Okay. Reed sizing. Wow, what a story and what a man of great courage, and somebody that blesses me, and I know blesses all of you too. Thank you so much for being our guest today.

REID ZEISING: Thanks, Jeff.

ANNOUNCER: Thank you for joining us today on Courageous. If you’d like to hear more about the work and ministry being done at Crossroads Apologetics, please visit our home on the web at Crossroads Apologetics.org. Would you or someone you know like to be featured on Courageous? Send us an email at info at crossroadsapologetics.com or info@crossroadsapologetics.org, telling us about the most courageous thing you’ve ever done.