Like every house, every Realtor has a history. Here’s my cross-continental story of love, travel, floor-scrubbing, and Rwandan coffee farmers. (Note: This is not required reading, but you may get a kick out of it.)
I was born in the tiny village of Grappenhall in northwest England. My parents were married in the local church, which dates back to the Anglo-Saxon era. Fun fact: A carving in the church’s wall inspired Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.
My dad was an apprentice printer, working his way up through the family business eventually landing work with Manchester United and even printing the official poster for the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana. Mum started work as a radiographer (i.e., someone who processes X-rays and other medical images). She was also the first ever “Miss Kodak UK” (the photos are hilarious) and ultimately the best stay-at-home parent a boy could hope for. Their hard work and love of what they did inspired a strong work ethic in me.
I spent my formative years kicking around Manchester, and after upper (high) school split my time between Plymouth, England, and Northern Spain, earning degrees in European Political Studies and Foreign Languages. I moved to the U.S. at 22 (in 1999) and went to work for a Boston-based company that planned educational tours of Europe for American high schoolers.
It was a sales job (telesales, at that), and it quickly immersed me in the value of building strong, trustworthy relationships with clients. I loved it. After a year “on the phones” I was rewarded with a chance to lead a group through Spain, and later I earned a promotion to Regional Sales Manager for the Southeast office in Atlanta. During my time with the company, I led European tours for hundreds of school kids and organized tours for thousands more, all over the world.
It was also in Boston that I met Jessica, the woman who would become my wife and mother to our three boys. But I’m skipping ahead.
Seven years after arriving in the US, now working in Atlanta and running the Southeast office for the student travel company I started to think about studying for my real estate license. My family in the UK had developed a few properties, and I wanted to do the same. However, life had other plans for me first. I made friends with a local church pastor with close ties to Rwanda. He had the lofty goal of wanting to reunite the war-torn rural Rwanda villages using coffee. That’s simplifying a bit, but the idea was to teach Rwandan farmers how to grow specialty-grade coffee, ship the beans to the States, and stir up a grassroots marketing campaign to get Americans to “Drink Coffee. Do Good.”
He envisioned members of the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups working side by side in the fields, tilling the soil and picking coffee cherries in exchange for a proper, living wage. Healing through their work. Though I felt out of my league, the project spoke to me. I signed on to help out for a few months while I was to attend real estate school.
He called the enterprise the Land of a Thousand Hills. Weeks of helping turned into months, months into 7 years. We went from roasting 50 pounds of coffee a week to a full-blown, multi-million-dollar operation that was changing the lives of thousands of Rwandans.
Still working in Atlanta, I traveled across Rwanda, the U.S., and eventually Haiti to grow the project. Then I was invited to speak at several nonprofit organizations in Colorado, Jessica and I fell in love with the foothills. We were ready for the next chapter in our lives, and in 2011 we loaded up the moving trucks along with two baby boys and two big puppies and headed west.
During this time, I decided to end my work on the Rwandan effort and settle into a family-centered phase of life. A dear friend, a local doctor, coincidentally suggested I look into real estate. “I’ve got a friend who sells homes,” he said. "He’s a navigator, helping people through the twists and turns. With all your years and adventures working with people, you’d be perfect.”
Before I even had a chance to consider (it seemed), Jessica had enrolled me in real estate school 7 years after it had first crossed my mind. Over the next several months I hit the books, studied hard, and passed my tests. It was time to move from the academic to the real brick-and-mortar world of residential real estate.
Knowing me, a real estate rookie and greener than a field of cabbages, I was lucky to have a pair of fellow preschool parents give me my first shot. I became a regular Cinderella. I cleaned. I scrubbed floors and painted walls. I borrowed pieces from my own home to complete the staging, staying up until the early hours to fit the house to perfection for the showings.
And readers, we closed and I had learned so much! And by that time the sellers had told all their friends and acquaintances about the Realtor that would stop at nothing to sell their home.
That was 2012 (a lifetime ago). In my first year, I was named the Fort Collins Board of National Association of REALTORS® "Rookie of the Year", winning multiple additional awards along the way and ranking in the top 10 National Association of REALTORS® in the state for both Coldwell Banker and RE/MAX Alliance. In 2024 I moved to Grey Rock Realty, a boutique brokerage, hyper-focused on Northern Colorado and run by my friend Ryan Jenkins. Ryan and I believe in the importance of embracing video and social media in real estate, we are a great match. To learn more, just click on my
Video Vlog or any of my social media links.
That’s the end, in all its glory. Whether you’re buying or selling, I'd be delighted to meet with you and learn your story. – Robert
