Behind the Dream: Tracey Walker’s Real Story of Losing Everything Twice

You did everything the traditional path told you to do. Went to school. Earned the degree. Took the corporate job. And you still found yourself sitting at your desk at seven in the morning, watching someone with less experience and more family connections get the promotion you actually earned.

Tracey Walker tells that story first, before any of the mindset teaching, because it’s the honest starting point. Not a highlight reel. A master’s degree in business, a corporate job she hated, and a system that promoted people based on who they knew instead of what they produced.

As someone who’s built something real only to watch it come apart, you already recognize the shape of what happens next in this story. This session inside the Unstoppable Mastermind is Tracey Walker’s own account of losing everything twice and rebuilding it differently the second time, and it’s worth hearing in full because the lesson only makes sense once you know what it cost her to learn it.

What actually changes when you shift who you’re serving?

After being laid off, Tracey Walker started a real estate investment company, working the distressed-property side of the business, negotiating short sales and flipping smaller homes. The work was constant and the margins were thin, and worse than thin, they were fragile. A homeowner staring down foreclosure would agree to a deal, then walk away the moment someone else offered a little more, because the whole decision hinged on a small amount of money that felt enormous to them in the moment.

The shift that changed everything wasn’t a new skill. It was the same process, the same negotiating, the same paperwork, aimed at a different kind of homeowner entirely. Higher-value properties meant homeowners who already understood mortgages, deficiency, and short sales, and who weren’t going to blow up a deal over a small gap in price because the relationship and the trust mattered more to them than squeezing out one more offer. As Tracey Walker puts it, “it’s about trust right it’s about beliefs it’s a relationship it’s a rapport right”. Fewer deals, far less conflict, and a business that finally had room to breathe.

What happens when the thing you built stops holding?

It didn’t stay steady. When the market shifted, the closings that once came several times a month slowed to almost nothing, and the income that had funded a fast-growing life didn’t just dip, it collapsed underneath obligations that were already in motion. The house went into foreclosure. The cars went into repossession, to the point where she’d bring someone along to the grocery store just to keep an eye out for the repo truck. She and her husband split their own address into separate units under the same roof, just to manage the paperwork of what was falling apart around them.

i just sat on my stairs one day and i just bawled and bawled and bawled and bob crying it was like there’s got to be a different way it’s just how did i end up here

That’s the moment the story turns, not because a solution appeared, but because she made a decision to let go of the version of success she’d been chasing and start over with almost nothing. A friend introduced her to home-based business the following year. It didn’t undo the damage overnight, but it gave her something the old business never had: a way to build again without needing a bank’s cooperation or a market to stay favorable.

Why did partnering with a homeless man in a van make sense to her?

Years into rebuilding through network marketing and then internet marketing, Tracey Walker crossed paths with a man doing webinars from a van he was living in, someone with no polish, no face on camera, just a voice and a story people couldn’t stop listening to. Most people around her would have written him off. She didn’t, because underneath the unconventional presentation was a shared conviction about how people in this industry deserved to be paid and treated.

As Tracey Walker puts it, “So judgment, we have to put those things to the side. People that are different, we got to put that to the side. You have to kind of get to know people that are different, right?” That willingness to look past the surface and listen for shared values is what turned a chance meeting at an industry event into the partnership that built the company this mastermind now runs inside of.

A few things worth sitting with from her own account:

• The same skill set aimed at a different audience can change a business more than any new tactic would.
• Fragile deals built on desperation collapse the moment someone offers a little more elsewhere.
• Judging a potential partner by polish instead of shared values can cost you the relationship that actually moves the needle.

Create your free account at empowernetwork.com/watch to watch Tracey Walker tell the rest of this story in her own words and download the full audio.

The full session transcript follows below.

Transcript

The first thing that I want to kind of talk about is, I have an assumption that when you get started in a business that you are going to make what? Money. Money. Who starts a business without the notion or the idea that they're gonna make money in it, right?

Most people don't do that. When you get started in a business or whatever endeavor, your goal initially is to be successful with it, right? So I'm coming to you from that standpoint, that I have to assume that because you're here, your goal is to make money. As a result of that, I want to share with you what to do when you start making the money, all right?

I can't pretend that you're not gonna make money because in my mind, you are making money. You are. You are, right? And you have to know that in your own mind, your own self-image that you are, all right?

And because of that, what I find is that so many people in home-based business, they make a lot of money and then a couple years down the road, what happens, they're broke, right? Like lottery winners, right? Now maybe the lottery winners didn't necessarily work for it, but in home-based business, you work for it, but I see it time and time again where people that were at the top of their game and a couple years down the road, they have virtually nothing. Well, why, right?

Even with me, my own story. I come from a background of business. I have a master's degree in business. I went to corporate America and after about two years, I was laid off, which was actually a blessing for me because I hated it.

I hated going at seven o'clock in the morning and I hated getting off. I had seven at night. I hated somebody telling me what time I had to be back at lunch or be back from lunch. I hated the fact that I, at that time, I was more interested in homecoming, right?

Like I had just graduated from college and I was like, I wanna go back to Tallahassee for homecoming, they told me no. And I'm, what do you mean no? I always go to homecoming, right? And I was just fresh out and it's important to go back when you're an alum, right?

And I was not able to do that. And that started to get some wheels to turn where I said, I really don't like this place. I don't like the bureaucracy. I don't like this seniority type of thing.

And because your uncle is the director, you have a better job than I have. And I have a master's degree, but you make more money. It's all of that, right? It's not based on production, it's based on who you know.

And it's not such a bad thing, except for the fact that sometimes people who don't know a lot of the people have a lot of value to bring, right? And you don't recognize that because they kind of get pushed to the wayside. So I was laid off in March of 2002. And I took that opportunity to then start and launch a real estate investment company.

And that was a saving grace for me because I learned some skills about investing in real estate in terms of negotiating short sales and flipping houses that at the beginning, we did a lot of like, what do you call them? Like ugly houses, right? Like buy them at 15,000, and turn them and do that right and then what we realized was that it was too much of a hassle when somebody has a house for twenty thousand dollars now if you have a house of twenty thousand i'm not saying this is you okay but if you have a house with twenty thousand dollars and your house when it goes into foreclosure and and then i can come in i try to help you save your home from foreclosure but your house needs twenty thousand dollars in work right it's only twenty thousand dollar house i'm gonna put up all my money to do the work i'm gonna buy the house i'm not gonna have to charge you anything right i might be able to give you some money just depending on what kind of equity you have in a home but at the end of the day the next person comes along and they offer you 500 more dollars and now the deal is over because you're going with them that's a hassle when you've got a team of people working to build a business and the mindset of the person is they're stuck on five hundred dollars right it killed so many deals and it wore me down and we realized well what if we took our knowledge and we dealt with luxury homeowners when we just did that the same skill set the same processes the same everything except now we were going to only focus on on houses that were at least a million dollars we added a couple more zeros and what we found was that a we were dealing with a more intelligent homeowner they understood things like mortgage they understood things like um deficiency right they understood short sale and if they didn't when we explained things to them they could kind of get it right and if they made a financial decision to walk away because it was best for their family another person who they didn't know who they didn't trust they weren't going to let the deal go for 500 bucks right because when you're dealing with a certain level of person it's about trust right it's about beliefs it's a relationship it's a rapport right um and making that small shift which is kind of what we're talking about here right going to the next level that's small shift i didn't change anything i was doing except for the fact of who i was speaking to that made all the difference so i went from fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting in every closing to make you know five or ten thousand dollars because the margins were small so being able to make thirty and forty thousand dollars per deal with less headache and now i could only i only had to do like two or three a month as opposed to ten a month right so i worked less and i made more all right so that allowed us to make you know several million dollars in our in that business but because i didn't know what now i know um when the market when the market shifted in 2006 we went from doing about two or three deals every month to doing three deals for the entire year of 2006 which was about maybe a hundred thousand dollars right well i had built a brand new house i had a mercedes i had alexis i had a hummer i had jewelry i had all this stuff we were traveling we're taking care of you know people want to come move in your house right hey can i come stay for a minute and now they got a room with their name on the wall in your room right and you know you're buying groceries and so that expenses are building up because of the things that we were doing trying to help people that we love right and we didn't know what we didn't know um and over time that what happened was that our income went down the the closings weren't happening as fast the laws had changed and my home went into foreclosure my cars went into repossession um literally i would go to the grocery store and make sure somebody was with me in the car so that the repo guy in case he was following me around wouldn't steal my car while i was in the grocery store right and so going down to the food stamp office and filling out paperwork and really my ex-husband my husband at the time we were living at the same house but we were brother and sister for the sake of that right so he lived at our address unit a and i lived at that address unit b because we had the same last name right we're trying to you know whatever we got to do and so this was my life for a little bit and i got to a point where i was just like how how is this even happening right you just i just sat on my stairs one day and i just bawled and bawled and bawled and bob crying it was like there's got to be a different way it's just how did i end up here virtually getting i'm waiting for the sheriff to come at any moment right the the thing I wanted to do was to have to be put out, right?

So we're trying to find a place before we get put out. And just the unease, the unease of it caused me grief. And I moved to, well, I actually had a good friend that introduced me to home-based business industry in 2007. And I got started in that company.

And that move for me was like the thing that was going to keep my head above water, right? It wasn't going to save my house because my house payment was like $3,500 a month, right? And so it wasn't going to save my house, but it was going to allow me to start building some skills. It was going to allow me to get our food stamps.

It was going to allow me to put gas in the car that I was hiding, that I wasn't really driving, right? It was going to allow me to do some other things like that. And I had to let go emotionally of that brick and mortar. You understand what I'm saying?

I let go of the brick and mortar and say, look, if I could build this house, I could build another house. It's not a big deal. It's not easy to think that way. It was a decision I had to make.

And once I let go of that, I made space for other things to come into my realm. So from that standpoint, started the business and network marketing and did okay for about a year, from 2007 to 2008. But I was tired, right? I was running around trying to do presentations.

I was running around doing parties and meetings and doing all this stuff. And I said, there's got to be a more automated way to do this. How can I reach more people with less hassle? And that's when I went to the internet in 2008.

And at that time, I learned about internet marketing. I learned about sales funnels. I was exposed. Let's say I didn't learn about it yet.

I was exposed to this stuff. And all I wanted to do was just do a video and give people the video when they wanted to hear me present about our company. And so that was my initial interaction with what we now are doing, right? What we're here doing and building businesses from that perspective.

In 2008, I was in the business industry. I was in the business industry. I was in the business industry. In 2008, I had to start a whole new skill set, right?

And I had to shift in my mind. At that point in time, I had been a boss, right? I had been a boss. And people that worked for me in this industry, it wasn't about being a boss.

It was about being an inspired leader, right? I couldn't fear people into doing things by threatening their check, right? You don't come to work on time. I'm going to dock your check.

I had to inspire people to take action to do things that they said that they wanted to do initially. It's a totally different skill set. If you've ever been a boss before and you get into this industry, you can't use those same skills. They don't work.

They don't, okay? People will find you to be a little obnoxious if you try to force them to do stuff, right? So from that standpoint, from 2008 through 2009, I began to learn some skills, learned about blogging and started generating some leads and doing things like that. And then I met a guy named David Wood in 2009 who happened to be homeless in a van at that time.

He joined into a system that I was a part of. At that time, I was on the leadership council of that particular system when he was homeless in a van, right? And one day he did this webinar and out of nowhere, he made like $12,000 on this first night, right? And I was amazed by that because I had never seen him before.

I didn't know anything about him. And his voice, he just sounded like this hyped up guy, right? But he was telling his story about how he did it and was sharing it. Everybody was so intrigued.

They wanted to learn more about him. So I got on his list, right? Got on the coveted list and began to learn things. He would never show his face to anybody.

He always did PowerPoint presentations. Yes, David Wood did not in the beginning. You see him now and he's not the same guy. Why?

Because he's grown. He now is the founder of a $100 million company, okay? When you're homeless in a van, your self-image is totally different. Do you understand what I'm saying?

So he was not live jumping in the pool. He wasn't doing all the stuff that he's doing now. What he was doing was doing PowerPoint presentations and did pictures, right? And you did not see him physically in the flesh.

And he learned how to recruit in this way because he knew he had a skill set of how to sell. And he could do that. And he built businesses through this methodology. And people would try to mimic, including myself, how he was doing it.

It just wasn't working, right? I mean, his presentations were like three hours long, right? And people were joining in droves. And I'm thinking, I can't, I can't, right?

And it just didn't work. So we began to open up and have dialogue. And we realized that we had some of the same core desires. Which was having our teams win.

Which was helping people in this industry actually be successful. Which was paying people more money, right? Which was giving direct access to the money. Because in traditional network marketing, you get paid, you know, the customers pay the company, right?

Then the company cuts you a check, right? There's process, all these things that happen between you and your check. But he had an idea of what if we could just take the money directly from the customer directly to the rep, right? So all these different types of things play out.

And nothing materialized right away. But then 2011, we're both speaking at this same company's event in Orlando. And he had this big, we were at the, I forget the hotel, the Dolphin, what was it? Coronado Springs.

It's at the city, though. The resort. Okay, yes. And he had, he had went to Disney World or whatever, and he had bought this big Mickey Mouse hand, right?

Like, it was a big hand. It was white. And he would just walk around the hotel with these shorts. This shirt that said something MLM guy.

You know what I'm talking about with the hair. And it had like yellow armpits on it, right? And he had this big hand. And I'm like, Deb, you're just so crazy.

Like, he'll just do anything, right? And so he's walking around with this hand, and he had that little crazy laugh, a little snorting type of laugh. And we had been awarded these big checks, right? So I got a check, he got a check or whatever.

And so he decided he was going to carry his check throughout the resort with the Mickey Mouse hand holding it. Right? So he's walking just through, and at this time, there was a, there was a company, I want to say, I don't know if it was Cigna or somebody that was there. They had a good, a big reception going on, really corporate people, you know, stuffy kind of like, and he's walking around with these shorts, yellow armpit shirt, MLM guy, Mickey Mouse hand, and a big check.

And he would walk over, let's say the high boy tables were kind of over there, and this was the wall. He would just kind of stand, you know, lean on the wall, holding his check like this. You know what I'm talking about, right? I'm not joking.

Right? He would do this. And I was, I'm like, David, what are you doing? Leave those people alone.

He's like, no, man. He's like, this is, don't you think that's fun, Trace? You think that's fun? I'm like, no, I don't think that's fun.

Leave those people alone. And, and people just would look, you know, in amazement at just his quirkiness and his ability to not be in a box, right? And, and all of this. And it was at that time, that weekend that he talked to me a little bit about what we're doing now.

Right? Didn't get all the details then, but he shared it with me maybe about a week later on Skype. And I got started. And now, you know, I'm like, I'm going to we're almost four years in, right?

Four years in. As a result of that, because of me being willing to listen as an MBA, right? Me being willing to listen to a homeless man in a van who did things that I would not have normally done changed my life, right? It changed my life.

And so you just never know who you're going to embark upon that can be of great service and a value to help you transition in any way that you want, right? So judgment, we have to put those things to the side. People that are different, we got to put that to the side. You have to kind of get to know people that are different, right?

And if you don't jive, you don't jive. But if something that they're saying or doing inspires you in any type of way, kind of go with that, right? I'm so glad that I did that. Now we are, you know, 27 months into that, we were able to cross the million dollar mark, right?

With the company. That allowed me to do a couple of things. Number one, be the first woman to do it, right? That's a big deal.

It's another big deal to do it on the internet, right? I mean, I don't think there's any other company that has, you know, $16 million earners on the internet, okay? In the period of time in which we've been in existence. And then it's also given me the ability to have a platform to speak and to share and to do things that we're doing here today, right?

Hopefully there's some value there and you are willing to listen, right? Why do I do that whole story? Because there has to be credibility, right? If I don't have any credibility with you and I can't share with you how what I'm saying can be of service to you, then you're shutting me out, right?

And so I've gotten results. All that to say, I hope that you're open. I hope that you're listening and I hope that you can receive something today that can be a great transformation for you. Fair enough?