Vernand Morency’s third grade teacher looked over his paper and shook her head. The class had been asked to write down what they wanted to be when they grew up, and he had proudly affirmed he was destined to be a professional baseball and football player. “It’s a nice dream, but the odds are so against you,” she told him. “Pick something else that’s more realistic; otherwise, I’ll have to give you an F.”
Young Vernand thought for a minute. He looked around at his classmates, who were writing about becoming doctors or lawyers, and felt an anger bubble up inside him that he had never felt before. Even though his teacher had been trying to protect him from potential disappointments in the future, he just could not agree with her that his dream was impossible. “That’s when that ‘It’ came out in me that I didn’t know I had,” Vernand recalls. “I became so driven, so determined, with no backup plan. I went to my uncle and asked him how I could get bigger and stronger. From then on, I would call him to work out, rather than the other way around. I would wake up at 3:00 AM to run around the block before school. People thought I was crazy, but to be successful, you need to be borderline insane.”
Today, Vernand’s assignment is framed and hanging proudly on his wall, complete with its bright red “F”. Having just entered his thirties, he is a retired baseball player for the Colorado Rockies, as well as a retired football player for the Green Bay Packers, and currently serves as the founder and CEO of Galleon Point Properties, a company specializing in the acquisition of properties for affordable housing and community development initiatives.
Vernand inherited his entrepreneurial spirit and real estate wisdom from his parents, who both immigrated to America from Haiti in the late 1970s before they met. They traveled over separately, each in a small boat with roughly 250 people on board. “Many people had to stay under the engine, where there was no air, and death was a common occurrence on those voyages,” Vernand says of the two-week long journey. “I don’t know if I could have done it, but it was an opportunity for a better life for them, and ultimately for my sisters and me.” His mother and father each arrived penniless in South Florida, where they were introduced to one another through the Haitian community and married shortly thereafter. Between them, the couple worked four jobs, slowly starting to save up a small cushion. “In Haiti, there was nothing, especially after they shut down the sugar plant,” Vernand explains. “There was nothing to work towards, so my parents were happy to repair shoes and tailor clothing here.”
By the time Vernand and his four sisters were born, both parents had moved up in the working world, choosing strategic jobs. His father worked at a full-service hotel and was able to bring home leftover food from the hotel’s restaurant. That way, the family always had good food to eat. Similarly, his mother worked as a nurse, so there was never a shortage of medicine. The family started to save up a small sum of money, which they began using to purchase houses, since real estate in Florida was so inexpensive at that time. “They would put 10 percent down on a house, and then convert it into a duplex,” Vernand says. “That way, the tenant paid their mortgage, and if they couldn’t pay, they put food on our table. My parents may not have gone to Harvard, but they had that ‘It’—that willingness to go out, give it all they had, and succeed.”
By the age of five, Vernand was helping with the family business by putting up walls and roofing houses. His parents urged him to focus on his education, so he was not allowed to work anywhere else but at the family business. This hardly bothered young Vernand, until he noticed how his neighbor, who worked for the Miami Herald, had a nice car and wore nice clothing. “I asked him for a job, figuring I could sneak out in the mornings to deliver newspapers before my parents woke up so they would never know I was gone,” he recalls with a smile. “I got away with it for the first morning, but when I got home on the second day, my dad was waiting for me, and I got quite a spanking. They wanted me to do well in school, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if I was tired in class.”
Despite his parents’ strong push for education, Vernand began to fall in love with sports by the third grade. That was the age he began noticing the ladies, and it didn’t take long for Vernand to figure out that all the girls would line up on the edge of the schoolyard to watch the boys play football. His attraction to sports thus began as a result of peer influence, but the ever-determined Vernand decided that if he was going to participate in them, he would be the best.
At the time, his parents didn’t understand sports, so he turned to his uncle for guidance, who signed him up for teams and trained him. “My uncle would tell me to do a thousand sit-ups and pushups just to keep me busy, thinking I wouldn’t actually do them all,” he recalls. “But I’d break them up into sets and do them during TV commercials. I’d hang off chairs from the kitchen and do dips, despite my mother’s objections. I think my uncle saw my body start to change quickly, so he really started taking me seriously.”
By the time Vernand graduated from high school, he was an All-American athlete in both baseball and football, so he could have easily gone into either sport. His parents, who were slowly catching on to how talented their son was, were fully convinced when a professional talent scout appeared at their door during his senior year. Vernand was drafted to play for the Colorado Rockies as soon as he graduated, and played as a centerfielder from 1998 to 2002. He also moved to IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, where he was surrounded by some of the best athletes in the world. “I got a chance to pick their brains, workout with them, and test my skills with them,” he says. “I was seventeen years old with access to this incredible wealth of knowledge, which I know gave me an upper hand over my teammates.”
One of the most influential athletes he met
was Gary Sheffield, who taught him the power of leveraging. This came in handy during his second year at IMG Academy, when money became a factor for the first time in his decision-making. “I evaluated the athletes around me and noticed they were making much more than I was, despite my talent on the field,” he notes. “I knew I had leverage, because I could always go play football in college or pursue my education, which, would ultimately lead me to a bigger salary. My friends were getting paid well, but I wasn’t, so I knew I had to do something.” Vernand turned to Sheffield for advice, who told him to send out a highlight tape and let his talent advocate for him. His roommate at the time was Matt Holliday, whose father was the head baseball coach for Oklahoma State University. Matt agreed to send a highlight tape of Vernand to his father, which launched a downpour of offers from colleges for him to play for them. Finally, Vernand was in a position to negotiate, and in 2002, he enrolled at Oklahoma State University to play football on his own terms.
Vernand notes that his time at OSU was distinguished by learning how big a business football really was. “As soon as I got to Stillwater, I told Les Miles I needed a year or two with the team, and then I was leaving to play professionally,” he says. “I was cocky but confident in my game. During my first game, I had two touchdowns, but then I didn’t play for the rest of the year. That’s when I realized the game was bigger than me. It’s a real machine, a real business, and everyone has their own interests at heart. That realization opened up my eyes quickly.”
Vernand played at OSU for three years before being drafted by the Houston Texans in 2005. He was with the Texans for a year and a half and was then traded to the Green Bay Packers, where he finished out his NFL career. Looking back, he feels every game was memorable, as each one afforded him the profoundly rewarding opportunity to do what he loved. “I had my linemen and my receivers believing in me, so I knew they would do their job and I could do mine,” he recalls with a smile.
In 2006, while playing for the NFL, Vernand participated in a syndicate group led by T. Boone Pickens that developed the $250 million Boone Pickens stadium at OSU. “Pickens was going to be flipping the coin to start the game, but beforehand, he and I were able to talk briefly in the locker room,” Vernand recalls. “He flipped the coin, I shook his hand, and we’ve been friends ever since. It was brief, but his message was powerful.”
In 2007 and 2008, Vernand was selected to participate in the prestigious NFL Business Management and Entrepreneurship Program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Through this experience, he began to see that while his athletic career was successful in the moment, he wanted to find something that would continue to sustain him for years to come. He was one of the best running backs in the league, but he was able to talk business with T. Boone Pickens in a way that most of his peers could not. It was a tough decision, but he soon realized it was time to draw his NFL career to a close and follow his inner drive to the next big thing, whatever “it” would be.
Vernand’s decision to retire at a young age is a notable factor that truly distinguishes him from his fellow professional athletes. “I had always wanted to reach the highest level in my sports, and I was able to do that by going pro,” he says. “The only step higher would have been to become a Hall of Famer, but I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to invest more years of beating my body up for that. That reality hit me when I saw older Hall of Famers barely able to move or speak. They are the greatest of all time, but I felt I wanted to do things to cultivate great relationships so I could be sustainable and not have to come back after twenty or thirty years to sign autographs as a way of living.”
By the time Vernand left the NFL, he had used his many connections through the organization to expand his network, thereby positioning himself perfectly for the creation of his own business. During his time at OSU, he had taken a note from his parents and used some of his earnings to start acquiring assets. “My mom had told me that I could put my money in the bank and get a small amount of return on it, or I could put it in a piece of property and get 8 percent back,” he explains of his early investments. He put these assets under the umbrella of his company, which he made official when he was drafted by the Houston Texans, and expanded after his experience at Wharton, where he received his Executive MBA.
Today, Galleon Point Properties focuses on affordable housing—a cause that is near to Vernand’s heart, in light of his parents’ experiences as immigrants who came to America with nothing. He refers to the process as an 80/20 deal, where 80 percent of the units are market-rate apartments, and 20 percent are designated as affordable housing with rent restrictions. The company acquires housing in D+ locations, which usually include areas near major highways and at the fringes of the roughest parts of the inner city. From there, the company stimulates change within the communities and allows the area to advance to a C+ level or higher, ultimately transforming societies and raising the quality of living for hundreds of families. “We take areas that no one wants to be involved in and grow them into successful communities,” he says. “I’m so passionate about it because it allows individuals a better opportunity to become entrepreneurs themselves, since they have more capital to allocate as they see fit and to support their children’s dreams.”
For all his success, he credits his parents first and foremost, who taught him a strong work ethic and instilled in him what he refers to as that “It” factor, which is the willingness to run through a brick wall and die trying to reach that goal. He also credits his strong faith, which has always been a guiding force in his life. Like the importance of education, his parents also taught Vernand and his sisters the transformational quality of believing in a higher power. When the children found Catholicism was not sitting as well with them as it did for their parents, they were permitted to seek out the church that was right for them. They chose to attend a Baptist Church, so every Sunday, a bus picked up the five Morency children, while their parents attended their own service.
When advising young entrepreneurs entering the business world, Vernand passes on a lesson he learned from his business mentor, Peter Lettermen, a real estate guru who once asserted that a person is only as powerful as their black book. “The sense of entitlement that permeates society today needs to go out the window,” he comments. “As an entrepreneur, you need to do whatever it takes to get things going and not feel that anything is beneath you. It’s hard to get people to believe in you, but once you pass that challenge, everything else will fall into place.”
More so than beating the odds and becoming a professional baseball and football player, Vernand’s story is about overcoming that voice that tells someone their dream is impossible. It’s about taking a force of discouragement and transforming it into a force of motivation through a belief in one’s own abilities and potential—a potential that continues to unfold as old goals are accomplished and new ones take form. “I’m hoping my work will help people realize that they are better than whatever circumstance they’re in now,” he says. “So many people feel defeated by life, and think they’re capped out. I used to think I was too, until I met the right people. And if I can do it, anyone can.”
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