Riches in Progress: A Rebel's Guide to Wealth and Entrepreneurial Success

By Claudio Sorrentino

Riches in Progress offers unprecedented behind-the-scenes access into the world of high-stakes entrepreneurship. Self-made millionaire Claudio Sorrentino pulls back the curtain to chronicle his ongoing journey building Body Details into an industry titan. With refreshing candor, Sorrentino shares the opulent spoils and lavish indulgences of success, as well as the punishing trials he’s endured—near bankruptcy, problematic partnerships, fending off predatory investors, and more.

This first-hand account provides aspiring entrepreneurs the ultimate masterclass, imparting battle-tested strategies to accelerate your own quest for riches.

From securing start-up capital to managing explosive growth, Sorrentino reveals the brutal truths and hard-fought hustle required to achieve outsized success. Diving into the challenging early days, he recounts how he bet it all on his business idea despite overwhelming obstacles. Sorrentino offers hard-won lessons on finding the right partners, raising capital, and navigating economic calamities like recessions. Readers get an inside look at the pressures and perils of managing outside investors, along with tactics to defend against predatory partners. As his company grows into a national player, Sorrentino shares with refreshing candor the opulent spoils and lavish lifestyle that success brings.

But growth comes with new trials, and Sorrentino finds himself in a battle for control of his company. Offering unprecedented access to high-stakes business dealings, Sorrentino reveals the cutthroat reality behind mergers, acquisitions, and growing a brand into an empire.

Packed with concrete strategies and insider knowledge, Riches in Progress provides aspiring entrepreneurs with the ultimate masterclass. Learn how to accelerate your own quest for success directly from someone conquering it in real-time. If you want to achieve your own fortune and build an industry-dominating business, this unprecedented book is your roadmap. The only easy day was yesterday.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Advantage Media Group
• Release date: Feb 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9781642259858

Claudio Sorrentino

Entrepreneur, innovative thinker, and growth strategist, CLAUDIO SORRENTINO is the founder and CEO of Body Details, recently recognized as one of the Inc 5000 fastest growing companies in America. With multiple locations throughout South Florida, its mission is to help customers achieve peace of mind through aesthetic medicine and to become the nation's largest cosmetic laser service provider. Sorrentino resides in Miami, Florida

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Reason

FOR THE LOVE OF PRAISE

Daddy… I’m alone, cause this house don’t feel like home.

—UNSTEADY BY X AMBASSADORS

I AM THE YOUNGER OF TWO BOYS BORN TO AN ITALIAN FATHER and Brazilian mother. They married young, had children early, and divorced nearly a decade later. To put it lightly, my father was a determined man. In his late twenties, he immigrated to New York City in pursuit of the American Dream. As soon as he landed, my father was determined to stay in a city teeming with excitement and promise and found work as a dishwasher in Little Italy.

The most charismatic person I’ve ever met, he quickly charmed his way up the ladder, eventually saving enough money to open his own pizza shop. A short time later he met my mother, a beautiful young woman who had moved to the city as a child when her father’s work for the Brazilian consulate brought them stateside. He fell for her immediately. He had his work cut out for him though. At ten years his junior, she was sweet and innocent, still unhardened by life in 1970s New York City. She was deeply religious and a dedicated family woman; to be with her meant my father would have to give up his playboy ways—at least temporarily. After just a few months of dating, he surrendered, and my mother became the only woman to bring the Lothario to his knee.

A year later, my parents welcomed my brother into the world, and my mother’s father received station orders in Miami. My father sold his pizza shop, and the family headed south for a new beginning. Once in Miami, my father opened an Italian restaurant, and my mother kept herself busy raising my brother and me, a newborn at the time. But the idyllic family life fell apart as soon as it had begun. My father’s many years of infidelity eventually wore my mother thin. When I was eight years old, she filed for divorce.

My father was my idol. He was a larger-than-life character whom I adored and yet barely knew. Somehow I felt closer to him than anyone else I had yet known. Once the divorce was finalized, he disappeared for two years. The only time I’d see him was when I showed up at his restaurant or on the rare occasion I was doing something praiseworthy. When he left, I was angry—we all were. Our family was broken, and we hated him for it, but me most of all. To make matters worse, everyone I knew saw my father in me. I walked, talked, and even laughed like him. My mother and brother were cut from the same cloth, but I was squarely my father’s son and an outsider in the home I was living in. When he left, my world crumbled. I felt both abandoned and ostracized; I carried a chip on my shoulder throughout most of my youth as a result.

One day, while I was in a fit of rage (a common occurrence for me at that time) my mother told me I looked like the devil as I was screaming at her in defiance of some request she had made of me. We tried therapy. The therapist did her best, but I was broken. I didn’t realize it until later in life, but I desperately wanted to prove that my father had made a mistake, that he was missing a chance to know someone great, someone he created, someone like him. Regardless of what happened between my mother and him, he didn’t have to abandon us. Subconsciously, I committed myself to doing everything I could to win his approval.

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

I had the good fortune of an unfortunate childhood, as strange as that may sound. My father’s love and presence, which I craved so deeply, was only granted when I did something to earn his praise. Not only did this motivate me to constantly seek ways to make him proud, but it also drove me to be better than my environment told me I should or could be.

My father would only attend events or activities when I was competing or winning an award. In second grade, it was a dinner award ceremony for an art project of mine that was displayed at a local hospital. Later, it was on Olympic day when I won multiple first-place ribbons running races with my then short legs and speedy feet. Sometimes, it was at his restaurant when he was bragging to others about me being in the gifted program at such a young age. It wasn’t pride in the traditional sense of a father being proud of his son, but more as though he was proud of himself for having sired me. Still, his absence and rare displays of approval drove me. It made me want to succeed at anything and everything because then I might earn his recognition, praise, and, most importantly, attention. That was our relationship. My father would show up, and he and I would have a reason to interact with each other, if and when I would achieve something of significance or had the potential to. Needless to say, this driving factor continued as I entered adulthood and the world of making money.

My understanding of social class began in junior high school. I was in the gifted program, so my classes were generally composed of a diverse set of students from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Some kids were wealthy. The kids who pulled into school in new cars, sporting the latest fashions every day, and who went home to large, expensive houses, in the best neighborhoods where the yards were pristine, the crime relatively nonexistent, and the iron gates to get in were tall and secure.

Some were from families like mine, working class who got by but not without struggle. And some who had it even worse. I always felt like I was born into the wrong social class. Not the normal dissatisfaction we all experience when we have less than what we want in life. In my case, the frustration ran deep to the bone. I knew where I stood but knew it in my soul that I didn’t belong there. My mind remained constantly in strife with the disconnect from my vision and my reality. I was a rich man somehow living in this foreign broke man’s body. Being acquainted with kids more well off than me was an opportunity to learn about the life I wanted, the one I felt I was meant to have and the one that would impress my father. He always wanted to be a rich man but his ego, general mistrust of people, and lack of ability to delegate responsibility made that nearly impossible. Though his failures taught me convincingly what not to do, I still needed to know precisely what to do and what made the wealthy kids different from me.

What do they do that I can’t? What do their parents do that mine don’t? I’d find myself thinking.

As far as I could tell, there wasn’t any real difference. I was just as smart and hardworking and clearly just as capable, if not more so, than they were. The only differences were the social statuses we were born into and the mentors we had along the way. But I was convinced that wouldn’t stop me. I decided that I, too, would become rich. Not necessarily because of a love of money and the life of freedom that only wealth can provide, but because I absolutely positively loathed being poor and the struggles that came along with it.

Most of my early childhood friends, and even some people within my own family, seemed to have given up hope that their lives could be better. It was all too common to find people who were unhappy with their circumstances and yet, rather than doing something about it, they reasoned that life was simply unfair to them, that no amount of personal effort would ever help them climb out of poverty. So, they accepted their unhappiness and adapted to poor conditions, playing victim rather than victor. Having resigned to the belief that the world was against them, they were frustrated and angry.

My junior high school was a hodgepodge of mainly bused-in impoverished kids from the low-income North Miami area sprinkled with a few affluent kids who lived too close to justify sending them somewhere else. Likely stemming from a frustrating home life, that youth anger turned to violence and my school clamored with fights morning and afternoon. When I took the bus to my after-school job at the mall, it was almost guaranteed that someone would pick a fight with me. It was horrible. I resolved that when I had children of my own, they would never have to experience what I endured on a daily basis. For that and countless other reasons I hated school. I picked up concepts quickly and grew bored easily. I saw nothing useful in the information I was learning, so I began to run with the wrong crowd to escape the boredom of classes and the stress of the very real dangers I experienced. Going into the last two months of my final year in junior high school, I had already skipped fifty-two out of 180 school days, missing more than a quarter of the whole year.

During what would be considered my freshman year of high school (final year of junior high), on one of the few days I decided to attend classes, I was in PE playing baseball when another student and I had a minor confrontation before the game started about who would bat first that ended with some choice words. The issue appeared settled once the teacher confirmed my position that we were up first. I was wrong. That same student, while I was playing first base, hit a grounder to third with no one on base, meaning the ball would be coming to me for the out. Seeing an opportunity as the third baseman threw the ball to me to make the play, the irate student ran with all the speed he could muster and jump-kicked me in the stomach. The force and location of the blow was so powerful that it forced my elbow through my stomach and lacerated my kidney right there on the spot. It was excruciating. I barely limped my way back indoors before my mother was called to come pick me up and take me home because of the pain. At that point I didn’t yet know I was internally bleeding.

The PE coach thought I was just winded as he didn’t see what had happened. When the coach called my mom she was furious, as a single mother, working to support two children, missing work and the income that accompanied it for any reason was unacceptable, so her words to me were I swear to God if I come to that school to pick you up and you aren’t deathly ill I’ll kill you myself or something eerily close to that effect.

As soon as I eased into her white Honda Accord to head home when she arrived, I screamed in agonizing pain and nearly passed out. I had been laying down in the gymnasium while I waited for her. Now, as soon as there was any pressure on my organs, the pain was too much to bear. We went straight to Jackson Memorial hospital where I would spend the next ten days in intensive care and the following three months on mandatory bed rest. When it was over, I had lost one-fourth of my kidney and officially failed the ninth grade.

I could either attend a school for at-risk students, which most closely resembled jail, or transfer to Miami Beach Senior High, which was well outside my district. Either way, I would have no friends and know no one. As dumb as it sounds, parents can’t simply choose what school their child attends in the public school system and as Beach High (as I came to learn MBSH was lovingly called) was outside of my district, it meant that to attend I would have to be accepted into a special program called the Academy of Travel and Tourism.

First, I had to meet with the head of the program and apply for admission. I met with the head of the program, Dr. Lupe Ferran Diaz, who seemed cautiously optimistic about me. She agreed to accept me into the program, which prompted the principal to offer me the following proposal: I’ll leave you in tenth grade as long as you are willing to attend the night school program to redo and pass all of your ninth grade classes at night. I agreed to the terms, sentencing myself to a year in classes for fifteen hours a day, every day, from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m.

While the offer to not have to remain in ninth grade was a blessing, it was very heavily disguised. I dreaded the thought of spending even more time in the very place that I dedicated so much time to avoiding. A place that limited my freedoms and never challenged me mentally. The idea of spending fifteen hours a day, five days a week, locked inside an institution that for me had only ever seemed to crush dreams and dilute inspiration was misery in its purest form.

My first day began with a shake as my mother forced me out of bed to get ready at the ungodly hour of 6:00 a.m. After a quick shower and a not-so-quick forty-five-minute drive to my new school, I found myself walking through the door of my first period class. As expected, I didn’t recognize a single student, and the only familiar face in the entire room was the director of the Academy of Travel andTourism, Dr. Diaz.

Almost immediately she pulled me aside and said the following words that changed my life: Claudio, I’ll be honest with you; I understand the circumstances of why you’re here and I understand what happened to you in your last school year. I understand that you may have been labeled as a ‘bad’ kid. But let me tell you something, two of your cousins were my students and both of them were great kids. You should be no different. In fact, I have no doubt in my mind that you’re also a great kid. To prove it to you, I’m going to give you some responsibilities in my class and I expect you to meet them. Will you do that?

This was a vastly different approach from how I was used to being treated by my prior professors. I was generally regarded as the class clown and troublemaker. For the first time, someone saw something better in me and I most certainly had no intention of proving her wrong. I nodded my head, Yes, whatever you need me to do.

Immediately, she gave me a hall pass to drop off some documents she needed delivered to the main office during the class. It was a relatively small gesture, but it meant everything to me as my previous teachers would question my requests to use the restroom, fearing I’d never return. She believed in me, put her faith in me, and I had refused to lose this newfound trust. From that day forward, I was a model student. I became the president of two school organizations, the Academy of Travel and Tourism and a competitive marketing organization called Distributive Education Clubs of America. I also became a student officer in the Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA) program and a student ambassador for the school, a position that allowed me to personally take potential donors and big shots from the school district on tours through Miami Beach Senior High.

That year was a breakthrough for me. I realized that effort put forth in a positive way was much more rewarding than the reverse. I disassociated myself with any person from my past that was a negative influence on me. Soon thereafter, I began competing in academic competitions, traveling around the country to attend different events.

Over the next few years, I took first place in the Hospitality Management and Marketing event at both the district and state levels and I attended the national FBLA and DECA competitions. I had never really had the opportunity to travel much before, and now, here I was traveling for free to Chicago, Louisville, Anaheim, Las Vegas, and New York City. Dr.