Switching careers can be frightening, especially if the change is drastic. But it also can be fulfilling. These three Berks County residents, believing opportunity outweighed anxiety, bet on themselves. And those bets are paying off big time.
April Crossley
An Unexpected Real Estate Millionaire
Looking to pass some time on vacation about 20 years ago, April Crossley picked up a book her soon-to-be husband brought entitled The One Minute Millionaire: The Enlightened Way to Wealth.
Though the longtime respiratory therapist had zero interest in real estate at the time, things got real really fast.
“The book is all about how you can buy houses and rent them out to people and then they’re paying the mortgage for you,” Crossley says. “And I thought the book was lying. There’s no way people do this. Why would you pay off someone else’s mortgage for them? And my husband looked at me and said, ‘That’s exactly what you’re doing.’”
A renter at the time, Crossley had never looked at it that way before. Her husband, who had two rental properties in Reading at the time, helped Crossley buy her first house.
“And then I just became obsessed,” she recalls.
She started taking classes and devouring books about real estate investing. She and her husband began flipping houses with the help of private lenders — people who want to invest in house-flipping without performing the manual labor on the units. And then they just kept buying.
Eventually, she began making more money in her side gig than at her full-time hospital position. Coupled with a rising level of stress on the job, it spurred Crossley to reward herself with an unforgettable birthday gift.
“For my 35th birthday I gave my resignation and I gave up my healthcare license,” says Crossley, now 45. “I decided I didn’t want any safety net. I was either going to succeed in real estate or I wasn’t. So, I didn’t renew my license and quote-unquote retired into real estate.”
That move put the Mohnton resident on her way to completing the transition “from a teenage mom on food stamps to a real estate millionaire.”
Today she owns three companies: Berks County House Buyers, a house-flipping company; Crossley Properties LLC, which owns numerous rental properties; and the interestingly named Lazy Girl Consulting, a company that teaches how to invest in real estate.
“It’s not because I’m lazy,” she says. “I want people to know that you don’t have to have all the pieces to invest in real estate. When I started, I had zero knowledge. I couldn’t even tell you what a hot-water heater was. It’s not about knowing everything; it’s about having the right people in place that do know.”
Lazy Girl has numerous free options, including a YouTube channel overflowing with videos and a weekly Q&A session on Zoom. The company also offers a video course for people who are new to real estate investing and a more involved option that includes marketing and hands-on assistance with purchasing property.
Crossley and her husband own apartment buildings in Berks County and a mobile home park and shared housing in Tennessee. The shared housing is rented to a nonprofit that helps men leaving prison restart their lives. The beneficiary of private lending early in her career, she now offers it to others who are getting started investing in real estate.
“It’s important to me to do projects that have a purpose,” she says. “When I left health care my biggest fear was that I was helping people and making a difference in their lives, and I felt like when I was transitioning to real estate that I would not be able to do that. But I was surprised at how many ways I could still help people.”
Michelle Pharand
Making Uniforms Less Uniform
By definition, “uniform” means always having the same form, without variation. Brute Athletic Apparel would like to point out one important variable.
“The reality of the situation is women are not small men,” company president Michelle Pharand says.
The Berks-based maker of athletic gear believes so strongly in that sentiment that it trademarked "women are not small men," part of the marketing push for its Athena line, designed for female athletes with the input of female athletes.
Manufacturing uniforms specifically for women athletes rather than simply making smaller versions of men’s outfits may not seem like rocket science, but it took someone with an aerospace background to make that decision.
The vast majority of Pharand’s professional career was spent working in the specialty steel and aerospace components industry, beginning with Carpenter Technology Corp.’s Toronto Service Center. Change has been a constant in her career, with the position relocating her from Toronto to Singapore to Reading to Pittsburgh and back to Reading.
When the opportunity presented itself to acquire Brute, it was too good to pass up for Pharand, an athlete and avid sports fan.
“Combined with years of manufacturing experience and business management, it was a natural career change,” she says.
Founded in 1967 as the Henson Group, Brute developed a strong presence in the wrestling community. Although that sport remains a linchpin for the company, Brute has expanded its offerings. One of the first things Pharand did after acquiring the company in 2019 was introduce Athena, its name inspired by a vast pantheon of mythological female warriors.
“In many years of competing, I have long believed that women have had limited choices,” she says. “The industry to this day is heavily dominated by men, and many believe that if you shrink and pink a garment, it automatically makes it a woman’s garment. The Athena line is designed to fit the contour of the woman’s body for all shapes and sizes, and the product line allows the females to choose from options that are either more form- or loose-fitting.”
Brute’s core output is business-to-business uniforms and custom-made gear for a range of sports, including basketball, field hockey, lacrosse, track & field and football. Brute’s standard lead time is 15 business days upon the finalization of art approval and order placement, according to Pharand. The company also produces commercial items, which can be found in select outlets and at bruteproshop.com.
Pharand hopes to build on her successful four-year stint as head of the company by continuing to grow national sales while also growing awareness among Berks County residents of the national company in their backyard. Previously located in Sinking Spring, Brute relocated to Mohnton earlier this year.
“Brute produces high-quality uniforms using high-performance fabrics,” she says. “As a result, the feedback we get from the athletes is very positive. It is also not uncommon that teams wearing our uniforms are asked by referees and other coaches where they procured their uniforms in addition to their warm-up gear.”
Chad Fisher
More Zen He Hoped For
Chad Fisher could not have picked a more inauspicious day to change careers.
“I quit my job on March 13, 2020, the day the world shut down,” Fisher recalls.
He enjoyed his position on the sales team at Penske Corp. but felt he needed to move on to better himself. With the COVID pandemic beginning to wreak havoc on the country, Fisher tried to get his old job back. But a hiring freeze made that an impossibility.
“It was almost as if the universe of forces came along and said, ‘Now you’re fully invested,’” he says. “So, I didn’t have a choice; I had to make this work.”
And he has made it work — by working on himself and his clients.
For many years, Fisher dealt with the effects of unaddressed trauma, which he describes as feeling like a hamster on a hamster wheel. He decided to travel to Peru and Sedona to do some self-reflection and study with shamans.
“I lived in Peru for a little over a month studying with the shamans, and I had a really interesting shift in consciousness and awareness,” says Fisher, 44. “It changed my life. It completely altered my brain chemistry and how I think about the world around me.
“I lived in the jungle; I lived in a hut by myself. It was just me and the plants around me, and it was such a connection when I realized there was more to life than just work. There’s more to life than what kind of material things you have around you. I realized then that life is about internalizing your connection with everything.”
That life-changing experience led to the founding of Chad Fisher Healing.
At first, he worked solely from his West Reading home before opening a small office at Bee Fit and Healthy in Wyomissing. In May, he continued to expand with the opening of Zen Den Wellness in Leesport. Along with a retail store, Zen Den offers workshops, classes and events.
Fisher bills himself as a certified shaman, reiki master and quantum energetic healing practitioner. Coined by alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra, quantum healing blends Eastern wisdom with Western medicine, physics and neuroscience.
“Everything has energy; everything has vibration,” Fisher says. “Quantum healing is going into the parts of you that you may have suppressed, whether it be some trauma, whether it be some energy work, and digging deep into that and pulling it out of your body.”
Fisher’s services include a shamanic soul retrieval session, quantum soul healing, a spiritual connection for couples, a sacred vision quest in nature and the bluntly titled “Let That S--- Go” session.
If that seems intimidating, he recommends starting with the free phone consultation, where he discusses with potential clients where they are in their lives and on which areas they want to work.
“My hope is to bring awareness to this type of healing that not a lot of people know about,” he says. “The work that I do is really worldly, and most people don’t get to experience that. So, I want to create a container, so to speak, where people get to experience this without breaking their wallet. It’s truly remarkable the transformations not only that I’ve seen in myself but especially in other people.”
Fisher also hopes to begin healing retreats to Costa Rica with Andrea K. Page, a naturopath who lives there and with whom he manages the website All Things Frequency, which touts a holistic approach to mind, body and soul connection by merging ancient modalities with frequency medicine.
“Most people don’t understand the world I live in, I didn’t either,” Fisher says. “It was really confusing in the beginning. A lot of people are afraid of what they don’t know. And sometimes you just have to dive into that unknowing. And that’s where the healing is.”
