JW Cherry III

I was born in Brooklyn; New York and I’ve been married 45 years with three children and a granddaughter. After 25+ years I can now recall being a newbie real estate investor. As a 20-year-old without real estate, business experience. It was exhilarating, yet new to me. Family and friends questioned my decision to leave my post office job. It was a lonely path at first. I did everything I could to learn from mentors in the various real estate industries. There was no internet, social media, apps, books, seminars, or you tube mentors, only hard knocks. I used to think you had to know everything before you started, but that’s rarely the case. As I learned more, I became aware of the opportunities and challenges that lay ahead. Discovering and learning a lot of information but with little experience can lead to analytical paralysis.

My businesses served the public and employed hundreds of people. I eventually came to own over 300 doors throughout New York. As an educator, I gave public talks about community redevelopment, private investor real estate, and wholesale transactions. As the founder of multiple businesses, including a New York-based mortgage brokerage firm with over $800 million in closed loans providing affordable mortgage financing in the late 1980s, and later establishing a mortgage bank in 45 states. These early businesses enabled me to pursue other interests.

I learned to be ready for the unforeseeable intangibles. This happened to me when a major company with which I had a Business-to-Business B2B relationship took me aside and complimented my work ethic and accomplishments with the volume of business that I was delivering to their company, and they asked a simple question: “What would it take for me to do more business, and how could they help me achieve that?” I was taken aback, but I paused and asked for a day to consider the question. The next day, I returned to their office and asked them to put me on my favorite Gospel radio station in New York at the time to advertise. Because I chose a Gospel station, they unofficially dubbed me Reverend Cherry. They initially paid for the radio advertisements, and after two months the volume of business was enormous, launching my business to a level I had only dreamed of providing so much business that allowed me to afford the advertising budget myself, purchase a commercial building, and fully staff my operation. Looking back, I was actually wholesaling, property flipping, and performing transactional funding before these terms were coined.

I often sort to mentor those in my community. One such relationship was with Steve Stoute, who currently partners with entertainer/business man Jay-Z. As a young man, Steve lived next door to me and often helped me with aspects of my first independent film. This early mentoring relationship aided Stoute as he began to recognize his own creative strengths as well as his ambition for growing brands.

I also takes great pride in community service previously serving as a founding board member of the International Christian Brotherhood (also known as the ICB later providing leadership by facilitating a Bond initiative which raised twenty million dollars in order to build the Christian Cultural Center in East New York, Brooklyn.

As a Founder, Chairman and CEO of Voices Impacting America. Once I decide to pursue civic initiatives, I became inventive, professional and quick to action working on forward thinking strategies. In 2013, after the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act stripping it of the preclearance clause which in great part protected the African American from institutional disenfranchisement of their voting rights, I, put pen to paper and wrote the book Your Vote Matters the Easy Way to Use Your Power. Through Voices Impacting America, a nonprofit organization,

Most of all I value and treasure my 45-year marriage to my wife Patsy, my three children Candice, April and John IV, as well as my granddaughter Alissa. I believe in consistency as I excel as an accountable leader with a clear vision.