He Made the NFL. He Always Saved His Dad a Seat in the Stands.
Richer Soul Podcast • Episode 506 • Corey Parchman
Every game Corey Parchman played, in any city, he got to the stadium early and found a seat in the stands. High school, college, the NFL, it didn’t matter. He’d tell himself his father was sitting right there.
His father died of a heart attack at thirty nine, when Corey was ten.
What Corey Built
Corey went undrafted and made the NFL anyway, playing five accrued seasons on a signing bonus of $2,300, a fraction of what most people assume former NFL players are paid. He started investing in real estate during his third year in the league, and never leveraged a property past 20 to 30 percent, which is the specific discipline that let him keep everything he owned through the 2008 crash while others around him lost it all. He pivoted into a digital signage company, then a concierge car wash for Miami’s luxury condos, then an all-boys preschool in his old neighborhood. For the last six years he’s focused on buying established businesses from retiring baby boomers, a wave he says could take six million small businesses out of existence by 2032 if nobody buys them first.
By any conventional measure, Corey has won, repeatedly, in several different directions at once.
The Night That Names the Pattern
Two years ago he was inducted into his high school’s hall of fame. He went home that night and broke down crying, in front of his wife, for the first time in twenty years of marriage.
“I go home and cry afterwards because my dad’s not there to see it,” Corey said in this conversation. “The person who’s the most influential person in my life isn’t there to see those things.”
This is the pattern worth naming. The milestone arrives, the recognition lands, and instead of resolving anything, it sharpens exactly what’s missing. Success doesn’t erase the hole. It just makes the shape of it more precise.
The Lesson Underneath the Ritual
Corey’s father died when Corey was ten, but the clearest lesson his father left him came earlier, the day Corey brought home a form for free school lunch. His father ripped it up. “You don’t get free lunch, I’ll pay for your lunch.” The lesson Corey took from it was to try to figure things out himself before asking for help, in anything.
That instinct built an extraordinary amount. It also runs alongside a second lesson from the same father, about a little league coach who wouldn’t stop yelling at Corey from the sidelines. “You need to appreciate that, because he sees something in you,” his father told him. “It’s when he stops talking to you, is when he’s giving up on you.”
Two lessons, both true, and both still doing work in Corey decades later: earn help before you ask for it, and don’t mistake being pushed hard for being given up on.
The Assumption That Follows Him Around
There’s a second thread in this conversation worth pulling on, and it runs directly underneath the emotional one. Corey’s actual NFL signing bonus was $2,300. People assume it was a couple hundred thousand dollars. That gap between assumption and reality followed him out of football and into business, where Corey now sees the same false math projected onto business owners, that they’re a “money tree” who can absorb any cost because they’re successful.
Both assumptions skip the same step: actually doing the math instead of just expecting someone else to cover it.
The Implication
If achievement and grief run on separate tracks, then the people around us who look most resolved, most successful, most like they have it figured out, may simply be further along on one track and no further along on the other than anyone else. It’s worth remembering the next time someone’s public win looks complete from the outside.
One Question To sit With
What have you built that the person you built it for never got to see?
About Corey Parchman
Corey Parchman is a former NFL wide receiver, real estate developer, and the founder and CEO of CorePar Holdings, an Indianapolis-based buy-and-build platform that acquires essential B2B service businesses across Indiana. Corey has built businesses from scratch — including a real estate development firm and an all-boys preschool — so when he says buying an existing business beats starting one, he’s speaking from experience on both sides. He’s the author of Already Built, a practical guide to business acquisition for the next generation of entrepreneurs, and he’s on a mission to make buying a business the most accessible wealth-building strategy in America — especially for those who’ve never been told this path exists.
Links
Website: https://coreyparchman.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corey-parchman-2a8a2790/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61584586944141
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coreyparchman_business/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@coreyparchman1181
Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@richersoul
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