Peter J. Burns III is a serial entrepreneur who specializes in establishing and operating niche market, replicable business enterprises. He is an innovative businessman who is known for creating and implementing new businesses from the ground up. In his over four decades of business experience, he has started, operated, sold, and/or expanded over 150 companies.

Peter’s passion for entrepreneurship and thirst for launching and growing businesses started at an early age (at age 6, he retrieved golf balls at the Biltmore Country Club that were hit into water hazards, and sold them back to the golfers – with a glass of lemonade.). After serving in the U.S. Army and being appointed to the United States Military Academy at West Point, Burns was given a four-year Army ROTC scholarship to the University of Virginia. As a freshman at UVA, Burns enrolled in an Entrepreneurship course typically reserved for seniors, by convincing his professor and peers to allow him a seat in the class. In this course, Peter and the rest of the students were given an assignment to write a business plan for a real business. “My plan focused on importing mopeds to the U.S. from Europe and renting them to tourists at U.S. resorts,” Burns explained.  After the class ended, Burns implemented this plan and went on to start the first moped rental business in the U.S., making $55,000 in his first 10 weeks in business.

Burns went on to play a pivotal role in starting the country’s first College of Entrepreneurship at Grand Canyon University. “I think that entrepreneurship programs and degrees should be commonly found at universities because small businesses, and small business owners, are the backbone of our country and our economy.”

Since his college years, his creation of the moped rental business as well as dozens of other profitable businesses, serial entrepreneurship and the establishment of unique businesses has been a major element of Burn’s life. 

 Some of the businesses and operations Burns has spearheaded over the years include:

• Started the first moped U.S. rental business, eventually expanding to 100 locations (Nantucket Moped 1977) 
• First to integrate beach stores with rental business and created a large chain (Island Beach Company 1980) 
• One of the founding members of the largest international network of entrepreneurs (YEO 1987) 
• Created the first “Dolphin Tour” business using jet boats on guided tours through wild dolphin habitats (Water Tours 1995) 
• Established the first franchised rental chain of bicycle, mopeds, Harley-Davidsons, exotic cars, water sports (Fun Rentals 1996) 
• Created the first integrated media rich commercial email marketing business (Cybertising  2000) 
• Invented the “Insert-A-Zine” niche-publishing concept (NightLife Magazine! 2001) 
• Started the first “open source entrepreneurship”  organization in the U.S. (Club Entrepreneur 2006) 
• Started the first independent accredited College of Entrepreneurship in U.S. (GCU CoE 2007) 
• Created the template to open CoEs through the development of a curriculum and business process Patent Pending (IfE 2007) 
• Pioneered the expanded market for Cost Segregation Studies, introducing a Patent Pending for unique applications (CSS 2008)
• Expanded to the massive commercialization of cost segregation (HL Cost Seg 2016)
• Established the first self-contained entrepreneurship center the in U.S. (eFactory/Club E Office 2009) 
• Co-founded the first financing organization for “Creatives” (singers, film producers, artists) (FundingWagon.com, 2013)
• Founded Ethiopian Capital Partners as a bi-lateral platform of commerce between the US and Ethiopia (Expatrepreneur.us 2013)
• Co-founded Luxury Travel Product Placement company that acquired vacant time in luxury villas in exchange for luxury products and remarked to Closed User Groups at 40% less than the villa owner could rent out their own villa. (HL Villas  2016)
• Co-founded Avia Travel Services by assembling a partnership with an expansive travel booking engine, joining it with an airline ticketing entity and creating a “one-stop-shop” for the corporate group and employee travel at significantly discounted rates. (Avia Travel Services 2017)
• Formed company to do Commercial funding with Alternate Sources of Debt/Equity Capital. (Financing Debt & Equity, 2017)
• Co-founded the Entrepreneur Credit Card, a non-secured debt resource based on personal credit for entrepreneurs (Entcreditcard.com 2017)
• Founded Luxury Pet Transport Company (Pet Jets Travel, 2017)
• Founded Cannabis Business Banking Services Company (Cannabiz, 2017)
• Founded Credit Repair & Enhancement Business (Entcredit.com, 2018)
• Founded Cryptocurrency Mining Financing Company (Cryptechalchemy.com, 2018)
• Co-created Vietnamese-centric travel platform (Travel.vn 2018)
• Co-created applications of Corporate Barter/Trade for Travel Utility Coin (Hi-Tek.io 2018)
• Founded Burn$ Funding, a unique Financial Services firm that offers a variety of personalized credit repair and funding solutions for individuals, entrepreneurs and business owners (BurnsFunding.com, 2019)

Growing up as a young Entrepreneur and experiencing, first hand, the ups and downs of starting your own business, as well as having decades of experience in the realm of Entrepreneurship, Burns developed a passion for mentoring. He has combined his passion for starting new enterprises with his affinity for offering guidance to aspiring and existing entrepreneurs, to create Burn$Funding (www.burnsfunding.com). Burn$ Funding uses unique and innovative methods (involving the use of bridge loans and shelf corporations to repair credit and gain access to funding) to provide aspiring entrepreneurs and existing business owners with access to capital to fund their own business ventures.  It was through Burn$ Funding that the Group Homes business opportunity presented itself to Peter.

Rob Tepper has enjoyed a wide variety of local and international business experiences during his career, including 17 years in semiconductor design and management, the next 10 years building and managing companies, and the past 8 years providing digital marketing and business consulting services in a variety of niches.  Rob has taken on a wide variety of entrepreneurial challenges, including Real Estate Investing where he learned about the residential care business from a variety of 7 figure earners. Rob has managed and directed all aspects of fast-paced businesses and has consistently demonstrated his management and technical abilities, as well as his communication and team building skills.  He thrives on making an impact and affecting positive change.

Rob was the first Chancellor of Southern States University, where he served from 2007 to 2010 and successfully took the school through the national accreditation process.  He was simultaneously the Chancellor of the International Academy of English, which he led through a separate, successful national accreditation application process during that same timeframe.

Rob has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Duke University, and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Originally from Reno, Nevada, Cliff Janke grew up in multiple, small mining towns between New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado and California with a mining engineer father and a family in the mining industry.  

He earned bachelor degrees in Anthropology and Physiology while in college at the University of California, San Diego and then went to medical school at Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, NE.  

Following medical school, he moved to El Paso for residency training in Emergency Medicine at UMC / Thomason General Hospital. Following completion of his residency program, Dr. Janke has been a full time Emergency Physician for close to 20 years between El Paso, TX, Tucson, AZ and other areas in Texas.

Shortly after completing his training in Emergency Medicine, Dr. Janke caught the real estate bug and has been an active real estate investor ever since. Beginning with multi-family properties in the Ft. Hood area of Texas 13 years ago, Dr. Janke now has real estate holdings there, plus a commercial project in downtown El Paso’s Union Plaza and a portfolio of single family and multi-family properties in the Tucson, Arizona area.

Dr. Janke is actively involved in the group home/assisted living facility space and is currently working on several group home projects in the Phoenix and Tucson areas.

Darren is a creative financing expert, and is responsible for coordinating and securing our investors’ assets and helping them to optimize equity utilization on existing assets to help them diversify into the group homes business. He has already helped several investors join us, helping us acquire our first mansion to be converted into a luxury assisted living home.

After earning his MBA in International business and entrepreneurship from Cal Polytechnic University, Darren got started in the import/export business, giving him diverse cultural experience and flexibility in business. Known as the Option ARM King during the Real Estate bubble, Darren capitalized the market, tapping liquidity and allowing many investors to follow their dreams.

Subsequent to the historical 2008 Real Estate market collapse, and watching many rising entrepreneurs suddenly lose their financial dreams, Darren quickly adapted to the business finance world and approached it from all angles, figuring out loopholes and having the resourcefulness and ingenuity to combine missing pieces from various puzzles to again help others fund their business and personal dreams.

Last year, Darren discovered the Senior Living/Assisted Living market, and learned an important fact: According to the AARP, 10,000 baby boomers are turning 65 every single day (a net increase of 2,200 per day in the US), and this is expected to continue into the 2030s. Inspired to capitalize on the group home business, Darren recently did a 6 months internship to fully learn the business, and shortly thereafter became a key adviser to a private wealth management firm, where he learned how to finance and run group homes with less fat and more profit. 

Tim Hurst has over fifty years of construction and construction management experience in residential, commercial, and industrial projects. In fact, Tim has developed over 2,000 single family and multi family homes in Arizona, as well as several hundred thousand square feet of commercial and industrial buildings during his career.

Since the economic downturn in 2009, Tim has been renovating and flipping homes in Scottsdale, Paradise Valley and the North West Valley of Phoenix. Tim recently discovered the opportunity for residential group homes, and during the past 12 months he has renovated and flipped 13 homes into 10 bed Residential Group Homes in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

Tim is a U.S. Army Veteran, having served in the 7th Engineering Battalion in Fort Carson, CO.

Following his military service, Tim formed an Engineering company in the San Francisco Bay area called C & H Engineering (Jim Carrol & Tim Hurst). C & H specialized in Engineering design and construction management of large scale residential and commercial properties in the San Francisco Bay area, and employed over 80 Engineers and Surveyors.

Following the untimely death of Jim Carrol in PSA airlines flight #1771 in 1987, Tim sold C & H Engineering and started his own development & general contracting company Hurst Construction, which has owned and developed over 2,000 single family and multi family homes in Arizona, as well as several hundred thousand square feet. of commercial and industrial buildings.

Molly is a Residential Care Facility for the Elderly (RCFE) real estate acquisition specialist.

Molly understands the process, glory and nightmares of the RCFE business. Right now the Requirements to be Licensed includes experience in the health field besides the initial 40 units of classroom and 40 units of on-line studies to pass the exam. However the most difficult license to acquire is the facility licensing. Each facility is licensed individually and requires completion of Part A and Part B as well as health plan for all areas of care. In addition you must be approved by City, County and State inspectors.

Molly ensures we acquire the correct properties that can comply to code while providing the best possible ROI.

Holt Hackney is a communications specialist with more than 30 years of experience as a journalist and public relations professional.

In the 1980s, Hackney began a career in journalism, rising from an editor at a small-town weekly newspaper to a staff writer at a national business magazine in New York City. At Financial World, Hackney crafted stories about billion-dollar corporations. This experience helped him understand the needs of business journalists as well as analysts, which he relied on as sources for his stories.

In the early 1990s, Hackney combined his journalism skills with his interest in public relations and assisted the National Golf Foundation in disseminating its messages in a highly politicized business environment.

Several years later, Hackney accepted a managing editor role for LRP Publications, a legal publisher, where he oversaw four publications and their respective editors as well as assisted the company’s marketing lead in her efforts to market the publications to potential subscribers.

In 1998, Hackney further put his communication skills to work in the technology field. First, he joined Stratfor/Infraworks as the Director of Communications, where he helped the company secure coverage in Investors’ Business Daily, InfoWorld and Time Magazine.

Hackney, then applied his skills at CyBerCorp, an electronic stock trading company. Without benefit of a public relations firm or relevant advertising budget, he achieved editorial hits in Forbes, Fortune, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today, Investors’ Business Daily, Texas Monthly, The Industry Standard, CNNfn, MSN Investor, PC World, Austin Business Journal and Austin American Statesman and others. He also facilitated interviews for the CEO on CNBC, CNN Moneyline, CNN Digital Jam, FoxNews’ Cavuto Report and all four network affiliates in Austin. Fifteen months after Hackney joined CyBerCorp, the company was purchased by Charles Schwab for $500 million.

Hackney’s next step was to assist Hewlett Packard, where he served as Director of Communications for the company’s enterprise software subsidiary, Austin-based Dazel. Hackney worked with the Dazel marketing team as well as HP’s corporate public relations team in California to extend Dazel’s messages through the media and analysts. His work helped secure coverage in all the relevant technology publications as well as coordinating interviews for Dazel executives with the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Businessweek. In addition, Hackney took over a flagging analyst relations effort and brought Dazel back into the good graces of outfits, such as Gartner, IDC, Meta Group and Hurwitz.

Hackney’s success has been attributable to a unique qualification in the public relations community — experience as a national business journalist. In addition to being a staff writer at Financial World, Hackney has written for Florida Trend (the Florida equivalent to Texas Monthly), Forbes’ Executive Edge and Treasury and Risk Management Magazine. This experience has influenced his ability to understand the needs of the journalist, gain immediate respect from the journalist and utilize existing contacts in the journalism world.

On a personal note, Hackney is a Florida native, who received a degree in journalism from the University of Florida.

Joel Grushkin is the Regional Director of Cost Segregation Initiatives (CSI). He brings forty plus years of executive experience to the CSI organization. Over the last twelve years Joel has directed cost segregation studies for developers, investors and owner/users of real estate that cover the gamut of property types and vertical markets.

Property types run from million dollar owner user office condominiums, to $500,000,000 in Senior Living Facilities, fast food franchise locations, hotels, high-end restaurants, manufacturing facilities, medical office buildings, shopping centers, multi-family housing, and auto dealerships, to name a few. For the last six years Joel has also been an instructor of continuing education courses for two organizations providing CE to CPA’s, CFP’s, and financial advisors on a national basis.

His background includes founding and chairing the private equity, venture capital and real estate practice groups of DHR International, the 5th largest executive search firm in the United States, eleven years with Arthur Young & Company (now Ernst & Young) as a Principal and director of the firm’s Management Consulting Practice. He was also a member of AY’s Real Estate Industry Specialty Practice Group.

Joel was also Chief Operating Officer of Edward Carpenter & Associates, a group of five consulting companies specializing in the start-up and on-going consultation to financial institutions in the areas of economic feasibility, capital formation, governance, mergers and acquisitions, business and regulatory affairs, and real estate. In addition to his executive search and consulting experience, Joel has also held positions of CEO, COO, and Vice President Corporate Development at either the holding company or operating company levels in conglomerates with holdings in real estate development, home building, financial services, mortgage banking, retail/entertainment, and automotive.

He has been a guest lecturer at San Diego State University, University of California-Berkeley, Orange County Corporate Directors Forum, and the San Diego Venture Group. He is a past member of the Board of Directors of DHR International, the San Diego Venture Group, and Compliance Coach, sold to FIS. He is currently on the Advisory Board’s of Soteria Intelligence, and Aerovu Technologies.

Nicole is our physician's liaison for Burns Funding. She recently graduated from Point Loma Nazarene University with a B.S. in biology and is headed to medical school in a year in San Francisco.

She also participated as a collegiate athlete on PLNU's women's tennis team where she earned sportsmanship and MVP honors during her years there.

She is passionate about helping others through medicine and loves to work with people. She works to connect doctors with the tremendous investment opportunity available to them through our group homes project.

Rose keeps our ship sailing straight. Her unparalleled organizational skills keep us in check, as we jet ahead on this venture at light speed.

Rose is currently finishing her last semester at Concordia University in Portland, OR and will be receiving her Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing in December 2019.

She is minoring in Sports Management and is a member of the Investments club, while also being a member of the women’s soccer team at Concordia. As the team’s goalkeeper, she helped lead the Cavaliers to their first GNAC conference championship and first ever Division 2 NCAA tournament berth (since the University’s transition from NAIA to Div. 2 in 2015), in the Fall of 2018. The women’s soccer team at Concordia finished first in their conference in 2018 and is currently ranked amongst the top 25 teams in the nation for Division 2.

Rose is a member of the Phi Theta Kappa national honor society and has been listed on the Department of Athletics Honor Roll every semester since transferring to CU in January of 2018. In 2017, she worked as a Business Development intern for Avia Travel Services company in La Jolla, CA and was the Social Media Marketing Assistant for the Women’s Soccer team at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, CA, where she was a member of the soccer team and also received her Associates Degree in Business.

She is concurrently working at an events planning company in San Diego, CA as a Marketing and Administrative Assistant.