Mark Bergerson
Mark Bergerson is a high-energy individual with a passion for service. He started his career as a retail manager and moved into the world of insurance in 2006. He is currently a Commercial Insurance Consultant/Producer with The Arizona Group Insurance Brokers. Mark has embraced the Town of Gilbert since moving here from Minnesota in 2018. He has sat on the Gilbert Chamber Small Business Council, Chaired the GEMTalks committee, participated in Gilbert Leadership (Class 30), and currently sits on the Gilbert Leadership Steering Committee, Business, and Education Committee. He will be joining the Gilbert Chamber Board of Directors next fiscal year. He is passionate about connecting businesses with each other, helping others find their potential, and serving his community.
Mark and his wife, Heidi, moved to Arizona leaving the cold winters of MN behind forever, to start a new chapter in their lives. They have three children, Jordan, Jack, and Jason. All are young men in their 20s and starting their own adventures. Mark enjoys hiking, reading, sitting by the pool, and taking in all the opportunities that Gilbert and the East Valley offers.
Episode Transcription
Guiding Growth. Conversations with Community Leaders. In this podcast, we'll explore the human journey of leaders. There are stories of humility, triumph, roadblocks, and lessons learned, come join us as we journey together and uncover the questions you've always wanted to know. This podcast is brought to you by the Gilbert Chamber of Commerce, providing resources, connections and belonging for business professionals and modern moments, an event and meeting venue in the heart of Gilbert and just like that. Here we are here, we are. I'm so excited for this guest.
Why are you so excited for this guy? He tell me this guest is known for living life to the fullest, taking chances, and investing in others. He grew up in Minnesota and eventually left his family business to begin work in insurance. Joined the fire department after 233 11 and made a life-changing decision to move to Arizona in his mid-forties. He has been married to his wife Heidi for almost three decades and they share three sons who are blazing their own trails. Please welcome Mark Burger. Hello. Hey, it's good to be here.
We're glad to have you here. We're going to start with what we call rapid fire. Are you ready for this morning? Beverage of choice tea? How long does it take for you to get ready in the morning? 37 seconds. I have no hair. Well, that works actually two minutes. I got to brush my teeth. So, beach or mountains, mountains. Name one thing you can't live without my wife. OK. Favorite sports team. The Minnesota Vikings. Where is the most beautiful place? You have been flathead Lake Montana Spender or Saver Spender.
All right, tough one. Describe yourself in three words, charismatic, energetic, and giving. Nice. What is the best room in your house? The living room. Final question, glass, half full or half empty. Always half full, perfect love that would not expect anything different. This podcast is brought to you by Mercy Gilbert Medical Center, recognized as one of the top 100 best hospitals by health grades. Mercy Gilbert Medical Center is a full-service acute care not-for-profit community hospital, providing exceptional health care to the East Valley with a staff of 1800 employees and 400 volunteers.
Patients can expect the expertise of more than 900 physicians representing all major specialties. Mercy Gilbert Medical Center is proud to be part of the local community and an award winning employer, learn more at dignity health dot org forward slash Arizona. Right? Well, thank you for being here. As we mentioned, we're gonna talk about your journey and so we're gonna dig right into it. So let's hit home. Um One of the fun things we were talking before the show started is that you grew up in an area that I grew up in Alexandra, Minnesota, which is pretty cool.
So, let's talk about Alexandria for a little bit. Shall we absolutely tell me how you guys got there because you didn't really start there, but you ended up getting there. Yeah. So, um, I've always had family in Alexandria and growing up, I, I was born and raised in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, which is just outside of Minneapolis, Saint Paul. My dad ended up getting a job in Warroad, Minnesota, which is way up on the Canadian border. Went to college in Morehead, Minnesota. Concordia College, a small private liberal arts college, met my wife who went to Morehead State, which ironically is across the cemetery from Concordia College.
And my goal was always to get to Alexandria to raise my family and it took us seven moves in seven years to finally make that jump to get to Alexandria. And that we did that right before our oldest son turned five. So he was able to start kindergarten there. And then all my kids were able to be raised there and go all the way to school there. It had everything to do with the blues, right? No, it's the big Viking. Oh, it's the big Viking at the Yes.
So the blue is be ok. So tell us a little bit of what it was like growing up there. What did childhood look like? What activities did you do? So, growing up in Minnesota, I won't specifically say Alexandria because that's really where I raised my family. But growing up in Minnesota was amazing. It was different. I went from a culture just outside of the Minneapolis, Saint Paul area to a very, very remote area where I went to high school. Um So two completely different parts of my life.
That first part till I was 15, I was able to be involved in like one or two things. At a time. We had a thing called trail blazers, which is, I got to do stuff with the parks department. I was involved in a lot of things in school ski club, all that kind of stuff, moved to Warroad, Minnesota where they didn't have all those things, but I could be involved in everything. So all of a sudden, I was a four sport athlete. I was involved in the debate club, drama club, Spanish club.
You name it? I was on pretty much every page in my high school yearbook because I wanted to be involved in all that stuff. And it was, it was a great experience for me. Not something that I necessarily wanted for my kids. I wanted something a little larger and to have them have a little more opportunities than I did because that was before the age of the internet. So even like to go buy a pair of jeans was 2.5 hour drive. So I didn't want that part of it.
So being able to move to Alexandria where I'd spent a lot of my summers growing up, my uncle has a farm outside of town. He has a business in town. So I would just go there with my brother and spend time with my cousin. We were, the three of us were all within a year of each other. My cousin and I are actually four days apart and we would just spend our time growing up and doing stuff on the farm and horsing around and learning to drive cars when we were 13.
So that part of it was really exciting. So I really enjoyed all of that ice fishing, skiing, summer fishing. Um One of my jobs in high school was actually doing the fresh catch of the day for the restaurant. There were four of us that would go out on a boat and we'd catch for four hours and we bring them back into the restaurant and they'd clean them and we'd get a free meal and they'd pay for the gas. And, uh, what else? What was your quote on that?
Only our limit? So, that's where there had to be four of us. Someone's listening the limit, the limit. I mean, it sounds idyllic and wonderful to have that kind of a childhood and it was it wasn't, it wasn't because think about it, I moved from a town where I had 153 classmates when I was 15. So, right, as I was entering high school to a town of 1800 people in a class of 72. So, making that transition right at that age was a little difficult going from a lot of opportunity academically to very limited.
I ran out of classes to take my junior year, my senior year I had four study halls and I ended up teaching physics fayed and helping with social studies because I didn't have any classes to take because I was already beyond what they were offering there. So this is the mark I still see today, like, uh, foot on the gas full throttle. Like you sound like, I mean, you take on everything now, but it sounds like you've always had that in you and you've always just really had the interest in being engaged and involved.
Where do you think that comes from? You know, that's a really good question. I just think it's, I've always had like that kind of servant heart and I've always wanted to be a giver. People always joked like if I had 50 cents, I'd give away 49 give away the shirt on my back. Always doing stuff for other people, whether it be as a teenager in my community, being involved through my church or any other activities, um, that followed into college where I got involved in a whole bunch of different things.
I was in student government. I was in the choir. I just always wanted to be involved. As soon as I got out of college and got married, I was always looking for ways to be involved in any community that I was in. Even though we moved quite a bit initially with my job, we bounced around. I was always looking for opportunities to plant myself and be a part of the communities that I was in. And I just think that I was, that was probably instilled to me.
My mom was very um involved in our church and involved in activities. So I just constantly wanted to do that. I wanted to be really busy. I maybe it's because I had ad D or a DH D that I was never just, you know, diagnosed with, but I was always constantly on the move and constantly busy and constantly wanted to be challenged. So I've just always been involved in a whole bunch of things because I think it keeps my mind busy instead of those idle hands. You know, I just keep going, going, going.
Let's go to third grade. Do you remember? I do remember third grade. It was a very pivotal time in my life. I heard you have a teacher that influenced you then? Yes. So in third grade, I had the first couple of years of school. I always had great academic marks, but I always had lack self control, lack self-discipline. It was one of those things they check marked on my report card every time. And in third grade that all changed. My mom had started babysitting a gal who was for a gal who was going off to get her masters or phd.
And she wanted to in child psychology and she wanted to do some testing. So she's tested me. I was a guinea pig and she said, you know, he scored really high marks. I'm not trying to brag or anything else. But I was like, oh, ok, she shared that with my teacher who said, you know what? This makes sense. He gets it the first time every time I'm teaching something and then he's bored in class. So it's not that he's lashing out because he doesn't understand or because he can't, has impulse control.
He's like, ready to move on to the next thing. So she was able to put me in a high potential classes. And so I'd actually leave the classroom and I'd go do things with brainstorming and learning. We'd go on different projects, we do projects within the school, which was phenomenal. So that was the first part of my journey with her, that her name was Mrs Fran. And that really helped me kind of focus and realize that I could do a lot more than I was doing. And then the second, the second part of that.
After that confidence happened, she was pregnant. Our, our in third grade, my teacher was pregnant. I was wait, wait. And one day she was teaching in front of the class and she started having seizures and calmly, um, this other gal and I up, went up to the front, cleared everything out, got her laid down, got on the intercom, had to push the button called the office said, hey, this is what's happening, this is what's going on. I think the office was more freaked out than we were.
They came down. She ended up having to get hauled away in a stretcher and everything else. She remembers it vividly, everything leading up to going to the stretcher. I remember it vividly. Um And to this day in our, our relationship, we have conversations still. She talks about that time in third grade. She goes, I knew at that time that you were destined to do something and always help people and that has really stuck with me all the way through. So when you talk about like all the things that I've done and I've always done, it feels like that was kind of that pivotal moment that I realized, hey, I can, I can do all those things and it ended up following me.
I mean, it's one of the reasons I ended up joining the fire department later in life was I knew that I could handle that kind of thing. And maybe it's because certain people are wired differently. Not my wife cannot handle that kind of stuff. I totally can handle it so well. And I wanted to get to that. So, you, uh, joined the fire department and became an E M when you were 30? Yes. Right. So, um, a total life change when you were probably already established as an adult.
How did that play out for you? Well, so in Minnesota, over 80% of all the firefighters are volunteer. So when I joined the fire department, it was an auxiliary thing to my normal job. Right. But I wore a pager. We were on call 24 7. So like I could just leave pagers were awesome. Yeah, I could leave whenever I needed to, to respond to a fire call. So I'd leave my wife at the movie theater, I'd leave her at Walmart. Hopefully one of the other wives would pick her up, you know, milk, she'd have a full shopping cart.
Um, but it was, it was a big change for me, but it was something that I, I felt like I really wanted to do. I always say that 2703 11 was one of the trigger points for that. Just seeing those guys running into the building and being selfless and a lot of them losing their lives doing that. Um I realized I wanted to be able to help people and be able to help my community and that was a great way. The fire department was very involved in the community.
So there was that aspect of it. Plus I was able to hopefully save property and lives and, and do all these other things and then becoming an E M T and then I was eventually the rescue ems officer. I ended up moving on and becoming the, the chair for the State Minnesota Board. Um M B F T E Minnesota Board of Firefighter Training and Education. Um So I was appointed by the governor to that position on the board and then I became chair of the board shortly after that and all that was about giving back to the fire service and literally giving away millions of dollars every year to help with training.
And then I taught as an E M T instructor for 12 years. Um So I, it, it was a big part of what I did outside of just my regular job and my family. It was one of those things that just, I felt like it was a really great opportunity to get back to the community that I was really proud of being a part of. Did you ever consider just making that full transition? Like, and even when you moved here, like joining the fire department or becoming an E M T. Um You know, I finally actually just gave up my E M T a year and a half after I moved here and moving here, I don't think it was at, I was 46 when I moved here.
So at that point, I'm like, you know, being a firefighter really is a young man's game. You, you don't, nothing really transitions. So you kind of start over as far as longevity and everything else. So he'd be starting a new career again at 25.5. And I realized that's probably not something that I really wanted to do at the time. It was very hard to leave and, and give that up. Um There were a couple of things that made it a little easier for me. I blew up my knee and I was doing some rehabbing and I had to have surgery and all three of my kids had graduated school and we were making this transition to a whole new place.
So it was kind of a whole new start. So I was like, I kind of wanted to give up that thing and that was a great part of my life for 213 years. But it was something that I was like, I kind of, I think I'm kind of done with that. I can, I can affect things in my new community in a whole different way. And so once I got here, I was like, yeah, I, I don't think I want to do that as a full time gig.
So let's go to this part in your life. So you're in Minnesota, your kids have graduated? And how does the concept of moving across country come about. So it really started with my wife Heidi. She was done with winter. We had come down here and vacationed a few times. And actually one of the times that we came down here on a vacation, we met with Christy Bo who's, um, also part of the chamber and her husband, Brian, who we've known forever because they're also from Alexandria, Minnesota.
And we met in downtown Gilbert at the farmhouse and my wife, we drove into the heritage district and my wife goes, this is it, figure out how we're gonna live here. And that was in March of 218. My son graduated in June of 213. I got a job offer at the end of June of 223 and we moved here in August of 215. So in less than six months, we went from, you know, maybe someday it would be really nice to move to Arizona to when we're going, we're going and we're going now and everything, like they say, everything happens for a reason, literally, everything fell into place exactly the way it needed to, for us to transition and move here.
So it worked out amazingly well. So one of the cool stories that actually, um isn't in all of this that I know of. And I'd love for you to share is how things came full circle. Um, in a conversation you had with one of our other members, Jeff Bride. Oh, and that's a very interesting story. So that goes back to me being on the fire department in Minnesota. Jeff and I met down here and became friends and we were friends probably for 0003, 2000 years and had never even thought about any connections.
And Jeff was actually talking to my friend Brian about stuff and his dad was actually started talking to Brian about some stuff and said, hey, did you know, you know, my wife? So Jeff's stepmother in-law was in an accident in Alexandria. She was airlifted out of there and everything else. And Brian's like, I think Mark would probably know about that. He was on the fire department. So Jeff reaches out to me and I'm like, oh, I totally remember that the car coming the wrong way. There was a, they were hauling a boat, they hit on the interstate, head on at 220 miles an hour.
I was on the crew that was extricating his stepmom and got her out of the car and got her to the hospital before she got airlifted to Saint Cloud Minnesota. And so Jeff and I were like, we have this great connection like I helped save his stepmom. Then I finally got to meet her and I was one of the first people other than maybe one of the E M T s in the ambulance that she had actually talked to since then. Because she was a traveling nurse.
So she'd met some of the other staff and then to finally meet a firefighter was a great full circle moment for us because that happened, you know, a long time ago, it was very early in my career on the fire department. But I was one of those first people. So I still remember that accident very distinctively because it's not very often you have those kind of things. I mean, I, I responded to a lot of accidents and a lot of not pretty incidents on the interstate. But, um, I remember that one because of the boat blowing through the back of the pickup and, you know, everything just the way it all happened.
So it was a really interesting thing that someone who's become a very, very good friend of mine. We have this connection, something all the way back, you know, from almost 2000 years ago. It was crazy. So, so let's talk about what you do now and how you got there. Ok. What part of what I do now? I do a lot of things now. Professionally. Your, your career now is so professionally. I am a commercial insurance broker. I was in insurance in Minnesota. Um, that was my day job after I left my family business, which was in retail and I travel all over the country doing stuff for that.
Um, my wife decided I needed to find something that was a little more at home. So I started selling insurance. Um And then that was the transition that able enabled me to get here. I had to leave everything and start over from scratch, but I already was licensed and everything else. So I work for the Arizona group, which is a large independent brokerage. Um Initially right here in Gilbert, Arizona, we've just moved across the 60. Now. We're in, we're in Mesa now. Um But we've been, we've actually the Arizona group heard of the Gilbert Chamber for over 30 years.
And, um, I've just been very fortunate that I was connected to that agency and be able to start over and build my new career again from my mid forties until now. And when you got into that back in Minnesota, how and why did you get into it then? You know, ironically, uh, so I was working for my uncle that he has a store called Ron's Warehouse Sales. And I would travel over the country working with insurance companies who had had claims on fires, floods, hurricane damage, whatever.
And we would buy up the inventory, the stock of all these places. Maybe it was a bankruptcy truck roll over or whatever it might be. So I worked with insurance companies all the time. And then when I was not traveling, I worked at the store and one of my customers who came in all the time, her husband owned an insurance agency. And she said, I think you'd be really good at selling insurance and being on the insurance side. And after being at in Florida three times and getting kicked out because of hurricanes happening, I was gone for months at a time for that.
And then going down to hurricane Katrina and the aftermath of that, my wife said you should probably try to find something there where you can be home more often. So I reached out to them and got um interviewed and got hired there and I worked there for 12 years and it was a great experience. It taught me a lot and it allowed me to transition with some skills to be able to come down here and find a new career, a new path, I should say same career, new path and be able to focus just on one thing.
I did everything at the agency from personal lines, commercial lines, individual life, health group benefits. We now here I can just kind of stay in my lane and, and do commercial lines. So anybody come to mind, sorry, anybody come to mind now that's kind of helped you in this path that you've been since you've been here. You know, my, my mentor at, there's two people probably at the office that I think have been very influential to me. One of them is the principal of the company, Paul Sear.
He's the guy that actually I got connected with just on a phone interview. Had a great conversation um with him and it was very shortly after his partner had passed away. And ironically, his partner was Doug Carr. Who, if you've talked about Deb Carr, that was her husband and Deb and I become great friends since then, but I was the first person hired after he passed away in the agency. So Paul has been a mentor to me and then another one is one of the other commercial insurance brokers.
His name is Greg. Oy, we're the same age. He's from the Midwest. He's been in insurance for a long time. We have a lot of, a lot of things in common, but he's been a good mentor to me because he's been down here and been part of this community for 20 plus years and he's helped me really kind of expand and grow. And he's also the one that kind of gave me my foot when I started there to give me a little bit of business to kind of say, hey, we think that you're going to be a good fit for this.
We, we want to kind of pass off some stuff to you. And it was one of his programs that he had started that I've kind of taken over. That's helped me really grow my business. So I want to go back just for a minute to family life because I feel like I've known you since your car pulled into town. But I learned something new that I really had no idea until, um, until we prepared for this podcast and that is that you are adopted, did not know.
And, uh, you shared with us that your sibling count went from 2 to 7 very quickly when you, when you had the opportunity to meet your birth family. And so I just want to know a little bit more about that, you know, that it's, it's actually a really great story. So I'm sitting at my desk at the insurance agency in Minnesota just finishing up with a client and you know how you get like those little shadow boxes that tell you, you get an email, it says son question mark and that's all it says, you know, that's the subject line and I'm like, finish up with my client.
I look this open a box, open up the email and it says 203 years ago I had to do the hardest thing I've ever done. I gave up my child for adoption and I'm pretty sure it's you go and I'm like, really, you know, and I pulled in some people that I work with and I'm like, what do you think of this? And like you, we need way more information. So I'm like, is there anything you can send me that this is real? I don't want this to be a fishing exit exit, you know, and she sends me a Polaroid picture, a copy of a Polaroid picture of me as a baby in a, in a one Z with a blanket and I'm looking at it and I'm like, hm.
So I send the, I send the picture to my mom who raised me and she's like, there's a picture just like that in your baby book. I'm like, this is weird because I sent you your baby book, go home and look at it. So I go home and I open up my baby book and there's a Polaroid in there of me in the exact same onesie with the exact same blanket. The picture she had of me was with my eyes closed. The picture in my baby book is me with my eyes open.
I find out from my mom that she had taken to the lady that had taken, the picture had taken two of them, one to give to my birth mother, one to give to my mom as part of that whole transition. It was a closed adoption. So there was, you know, 50 years ago, there wasn't, they didn't have open adoptions like they do now. Um But for the first two weeks of my life, I was in foster care just to make sure that there was nothing that they had to send me back to the hospital or anything else.
I was adopted from birth like everything was done prior to that, but they just kind of have that transition period and the gal that had taking care of me for those two weeks, had sent one to my birth mother and one to me. So that was like, oh my gosh. So she had found me on Google. I had filled out an app like 12 years prior to that online saying that this is when I was born. This is where I was born. And I just wanted to find out my medical history because I had three kids and I was getting a little older.
I kind of wanted to figure out what was going on and technology caught up that she found that I don't know how she found that website. Then she was able to Google me and find some pictures of me. And then she looked at those pictures and she's like that's him, reached out to me. So then we met. So I was 39 years old when I met my birth mother, Kathy. And immediately we had a connection and it, it has been a great relationship. She actually lives now full time in Green Valley.
And she was one of the reasons we came down here to visit, which ended up making this whole transition and, and everything else. And she has two sons so that those were my half brothers. And then she told me who my birth father was. And before I even reached out to him, one of his kids turned around and reached out to me and I found out that there were two more brothers and a sister on that side. So then I got to meet them a few months after I met my birth mother.
So that's how I went from two. I have a brother and sister that I grew up with that are my brother and sister. My brother is my best friend and I've been able to meet you didn't say everybody else. She's, my sister is 5.5 years younger. So, to me, she's still 13. Like I left the house when I was 18. She's still 13 years old. Yeah, forever. And she's little too. She's like five ft tall. And so I love my sister dearly, but it's like, Mike's, my brother's my best friend.
We're nine months apart. Like they call when I was getting adopted. They called my parents to say congratulations. And my parents thought they were congratulating them on having a son because my parents have been on a waiting list for seven years and they're, and they're like, no, wait, you just had a son and they're like, my parents were like, yes. And they're like, well, you just actually got matched and selected for a baby that's going to be born in a few months. Do you, do you want to still go through this?
And my parents said absolutely. So my brother and I are literally nine months apart, but my mom didn't have to go through that back to back. But it was worse than raising twins because every stage was twice as long and there was so much competition. Um But my parents, it was really interesting when I talked to my birth mother about the whole, her side of what she saw going into that, she said she picked my parents because on their application, they said they wanted a child, they didn't put any stipulations on it.
They didn't need a boy, they didn't need a girl, they just wanted a healthy child and she thought that was the most important thing and that's how I was chosen. So when she reached out to me, she never, she didn't think we'd, if we'd ever have a relationship or not. She just wanted to know that I was healthy, happy and been raised in a good family and it's been great. My, my birth mother and my mother have met several times and they know each other and, and communicate and I've gotten to meet all my siblings.
As a matter of fact, one of my half brothers is coming next week to Arizona and for a training and so we're getting together and going to a Diamondbacks game and, and hanging out a little bit too. That really is a beautiful story. Yeah. I, I'm very, I'm very fortunate. I've heard some horror stories of people meeting their birth families and it hasn't gone well, mine has gone amazingly. Mother's day gets to be a big deal because I have a birth mother, a mother, a mother-in-law and a stepmother in-law.
So just on the mother's side, I have to send out four cards and make sure you ready for that. Yeah, I've already got the cards all done and I just have to take care of the mother of my Children. Now is the last, the last phase of all that. So you shared some words of wisdom and I just want to, um, have you explain to us why these are important to you? So you said if we are kind to each other, it can change the world, you know, especially right now.
I mean, I've always lived that way, like always be kind, you know, the whole do unto others as you want done to yourself, right? That kind of philosophy and, and always help your neighbors because, you know, there's a whole karma thing for me and especially today, there's so much divisiveness out there, like you can go a long way just with a kind word, just with the kind of thing. You never know how you're going to affect that other person just by being nice and friendly and polite to somebody.
It might just change their whole day, their, the way things are going for them and they can appreciate that and you might never know how you affected them, but it can have a profound effect on how they deal with that day, how they deal with things moving forward. So I've always just been one of those people, like you're never gonna see me cranky or I'm never gonna snap at anybody. I mean, I, I have done that but it takes a lot to get me there. I will always try to be that friendly face, that smile that you maybe you need.
Hopefully that word of encouragement because that's what people need. That's what people want and that's what the human connection is all about. It's not about our divisiveness. There's so much more that we're the same and we're connected than we are that pulls us apart. So I try to highlight that every time I can in my life, that's just one of my mantras. I guess I can see it in my interactions with you. I see it all the time. She's jealous too. Well, I am jealous that he can do a cartwheel. Barely.
Cart wheels are good. Let's talk about the future real quick. Where are we headed? Where do you think the future is for you and, and your path? So, you know, um I'm almost an empty nester. Our 23 year old son still lives with us. Um which I, I love actually, he, he's the one that moved here with us. So like he graduated high school in June and he moved here in August with us. There was no hesitation. He wanted to move with us and be in Arizona. He loves it here.
Um The future for me. I'm, I'm still in that process. I feel like five years in, it's, it's still learning what I need to learn about this community, learning what I need to learn about Arizona um growing in my business and my professional life. And I see that, you know, for the next at least 15 years continuing to do that, I really see my involvement in the town of Gilbert through the chamber through Gilbert leadership through all the things that I'm involved in really putting kind of my stamp on this community.
It's, it's amazing to me that this is a community of 270,000 plus, but it feels like a town of 20,000 people with all the connections that you make. And I love that feel. And I think the chambers have been a big part of that. And that's one of the reasons that I stay involved in the chamber as much as I do is because of those relationships, those connections. So I hope to continue building those moving forward and being able to give back to the community that has really taken me in and my wife and I absolutely love it here.
We feel at home and people say, where are you from? We used to say always from, well, we're from Minnesota or whatever, you know, we're from Gilbert Arizona. And that's what I hope to say, moving forward is always that this is, this is our home and we don't ever plan on leaving. That's awesome. I love it. Yeah, me too. Well, thank you, Mark. This has been a great conversation. Thanks for sharing with us your journey and the people that have been a part of your life. It sounds like uh there's a lot more to go here and I can't wait to follow that too.
So, thank you very. So if you like this show, I know you did uh join our tribe, subscribe and you get all these in your inbox. We appreciate that. And thanks for listening, guiding growth, conversations with community leaders. Ben, let me ask you a question. How do you see other community members being involved in this podcast? This is going to be a great opportunity for so many people in the community to have a chance to be heard if they want to tell their story or if they just want to be part of this journey with us and help sponsor in a way that helps bring more people to the table with us.
So I think there's many opportunities at hand whether you want to again be on the show, reach out to us, let us know what your story is and how you think you could be part of it. We'd love to hear from you, reach out, let us know and we'll see if we can make that connection.
