69 www. ReadMPM. com | www.MountPl easantMagaz i ne. com | www.MountPl easantPodcas t . com Running Through The Dark Financial Advisor Takes Difficult Road To The Top In summer 2020, Kimsey Hollifield had a lot to celebrate. He and wife Lorna were nearing their 15th wedding anniversary. Their first daughter would soon be born. He’d completed goals of becoming a marathoner. And his decade-old business, Hollifield Financial Group, had not only been named one of the top five best in Charleston, it was also awarded the Thrive Award by WealthManagement.com as one of fastest-growing financial firms in the country. It was at this time that Hollifield knew he’d truly escaped the demons of the past. RUNNING EARLY The demon was already present when Hollifield reached his first conscious memory at age three. Growing up in a single-wide trailer rented from a convict in Appalachia, the outside world called his demon poverty, but Hollifield knew it only as running. Every day in his early years, he watched his family trying to stall creditors and sharing their nightly dinner table with a mountain of bills they couldn’t pay. “Even as a kid, I understood the stress of money,” he said. By age 11, Hollifield was juggling several odd jobs with being a middle school student — mowing a full round of lawns, selling homemade origami, cleaning industrial machines at a dry cleaner while wearing a hazmat mask and helping his dad on the railroad. Nothing he earned changed the situation, but inside his mind, the wheels were already turning. “I knew I had to make money to be able to control my destiny,” he explained. RUNNING AND HOPING Each week, one of Hollifield’s errands was to run his grandmother’s money from her alterations business to the BY L . C . LEACH I I I senior living K imsey Ho l l i f i e ld on a weekend run . Photos cour t esy of Ches l ey Lanford.
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