Everyone was dying or going to jail.

At seventeen, Roel could already see how the story ended. Everyone around him was dying or going to jail. That wasn’t a turn of phrase — it was the arithmetic of the life he was in, and it wasn’t hard to work out where his own name landed on it.

At seventeen he promised his mother and father that he would do everything possible to avoid ending up like all those around him.

That search is what brought him to Victory Outreach Portland. He stayed two years.

That is where he really found God—not in one night, but across two years of them, at an age when most people are still being handed a life instead of rebuilding one. He came out at nineteen with a foundation under him.

At nineteen he went looking again—this time for a way to make a living, to see what was out there. Job Corps is where he landed, and nine months later he had a GED, a technical degree, and a pre-apprenticeship in carpentry. That, he says, is where he reclaimed his foundation in life.

Carpentry became construction, and construction became eighteen years as a project engineer and project manager — large-scale commercial work, and disaster relief for FEMA. Somewhere in there he found he had a knack for business, and over the years he owned all kinds of them.

Then he was thrown into the lab business. The diagnostic tools doctors and patients count on weren’t advancing fast enough, and nobody was going to fix that for them—so he went to work. This involved years of research and development and a pilot program in urology clinics, which he refined until it succeeded. Doc Lab Inc came out of that, and he has kept building since, acquiring and scaling other businesses in the same space. Today he is its founder, president, and CEO.

His mission, in his words, is simple: take care of doctors and patients, every single day.

Pastor Max calls it a real rags-to-riches story. What a résumé leaves out is the order things happened in. The recovery home came first. Everything after it was built on that.