About Nicholas Volinchak
I’ve been where you are—and far lower. That’s why I know what’s possible when you stop running and start rising.
“No matter what they do, they’ll never have done what you’ve done.”
– Tony Laricca, philanthropist and mentor
Addiction. Rock bottom. Reinvention.
What began in chaos and self-destruction became a path to purpose, leadership, and real change.
Nick’s story isn’t about perfection—it’s about the power of getting back up. He’s lived what many only talk about: hitting bottom, confronting the truth, and doing the slow, brutal work of becoming someone different. For the reader, his path offers proof that no matter how far off-course you feel, transformation is possible—not in theory, but in practice. His life is a mirror for anyone ready to stop pretending they’re fine and start doing the work to become who they were meant to be.
This isn’t a polished résumé. It’s the lived-out proof that perseverance builds more than success — it builds men.
Tested by life. Delivering
Built Different
Spiraled fast. Didn’t die. Win.
I was born into a normal family in America. My dad worked and this was still a time where dad worked and mom stayed at home and took care of the kids. Everything was totally normal. I loved sports. I love wrestling. I really love Christmas.
Entrepreneurship wasn’t really in my blood, but I was always into something I seemed to end up involved with.
In my early years, I used to make Kool-Aid and sell it on the construction sites in our growing neighborhood.
I would hustle baseball cards at school, trying to flip my current stock into the players I really liked – and I did tons of research trying to figure out who the future stars were going to be.
In the mid-90’s, I turned 15 wrestling figures into hundreds of pieces of wrestling memorabilia trading things across the globe, utilizing AOL chat rooms and message boards to find people who wanted exactly what I had and were willing to pay any price to get it.
Everything was normal - but it wouldn’t last.
After a family vacation to Niagara Falls in the late summer of 1992, my world turned upside down for the first time. When we came back, my mom went to her brother’s house and when they wanted to leave to get lunch, she couldn’t stand up. Finding this odd, they called her doctor, as gout does run in our family, and the doctor instructed her to go to the ER. After tests, it was found out that she had and inoperable cancer, and it had spread so wildly and violently that there was no hope. On October 25th, 1992 just 4 days after my brother and sister turned 5, she died. I was 8, going on 9.
I was always a really smart kid and I knew exactly what happened. I knew my mom had died. I knew that she was gone forever. But knowing something like that rationally and being ok with it, or knowing how to deal with it, or two entirely different things. There’s no question to some extent that’s where things started.
Even though I went to a catholic school and was an altar boy, I harbored a significant amount of disdain toward God. After all, how can I rationalize that a loving god would take away a young mother from her young family? So I began to walk away from that institution.
Things at home weren’t great either. It goes without saying that my dad didn’t handle it well, and I will never hide from the fact that there was physical abuse. It toughened me up, no questions, but it also made growing up tougher than it had to be.
Still, I felt like I had a pretty good life. My aunts and uncles always tried to make childhood up to us, and our grandparents especially. I have so many good memories from my childhood and even though I remember the bad times, I still feel like the good out weighed the bad.
I was 11 or 12 when I found out that my small Catholic school was going to be shutting down and I was going to have to go to the high school in the upper middle class city I lived in, Canfield. Now St. Anne’s had dwindled down to probably 12-15 kids by the time the 6th grade rolled around, and going from a school that size to a 250+ person class like Canfield was a massive shock.
Not to mention the fact that even though my dad made great money in the elevator industry, he didn’t spend on things like clothes and that trickled down to us, as he had my Grandmother shop for us at K-Marts and Ames, not exactly the fashion stalwarts of the time. I stood out like a sore thumb, and I didn’t know anyone. I was picked on to the point where very quickly into my time at Canfield, I had to throw hands to show people they couldn’t fuck with me.
After all, I was being raised violently by my dad - and I’d be kidding if I said I didn’t enjoy causing the pain to someone else.
I made a group of friends, but still, we weren’t the most popular kids in school, though some of that was self-inflicted. I was 15-16 years old when the routine of listening to metal music, going to concerts and wandering around the mall, while ending the night in Kevin and Paul’s basement, 8 dudes and no chicks stopped cutting it.
Remember, this is a point in time where American Pie and Can’t Hardly Wait were on the big screens, providing a path of what high school was supposed to look like.
And it wasn’t what high school looked like for me.
I started to make some acquaintances with another group of kids in school who were more popular and started tagging around with them, and even while I was hanging out with my prior friends, I was starting to experiment with alcohol and weed.
I really went all in with it during my senior year, and it started to look more like American Pie and other movies of their time. But it was really quickly starting to become more than just fun times – it became a necessary part of my day to day activity.
I got arrested for the first time when I was 16. Kevin and I stole some CD’s from CD Warehouse – I know I’m aging myself here. I got off without a charge because I refused to talk to the police and Kevin admitted to taking CD’s. My dad was pissed and you would have thought I would have learned from there but nope.
The plan was to go to Youngstown State University right after high school, but I got plastered the night before the ACT’s and I misread the directions my dad gave me to get to the test site and didn’t take it.
So I decided to take a year off.
I ended up getting a DUI right after high school and really the arrests didn’t stop.
Possession. Disorderly conduct. Paraphernalia. Theft. Possession of narcotics. Theft of narcotics.
The problem was I never really got in trouble – sure, I got arrested, but nothing severe happened to me – just probation.
I had to go to a DUI school for a weekend.
I got arrested and my dad wouldn’t bail me out, so I spent a weekend in jail.
I got a 10 day sentence but convinced the judge that since I worked at a grocery store (LOL) I should be allowed to do weekends in jail.
There’s no doubt I had to have double digit probation violations from the time I was 18-20. In three years. Easily 12 if not 18.
Zero times did I end up with anything more than those 10 days - just more time added to probation.
It did nothing to teach me a lesson.
Finally, I got to the point where I just didn’t care. And by this point I was in full on addiction to OxyContin.
That went from the time I was 18 until 21.
I robbed everyone I could, friend or foe, and did unspeakable things to people, things that I have to live with every day to this day.
My dad got a restraining order on me.
I went to my grandmother’s house and she closed the door on me and told me never to come back.
I didn’t care.
There were definitely thoughts of ending it all , but I really only made half assed attempts.
I drank a full bottle of vodka while driving around the backroads in Canfield and there is one sharp turn into a ditch area and I thought I could just get in a bad accident to end it.
So I took the corner at about 90 and the car actually did spin out, went into the ditch, and somehow just popped out facing the opposite direction I was coming.
I took it as a sign of divine intervention- but still didn’t do anything to act on it.
I ran out of gas shortly after and even in the early 2000’s, people weren’t inclined to stop on the side of the road for people they don’t know. This would have been late 2002 or early 2003.
Called everyone I knew and no one wanted anything to do with me.
Except one couple on their way to Old North Church picked me up and took me to my father’s house who had been willing to take me to get a can of gas filled.
There was a brief conversation, and I opened up to them and they told me they loved me and hoped that everything would work out and that I was strong enough to get through it.
It was kind of an out of nowhere experience for me, as up to this point everyone, friends, family, everyone, basically wrote me off.
But these people who just heard they picked up a terrible person didn’t express that same perspective.
Something started to tick inside me.
It wasn’t that long after that I ended up completely crashing out.
I stole something from an older lady named Joyce, who had adopted one of my friends, and who was like a mother to me, and even then, she was still willing to take time to talk to me and try to advise me to go the Rescue Mission to get help.
That night after the conversation, I actually did attempt to do that. I couldn’t find it at first, and then on the way back I did find it. I pulled in.
Then I pulled right back out.
I couldn’t do it.
The rest of the night was spent drinking and smoking crack for the first time and then when I was trying to drive to Wal-Mart to go to sleep for the night, the Austintown Police Department pulled me over.
Drunk, high, no insurance, no license – I think I’m cooked this time.
The officer got out of the car, and I was assuming that it was straight to jail for this guy.
As he approached my car, he shined the light in the backseat, undoubtedly seeing my bags of clothes and stuff in there. Moving toward the front of the vehicle, I rolled down the window, cold February Ohio air hitting my face in what I only assumed was going to be a tense situation that resulted in me losing months, if not years of my life.
“Sir, before I ask any questions, are you living in your car?”
“Yes”
For whatever reason, the levity was broken and the conversation was not what I expected.
The officer spent the next ten minutes, not asking how much I had to drink or what substance I was on, but asking where I was going to sleep that night.
You see, even though the officer had sympathy for me, he still had a job to do and because I had no legal right to drive the car, he had to take it.
But he also legally, and very clearly morally, couldn’t let me sleep in the woods or wander around town in the freezing temps.
“Where do you want to go?”, he asked.
“I guess I should go to the Rescue Mission.”
I rolled up in police custody at exactly midnight on Valentine’s Day 2005. Having been 21 years old for just 40 days, I had already bottomed out and ended up at the homeless shelter. A man named Frank was there to let me in.
As he walked me to the back of the facility, I looked at the aged building and started replaying the decisions of my life that led me away from college and starting my life to the Rescue Mission.
“How old are you?” Frank said.
“Just turned 21” I responded.
“What are you doing with your life that at 21 years old, coming from Canfield, Ohio, that you landed at the homeless shelter?”
I guess it was that kind of truth that I needed to hear because something in my spirit just sunk.
For the first time, I really felt like I got called out on my shit.
The first few weeks at the homeless shelter were interesting. I slept in a dorm with 53 other dudes. I had to shower in an open shower, which as someone who didn’t play sports, wasn’t really something I was used to, nor did I know if I was showering with someone who might do something you wouldn’t expect someone to do.
I entered at a time where there were more young people than normal, which actually wasn’t great for me, because as much as I was trying to make a change, I was still 21 years old and coming off drugs, and I was surrounded by young women in the same position.
Kind of distracting to the end goal here.
I was half assing my way through their residential program when one night at around 11PM I got a knock on my door. When doing the residential program you got your own room, which is basically the only reason I decided to do it.
I asked who it was and another resident who worked as midnight staff said you have some friends here, and I got excited thinking about who was at the door to see him.
Pretty quickly, I realized that a) none of my friends wanted anything to do with me because of what I had done to them and b) no one from the Mission was just going to allow random drug addicts upstairs at 11PM to hang out with me.
As the door opened, I looked down a long hallway of US Marshalls.
“Do you know why we are here?”, one of them said.
Now this is a tricky situation I’ve found myself in. Saying nothing isn’t likely to humor them, but trying to guess which of any hundred or so crimes I’ve committed in the months leading up to this is also not an easy task.
So I asked myself: “What is the least significant crime you committed?”
“I stole a playstation from Joyce” I responded, hoping that I didn’t just confess to a different crime than what they were here for.
“Yep and you are coming with us” he responded.
I’m not sure there has ever been a time in my life that I’ve been so relieved to being led away by a dozen big tough guys in handcuffs, but even though this wasn’t an ideal situation, I was being taken in for what I knew was the least significant thing I’d done.
I had something like three days between when I was arrested and was set to go in front of the judge, who I assumed based on my track record would just let me go. Especially since I was living at the Mission and doing their program, which was viewed positively in the community, I figured that I would be back to my antics within a few days.
And that is exactly what happened. Stood in front of the judge. Told them I was working on getting my life straight and I was sorry.
But I was about half serious. I mean I was sorry, I loved Joyce for all that she did with me, but this was all a game I was trying to win over here.
I took the van back to jail, having been released on conditions that I completed the program at the Mission or something close to it, plus restitution and, you guessed it, more probation! I got back to the cell and told my bunky I was out.
I decided that the system worked for me and there were no consequences. We even worked out a plan that when I got released his chick was going to come pick me up and take me to the dope house and I was just going to stay there.
I waited.
One day.
Two days.
Three days.
One week.
What the hell is going on? I got released by the judge a week ago now but still here I sit.
The thing about jail is that everyone is an attorney. I had so many different legal opinions being thrown at me. If you have a release date and they hold you past it, they have to pay you a certain amount a day. Get an attorney because you can sue.
One of the guards hearing this pulled me aside, as I was a nice enough guy and didn’t cause any problems, and told me something that made my heart drop: usually, if you get released by a judge and you are still being held, it’s because they have another charge waiting to drop. And typically, the longer that length is, the worse the charge is going to be.
Now look, I didn’t kill anyone, nothing sexual, nothing physical. But I was moving pills, I was doing stuff I shouldn’t have been doing. I fully believed that I was about to get indicted – this was around the time when the initial crackdowns on OxyContin were starting to take place.
I sat in there for sometime between 3-6 weeks. As little as there is to do in jail, this was still the most chaotic time emotionally and mentally for me, because I thought they could drop a big charge on me. At some point, though, I just said fuck it and went back to my old ways and started popping pills in jail. Easy enough, trade a break for a pill. No big deal.
One day I was playing basketball, and I heard my name called.
My heart dropped. Here it is – the end of everything for me. A once straight A student going to prison for who knows what.
I walked up to the officer, expecting to be taken to his superior to have my charge formally introduced or whatever the process was, and he said the most amazing words I’ve ever heard.
“Your release papers were misplaced, but they just came through and you’re going home.”
I’ve never been so excited. I went and cleaned my bunk off and threw it in the bin and told my bunky I was out. He called his girl and she was going to come pick me up.
I got on the elevator with the biggest CO I’ve ever seen in my life, and all I can express is that I saw a flash of light. When I saw it, I knew exactly what it was.
“Alright Jesus. Everyone at the Mission keeps telling me you can change people. Well, all I’ve ever been able to do is land myself in jail, so if you can change me, now’s your time. Prove it and change me.”
The CO just stood there silent and stunned.
I got off the elevator, changed my clothes, and walked out the front of the building. I saw my bunky’s girlfriend, started walking toward the car, got halfway, turned around, and ran the mile or so from the county jail back to the Rescue Mission.
It was time to change.
For the next 9 months or so, I actually did my best and I can say that there was an actual change in the person I was. Sure, not all of me is gone, but most of the bad parts.
I accomplished three things at the mission: I got through what I needed to and worked my program, I ended up getting hired there and worked there for almost a decade, and I met my first wife there.
Like they say, you can’t win them all.
My marriage during the first year was fine, and work was good too. I was repairing my relationships with my family and some friends.
One of those friends, Kyle, and I always dreamed of being professional wrestlers. What better way to do that than to start our own wrestling company?
As I research the top talent to bring in, I stumble across a video that starts out:
“Is ‘Sweet n Sour’ Larry Sweeney lookin’ good today or what?”
A throwback to wrestlings late 80’s-early 90’s over the top characters, Sweeney possessed a charisma on his worst day that most men would be excited to have on their best. While undersized, he was extremely talented, and one phone call later, I knew I had who we were building the company around.
And in July of 2007, he was our champion.
And by January of 2008, because we were 22 years old and had no idea what we were doing, he was no longer our champion because we couldn’t afford to bring him in from Philadelphia.
I stayed in contact with him because he and I hit it off and we clicked. And sure, maybe, some of that could have been our relationship (I give him money to roll around in tights – well, that sounds weird), but it was because we stayed in contact for 4 years after that as he was going through a yo-yo of personal issues and I wanted to do whatever I could to help him.
We didn’t talk often, and I know he had a circle of friends that he broke into the business with that I would never be able to be a part of, but he had a massive impact on me and I wanted to be able to be there for him.
I can’t recall the last time we spoke. We effectively stopped running the company in 2010, but I did hear from people I stayed in contact with that he planned on coming back with a vengeance.
Unfortunately, in 2011, he lost his battle with his demons.
It hurt me. I know it didn’t hurt me like it hurt others who had traveled the road with him and had stories to tell for years to come.
But the micro interactions I had with him stuck with me even to this day, and have affected me in one way or another to approach what I am doing now.
It was around this time that, while my personal relationships with most everyone else were improving, my marriage wasn’t.
I’m not going to go into detail, but my ex-wife went back into the life of drugs about a year after our marriage, and the start and stop nature of addiction became too much for me to continue on with.
I gave up on my marriage many years before I actually ended it, and I wish I could go back and end it sooner. I often have dreams about that. All jokes aside, I didn’t do myself any favors because I had long been out of love with her because of what she put me through, albeit somewhat hypocritically, but I couldn’t withstand the potential danger I felt I could be in with her doing what she was doing.
This also marked the end of my time working at the Rescue Mission, a mixed bag for me, as while I loved working with the clients at the Mission, oftentimes the staff and their hypocrisy made me wonder what I was doing with my life.
Fortunately, I had been going through college at the time, where I had earned a solid reputation as a straight shooter and someone you didn’t want to fuck with – a weird combination to be said about a near 30 year old in college, but it is what it is.
Most of it stems from a situation with a transplant accounting professor from Texas who went off on me in an email chain with other students and professors because I requested a “read receipt” – because guess what, college professors are humans too and sometimes they get in their feelings or make mistakes and I want to have that acknowledgement that you saw what I sent you and with the amount I’m paying to the university, you can deal with it.
Well, upon seeing his response, I immediately left my desk job as a student worker in the administration office, marched up to his office, unannounced, may or may not have hung up the phone call he was on, slammed the door and proceeded to tell him he wasn’t in Texas anymore and that he was in Youngstown and his shit don’t fly around here.
Needless to say, an immediate apology and genuine bending over backwards took place after this confrontation, though it definitely could have gone in a much worse direction where I never received a degree from the university.
Everything happens for a reason though.
It was at this time I met two of the most important people I ever met in my life.
The first was my current wife. We can talk about her later.
The second was Tony Lariccia.
Tony was well known in Youngstown because he made tons of money and made sure he was very philanthropic with it.
He was a very short man, and at 6’5” the sight of us next to each other was probably humorous.
I met him at an event and thanked him for what he did, but I never really got a chance to talk to him. Everyone always wanted to get his ear, and I did feel bad, because oftentimes it was because they wanted something.
Understand, this may have been the lowest point in my life. Work sucked because even though I remained qualified from every angle, I was never given an opportunity to advance my position at the Mission. My marriage was in ashes, the wrestling company had died, and I’ve started to see my contemporaries achieve things in life and I was nowhere close. Oh, add to this that I was amongst the top of my class but still couldn’t manage to get an accounting internship.
I felt like even though I was clean, I was still stuck in the mud and slowly getting pulled into the quicksand under it.
Tony decided since he helped pay for such a nice and big new business building that he would have an office next to the office that I worked. One day, he walked into the office, and started talking to one of the employees about someone he knew going through addiction, and they said, “oh, you should talk to Nick. He used to be an addict.”
I’ve never seen someone turn around so fast with the response, “Him?!?! There’s no way he was an addict!”
In fairness, the fact that I talked so eloquently kept people from thinking I was an addict, and in my addiction, this was one of my greatest strengths. By the time I met Tony, though, I was 6’5” and nearing 300 pounds – not exactly what anyone thought a drug addict would look like.
From that day forward, we were inseparable. Whenever he was in his office, my office knew they just had to deal with it when he pulled me in to talk to me or have me do random tasks for him. In the ultimate act of trust, mere weeks after our friendship kicked off, he asked me to execute a trade on his platform for an amount of money that I am still in awe of.
This wealthy, 60 plus year old man thought so much of me that he entrusted me with a portion of his fortune. Sure, I couldn’t have done anything to get it that wouldn’t have been traceable, but that’s not the only way you could play the angle.
Bigger picture though, I thought to myself, “if this wildly successful guy thinks so much of me, maybe there’s something there.”
And he did. We would be walking up and down the halls of the building, and he would stop random people, staff or students, and say “Did you know Nicky used to be a drug addict?”
At first I remember saying “Tony, what the fuck man? Why are you telling random people such a personal thing about me?”
“Because Nicky - no matter what most of these people do, they will never have done what you’ve done and you should be proud of that.”
I just got goosebumps after writing that. I actually remember leaving work right after this, as I had just finished my shift and sitting in my car and balling. I’m part Italian which means I am emotional and I’m fine with that. It’s one of the many good parts of that heritage.
But to think that he barely knew me and actually had that amount of love toward me and pride about what I did, I couldn’t imagine.
For a few years after that, he and I remained in touch as I finished my undergrad and he spent less time at the university. Unfortunately, in 2017, his time came to an end and I had to say goodbye to my friend from afar.
I was truly touched by that moment and it will likely go down as one of the single biggest turning points in my life.
Oh yes, my current wife. While the divorce was happening, I started dating this hot girl I was working with at the university.
It was pretty immediate that things went from dating to living together, and almost ten years later, we are married with a child! Especially wild considering that she hated me when we first started working with each other!
Right before we got married, we wanted to have a little side hustle so we started doing small website builds and some social media. As the years went on, we began getting more and more referral clients, and after being laid off before we became pregnant (I guess I had time on my hands…), we decided that I would try to make it work.
It didn’t. I wasn’t able to do it by myself and I was very quickly going into a depression because this felt like another thing that wasn’t going to go my way.
But my wife never stopped believing in me.
After a dispute with her working situation after having our son, Primo, my wife decided that she was going to take the risk of working at home and helping me build out the company.
Little did I know she would basically run away with it herself! I very quickly became a background character to her abilities, and she has grown the company with assistance from me, but mostly due to her intelligence and skill to be able to take care of her family.
I kept feeling like it still wasn’t good enough.
Because for me, I’ve always wanted to use my stories and my life experience to help others who were experiencing a multitude of feelings – not being good enough, self-doubt, imposter syndrome.
But for years, I’ve set up some imaginary goal posts that I felt would provide me with a clear understanding of when it would be time for me to share my story.
For 20 years, I just kept moving them ever so slightly so that it was close but just slightly out of reach. I told myself the reason I was doing it was because I wanted to be the best version of myself to help those who needed my help.
The reality was, though, that I didn’t want to believe that I could do it.
Then a chance conversation with my father took place.
Our relationship has improved to heights I couldn’t have ever imagined. He knows that he should have done better and so do I – that’s growth and that’s absolutely one of the things that went through my head in convincing myself that it was time to move forward.
But more important than that, he told me how much regret he had for so many things in his life. He had chances to take trips, buy businesses, and go to places where few are able to go.
And that’s really when it clicked to me: I would be 45, then 50, then 55, then 65 and I would still be singing the same song about how bad I wanted to do this, while consistently digging up the goalpost and moving it further and further away.
I don’t deserve that, and more important, neither do any of the individuals who would benefit from what I have to offer.
Sometimes we have to take risks in life, and one of the best risks you can take is taking the risk on yourself.
And that brings us to where we are at now.