The operator behind PELORA.

Started his first business at 17 years old.

Preston launched his first company at 17 — a clothing brand. Sketching products, finding suppliers, selling to friends, learning operations the hard way. He found out early what would define everything since: he was a builder.

Then addiction took over. The long journey back began.

Newport Beach. Epic Journey Recovery begins as a behavioral health marketing company.

Preston grew up in La Quinta, California. In 2012, he moved back to Newport Beach. In 2014, he founded Epic Transformations — originally built as a marketing company for the behavioral health and addiction recovery space, supporting treatment centers and recovery brands.

The company evolved. Today it’s called Epic Journey Recovery and focuses on three things:

• Capital raises — helping treatment centers and behavioral health brands raise the funding they need to scale care.
• Fundraising — running fundraisers that pay for addiction and mental health treatment for people who can’t afford it.
• One-on-one support — Preston and his team work directly with people still struggling, virtually and in person. Hands-on, still active today.

Across the past decade, the work has touched 3,000+ men and women through coaching, fitness, mental health, addiction recovery, functional medicine, and QEEG brain biology scans. Epic Journey Recovery is still running today — alongside PELORA Marketing.

Pro action sports athletes. Skydiving, motocross, freediving, surfing.

Starting in 2013, Preston began working with professional action sports athletes. Personal brand, sponsorship strategy, content production, mindset coaching. Skydiving. Motocross. Freediving in the ocean. Surfing.

The standards transfer. The intensity transfers. The same operator mindset that runs PELORA today was forged in environments where mistakes have consequences.

Twelve years sober. The foundation under everything.

Preston got sober in his early twenties. Twelve years in, sobriety is the operating system — why the work is creative-first, why standards don’t move, why behavioral health is the one industry he won’t leave.

“Recovery taught me what discipline is supposed to feel like. Everything I’ve built since is downstream of that.”

Lost his father. Co-founded Fresh Start of California Detox with his brother.

In 2015, Preston’s father died by suicide. The same year, he and his brother co-founded Fresh Start of California Detox — a licensed sub-acute program built to move people through the hardest 7-14 days. They ran admissions, intake, clinical ops, marketing, the entire back office. Grew to two locations across California. Sold in 2025.

“We work for the companies helping people get better. The work is personal because of who I lost.”

7+ years designing & scaling health, wellness & longevity practices.

For the past seven years, Preston has designed, advised, and scaled health and wellness operators across the proactive, preventive, and performance side of medicine:

• Longevity practices — performance, hormone optimization, biological-age testing.
• Peptide therapy clinics — physician-supervised peptide protocols.
• Concierge medicine clinics — membership-model primary care.
• Med spas — aesthetic, injectables, laser, and skin-health practices.
• Regenerative medicine clinics — PRP, stem cell, and exosome-based therapies.
• Functional medicine practices — root-cause clinical medicine.

Capital raises. Marketing strategy. Operating systems. Patient acquisition funnels. Helping wellness operators turn a vision into a real business.

Built treatment centers across every level of behavioral health care.

Starting in 2019, Preston began building treatment centers on the behavioral health side — a fundamentally different specialty from the wellness clinic work above. This world has its own clinical licensing, its own regulators (Joint Commission, CARF, state DHCS), and its own marketing rules (LegitScript). It’s the world he grew up in as the operator of Fresh Start of California Detox and SoCal Mental Health.

Across the past several years, Preston has built and operated programs across the full continuum of care:

• Sub-acute detoxification — medical stabilization for the first 7 to 14 days.
• Residential treatment centers (RTC) — both dual diagnosis (substance use + co-occurring mental health) and primary mental health.
• Partial Hospitalization Programs (PHP) — structured day treatment, 5-6 hours daily.
• Intensive Outpatient Programs (IOP) — 9-15 clinical hours per week.
• Virtual outpatient programs — telehealth IOP and PHP for clients accessing care from anywhere.
• Short-term crisis stabilization residentials — intervention-grade care for primary mental health crises.

From admissions to clinical ops to discharge planning — the operator path, owned end-to-end. Most marketers can’t bring this to a client meeting. The muscle memory of running a treatment center as the operator, not the vendor.

Published The Epic Journal. 20,000+ copies sold.

Preston wrote The Epic Journal — a guided mind-body-spirit journal for people in recovery. 20,000+ copies sold. Still selling 1,000-1,500 a month organic, no paid push. The curriculum behind Epic Journey Recovery — the behavioral health company Preston runs in parallel with PELORA.

The proof case for what we now build for clients: content engine, SEO surface, customer-acquisition asset — one product, no launch budget, sustained by creative.

Watch the film The Epic Journal

Co-founded SoCal Mental Health. Raised $10M+. Three crisis stabilization residentials. Sold in 2024.

In 2020, Preston co-founded SoCal Mental Health. He helped raise over $10 million in capital and the company built three short-term crisis stabilization residential programs for primary mental health. Operated through 2024.

The kind of facility that catches people in crisis before they fall through the cracks. The kind that doesn’t exist enough.

Lost his brother to a fentanyl overdose.

In 2022, Preston lost his brother to fentanyl. The work he’d been doing for a decade stopped being a career and became something he could not put down.

Everything PELORA builds is downstream of that. If your business helps people live healthier, we treat the work like it matters — because on the other end of the funnel, it always does.

$580,000+ raised for behavioral health, mental health, addiction & wellness.

Over the past decade, Preston has personally raised $580,000+ for behavioral health programs, mental health awareness, addiction recovery, and wellness initiatives. Foundation work, athlete partnerships, golf tournaments, alumni events. The Red Songbird Foundation event PELORA powered is one chapter.

Treatment center owners and recovery-adjacent founders aren’t running ad-budget math in a vacuum — they’re doing the work because someone they loved needed help. We understand the buyer because we’ve been the buyer.

Sold both treatment centers. Invested everything into marketing.

In 2024, Preston sold SoCal Mental Health. In 2025, he sold Fresh Start of California Detox. Then he made a decision: he invested everything into marketing. Because across every business he’d built or consulted on for the past decade-plus, marketing was the through-line that decided whether the work scaled or stalled.

That decision became PELORA Marketing — a creative-first agency in Newport Beach for the operators on the wellness and behavioral health side of medicine. We shoot the video, design the sites, run the ads, and build AI-powered CRM automation so leads don’t fall through the cracks.

Over the years Preston has consulted with 35+ businesses as an advisor and operator. Today PELORA serves 36+ active client companies across health, wellness, and behavioral health. Preston lives in the back end — building CRMs, integrating AI agents, overseeing every project shipped under the PELORA name. The agency runs the way he wishes one had when he was the client.

Today Preston runs two companies in parallel: PELORA Marketing for builders, and Epic Journey Recovery for capital raises, treatment-access fundraisers, and one-on-one support for people still in the fight.

His favorite thing — alongside the skydives and the surf sessions — is helping other business owners feel safe, heard, and supported. Because building alone is brutal. And nobody should have to do it alone.

“I’ve spent my life trying to help people get well. PELORA is just that work, applied to the businesses doing the work.”