Gregory DePriest
Amazon DSP Owner & Former Pastor, Amazon Delivery Service Partner
A Mississippi-raised outdoorsman who reads a great lodge like a business case — bird hunting behind the dogs, fly fishing the tailwaters of East Tennessee and the rivers of Montana, with a cast-and-blast in Argentina still on the bucket list.
- Last-Mile Logistics
- Amazon DSP Operations
- Church Leadership
- Nonprofit Fundraising
- Career Reinvention
About Gregory DePriest
What Gregory built
One of ten kids raised by a widowed mother in Mississippi, Gregory has reinvented himself across four industries. He started in auto finance — with Nissan Motor Acceptance, and helped stand up Infiniti Finance when the brand launched — then pivoted into ministry at 33, taking a 60-person church in East Tennessee and, over 25 years, building it into the largest-attended congregation in the Tri-Cities at more than 2,200 people a Sunday. In 2018 he helped a billionaire friend raise $56.6M for an orphanage — bringing in Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Peyton Manning and Dan Marino for what became the highest PGA-endorsed fundraiser in history. Then Amazon called. At 57 he started a last-mile logistics company from zero, got his CDL, and today runs an Amazon Delivery Service Partner business with more than 200 employees and a monthly payroll north of $600,000.
Gregory in the field
Gregory learned to hunt — and, as he tells it, learned to be a man — from the successful businessmen of his boyhood church, who kept a 3,000-acre hunting lease in Mississippi and took him and his four younger brothers into the woods after his father died. Six decades on, the outdoors is still where he resets and where he studies his craft: bird hunting behind pointing dogs, fly fishing the Watauga and South Holston near his East Tennessee home, drifting the Gunnison and the Yellowstone, chasing pheasant in South Dakota and quail at Rio Piedra in South Georgia. He reads biographies and autobiographies constantly, keeps a cigar case loaded with Liga Privadas, and treats a world-class lodge less as a vacation than as a service clinic to reverse- engineer for his own drivers.
Why this conversation matters
Gregory is proof that reinvention isn't reserved for the young — and that the leap only works when it's paired with a plan. He's blunt about the mechanics: faith without a strategy is just a wish, you can't steer a car that isn't moving, and "potential" is the one word he won't let his team use because it means you want it for someone more than they want it for themselves. He gave up an established Austin territory to rebuild his whole company from scratch when Amazon wouldn't transfer him home, laid awake nights sure he'd fail, and did it anyway — because people who didn't make big moves never lived big lives. Underneath the operating lessons is a quieter one he found in marriage counseling: that a man surrounded by a big, close family can still have no one safe to brag to, and that building that circle on purpose is the work.
“Faith without a strategy is just a wish.”
Gregory DePriest on The Hunt for Success
Sam McGough's full conversation with Gregory, available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Key takeaways from Gregory DePriest
The ideas Gregory left on the table in episode 14.
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Faith without a strategy is just a wish.
After 25 years in ministry Gregory watched people use prayer as an excuse for inaction — "if somebody says they need to pray about it, what they just told me is no." His fix is motion: you can't steer a car while it's sitting still, but once it's in drive you can correct even a wrong direction. When he left the church his whole plan was "get my CDL, drive a truck, own a fleet in five years." It was concrete, and that was the point.
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Everything has a shelf life — including you.
Gregory speaks to colleges about understanding your shelf life: you can extend it, but never indefinitely, so you have to keep reinventing yourself for the next phase or life leaves you behind. His line for it is grim and useful — "a lot of people die at 25 but aren't buried until 75." At 67 he still keeps big dreams ahead of him and hires people who are better than he is.
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People who didn't make big moves never lived big lives.
When Amazon wouldn't transfer his successful Austin operation home to Tennessee, Gregory gave it up and started over from zero — "I didn't know what I was doing the first time and I was successful; I know what I'm doing now." He's honest that he lay awake sure he'd fail. Reading biographies taught him the pattern: the people who lived big lives were the ones willing to make the big move.
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Get the word 'fail' out of your vocabulary.
Gregory asks his kids a question worth stealing: if you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt you could do anything and it was impossible to fail, what would you do? His son said he wouldn't be afraid to try anything. His point — you can get experience, even painful experience, but you can't fail — and most people stay focused on the failure instead of the reward.