2nd Mile Films
Founder's Corner

The people behind the journey.

Explore the founders featured on The 2nd Mile and discover the defining moments, setbacks and breakthroughs behind the businesses they built.

Aries Haygood

A&M Farms

Vidalia, Georgia

In the sandy soil of Vidalia, Georgia, the Haygood family has grown sweet onions for generations. A&M Farms is more than a business to Aries Haygood — it is an inheritance, a responsibility, and a way of understanding the world. Then came the diagnosis. Cancer arrived without warning and rearranged everything he thought he understood about time, work, and what the land is really for. The fields did not stop while he fought, but something inside him shifted. The onions he had always grown became something more: a measure of what he was leaving behind. Today, Aries speaks about healthy soil the way some people speak about faith — with reverence and with evidence. Resilience, for him, is not a single act of survival. It is the decision, made every season, to keep planting for the people who will harvest after him.

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Michael Longo

Icon Realty

Fort Lauderdale, FL

Michael Longo built his first real business before he was old enough to understand what it would cost him. From a teenage barbershop to the brand that would become Icon Realty, his path through South Florida real estate was never a straight line. It moved through setbacks, missed certainties, and the kind of moments that reveal which of your convictions are real. Michael learned to see potential where other people saw only risk — in neglected buildings, in difficult deals, in the gap between what a property is and what it could become. That instinct, sharpened by failure, became the foundation of a company built on reinvention. Ambition, for him, is not about acquisition. It is about the discipline to keep building when the easy exits disappear, and the leadership to bring other people along for the next mile.

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