In the summer of 2023, Bill Leighty was seventy-eight years old, exhausted from a road trip gone sideways, and sitting on a bench in a park in Gillette, Wyoming, wondering what came next. Behind him were thirty-eight years in residential real estate, a lifetime of self-employment, a nonprofit he’d founded, a planning commission he’d chaired — and the unsettling recognition that none of it had left him financially secure enough to rest. Ahead of him was the question that confronts every man who reaches this moment: What do I do now, when the world stops calling for what I used to offer? The answer he found — not on the road, not in a business plan, but in the stillness of that park — became The Encore Project. This is the story of how a man who had spent his life building things for other people finally built something for himself, and in doing so, built something for every older man who has ever sat on a bench wondering if this chapter still mattered.
Insight Map
Bill Leighty: eighty years old, Tulsa-born, thirty-eight years in real estate, founder of The Encore Project. Here’s a snapshot of the life that shaped the platform — the career pivots, the civic work, the financial reckoning, and the park bench moment in Wyoming that changed the direction of everything.
