“Never despise humble beginnings.”
ZECHARIAH 4:10
Bo Cunningham, Founder of Arkansas REM
Hey! I’m Bo Cunningham. I picked up a camera at 14, and it’s been hard for me to put it down ever since. Ten years later I get to do this for a living, and I still get fired up every single time I pull into a driveway.
Ten years behind a camera, and still just getting started.
It started with a blurry background.
Okay, real talk, this whole thing started because I was obsessed with one tiny detail. You know that creamy, blurry background in senior photos? I had to know how they pulled it off. So I picked up a DSLR we had sitting around the house, got a new lens for it, and spent hours on YouTube teaching myself photography.
By 14, people were offering to pay me for senior sessions, and I couldn’t believe it. Joining yearbook staff in high school kept a camera in my hands constantly, and my work grew from there, people, families, products, sports, whatever came my way. And I loved every single second of it.
Then a class project got me into video.
Tenth grade, Conway Christian. We had this project where you got 20% of your class time to work on anything you wanted. One of the options on the flier? Make a promo video for the school. I didn’t even hesitate.
I poured a whole semester into that one video. Just one. And the day I posted it, the school president shared it and it blew past 700 views. I was floored. I ended up making three more after that, and that was it. I was completely, hopelessly hooked on video.
But the camera wasn't the whole job.
When Covid hit in 2020, my brother Marshall and I started making videos for a local insurance agency. That turned into my first business, Cunningham Creatives, and man, we had a blast.
But here’s what I learned the hard way: we were great at handing people gorgeous footage, and terrible at telling them what to actually do with it. No strategy. No game plan. Just videos. That lesson flipped a switch in me. All of a sudden I cared way more about how business and marketing really work than about which lens I grabbed.
And real estate? That was the calling.
Here’s the part that surprises people: I fell in love with real estate while buying my first house at 19. I know, who actually says that? But it grabbed me and never let go. The moving parts, the strategy, everybody rowing in the same direction to help someone buy or sell the biggest thing they’ll ever own. I was hooked all over again.
And I’ll be straight with you, when I got into this, my own realtor was pretty much my only connection in real estate. One person. I didn’t know another agent, I had no warm intros, no inside track, nothing. Just a whole lot of belief that I could serve this industry better than what was out there.
Then the floor fell out.
I almost left this next part off the page. But it’s the real story, so here it is.
Right after I closed on that house, everything went sideways all at once. Cunningham Creatives lost its biggest contract. I got fired from my day job, which, fun fact, was shoveling manure at a sheep farm. And that mortgage? Still due. Every month, right on schedule.
I’ll be straight with you: I didn’t start Arkansas REM from some place of confidence. I started it because I was scared out of my mind, and I had to make something work.
