Drew Boyles and the long way to a wave

An airline broke Patrick Boyles’s competition surfboard. His father, Drew, and his older brother, Ryan, responded by developing a collapsible protective case for action sports equipment. In a family of surfers, damaged luggage could apparently become a product-development meeting. The result was Crypt Cases, a patented design intended to protect the equipment that makes the trip worth taking.

It is a useful place to begin with Drew Boyles. His career includes franchise businesses, hazardous waste removal, public office and real estate. Those can look like unrelated entries on a résumé. The broken board supplies a more personal explanation: he encounters a practical problem, then tries to build something around it. Surfing has provided both the recreation and, occasionally, the complaint department.

The case also makes an unusually literal bridge between his family and his work. Drew and Ryan developed it after Patrick’s board was mishandled. The inventor’s problem was already sitting in his own household. There was no need to commission a survey to establish whether a surfer would prefer to arrive with an intact board.

An education between shifts

Boyles was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1970. He became a father at 17 and joined the U.S. Navy. At Miramar in San Diego, he worked with an F-14 squadron and began surfing. The water would remain a constant while the jobs, businesses and public responsibilities changed around it.

He used the Navy’s education program to study through Southern Illinois University’s extended campus. Later came an MBA in finance from the University of Southern California. Education and work were intertwined with raising children; the neat separation between student years and working years does not describe this part of his life.

His employers included Brunswick Corporation, Starbucks and Andersen Business Consulting. In a 2016 account of his career, he described opening 19 Starbucks stores and a remote market, and helping turn an acquired urban district profitable. These were businesses with premises, employees and daily operating demands. A spreadsheet might describe the work; somebody still had to open the doors.

Andersen’s collapse interrupted that corporate career. A subsequent startup also failed. Years later, recalling those chapters, Boyles put his wife, Lee, at the center of the account: they met while he was a single father with three boys, living in a two-bedroom apartment and beginning graduate school. His retrospective is as much about who stayed beside him as about what he built.

The truck had a career ladder

Boyles bought his first 1-800-GOT-JUNK? franchise in 2004. By his own account, he spent two years in the truck learning the business. That detail gives the later acquisitions a different texture. Before he could manage a network, he was doing the work customers had paid to have taken away.

Endless Pursuit Corporation, established in 2003, became the umbrella for holdings across consumer services, real estate development, hospitality and consumer products. His businesses have included You Move Me in Southern California and HazAwayToday, which handles residential and commercial hazardous waste removal. The portfolio gives him plenty of opportunities to discuss entrepreneurship without ever needing to start with an app.

One of his more revealing acquisition announcements concerned Lafayette and Baton Rouge. He congratulated Mike Davis, who had moved from truck work through training, recruiting and performance coaching to owner-operator. Boyles singled out the five-year progression, making the employee’s route through the company the point of the announcement.

The ownership structure appears in franchise records, too. A 2023 disclosure lists Boyles alongside Raychel Hedge, William Herbe, Heidi Weiss, Mike Davis, Jason Avalos, Sal Ramirez and Adel Mohammednur at the Lafayette franchise. The list turns a general promise about opportunity into names attached to an operating business. It also complicates the familiar founder story, in which everyone else tends to disappear once the company becomes successful.

Five square miles, several constituencies

In El Segundo, Boyles moved from chairing the Economic Development Advisory Council to winning a City Council seat in 2016. His fellow councilmembers appointed him mayor pro tem; he became mayor in 2018 and served in that role through 2024. He remains a councilmember. The distinction matters in a career where public service continues after the most recognizable title has changed.

His public agenda emphasized economic development, fiscal management and bringing operating discipline into government. The setting was a coastal city with major employers and a small-town identity, where decisions about investment also become decisions about what residents encounter in their everyday surroundings.

Recreation was part of that work. In April 2022, El Segundo welcomed a Topgolf venue alongside the renovated Lakes golf course. Boyles described the pairing of traditional golf and new technology as a fit for the city. In July 2024, he joined fellow officials and the Chargers organization for the ceremonial opening of The Bolt, the team’s headquarters and training facility.

There were smaller vehicles on his civic itinerary as well. At the November 2023 launch of El Segundo’s Local Travel Network pilot, Boyles and environmental committee chair Tracey Miller-Zarneke led a ride-along parade in their own neighborhood electric vehicles. The pilot covered approximately 8.5 miles of streets. Economic development could involve a professional football team; local travel could involve taking the slower route through town.

The least glamorous part of surfing

For years, Boyles has wanted to develop a surf destination. In recounting that effort, he describes a previous site that reached the contract stage before a change at the local level stopped it. He subsequently evaluated dozens of locations across California and Arizona. The obstacles he names are water, infrastructure, approvals and alignment. None offers much scope for a good surfing photograph.

The search led to Hidden Lake in Buckeye, Arizona. In January 2026, the 120-acre property sold for $10.5 million to Ocean Front Property in Arizona LLC, the company associated with Boyles. The site had previously hosted fishing, boating, weddings and concerts. An existing lake occupied 60 acres. The proposal would add surfing to a place with a recreational history of its own.

The current concept includes an Endless Surf lagoon, a resort hotel, beach club, marina and accommodation options. At the September 2026 Surf Park Summit, the team presented a plan for a 12.5-acre surf lagoon. The lake and the proposed lagoon are separate features: one already exists, while the other belongs to the development plan.

Boyles is the project’s sponsor and managing partner. Jeff Zuckerman is chief investment officer; the wider team includes development, engineering and guest-experience specialists. The division of responsibilities is revealing. Bringing people to water requires a collection of professions whose working day may contain very little actual surfing.

Before anyone catches a wave

Hidden Lake won the Surf Park Sharks developers pitch at the September 2026 summit. Boyles also received the Developer of the Year award. Those results gave the project industry recognition, while the practical task remained advancing a proposed resort toward financing and construction. There is no announced opening date.

In July, Boyles and Zuckerman had joined a Bisnow panel on financing surf parks and destination developments. Topics included investor appetite, site selection, entitlements and community buy-in. The conference photograph shows the public-facing part of work that, in Boyles’s telling, has required years of less visible preparation.

He says a sponsor should put personal capital at risk first, then reduce uncertainty before asking others to invest. His stated sequence includes securing land, installing water infrastructure, working through engineering and building relationships with the city, neighbors and utilities. It is an argument about the order of work, drawn partly from having evaluated development proposals as an elected official.

There is a quieter image of the intended destination in a video he shared from a wedding on the Buckeye property. Guests were gathering at sunset. Boyles wrote about places where people mark milestones and make memories. The resort concept is full of buildings and attractions, but that particular observation begins with people already finding a reason to be there.

Room for a blue wig

Boyles’s interests outside the businesses have included leadership in Entrepreneurs’ Organization, service on the board of The World Is Just a Book Away, and co-chairing Surfrider’s Malibu/Santa Monica chapter. Libraries and coastlines sit alongside acquisitions and City Council committees. His stated goal is to surf every country, including landlocked ones; the city recorded 25 countries surfed by 2024.

Former El Segundo mayor Bill Fisher supplied a less formal portrait: Boyles dancing in a blue wig with his junk-removal team in the Christmas parade, then breaking out cardboard to breakdance at a party. These are useful details about a person whose official biography otherwise has a considerable number of committees to get through.

On the Habits2Goals podcast, his recommended books included Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days. Fiction, questions of purpose and a surfing life make a rather apt reading list for someone moving between operations, civic responsibility and waves.

Hidden Lake now brings several of those pursuits onto one property. The surfer has a destination in mind. The operator has infrastructure and partners to organize. The former mayor knows a development must make sense beyond its own boundary. A broken board once produced a case. This time, the practical problem is much larger, and the answer is still being built.

“The team is the story”Drew Boyles, on LinkedIn