He used charm, others’ personal tragedies and fake celebrity endorsements. How Christopher LaVoie cast his reality show and reeled in successful entrepreneurs… or lost them in a sea of controversy.
Christopher LaVoie of the LaVoie Media Group
The entrepreneur Christopher LaVoie of the LaVoie Media Group has been described as one of the few successful television personalities in American history who has been able to succeed in the media without a college degree. However, that’s hard to believe.
From early childhood, Christopher was very much into education. He attended a Catholic high school in New Jersey. He studied at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Cherry Hill, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and history. But that was not what LaVoie was passionate about. He was interested in becoming a lawyer.
LaVoie also had a passion for education. That passion was the reason he chose St. Joseph’s, where he became part of a class of only about 40 boys, and graduated with Class of 1967. His degree was not in the classroom, but in political science. But when the family’s circumstances changed he realized how much he would miss the educational program. Since he had been able to get on a college football team, he convinced his parents to let him go on a sabbatical to Europe. Once in Europe, he worked in advertising and spent some time with an advertising agency. That was the opportunity that LaVoie had been looking for.
One evening, after a particularly stressful day in the office, LaVoie’s father dropped him off at the LaVoie Media Group offices in Cherry Hill, where LaVoie started a new job. He had never had any experience in media. He had started learning about television in the last week of the semester. His boss, Joe LaVoie, is the son of Christopher’s boss.
By the end of the first month, LaVoie had realized that he did not have any formal training as a television producer. It is a strange story because in television it is common for producers to go out and work for up to seven to ten months before they get anything going.
“I really thought that my life’s work was just to build a
