Marcus Lemonis opens up to PEOPLE exclusively about his emotional decision to explore his heritage in The Profit: My Roots
Marcus Lemonis is used to making other people cry on his wildly successful CNBC show, The Profit — so it might come as a surprise to viewers to see the 45-year-old businessman breaking down in tears on Tuesday’s episode.
The emotional moment, exclusively previewed by PEOPLE, airs in a special 90-minute episode of The Profit subtitled My Roots. The original documentary sees Lemonis traveling for the first time back his birthplace in Beirut, Lebanon, to visit the orphanage he lived in until 1974, when his Greek/Lebanese parents adopted him at 9 months old and moved him to Miami.
Stepping foot in the orphanage — which has remained unchanged so that people who return there can see what it was like — is hard enough for Lemonis, but laying eyes on the crib that he slept in as a newborn brings him to tears.
“When I went into the actual room that the nun told me I slept in and saw the actual crib and the fact that it had casters, that’s probably what really lit my emotions for me,” says Lemonis, recalling how his mother used to tell him that he would shake his crib around to mimic that. “It put it all together and it made it very real.”
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Opening up to PEOPLE about the episode, Lemonis explains that he never anticipated he would have that moment.
His mother, who died before the first Profit episode even aired, had long asked him not to go back and look for his birth parents. Out of respect for her, he put visiting Lebanon out of his mind. “We’re always trying to please our mothers,” he says.
Even after he arrived in the country to film the special, which also explores the business market in Lebanon and the importance immigrants have on American business, Lemonis wrestled with whether or not he wanted to go to the orphanage.
“I was very conflicted,” Lemonis remembers. “I wasn’t sure I was actually going to go. I didn’t go for the first three days I was there, because I was still on the fence about it. I was emotionally scared. I was mentally scared. I didn’t know if I was going to fracture my soul or not, and I know that sounds super meek, but to do it on television is kind of another thing.”
Walking into the orphanage was ultimately “a pretty powerful” experience for him, he says.
While there, he had a peek at his birth certificate, where he got to see (among other things) his birth mother and birth father’s names.
“For a brief moment, I felt like I was living two lives,” confesses Lemonis, who married wife Bobbi Raffel last year. “I felt like, ‘Is the life I’m living today a fraud, and that’s my real life? Or is that who I was and this is who I am?’ It was very confusing to me. I was emotional because I was like, ‘The name I’ve been telling people is my name is not even really my name.’ I’m not even heritage wise, who I thought I was.”
Tears where shed there, too, but the 84-year-old French nun who runs the orphanage helped snapped Lemonis out of it. “She made me laugh because she told me, in French, ‘Kleenex are very expensive, please stop crying,’ ” Lemonis jokes. “And I said to her, ‘Don’t worry, I did okay in my life, I can buy you a lot of Kleenex.’ “
The Profit: My Roots follows previous specials Lemonis has produced about the massive growth of the cannabis industry, the crisis in Puerto Rico, thriving small businesses in Cuba and the industry in Las Vegas.
Lemonis says the idea of the trip back to Lebanon came from CNBC Chairman Mark Hoffman, who spent a year trying to convince Lemonis that viewers wanted him to pull back the curtain on his life.
“He really just said to me, ‘Listen, Marcus, you’re an important part of our network at CNBC,’ ” Lemonis recalls. ” ‘You’ve taken us on 94 episode through 94 different families and businesses. We want to go on your journey now. We need to know more about who you are. And we need to understand, why do you do what you do? Because it’s sort of head-scratching for us. You deal with crazy people, it doesn’t always work out, you have a lot of aggravation. I’m dying to know what your motivation is.’ “
Of course, Lemonis always knew what his motivation was — or so he thought. Going on the trip, he says that his eyes were opened.
“I used to give people a glib answer: ‘I do it to help people and save jobs,’ ” Lemonis says. “And while that is absolutely true, after doing all of this, it clicked for me why I do what I do. What I end up asking myself is, is my necessity — my obligation to do things for other people — born out of my gratefulness for what was done for me? I needed to learn the answer to that myself. And while that sounds a little corny, I think when people watch the episode, they’ll see the gravity of what I discovered and the gravity of who I am today.”
The specifics of that lesson Lemonis learned is something he’s still keeping under wraps (“You have to watch the episode,” he teases throughout our chat). But the one thing he did have reinforced is that it’s important people take the time to do that type of reflection, even if that’s not always easy.
“I want to give people the courage to explore their own path,” Lemonis says. “You’re going to learn some stuff that you may not like or that you may like, but that’s okay. You have to uncomfortable sometimes and you have to vulnerable. Because only then can you really understand the reason to do things.”
And while he’s excited for viewers to see what happens to him, there’s one person Lemonis is still worried about: his father.
“I don’t know if my dad knows what happens,” Lemonis says. “He knows I went to Lebanon, but I think he just thinks I went on a trip, not to also find out information about my birth parents. He’s going to see the episode for the first time when I do go, so I’m not sure how my dad is going to feel when he watches that.”
“I’m a little nervous about that,” Lemonis jokes.
The Profit: My Roots airs Tuesdays (9 p.m. ET) on CNBC.