Today's Guest

Zachary Green is a warrior turned entrepreneur. He began his career as a U.S. Marine, and after leaving the Marines, he became a firefighter. It was as a firefighter that Zachary became keenly aware of the need to help other firefighters who might be trapped in burning buildings to be able to see an exit path so they could escape. He founded LumAware, a company whose photoluminescent helmet bands and exit path markings could enable a firefighter to see their way out through smoke and fire even without an electrical source. Listen as Zachary explains how his experiences in the military, firefighting, and as an entrepreneur helped him realize that these careers have a lot in common. They all entail risk, struggle, grit, and bravery. Hear about Zachary’s journey into entrepreneurship and what almost caused him to fail from the start.

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:             Hey, hey, this is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street and this week we're really fortunate to spend some time with Zachary Green. Welcome to the show, Zachary.

Zachary Green:            Gordon, thank you so much. I've been a big fan of your show and I'm really honored to have the opportunity to talk with you today.

Gordon Henry:             Well, we're excited to have you. So quick intro on Zachary Green. Zachary, or Zach, is a US Marine Corps veteran. He was a lieutenant in his local fire department, and he is the founder and former CEO of MN8 LumAware Foxfire, better known as just LumAware, a company that makes top quality safety products geared to improve the safety of your facility. And we're going to talk a lot about that. Zachary grew the company from the trunk of his car to over 30 million in organic sales and 5 million in venture funding.

                                   Zach's new book Warrior Entrepreneur was released in September 21 and in the first few weeks was launched to bestseller status on Amazon. He and his family now live in Hilton Head, South Carolina where he speaks to us from today. So what should listeners expect to get out of this episode? I think you should learn some important lessons about how non-business experiences like being a marine and being a firefighter can make you a better entrepreneur, and what as aspects of your repertoire you could expand.

                                   So Zach, quite a resume. It's really incredible story. So let's start at the beginning of your journey, just where did you grow up and how did you come to join the Marine Corps?

Zachary Green:            Certainly. So I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. I struggled a lot growing up. I went to probably seven different schools from kindergarten through high school. I suffered with pretty significant ADHD, which is funny because it's a learning disability when you're in school, but when you get out of school it's called multitasking. And then all of a sudden it's a great thing. They're like, Oh, he could do 10 things at once. And he is very energetic, but that's not really good when you're supposed to be sitting at your desk.

                                   I spent a lot of time fantasizing because school wasn't really good for me and I always dreamed of the warriors of the past and especially the Marines. For some reason, I grew up in somewhat, my family was the exact opposite of a military family. My parents were so anti-gun, I wasn't even allowed having squirt guns growing up. No one had ever been in the military. So you can imagine when I came home and said I wanted to join the Marines, that my parents were kind of thrown for a loop. They're like, Well now you've finally done it. So that's kind of a very roundabout way, the way I ended up getting into the Marine Corps.

Gordon Henry:             So did you join after high school? When did, how did it actually happen?

Zachary Green:            So I first joined when I was about nine years old, but they told me [inaudible 00:03:44]. I went down to Camp Pendleton in California. I always knew I was going to go in the Marines. I wanted to be ultimately a marine general and I figured the best way to do that is to do both enlisted and officer. So I went ahead, I got accepted to college, enlisted in the Marine Corps while I was in college. So I was doing the reserve program while I was in school. And then the summer after I went to Paris Island enlisted bootcamp, I then went through the officer candidate program.

Gordon Henry:             Got it. Interesting. So what was your experience like in the Marine Corps? Was it all you expected it to be?

Zachary Green:            It was horrible. It sucked. We have a saying, embrace the suck. I grew up my, I'm a big mama's boy. She literally laid all my clothes out for me on the end of my bed, my senior year of high school. All of a sudden I show up down to Paris Island and your exposure to the Marines up into this point of the beautiful dress blue uniform, the recruiter super friendly. And I remember I smile a lot and laugh a lot and they don't like that very much down at Paris Island. And it was about the second week, which is the most intensive of the training that you go through those first couple weeks. It's interesting because the training gets harder every week, but it feels easier because you're getting more used to the military way of life. You're getting stronger, you're developing that rhino skin. But it really came crashing down for me about week two and I realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was.

                                   Everybody growing up told me how great I was. And yeah, I had a lot of teachers telling me I wasn't going to amount to much, but I knew I had something bigger in me. But you got kids down there that grew up in the coal mines of West Virginia. They literally didn't have, they had dirt floors. We had kids from the projects in New Orleans and Philadelphia that didn't get three meals a day. That one guy was saying, I don't even have a mattress, I just slept wherever I could sleep. They thought the Marine Corps was great because they had three square meals a day. They had a nice comfortable bed, they got to work out, not have to pay to go to a gym or anything. And I was really struggling. And that's when I first realized this concept of the warrior mentality, that a warrior looks at challenge and has adversity and they get stronger as a result of it.

                                   And I wasn't quite ready to be a warrior yet. And I'll never forget, I remember exactly like it was yesterday, even though it was 30 years and probably 50 pounds ago, the whole platoon turns to the left. I turned to the right, I collapsed the formation because we're all bumping into each other because of me. Drill instructor pulls me aside for what's called IT, incentive training. And it's basically just doing calisthenics till you either throw up or pass out. And as I'm in the middle of doing this, he's like literally whispering, I knew you were a quitter. I know you're not going to make it. You're not supposed to be here. And then he said the words that really cut deeply, he said, Your mommy's not here to help you. And for me that was such a transformational moment because I realized at that point in time, my parents weren't going to be there for me and I needed to do it on my own.

                                   And I collapsed. I dropped my rifle, I fell down into the prenatal position, curled up, and I'm crying hysterically. I'm 18, 19 years old, you don't cry when you're an 18, 19 year old man, especially in the Marine Corps. And he just looked at me with this disgust and he walked away from me and left me by myself. And that's when my whole life changed, because at that point I had looked into the abyss. I was in the middle of my crucible, the hardest moment of my entire life. And I had two choices. I could quit and give up and surrender to the abyss, or I could say, I'm going to destroy this thing, I'm going to conquer it. And I did.

                                   And that's when I really became a Marine. And I made a decision to myself that no matter what happens to me for the rest of my life, no one's ever going to tell me I'm not smart enough or good enough. There's nothing that's going to break me and I am a marine and literally, nothing will stand in the way of me accomplishing my mission. And that fire burned through me up until this day, 30 years later.

Gordon Henry:             Great story. So what happened next? You do your tour of duty in the Marines and you leave the Marines and what happens next?

Zachary Green:            Yeah, so the typical story, I left the Marines for a girl, met my wife at the time and decided I wasn't going to pursue my commission. I ended up going through Officer Kenneth School but declining my commission because it was another six years. It was a bad time to be in the military. It was during the Clinton years in the nineties. A lot of attrition, a lot of lack of morale. And I got out, I pursued a great job in the pharmaceutical industry, worked for a company called Eli Lilly. I learned a lot about brand marketing and how to build brands of value and sell solutions and not features and benefits. And I worked my way from sales to sales management to sales training to eventually leadership and strategy, it was fascinating. But then September 11th happened and I had guess what you would call the opposite of PTSD.

                                   I had incredible survivor's guilt. One of the units I served in took very significant casualties early on in the war. And I went to probably four or five funerals. And it really rocked me because I'm looking at the flag draped coffin knowing that there's a fellow marine that's in that box and he ain't coming out. And I had that billet and I left and he filled my space. And it really was tough. So I'm like, I got to get back, I got to do something. And I joined our local volunteer fire department. And it's funny because in the Marine Corps we take things that are really fun, and we make it as miserable as possible. And the fire service, it's the opposite. We take stuff that's really miserable and make it as fun as possible. And it was a really neat experience to serve my country in a different capacity as a firefighter.

Gordon Henry:             So you were a firefighter while... This was a volunteer job serving your community in the Cincinnati area and meanwhile you had a regular day job as Eli Lilly. So what was the experience as a firefighter like and in particular, what was the insight that allowed you to eventually led you to LumAware?

Zachary Green:            Sure, great question. When I was on the different brand teams at Eli Lilly and we sold drugs, first of all, we never tell you, Oh, you're getting this special hydrochlorizone, whatever chemicals in there. What we do is we talk about a brand and how that brand solves a problem. So let's take something that we're all very familiar with, depression. Rather than talking about the neuro receptors in your brain and the serotonin and the norepinephrine and all the other uptakes and all that stuff. We'll talk about the problem of depression. We'll show you a video or a commercial of somebody that's depressed and they're in their pajamas in the middle of the day and they're not answering the door. And then we show the brand and then we show what the good looks like. So we always focus on here's the problem, here's the solution.

                                   And that was something that I really learned because up until that point when I was selling software and insurance prior to that, it was always features and benefits. My product's cheaper, my product's faster, my product does this. But that's not, that's helping you. But that's not helping your customer. Your customer is willing to give you money if you can show them that the value you're presenting them is more important than their money is to them.

                                   And that all really came to light literally and figuratively. Early on in my career as a firefighter, I got lost in a fire. I'm pushing my way down the hallway, it's completely dark. I'm on my hands and knees. I can't see anything. We crawl because that way if you walk, you can fall through the floor. If you crawl, you can feel it. But the other thing we do is we take our tools like our hook or our ax, and we swing it back and forth like a blind person would use a cane.

                                   And I found myself thinking I was in a hallway knowing that at the end of the hallway will always be a staircase or a door. And instead I had three corners or three walls. I'm like, I'm in trouble. I veered off into a bedroom and went into a closet and didn't even know it. So now I'm panicked. I got 20 minutes of air left before I'm goodbye. And I did what they trained you, take a couple deep breaths, center yourself, find the hose and follow the hose backwards. And I did. And I got out and I remember talking to my captain and I was almost in tears and he starts making fun of me. He's laughing at me, he's like, Bro, this happens every single time you go into a fire. If you can't be comfortable with that disorientation, you're in the wrong business. And I'm like, No, that's not good.

                                   There's a problem here. I'm going to find a way to fix it. And that's when I developed the line of products, the glow in the dark material. And what I did is I would go from fire station to fire station. I developed these glow in the dark helmet bands that would go around your helmet that glowed and paint on your tools and some elastic wrap that you could put on as grip wrap. And I would go to a fire station, I'd say, Hi, my name's Zach. I'm a firefighter from the Cincinnati area. Can we go in the bathroom and turn the lights off together?

                                   They were usually like, Okay, this is cool. Now once I got them in the bathroom, and the reason we did that wasn't because I'm weird. Well I am weird, but that's not true. It was because there was never usually windows in a bathroom. It's the one area that's completely dark. And when I say dark, I mean you can't see your hand in front of your face. I'd say, Jen, have you ever been in this situation? Well yeah, all the time. And then pull out the glow in the dark material, the helmet or the ax. And I said, What if you could have something like this to have accountability of your tools and your crew and reduce disorientation? And it was again, the literal light bulb goes off. And as I started to do that, I made about $5,000 over a six month time period.

                                   It was a hobby, never supposed to be anything more. And my fire chief sat me down one day and said, Zach, you have something that's going to revolutionize the fire service. Stop treating it as a hobby. And I remembered a quote from one of my favorite leaders of all time, Teddy Roosevelt. He said, "When you're faced with a monumental decision, the best thing to do is the right thing. The next best thing to do is the wrong thing, but the worst thing to do is nothing." And that's really when I made that jump and said, You know what? Let's cross the threshold. Let's go ahead and make that move into entrepreneurship.

Gordon Henry:             So you made a decision at that point to quit your day job and do this as a full time career move, right?

Zachary Green:            Within a couple weeks. So what happened was we went to a trade show. I say we, it was a bunch of my buddies and I, we had a soccer tent that we put together with sidewall held together with duct tape and zip ties. We had cardboard signs written on them with black sharpy markers. And next to us is Honeywell and these big billion companies with their million dollar boost. We had a line, the firefighters liked us because we were authentic. We were one of them, we're not some big corporation trying to make money off the back of our brothers and sisters. I booked a hundred thousand dollars of business in three days. The problem was, is I had no cash left because I had spent it all on getting up there. I had no way to produce that amount of product. I had no way to fulfill and ship those orders.

                                   And people are like, Hey, you got to stop taking in more sales and start refunding this. I'm like, hell no. I'm a marine. I'm going to accomplish this mission. There's no way I'm going to fail. And I ended up refinancing my home, maxed out my credit cards, borrowed against my 401k. Those are all the things you need to do as an entrepreneur that I'm like, no matter what, I'm going to be successful. I have a mission, I'm going to accomplish it. And yeah, it's tough.

                                   And I think one of the main reasons entrepreneurs fail is, and again it's easy to cop out to say they give up, that's not fair. But eventually the stress of staying in it is not worth it. And I get it. And sometimes the risk that they want to take is not worth it. Most people are not going to refinance their home or use their home as collateral for a business loan because if they fail in the company, they're going to be homeless also. And that's why I tell people, and I get pushback from this from time to time, but I believe it in my heart of hearts, every single challenge that you face as a small business owner has a solution. You just sometimes don't want to do those solutions because they can be really difficult.

Gordon Henry:             So you met with this initial success. People wanted the product, they got it, they understood what you were offering them and how to solve their problem, the solution. And you had these financial issues to work through, but you pushed through and eventually succeeded. You developed a company called LumAware, it created a bunch of different products that were successful. Right. I understand you also raised some venture capital money. So take us through that moment from where it was just kind of like an idea that it had some initial traction and now suddenly you're off and running a company?

Zachary Green:            Unfortunately for me, there was no ramp up. It went from, hey, I need a sip of water to here's a fire hydrant, let's turn it on full blast and try to get your mouth to cover up the five inch hole there. I struggled a lot, I learned a lot during that process. So couple things that I... And again, I would never do anything differently. And I hate when people say I would do it... BS, because at that time you're making the best decision with the information you have. Yeah, it's easy to look back two years later and say, Oh, I would've done that. That's not fair. Hindsight's always 2020, right? So the number one thing I think in entrepreneurship is cash. It's not revenue. So here I'm thinking I'm all this money because I just made a hundred thousand bucks. Well no, I booked a hundred thousand dollars in sales.

                                   It's the cash that matters and what kills you, and I almost bankrupted my own company over this is this thing called the cash conversion cycle. You literally can sell yourself out of business. And that's what I was doing. So I raised some money from the venture capital. I eventually raised a second round from them. I got the friends and family and there's different levels of money. You start with bootstrap, then you go to bank debt or probably credit card debt, then bank debt, then friends and family, then venture capital and private equity and so on and so forth. IPO eventually. And each of them have different strings and pros and cons to all those things. But what I didn't do, and looking back I know, is I never let anybody do what they were supposed to do. I was a micromanager.

                                   And there was a reason why number one, it's my baby. Nobody takes care of your kid better than you. And number two is, I didn't have a lot of really good employees early on because I couldn't afford them. So I'm used to having to proofread every email because there were so many misspellings and so many errors in the spreadsheets. I had to review everything. So I got a great CFO and he is like, Zach, you need to slow down on the sales. And I'm like, screw you, you don't know what you're talking about. Sales solves everything. But between the time you spend your money and the time you get paid can be a long time. And usually the bigger the deal, the longer it takes to produce and the longer it takes till you get paid. And that's what happened to me. So my whole life came crashing down about six years into the business, maybe seven years in the business.

                                   My family and I go on vacation in Hawaii. I'm like, I'm checking out. I tell my CFO, Do not call me unless there's an emergency. Well what happens? Three days into the vacation, I get a phone call. He's like, Look, we didn't get paid the big, it was supposed to be hundreds of thousands of dollars. And again, it's not that the big company was trying to slow us down, they just, there's so many different steps they have to do to release a PO. That one piece of paper didn't make it to the right desk. So it was getting pushed back another two weeks. We weren't going to make payroll. You don't make payroll, you're pretty much toast. That's one thing we've never missed. We've never ever missed a payroll in the 12 years we've been in business. But he said, You got to prepare yourself for liquidation because when we come back we're going to have to go bankrupt.

                                   And that's the only way we're going to get through this. And I know, okay, well not am I going to lose my identity. And most founders and entrepreneurs are arrogant. Our life is that exposure. And now all of a sudden I go from being this great award-winning entrepreneur invited to the White House, to a failure. I don't think I could handle it. And I had a panic attack. I thought it was a heart attack, it wasn't. I couldn't breathe. I could feel my chest getting tight. I could feel the electrical current shooting down my arm, everything they trained us as a firefighter that if a patient presents with those, you take them to the hospital. No...

                                   And thank God my wife's a doctor and she's like, look, you're not having a heart attack. You're just having a panic attack. Calm down. And I found myself right back at Paris Island in that dark abyss again, where I was looking at this darkness. And as the great philosopher Nietzsche says, If you stare long enough into the abyss, eventually the abyss will stare back and consume you. And what I found was if I continue to stay in this head space that I was in where I wasn't empowering other people, where I was stressing myself out, I wasn't going to make it. And I made probably the most difficult decision of my entire life when I got back. Well first of all, we got a bridge loan, we were able to make payroll, get everything worked out. But I resigned as CEO of the company I started. Why would you do that?

                                   Why would you literally hire somebody that you have to report to? And the reason why is, founders make really horrible CEOs. Founders are great at starting companies. They're great visionaries, they're great at getting energetic, but they're really poor people when it comes to focus and completing things.

                                   And again, back to the first thing we said, I'm a multitasker, I'm ADHD off the channel, I'm going to use that to my strength. And my strength is not being singularly focused on... I can't look at spreadsheets. I can read Excel backwards and forwards. I can do pivot tables, macro, all that stuff, but I hate it. I want to be talking to the Gordons of the world and sharing my story and inspiring other people and talking about the next product. And so when I finally was able to put myself in the position where I needed to be, which is the founder, the spokesman, and I found someone to compliment me that could do that accountability. We literally went from about a million dollar a year company to almost 30 million within the years. Yeah. Part of that was during COVID. We had our best year during COVID. And the reason why is I was able to be free to innovate new products were, had I not had that freedom to do that, we would've never have come up with those COVID products.

Gordon Henry:             I went through your product line and I noticed you have a lot of these shields like face shields, you have desk shields, all those things we saw for two, three years that kept people separated. That was your innovation, right?

Zachary Green:            Yeah. So what happened was is we were getting... So I didn't connect the dots here. There's a hundred million exit signs in the United States. Every one of those exit signs needs, batteries, light bulbs and electricity. There's a little loophole in the code that not a lot of people know about that says that an exit sign doesn't have to be electrified, it just has to be visible in the dark for 90 minutes. They don't care how it's visible as long as it is. The glow that we developed actually meets that standard. Well who inspects the exit signs? The firefighters. I've got a hundred thousand firefighters using my products. Chances are no matter what city that we're at, I'm going to know someone that knows someone that's got connection with that fire marshal. And that's how we're able to really accelerate. So now we're making these exit signs.

                                   It's this clear plastic substrate about a quarter inch thick piece of acrylic. We buy them in these big huge sheets like drywall. We send them into a laser cutter, cut them out, think of it like a license plate. And then we put the letters E X I T on there. Well nobody's interested in exit signs during the pandemic. They can't even go in there. So we're like, we're going to go out of business, no question. But we kept getting, seeing all these people talking about Plexiglass in the shortage while I'm sitting on one of the largest supplies of plexiglass in the United States.

                                   And early on my team and I were able to negotiate with some of the global suppliers to get us a bunch more material. We actually put personal guarantees up knowing that we would go out of business if the pandemic was over anyway. But if it succeeds, I got a line on this. And we became literally within about 72 hours, Home Depots leading provider of COVID protective products. I had a great relationship with the CEO of Home Depot. I was able to text him and say, Hey, I need your attention. I got this.

                                   And he is like, Look, hand sanitizer, PPE and product. He's like, that's got my attention. I was able to take literally a one year brand development plan and put it together in 48 hours, created PowerPoint trainings, created videos, lined up all the marketing material and everything, was able to launch it within 72 hours. I trained up probably 700 sales rep within about two or three weeks. And boom, it just took off. And the beauty is, because we did such a good job with that, now some of our partners are giving us other products that have nothing to do with our original line because they know how good we are at innovating, marketing, and putting the training plans together.

Gordon Henry:             Wow, terrific story. That's really inspiring and shows how you were able to look at these problems that were different than the original problems and create new solutions. So, hat's off to you. So let's turn a little bit, now that we've heard kind of your business story, to this philosophy that you've developed about warriors. Your book is about the warrior mentality and how that can be adapted or relevant to other areas like business, right?

Zachary Green:            Absolutely. So I keep going back to that event at Paris Island when I collapsed. And why are these kids that had a really tough life, that didn't have their mom laying their clothes out for them on the edge of their bed, they're doing great. And I had everything handed to me on a silver platter and I'm failing. And that's when I really realized this whole concept of iron sharpens iron, and the warrior's journey, the same thing. I needed that horribleness to happen in my business, for me to be enlightened to make that next move as a innovator and less of a president and CEO. And as I started to do research, I realized this is not new. This goes back to Homer and the Iliad and the Odyssey. This goes back to Kurosawa who wrote this incredible movie called The Seven Samurai in the forties.

                                   That literally is a complete, George Lucas completely copied that movie for Star Wars, like everything about it is copied from that. But what I started to realize is, and first of all, a warrior doesn't mean you're a Jedi or you're a Greek hero. You could be a single mom working two jobs, you could be an entrepreneur that's so broke the only way you can get on email is going to Starbucks all day and order one cup of coffee. So you can use the wifi. A warrior is someone that has adversity and struggle and they get stronger as a result of it. A non warrior is going to be the person hiding in that cubicle that says, I would never be an entrepreneur because I may not get enough money. Well, and that's fine, most people are like that. But the entrepreneur's like, No man, that sounds like an adventure. Let's try this.

                                   What I realized is a 15 step journey, and I'm not going to go through all 15 steps, but I'm going to kind of outline it and where we all fall during this journey. And specifically I've developed a whole series of coursework and training and an online community around this concept I'm going to share with you.

                                   The first thing is the warrior at a very young age realizes they're different. I'm struggling in school, I'm fantasizing about dungeon and dragons and Marines and I'm spreading mud on my face, crawling around in the woods when my friends are out playing soccer. The warrior knows they're different. They know that there's a different calling that's out there. Eventually they find a mentor, and that guide, that mentor think Star Wars. You got Luke Skywalker's the Young Journey. He knows he is different. Then he meets Obi Wan Kenobi, the wise mentor And the mentor can't do it for you, but they can guide you on that way.

                                   And in my case, it was the recruiter in the Marine Corps. It was a distant relative that I had that was passed away at a very young age. But I remember him talking to me about his experiences in World War II. The real defining moment happens when you cross the threshold. And in my case, the threshold was very visceral. It was standing on the yellow footprints of Paris Island and meeting the drill instructor for the first time. The other threshold in my life was quitting my full time job at Eli Lilly, putting in my notice and getting my LLC sent to me in the mail. That's a real threshold. There's a change.

                                   Then that's when the warrior really either dies or they get stronger. One of the two that's going to happen, because you go through your trials and tribulations, you go through that challenge. You go through as in the Odyssey fighting the five headed dragon. Or you go through like Luke Skywalker battling all the evil forces. And at that point in time you're going to get stronger. You start to develop that rhino skin, that iron sharpens iron. And the more difficulty you have, the stronger you get. The exact same thing happens in your entrepreneurial journey. Those early days, the problems stay the same. You just keep adding zeros and commas onto the end of those problems as you grow. As the great philosopher Biggie Smalls once said, mo money mo problems.

                                   So at a certain point during those trials and tribulation, you're going to bite it off more than you can chew. Something's going to happen and you're going to get into that crisis. In my case, the crisis was not listening to my CFO, getting overwhelmed and not paying attention to the performers and the finance. And that's when you go into the Crucible. Now the crucible is an area that everything falls into this cup and you add a lot of stress and heat and a transformation occurs in that crucible. At the bottom of the crucible is that abyss that I've talked about several times here. You have to know that the abyss is there. You have to honor the abyss. When I say honor it, if you're walking down the sidewalk and a big semi truck's flying by at 50 miles per hour, you honor that that's going to smash you dead before you even know what happened if you stepped in front of it.

                                   But you just don't go there. The warrior's going to look at that crucible, not spend too much time there. And by the way, if you do spend too much time in that the abyss, it will consume you. We've all had friends that have abused drug or alcohol or they've been in abusive relationships. The longer you're in there, the harder it is to get out.

                                   A transformation then needs to occur. And in that transformation you have to conquer what got you into that crucible. In my case, the conquering was me. It was my arrogance, it was my ego, it was stepping aside. And then at that point in time you really get into that sweet spot of being that warrior. Where nothing can hurt you, nothing can change, but there's still something missing.

                                   You want to start to now give back. You want to start to teach and educate others, share with them what happened and eventually you become a mentor and you pick up that next generation of those young warriors that are getting ready to go through.

                                   So for me in my life, I wouldn't say I'm done with business. I mean I love it. But my passion now, my drive, my purpose is helping other entrepreneurs that are getting ready to enter into that threshold or maybe they're in the middle of their crucible or those trials and tribulations. And show them how they can fight their own battles. You can't do it for you. The mentor can't do it for you, but we can show you how to maybe duck and move around a little bit more efficiently.

Gordon Henry:             Great stuff. We're going to take a very quick break to your word from our sponsor and we're going to be back in just 30 seconds with more from Zachary Green, don't go away.

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Gordon Henry:             And we're back with Zachary Green, just amazing story about his life journey and how he's using that to help others in their entrepreneurial journey. I wanted to ask you about this concept of adversity. Iron sharpens iron you said, and how you realized you were kind of a mama's boy when you got to Paris Island and how the other kids who had had the adversity in a way had it easier because it was a step up for them, right? You said it was easier for them. Is adversity something that we're losing sense of in our society? That we seem to all want our kids to have it easy, to have the privileged life and in a way adversity is a good thing and we've sort of lost sight of that?

Zachary Green:            Abso-fricking-lutely, we are in a crisis mode as a country and as a society right now. We have been so concerned about hurting that we've now created hurt where there wasn't hurt before. And let me give you an example of that. You've got two cohorts. You've got the one cohort, upper class family, great school, parents love each other, they show love to their child. The kid doesn't get starting on the soccer team. So the dad calls the coach up and yells at him, Get my kid in there. That kid then goes to a really nice Ivy League school on scholarships so they don't have to pay anything. As soon as they get challenged, they can go to a safe space at school and have a protected area. They get participation trophies, they get all that stuff.

                                   Then the next kid is a single mom, barely even sees her because she's working so much. He had worked multiple jobs, tough jobs, fast food type jobs cause that's all he could get. And then he eventually earns enough money to go to college, but he's got to work his way through college. He's not going to the parties in the fraternity and sorority stuff.

                                   Both of them come to work for Gordon, and Gordon sits them both down and tells this first kid, Hey, you really screwed up. This is unacceptable. I'm putting a note in your file. Do better. You have that same conversation with other kid. The first kid's going to be collapsed because that's probably the first time in their life that's happened. So that other cohort we talked about, that other kid, Gordon tells him, he is like, Sorry sir, I messed up. I won't do it again. Cause he's thinking like this is not nearly as tough as having to run away from the gunfire in the place that I used to grow up.

                                   We've got to do something because the pendulum has shifted so far. Those kids are now in the workforce and we're starting to see the dangers of what happened back in the nineties and two thousands, of us coddling our kids.

Gordon Henry:             So we just have a few minutes, Zach, really enjoyed the conversation. I wanted to ask you a few more, I guess, personal questions just to learn a little bit more about you as a person. First of all, in this startup world, you talk about startups and warrior mentality. Are there any particular founders, entrepreneurs, business people who you've seen in your career who you really admire, who are not necessarily mentors to you, but who are inspiration to you?

Zachary Green:            Yeah, I mean, I think we can go down the list. You start with Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison founded General Electric. I didn't even know that at the time I was doing the research. Somebody came up to him, a reporter, and says, What's it feel like, after he just launched the light bulb, to fail a thousand times? He said, I didn't fail a thousand times. I just found a thousand ways that it wasn't going to work. Walt Disney, Walt Disney had gotten fired from his job as an illustrator and was literally destitute on a train and started sketching this little mouse to show this young girl happiness. And that's how he got the idea of Mickey Mouse. He had failed. Elon Musk. I mean, look at Elon's story of what he's been through. Rockefeller, all these guys, that's where they earn their stripes. And I think Elon is the Rockefeller of our time, like him or hate him.

                                   That guy is so incredible with what he's done. The fact that nobody, he'll never take no for an answer. They said, You'll never be able to make a non combustion car. Watch me. Look what he does. You'll never be able to... They're flying, SpaceX is flying more emissions to space right now than every single nation state combined to another factor. It's unbelievable. And they weren't even around a decade or two ago.

                                   So again, that common theme you'll see with all those great ones. Another great one is Momofuku Ando, the guy that invented ramen noodles. He invented ramen noodles because up to then you had to have them fresh, but he was so destitute and bankrupt he had to find a cheap way to make ramen noodles. And look what happened from there.

                                   So my book Warrior Entrepreneur, not to give a gracious plug here, there's literally hundreds of stories in that book about Thomas Edison, about Elon Musk, about all these people. And some ones about Kate Spade who didn't do the right thing and ended up falling a victim to that abyss and the demons that she had.

Gordon Henry:             Fantastic. Well, I want to thank you for coming on the show. Zach, you've been a terrific guest. I'm sure everybody who listened will agree and I want to recommend to everybody, go out and check out this book, Warrior Entrepreneur by Zachary Green. I think you can hear it on audio. And by the way, if you like Zachary's message, you can go online also and find, he did a fantastic TEDx talk, so get to know Zachary Green. Zach, thanks so much for joining us today.

Zachary Green:            Gordon. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you.

Gordon Henry:             And great to have you here. And I want to thank our producer Tim Allman, our coordinators Diette Barnett, Daniel Huddleston. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your friends, colleagues, and family to subscribe and please leave us the five star review. We'd really appreciate it helps us in the rankings. Until next time, make it a great week.

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