From Manager to CEO: The Leadership Shift That Changes Everything

Good morning Colonel Myhams Tom Kubanick. I'm considered the leading authority in small arm storage and armory design. I really believe we're the company to do this for you. He's a self-funded entrepreneur who took a billion dollar legacy industry, anyone. He's the founder and CEO of Secure Tactical. He rebuilt the gun safe category from the ground up, scaling from a garage to the number one provider of military firearm storage without VC. And a really nice house on a lake in Central New York. And we were going to sell the house and get a little farmhouse that we could afford. This was the last asset I had. I laid off most of the people in the company and this was not a difficult layoff. We simply had no money. I'm sorry guys. And they all came to pay for it. I can't make payroll. Come in there's nothing to do. In 2012, I came to the conclusion. I've got three businesses all of which went very quickly to five million sales and sat there. I'm a five million dollar year guy. And I realized the bottleneck was me. To get past that, I've got to go from being a manager to a leader. And that's really delicate everything. The entrepreneur is the guy that it's Friday. You've got 30,000 in the bank. Your payroll is 41,000. That's coming out on Tuesday. And you're going to bed on Friday night with this idea that Monday is my biggest mail day. I'll get enough checks to cover payroll. The entrepreneur sleeps like a baby. We're back. And we're better than ever. And today we have a great guest. Very interesting. Gat, you know, his name is Tom Kubanick. And he's a self-funded entrepreneur who took a billion dollar legacy industry on. He took it on head on any one. He's the founder and CEO of Secure Attactical. And he rebuilt the gun safe category from the ground up, scaling from a garage to the number one provider of military firearm storage without VC. So that's pretty cool, man. I'm excited to talk with you and kind of hear your journey. It's a. It's a. Yeah, it's an interesting path. I'll tell you that. Now, listen, if you're listening, you know, his background is is a very interesting. So you might want to tune in on YouTube and watch this one. You got it. It looks like a guitar gun or a gun. Yeah, there's a, that's it. Yeah. So my background. I graduated high school. Did not go to college. I was a guitar player. I played in heavy metal bands for about 10 years. I played all over the East Coast. In 1984, guitar player magazine didn't article on me as the best unsigned metal guitar player. I was like, let's go. Demon monster guy playing, doing pagan in his capris on guitar. And I moved the Hollywood to pursue a music, you know, career music. And really thought, you know, I was off to the races. And I developed really bad tendonitis. And I was played for about a year in LA. And things were starting, we're doing well in it all of a sudden. Boom, I couldn't play anymore. And I never played professionally again. I do that sucks. I was on the flip side of that coin. I was actually in a Christian rock band. Okay. So all my 20 years, we were signed and we traveled and, you know, songs and the radio and stuff. So that's cool. It was fun. It's, it's, I had a lot of fight. What, you know, throw out through real quick. It was a brutal time in my life. But in hindsight, after my got my first business going and started actually getting a level of success, I hated being a musician. I love to play hated the lifestyle. So in the end, I think you're traveling constantly, you're sleeping on a floor somewhere in a van. Everybody you're working with is kind of, kind of scam me a little. It's not an honest industry, but, uh, so he is. I'm trying to tell the top, right? Yeah, pretty much. I'm, uh, yes, I took a job telemarketing because it hire anybody. And I did that for about a year and a half. And I quit and started my first business in an apartment selling typewriter and printer ribbons, which is why I was selling for this company. So what did that come from it? So you essentially, you did a good college. So you're like, I'm going to make it as a musician. I'm going to be a rock star. That falls apart. You're like crap. I just got to get a job. So you start working somewhere. What point was it that you felt like because so many people just want to clock in and clock out and get a job and move on with things. But obviously there's something within you that you're like, man, I just can't do this whole job thing. And so you started something. It's, you know what it is is. I don't mind the job. I've done as a musician. I worked, you know, canning factories. I've worked on farms. I've done everything. Yeah. But it wasn't about a job. I was, I was trying to plan my future. I had, I thought I had my future pretty well mapped out. And then a big wrench got thrown into the gears. So I saw, I took a job telemarketing. I was so bad they moved me to a non sales position because the guy liked me. I made a lot of calls. I was so bad at it. But I had friends working for another company that were making commission. They're making what I thought was a lot of money. Wasn't that much, but it was still they were doing really well. I said, you know what? I'm not going to make, you know, I'm not going to sit and work for $10 bucks, $15 an hour. For rest of my life. So I said, I've got a producer die. I quit and I went over to this company. It was straight commission job. If you didn't sell, you did not get a paycheck. I don't think you can do that anymore. And instead of practicing guitar six to eight hours a day, I immersed myself in the world of sales. I said, I've got to figure this out. I need to move forward. So I read every book. I listened to a lot of, you know, back then cassettes. A lot of fun. A lot of fun. Oh, yeah. All that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Zig Ziglar. And slowly started to make sense. And I finally figured out sales. And I, so I quit that job. At, you know, after about a year and a half into it and started my first business in an apartment. In panorama city. Really bad neighborhood. But it was a cheap apartment. We could afford. I had two partners. We just started cold calling and really making it up as we go along. And the thing about, you know, for starting a business, you don't need to have all the answers. You just need to move forward every day. We had no idea what we were doing. We really did. I mean, none, all three were three of us started the business. None of us. None of us had any college experience, but college doesn't teach you how to start a business. There's no class. It teaches you what it takes to start a business and what it takes to hire your first employee. We just every day move forward. If we got into something we couldn't figure out, we stopped, break it down, figure out and just keep moving forward. We're in the apartment for about five months and we rented a little office. Three months later, we hired our first sales rep. Four years later, we had 18 sales reps, a nice little business go. That's a nice, I sold that company to my partners, went off on my own, doing the same thing and built greenline data. Got into the internet in the 90s and taught myself HTML, created a lot of websites. Taprack.com and laptopstorage.com became wildly popular. Your younger listeners won't remember this or what we're alive then, but companies used to back up their computers on these little cassette tapes. It would take thousands of tapes for a big company. So they had these big racking systems to store and organize all the backup tapes. Taprack.com, we were one of the largest sellers of data storage, these tape rack systems. Now, the people that came out for hospitals have the lock up hard drives. So we created secure laptop storage.com and started selling cabinets. And that's when a guy called me and said, can you store an MP5? I'm like, sure. What's an MP5? And he said, it's a little submachine gun. I started laughing. I'm just like, I'm sure we could be talked for a while. He was with the FBI. I mean, I'd never owned a firearm at that point. And I was fascinated. So I just started doing some research. This is before Google, back in the Yahoo days, finding references that the military was struggling with armories. Again, we knew nothing about this. We jumped in and started. We worked as a reseller selling weapon store to systems and then got into a contract with US Army Special Forces command to really solve their problems. Secure it. That point was a three person company. And it was during that contract that I developed the secure tactical integrated weapon storage platform. What we simply call cradle grid. I designed it and patented it in 2008, early 2009 by 2011. We're the primary supplier to the US military. That's awesome. The lesson here in this is how we did it and what transpired. We heard about this contract gun, which was solicitation was coming out to hire a company to survey all their armories and write this report for them. We got a meeting with the Colonel running the program. And you know, Gary Myrick is my head of sales myself. We're in Fort Bragg. It's about my first time on a military base. And we get on the base, we're going with security. We're walking through this building. We're new facilities, third special forces group, all this memorabilia on the walls, all these photographs, these cool guns, all this stuff. I'm just kind of taking it all in. And it just hits me out of the blue as I approach the Colonel's office. I walked into his office, walked right up to him and just said, good morning, Colonel. My name's Tom Kubanick. I'm considered the leading authority and small arm storage and armory design. I believe we're the company to do this for you. He said, we're going to do sat down. We talked for 15 minutes. We left out in the park and gotten Gary's like, what? Leading authority. I started laughing. He's like, what the heck was that? And I'm like, Gary, it hit me out of the blue. But nobody knows how to do this. There is no company that does this. We walked in. And I just claimed to be the expert. All we got to do is back it up. We just have to, so we won the contract. And what's interesting is we won the contract for 18 months. I was on the road. I went to every single special forces base. Every armory I spent a day with the armor, watching his workflow, intermoving them, stuck me just a deep, deep dive into all things, armory and weapon storage function. Over the course of that 18 months, I became the leading Thorian's, well, arm storage and our redesign and. No one had done, no one was doing what you were doing, right? So at this point, you had more knowledge than anybody else. People were selling gun racks and selling cabinets, but nobody, nobody had the access. I had access to the armor. I had access to these, this contract gave me access to everything. Had we not won that contract, we would have still been a reseller of somebody else's gun storage, probably. But the lesson behind all that is, I'll tell you with anybody, if you're looking at a business, even locally in your area, if there's no leading authority. If you've got access to the information and you can answer questions clearly on the subject matter, claim it, claim to, or have one of your employees, if I had a friend running who ran a business making high pressure hosing, I said, just take your oldest guy there, put a photograph, just say, you know, Brad Johnson, the leading authority in high pressure hoses, nobody's gonna argue, but when somebody's shopping, click on our website, and they see that you've got the leading authority, boom, they wanna buy from you. So that is up for grabs with nobody's claimed. - Yeah, I always, there's that saying, it's like fake it till you make it. And I was always like, fake it until you become it. Because I know for me, there are so many situations that I got into and I just said yes, and I put myself out there and kind of took a risk. And at one point, I woke up and I was the guy I said I was, even though I had to Google and learn all these things to get there. And so I'm always like, yeah, fake it until you become it. And then you'll be it. And then you won't be fake it anymore. - It's some. - But I agree that what you're saying is like, it's really about that forward momentum, right? And just taking action. And so many people have paralysis by analysis, right? And they're always in the building phase and I was trying to get the website just right, get the copy just right, get it, the supplier just right, or like all these things. And they just get stuck in this preparing phase and they never execute because of fear or insecurity or whatever that might be. And it's just important to take action. - I see it all the time. I get people coming and asking about this all the time. I mean, exactly as you describe that all these different components are trying to get this right, to try to get that. And I tell everybody who wants to start a business. Ultimately, your business is selling something whether it's a service or a product. I said, forget all the crap. Get an order. Get an order, sell one. You want to start a business selling some widget? That's great. Sell one first, just sell one to somebody. Make sure you can do it 'cause having a website is not gonna get you sales. Having all this cool stuff, well, if you can't sell the product that you've got yourself or you don't have, I mean, if you're not a sales guy, if you're an engineer and you're running a business, sales guy, you've got to be able to, at a micro level, you have to be able to execute on what you're trying to do at a macro level. But make sure you can do that a micro-level. I was seeing a lot of businesses open with these grand ideas. And then they always have that statement I've seen all the time. Small businesses closed. The biggest reason for failure is lack of capital. They run out of money. And I'm like, that's a cop out. It's lack of your ability to sell your product in the early days. If you launch a business and right out of the gate, you're selling what you make. You're generating revenue. You got so much better chance of being served. If you're trying to start a business where you're going for so many months with no sales because you're trying to figure out your website and I figured out this stuff out, killing your burning cash, you're just killing yourself. So it's in the modern world again, so much of what we do now is credit card driven. So the idea of cash flow has gotten a lot easier for the French panors, I think. - Yeah, it seems like you've been very vocal about bootstrapping over venture capital. Looking back, what specific freedoms that's staying self-funded give you that maybe would have been impossible with outside money? - It's funny, but I didn't want to stay self-funded. Nobody would lend me money. And that's again, when you're again, let's go back, I start my first business. I've got hair down to my waist. I'm a heavy metal guitar player who's now running a telemarketing computer supply company. And I've got two kids, we're all our 20s. We're just rock climber. We did just a bunch of scrappy kids. We go to a bank, they're like, they're looking at us like we're nuts. So we learned to do this without any capital 'cause we couldn't get it. It's tough because if somebody puts a big infusion of cash into your business, you can start making bad decisions when you were really tight. You had to make good decisions. You had to make what I'll say, efficient decisions. It's a tough question for me in some ways because I've never gone the capital route. We, I built my three businesses. I mean, we have a big line of credit with security, but I don't really hit it much. I mean, it's not, it's, you know, we borrow against it once a year just so the bank sees it, we're using it. And it's there for opportunities if they come up. But again, that's the beauty of the modern world is, even B2B credit card gives you instant cash. Whereas when I started businesses, everything was net 30, which turns into net 50, really, really expensive. And it was always a cash flow game. I do think that's gotten a little easier. - Yeah. What? So when you were first identifying places to go, so you know, you left telemarketer and then you started doing these racks for the tapes, right? How did you decide even to get into that business? Did you do like market analysis or, how was it that you kind of decided to go down these different routes? And then, you know, eventually getting into the securing, you know, field, that was just by necessity, right? Because it was like, oh, okay, we need these HIPAA compliance. So now we're going to create these secured areas or secured cases or whatever they were for these tapes. And then obviously that then led you into, you know, gun safes and stuff. So, but how did you initially decide what business to start or where to kind of start pounding the pavement? You know, it's interesting. Back then, it was early days of the internet. How it was fascinated with creating websites. So I was creating and registering domains and making websites, you know, 50 of them. And what drove us into tape racks, I registered tape rack.com 'cause it was a, I knew what they were. I didn't, we never sold them, but I created tape rack.com, put some racks up. And it just started getting hits. I had crossbow.com. I had so many websites just playing again. This is really before the concept of like e-comes, way before Amazon. So it was just, all we were doing was generating leads, you know, get a quote. And that site, tape rack.com started getting hits. And we started, and that's why we just said, okay, let's build this out. Let's hook up the manufacturers. Clearly, they're only a need. Yeah. Right, right. So what's happening is the tape rack industry was kind of slowly collapsing because computers were becoming, you know, tape was becoming higher capacity. The web was coming out with online stores. You could see that this was a declining industry. This is where coming into play. Absolutely. But normally this was stuff that was all sold through local dealer installers. As the market got smaller, none of the dealer installers in one local area could sustain their business. So by being a national company, it just sold the stuff. As it got smaller, it all came to us. And we did a heck of a business with it. But I look at my path in business is turning over rocks. I kept, you know, I'm doing what we're doing, but I'm always turning over rocks looking for the next thing, looking for the end evaluating, what do I, and I'm doing what, what fat, what, what I find interesting, I don't do market research saying, wow, this makes me a lot of money. I just say, well, this, well, this be really, could this be a cool thing to pursue? Is there a need? Can we sell the product? Yes, we have to generate, is there a margin in it? You know, high margins make it a lot easier. Right. So I make a little margins. And then the fire, the gun storage thing, he called me and I just got fascinated with it. And then once I started looking at it, you know, this is the Gulf War time. And this is, you know, 2002. And I'd never served in the military. I was a musician, but I looked at all this thing. You know what, this is, this is how I can give back a little bit. This is how I can make a difference. 'Cause these, these kids are risking their lives so we have our freedoms. I see, you know what? We jumped in and said, let's, let's see what we can do to help the war fighter. And that really was our mission with security was to build a system that would streamline everything they do, make them safer and better prepared. And what we did, absolutely, we completely changed the way the US military stores and organizes guns and gear, our system and our men, methodology is the standard operating procedure now in military armories all over the world. And then 2015 ish we brought this into the consumer market initially driven by Navy seals were getting out and they say, "Come, you want your system in our house?" So our big military racks didn't work well in the house. And so we looked at cooking to retail. So we designed smaller stuff. We started just kind of toe dabbling with it. And again, talk about market research. I'd never done any. The military market is 10 to 17 million dollars a year in business. That's the military armory market. The consumer market is 1.1 billion dollars a year. I wish I'd done some market research 15 years ago. I would have gotten it. But it never occurred to me until, you know, we had these guys looking and then be there was the sequestration hit in the Obama years. This was the forced military cutbacks because the Congress didn't pass a budget. And it basically gutted the military budget for about three years. And we went from a vibrant company to I didn't get an order for eight months. I laid off most of my staff. It was a brutal time. But that really forced me into retail. And now we're, you know, military's cranking, but retail is about 87% of my business. Just because the market's so much bigger. Yeah. So we are. And how was that growth curve as far as, you know, when you started contracting with the military, I mean, in my mind, I'm thinking, oh, sweet like payday, like, you know, big contract and boom, you're off to the races and, you know, providing the service. Was it like just to the moon right away? And just it was like that lucky opportunity that you had or was there kind of growth or like learning. You know, it was interesting. It went from nothing to five million a year real fast. And it was very profitable. And that was kind of our, now we had a lot of competition. We introduced this new system. We did have a lot of competition. And when we launched the, our, what we now call cradle grid system, 2011 was really when it was really started going well. The bulk of the military had already upgraded their old Vietnam racks to modern racks using one of our competitor systems. It's not as good as ours. And we're now replay. We've spent the last, you know, eight years replacing their systems with ours. But the big growth in the company came on the, when we went in the retail in 2014, it took us, you know, a couple of years to figure things out to get a prockline together and really dial in what just how to run a retail business. We'd never done it. 2018 and in 2021, we made ink magazines, fastest growing companies in America. So once we kind of figured it out, it really, it really took off. Yeah. So then how have you kind of, I mean, obviously you have some sort of acumen for you didn't go to college. You were in a band. You just started grinding. Like what are some of the things that you really had to learn or grow or develop in order to kind of, you know, grow a, you know, seven figure business. The biggest, me for me, it's always been, you know, I'm a high energy person that loves to dig into things. So I'm always pulling stuff apart, seeing how it works. And then putting it back together better way or whatever. My first company grew to three and a half million in a couple of years. Well, I started Greenline data. It grew to four million in a couple of years, secure it grew to five million in a couple of years. And they all stayed there. And in 2012, I came to the conclusion, I've got three businesses, all of which went very quickly to five million sales and sat there. Only this company had so much potential. And I realized the bottleneck was me because all my companies were, they were different types of companies, but they all had the same limit. And what that limit is, it's the management limit. When you manage a company, you max out at three to five million in sales, because that's where I'm hiring people to help me do everything. And that's where you delegate everything. And now you lead a company, kind of like in the military, generals aren't digging foxholes. They're planning and strategizing. And it's a very good hierarchy to look at when you want to look at how to run a company. And I hired a gentleman who owned a company that was a supplier to ours, had sold his business. And he retired semi, but he and I were friends. I knew him. I hired him for a two year contract to teach me how to be a CEO. And then I joined Vistage, which is a peer to peer CEO group. I have a group in Albany. I meet with once a month. And with the sole purpose of turning a salesman into a CEO, because it's a different job. And I didn't know the job. I remember sitting in my meeting in my Vistage group saying, guys, look, I'm a CEO of this cool company. I don't know what CEO does. And they all kind of laughed. And I said, no, guys, I'm doing. Do you want to see you? Really? It came down to delegate everything you do. And I made a sign on my wall saying, what are you doing that you should be delegating? I'm a computer monitor. It says, delegate it. So I just kept saying, all right, I need to take care of this. Any questions? Cool. Can you have it done by Friday? Perfect. And then Frank would come and say, Tom, don't do that. You need to get somebody doing that. He really helped me. And you think if you delegate everything you do, you don't have anything to do, what happens is it frees all the clutter out of your brain. And now you're thinking more strategically. Now you're thinking more again, it's that concept working on the business versus working in the business that's management versus leadership. The other piece I'll throw out there really quick is a quick nugget of knowledge. And this goes back to my music days. If you got a song in your head and your musician record it, write it down until you get it out of your head, you will not get another cool song. Yeah. The same thing in business with ideas, use ever note, get a good note program when you're getting ideas, cross some for a little while, get them, you know, let whatever your brain power thing, however it works, get the idea formulated, then commit it to paper. And I've got pads of paper with ideas, I go back and look at some of them are the stupidest ideas, but you come up with it, but sometimes every idea I come up with is I write it down, I flush it out, I detail it, and I park it for two to three weeks and read it. If it's, if it makes sense in two to three weeks, then I said, okay, this could be a good idea. But I was give myself that because I have a lot of crazy hair brain stuff too, but it's really important in my opinion when you're working with it, solving a problem, whatever it is, commit your thoughts to paper, your brain has so much will call it RAM so much working memory. You're holding a whole lot of stuff in your head, you're simply blocking your ability to find new creative solutions and my success in business has always been just finding dramatically more creative solutions than my competitors. Well, yeah, or write it down because you might lose it, it might be gone, you know, it's like that melody or song, if I didn't record it, it would be like, I knew that was a number one hit, I didn't record it, like what was it, I can't think of it again. It's like having those, I've had those ideas in the shower, so I bet if I do this and I don't write it down and I completely forget anything and like, man, I knew I had a million dollar idea, I can't remember what it was again. Yeah, well, so one of the questions I have, I feel like sometimes you get caught and I get the whole delegating thing and we've talked about that before on the show and know how important it is. But I think one of the things that sometimes people struggle with right is like knowing when to delegate and then being able to afford to delegate right I think so many times in small business, it's like you might be running a lifestyle business, so like that where it's like pan your bills and maybe you have, you know, some some contractors or whatever that you're you, you know, paying for it. How do you afford to start to delegate because obviously with delegation also comes a cost of putting somebody in that position. For me, I had I had a I had a staff already, but they weren't that wasn't managing them. They're all working hard, but it wasn't by delegating everything and building structure into the company. We became more efficient, but when you're first, you know, bringing people on it's always, you know, the hardest thing sometimes in business for for entrepreneurs is to hire your first person. Sometimes I think it's easier these guys, you know, get together and they start a company with $10 million of seed money and 200 people. Well, that's kind of the off the easy, but when you have an idea for a business in the bulk of small businesses are somebody with an idea instead of going to work one day, they go the other way and they start, they start breaking this thing down and start building it and. Yeah, it's, I'm sorry, I think where I'm going with this one. Yeah, no, I gave what you're saying. And I think this one makes sense. It's like you you kind of have some people already maybe, you know, under your wing or you're working with a team and it's like trying to push them to be more efficient and, you know, do more with less essentially and then continually trying to, you know, grow and delegate and grow and delegate and grow. And then at some point, I mean, bringing in maybe someone to replace you, right. Well, that's one of the things. to keep man a small business starting out, you're going to be doing everything and you better be because you want to know what's going on. And you delegate when you have the people to delegate to. And if you don't, you've got to look at, do I make enough money to hire somebody? And can I hire somebody? It's going to cost me, you know, $45,000 to hire this entry-level person. Can I get them to generate $90,000 in value to the company? So how do I do it? Or how do we, how do we do these things? Because it's, it's hard to go from, you know, there's from one person's soul on sole proprietor to hiring your first person. That's a big jump. Once you've hired your first person, hiring people is easy. Your next big jump is going from three to five million to 10 million. That's where you go from managing to being a leader. Once you get into 10, 12 million, now you're building middle management, you're building your, your, your, your infrastructure of your companies, you're growing into 30, 30, 40 million. Now you got cash flow. Now you're dealing with more structure. You get structures in place. Now you're looking more, you're leveraging more probably on your CFO and looking more at the use of capital to grow your business. I mean, there's a, there is a, there is a process by which this goes and it's pretty consistent. Yeah. How, how was joining a group? At what point did you think like, ah, I should join this vestige like, because I feel like we all get the marketing things and the join a group and be a part of a mastermind and do all this stuff. You know, what was it for you that you felt like, yeah, I think I want to make this jump. And then did you really, I mean, it sounds like it made a really big difference in your, you know, life and business. I accredit that, that relationship with vestiges is completely changed my world. Absolutely. I got a lot of my, most of my success comes from what I've learned working with that group. But if you're going to be an entrepreneur, rule number one, you don't know everything and just, just admit, just realize you don't have the answer. You don't need to have all the answers. You just need to ask questions and learn. And I was at a point where I said, you know what, I've got to change because I don't want to be a $5 million dollar or guy that rest of my life. And I think that I thought really thought secured has so much potential. And I seek, I look, I started looking at coaching and I came across vestige. It was a guy I knew local and Syracuse. He was also in the, he were, he made a defensive product that he sold to the military. So we were friends because we're in the kind of the same field. And he had mentioned, we're talking about business and some of its frustration. He had mentioned vestige and just planted that seed. I said, huh, so I did some research and I reached out to the vestige and they got disabled schedule and meeting. And then I went up to met with my primary manufacturer is a, is a big company that makes my military weapon racks. And the owner and I became very good friends. He lives in Connecticut. I go up there, I used to go, I used to go up there all the time when you're designing the racks, but I get there twice a year, we'll play golf and meet. So I met, met with him. And I was talking to him. I just after we'd played golf and just like, yeah, I'm looking at joining this group. It's called Vistage. He's our laughing. I looked at him. He goes, I've been a member for 12 years. I said, you're hitting him. And I had a lot of respect for this guy because he took a, he turned a $30 million your company into a $500 million your company, just very, very successful. So that inked it for me and I joined, I just joined right away. And it's expensive and it's time consuming. But important, good things are, you know, you just, you, that's, you know, I didn't go to college, but that doesn't mean I didn't stop. I didn't not learn. And I've done so, you know, I spend my whole life learning. I just, I didn't go to college because I can't learn in the classroom. You got decent grades in high school. I just can't sit in the classroom. It's like, my, there's no way I'm going to college. I can't do that. Yeah. I mean, I love that. And again, I don't think especially in this day and age, with, with all the education and online and YouTube. And I show that I tell my kids like, Hey, you know what? If you're not going to be a doctor or a lawyer or so, it's like, don't go to school to be like an art, you know, major or some sort of, you know, some random, you know, indigenous people studies. It's like, come on. Like you could just go out and start apprenticing and learning from somebody and, and whatever. And, and really find your way. I, if you wake up and you work hard and you show up on time and you're positive, like so many things can come your way. It's a shame that we've got. I mean, the generation of kids right now have been totally scammed. This idea, you have to go, you have to go to college. Not even you have to go, oh, no, no, no, you can afford it. We'll make it affordable. Here's all these loans. And so you come out of a four year school with a 10 year sentence. You're spending four to $700 a month on your student loans for the next 10 years. And if you don't, if you defer them, which they love, you did, now you're making these payments for the rest of your damn life. It's the stupidest thing in the world. And I'll tell you what, we don't secure it. Does not require a college education for any position in this company. Absolutely do not require it. That was a conversation years ago when we were hiring people. I said, why are we asking that? I said, look, I own the damn place. I didn't go to college. We don't care. And but we now have a list of schools that we will not hire from. And because we just don't want the baggage. These kids are being taught. They're being taught an alternate world. It's just not, it's not even reality of safe spaces and you know, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I'm hiring you. I'm hiring you to add value to my business. Once you're on board and once you're one of us, I will do everything in my power to make sure you are wildly successful. But don't come in here expecting something. Yeah. Some level of treatment you think you deserve because I mean, we treat everybody fairly. We're a great, I mean, we are a great company to work for. But I don't want, I don't want this baggage that I see these kids coming with in this. I don't understand how they're teaching it, but this idea that, man, I talked to so many, I like, my kids are just graduating college or just finishing up and see what their friends and so many of them are like, oh, we can never afford a house. We're never going to afford it. Look at the cost. It's crazy. You can't get a job that's going to pay the cut when I was a kid living in Hollywood. I had the same thought. House was 400. I mean, they're going to afford a house. By saying, you know what? You figure it out and you can bitch all you want, but there's no place else in the world that you can get up in the morning and just ignite your future and just have an unbelievable future because the opportunity to have here and that's. Yeah. No, it's so true. And it's taken for granted by so many people and again, it's like you can complain and find out, you know, find all the reasons why it's you know, rigged against you or whatever it is or you can just put your nose down and start working. And then one day you'll look up and be like, oh, wow, like, I made it. It's it's a yeah, it took me a long time before I kind of realized that, you know, things are going okay, just because you're still your kind of tunnel vision. You just really focused on things, but yeah, no, it's a during the time that you had to lay people off. I mean, what was the thought? Like, did you have to jump back into working in areas of the business that you hadn't in the past? Like, and then it was your rebuild like plan or I mean, how can you just then shut out your doors completely? Well, I didn't have, I mean, this was all I had. I didn't have a lot of resource at the time. Now, coming off of some big years with the military, I had a plane. I was flying all over the Northeast. So I sold off all my assets. And we got to a point where we were looking at a little I had a really nice house on a lake in central New York and we were going to sell the house and get a little farmhouse that we could afford and just really this was the last asset I had. And I had laid off most of the people in the company. And this was not a difficult layoff. I'm sorry guys. And then I knew it. Come in. There's nothing to do. It wasn't that difficult. But I jumped. We got it down to about a three person company again, which again, I got a lot of experience being in two and three people companies. And we picked up a couple of military orders. Things started coming back. And I was back to doing quotes and designing systems. And the three of us just slowly built me hired another person, started getting busier. And then we see with this idea of retail, we started pursuing that. And it took a long time to get the contacts to get the the manufacturing logistics took a long time. I mean, our first, our first order, our first container of retail product, we didn't make any money on it. We should have. We didn't know what we were doing. So we can't. We just ran all sorts of problems. We didn't anticipate. But you learn through all these things. And just because you don't know how to do something doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. It just means that make sure you got some reserves, make sure on plan for some big mistakes, you're going to make them, but you still got to move forward. Don't wait. I just tell it, don't wait to have all the answers. You just need to have enough answers. You know, it's kind of like if you want to drive, if your goal is to go to Los Angeles, let's hit the business, the business is going to go to Los Angeles, you can sit at your desk with a map and map out every single road, every single turn, every single meal, every single hotel. Well, you can get in your car and just start driving west. Now, the guy who jumps in his car and says driving west, his path to way is going to be a little messier. But he's going to beat you. He's going to beat you every time. That's kind of in business. I look at that as, "Maloop, keep moving." It's okay to make, you know, one of the big things in security is fail fast. Keep moving, fail fast, and learn. Because it's too failure that we learn. And our biggest failures are our biggest lessons when we learn the most. And I've had some very, very expensive failures. It's a million dollar plus failures. And. But you learn so much from the most. They kill you. But you just got to keep moving. I was telling everybody, another analogy for that is you're driving down the road. You're going someplace you haven't been before. You kind of have good direction. You know where you're going. But you come to a fork in the road, didn't anticipate. You have three choices. Go right, go left, or stop and plan. The guy that goes left, let's say that's the right way. He's on his way, he's going there. The guy that goes right, he's on the wrong path. But he recognizes we made a mistake. We course correct. Now he's back on tracking back to the right path. The guy that stops. He's in last place every time. You just can't stop. Stop your forward momentum because you have problems. You've got to suck it up, deal with the problems, but keep moving. And if you're afraid of making mistakes, do not be an entrepreneur. And I think entrepreneurial, I don't think you can teach how to be an entrepreneur. I think it's something you're probably born with. And it comes down to risk management. And you're going to bed on Friday night with this idea that Monday's my biggest mail day, I'll get enough checks to cover payroll. One entrepreneur who wants to be an entrepreneur, doesn't have the mindset for it. Stress to the guilt. The nervous wreck because you might not make payroll. And that's, it's this tolerance and ability. It's an ability to live in a relaxed state when you're processing and dealing with a lot of risk. And I think risk assessment and then just risk analysis and you got to be able to turn it off too. You got to, I go, I leave this business. And I've always had a 25 minute drive wherever I've worked. I live 25 minutes because it takes me 25 minutes to go from time at work to time at home and same thing in the morning. During COVID, this company was empty. I was here every day because I couldn't just get up in the morning and work for my house. I couldn't get anything done. That 20 minutes is I just sit and process. I might listen to a podcast. I might do a book, but the most part, it's it's 20 minutes of pure idea time there and back. Process, you know, launch the day on the way home. I review everything and make plans for the next day or the next week. And I find that is my downtime. And I also, I've got a hunting ranch now. And I'll go out in the tractor and just mow and just just working with Fino. They're making a trail. It's such a disconnect from me. I've got to I love the tide of nature. And I spend a lot of time up there. But when you do get away, you know, it's it's it's how many days a week do you work? I work every day. Every single day. I mean, I've never made my wife drive me nothing. I'm never not thinking about ideas for the company. I'm going vacation. I'll disconnect with the kids are doing a lot of fun stuff. But in all those little quiet moments, I'm just you're always 24/7. You're always processing stuff. Yeah. Well, hey, thanks so much for hanging out and just sharing with us and talking with me. This has been really encouraging. And I felt like I learned a lot and was encouraged by you. So I really appreciate that. You know, I always love to leave people with one action item for for Monday and to say, all right, hey, if you're if you want to, you know, take your business in the next level, if you want to grow personally, professionally, start doing this one thing starting next week. If you had to give that advice to somebody like, hey, just start doing this. What would be the thing? Block out time for creativity every day or if that's too much every other day, but block out 15 minutes and set a timer. That's important. Set a timer so you know it's going to end because you might drive yourself nuts, but set a time to for and piece of paper and just let your brain go. And you're going to take down notes and ideas. Nothing is wrong. It's jot down crazy stuff. But train yourself to be creative and it takes some time to do it. Ultimately, I've got I've got a good friend that got me on this whole idea. He has a white room in his office. There's a chair in there. It's all white. There's no desk and he goes and sits in a white room with a pad of paper. Not even it's on his lap. And he writes ad keys. He's in the advertising and he does all of his big ad concepts and all his campaign concepts in a white room because he says, I just it just clears my head for me. I've got to redark my office. I can just darken it up. I just sit quietly and just you want to disconnect from what I would call your reticular activating system. The part of your brain that filters out all the nonsense in the world. You have no idea how many blue cars you've walked by or seen today because it's unimportant to you. If I told you tomorrow, count every blue car you see. If you get it right, I'll give you $10,000. All the sudden, those cars have a value and your brain's looking for them. Well, your brain is filtering out stuff all the time. Every, every, every, we have millions of bits of data and it's filtering. So you only get what's important. The problem is it makes mistakes. And by creating a 15, 10, 15 minute time where you can disconnect and allow that creative side to come in. If you can do it effectively, you can come up with some brilliant ideas and all things being equal creative companies are the ones that will be successful. Everybody can work hard, but not everybody can be creative. That's so true. That's true. All right, guys. Hey, thanks for tuning in and hanging out with us. If you go to the FridayHabit.com, you can find channels for this episode. You can get links for our websites and ways to get in touch. At the bottom of the page, you can download our guide to the Friday Habit System. It's going to help you set aside one full day each week to dedicate working on your business. Instead of always in your business, if you want to shoot us an email, maybe request a guest or a particular topic to chat about, please hit us up at hello at the FridayHabit.com. And until next time, remember, live every day like it's Friday.