328: You Get The Life You Give Yourself. With CEO, Matt Malone

0:00:00 - Opening 0:02:22 - Matt Malone, CEO. 2:24:11 - Final thoughts / How to stay on THE PATH. 2:42:15 - Closing Gratitude. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 328 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Good evening.

• 0:08Jocko Willink?

  Leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield.

• 0:13Jocko Willink?

  It's the most important thing in business and it is the most important thing in life. And on this podcast, we consistently and regularly go through examples of that from military history. And about how the principles of extreme ownership apply to combat situations. And I've had many combat leaders on this podcast from every level, from corporals and sergeants to gunnery sergeants and master chiefs to generals and admirals. Talking about these principles of leadership and how they apply on the battlefield.

• 0:56Jocko Willink?

  And sometimes they talk about how these principles positively impact their lives as well as well. So we've covered the battlefield, we've covered life. Tonight, we're going to get a perspective from the business side, from an individual that has taken the principles of extreme ownership, the laws of combat, the leadership strategy and tactics that we learned in combat. And has applied them directly to his business, resulting in some incredible success. Our guest tonight is Matt Malone. He's the CEO and owner of Groundworks, which is a nationwide

• 1:40Jocko Willink?

  construction company that provides foundation repair, basement waterproofing, crawl space encapsulation and concrete lifting.

• 1:51Jocko Willink?

  And a host of other services that helps keep Americans foundations dry and safe and serviceable. It's a company that's ranked number 1,047 on the Inc. 5,000 in 2021. Grew by 461% in three years.

• 2:09Jocko Willink?

  Has over 20 brands under its umbrella, still growing. And that growth is based on leadership. And that leadership starts with the CEO, Matt. Matt, thanks for coming on.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Thank you, Jaco. An honor to be here.

• 2:28Jocko Willink?

  Let's, uh, let's start at the beginning. Let's start at where you started.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:32Jocko Willink?

  Tell us about, uh, growing up.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Well, I grew up in, uh, a town not too dissimilar to, to this one, not as pretty, uh, Norfolk, Virginia.

• 2:40Jocko Willink?

  Come on, man.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Come on, man.

• 2:41Jocko Willink?

  Norfolk's pretty, pretty, pretty place.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  I looked out the window at the, at last night or this morning and overlooking the, the little harbor there. It's like, man. I see the big Navy vessels, but doesn't quite look the same as my hometown, but, uh, a lot of similarities, a lot of similarities, a lot of differences. But so I grew up in Norfolk, uh, Norfolk, Virginia. For those that don't know, it's, uh, you know, it's part of East Coast Command for the SEALs. It's the world's largest Navy base, I think. A lot of shipbuilding there as well. I'm a Navy brat, so my, my dad was enlisted in the Navy's, uh, he made his way there, had made his way there from Texas. So he was born in Dennison, Texas, a classic story that you probably see a lot. Tough childhood.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  He said, I'm going to go join the Navy and see the world. And, uh, he did, he did. Um, he was enlisted E5.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  But he spent four years in the Navy, two years in, in the Guard, but, uh, it brought him to Norfolk, as you can imagine. There he met, uh, my mom. And, uh, she too is a Navy brat. So, uh, my grandfather, he, uh, he was, uh, Chief Warrant Officer. So he's, uh, 20 years plus. So he, he served, he was actually in the Pacific Theater for the most of his career. Yeah. Uh, he was, uh, injured and.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Kamikaze attack and you know, he's got some great stories.

• 4:07Jocko Willink?

  He's no longer with?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Well, I only know in in the Atlantic, he was on his first ship was the Brooklyn, the USS Brooklyn. He's no longer with us. So in fact, I I was trying to find some things before I came to see you to see if I could get some more data, but I do. He was, he had lived and kind of raised for many years, my mom in Guam. So you know, he was Pacific theater and you know, finally moved back to retire Norfolk and and that's how you know, my parents met. So as you know, Navy towns are a lot of examples like that.

• 4:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So what did your dad do while you were growing up?

• 4:43Speaker 02

  You know, it's funny in the Navy. So he's a Texas guy, tough life, ran away frankly, to to get some freedom. In the Navy, he he was involved with computers of all things, which back in the day, that was.

• 4:56Jocko Willink?

  What was that like a calculator?

• 4:58Speaker 02

  It was like he would have these big tape type things that he would chug around and that was the skill that he learned in the Navy. And then he went to work for as this kind of new technology rolled out in the banking world. So he would oversee the computers at a couple of local regional banks. Now.

• 5:16Jocko Willink?

  When I was a kid, I went on a field trip. So this is we're talking, this might be 1977 or something like that. I was young. And I remember we went to a bank on a field trip. And first of all, I was just thinking, this is the most boring thing I've ever seen in my life. I don't want to. I'm never going into bank. But they had this thing that they were calling a computer and they had the little, these little punch cards. And I think it was some kind of an IBM computer system that kept track of something. And I remember thinking, well, not going into banking over here. I'm sure there's some kids that were thinking, wow, look at that guy with a briefcase. Remember, did you think a briefcase was ever cool, Echo Charles?

• 5:56Speaker 02

  No, not that I can remember.

• 5:57Jocko Willink?

  I remember some kids thought a briefcase was cool. I wasn't one of those kids.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  So so thank going into a big room now with stacks and stacks of machinery and they had to take these tapes down every night and move them for security to a different location. It wasn't like. You talk computers today, it's coding and all these, you know, kind of glamorous things. It was the opposite of that. So he would manage a store as the tapes would store the data from the transaction, I guess, from the customers during the day and make sure they're protected. Really didn't know what he did, but I too knew that I never wanted to do that. But, you know, as a kid, you just, uh, it's, uh, I would just say that my parents, uh, just great people. We grew up, as you can imagine, fairly poor. So we, um, lived in a 1,200

• 6:46Speaker 02

  square foot house with one bathroom. I have a brother, um, but never knew it, frankly, never knew what wealth really was. Just knew that my parents loved me and just got after. My mom was a telephone operator. Went, Eckhart didn't even know what that is, but, uh, they don't have theirs anymore.

• 7:01Jocko Willink?

  I'm laughing because that statement about like, we didn't have much money, but you know, we didn't really know it. So both my parents were school teachers. We didn't have much money.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  And I knew it.

• 7:13Jocko Willink?

  I was, we were, we, I remember we had like a car, we had one car for a while. We had one car. It was a Chevette scooter, a beige Chevette scooter with no air conditioning and the, had like a crappy AM radio and, and we would get, get into that thing in the summertime to go like drive to see the grandparents. Three kids in the back of the tiniest car. So when people are like, oh, you know, I was poor, but we didn't know it. I knew it. I knew it, man. I was like, I'm getting out of this joint when I can.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Uh, I'm having flashbacks. So we, we, we had a similar, we had a rabbit. Remember these Volkswagen rabbits?

• 7:52Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Two door, not four door. And so my dad was from Texas. Occasionally we'd make the long drive from Virginia to Texas. No way to see.

• 8:00Jocko Willink?

  Oh, my God.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Uh, oh, we had pictures of the four of us in this thing and, uh, you know, it was good times.

• 8:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And of course, I mean, uh, I don't want to make it sound too bad. When, when you have a car, you're not doing too bad, right?

• 8:12Speaker 02

  That's exactly right.

• 8:13Jocko Willink?

  And, and we've always had food. So thanks to my mom and dad and, and the, the teachers union that they got paid. And we ate, we got to eat all the time, but yeah, uh, as far as not knowing you're poor, I definitely, I, let me rephrase it. I knew we didn't have much money, that much I do. I knew we weren't, I knew we weren't getting like, you know, a new bicycle. We might get a used bicycle. We might get a, you know, um, we always had some fun around Christmas time. The, the saying in my family was it's going to be a lean Christmas, which had been inherited, I guess for my, my mom's dad. Who would say the same thing. It's going to be a lean Christmas. That's all we'd hear about. So whatever dreams you had for Santa, go count on it.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Well, look, Echo would appreciate this, being from Hawaii. Look, uh, the big meal sometimes during the week was Spam. Uh, now back east, that wasn't a thing. My mom grew up in Guam for many years, right? So yeah, well, we'll fire up some Spam and put it in a crock pot and then I'm like, what? So the running joke when I realized that Spam really wasn't real me to see my mom. She made, she signed me up for the Spam of the Month Club and I had a sweet shirt that said Spam on it and I would get this letter every month. So, you know, again, it, it took me a while to realize, hey, you guys don't eat Spam at your house, you know? So anyway. Uh, but so grew up in Norfolk, um, you know, uh, good parents, normal childhood.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Um, I, I actually going to elementary school, uh, I went, uh, this was when cross town busing was a thing. I don't know if they have that here in California, but back in the day that we would have cross town busing in Norfolk. So I grew up in a place called Ocean View. Um, I don't know if you remember that. I don't know if you were stationed back in.

• 9:56Jocko Willink?

  I, I was stationed. I remember where Ocean View is.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  It's a little sketchy. We'll talk about that later maybe, but, uh, so a cross town busing was a big deal. So in first grade, you know, mom would walk me out to the bus stop, 45, 50 minute drive on the bus to a school. Um, Young Park Elementary, it's literally in the middle of a project and it, uh, you know, they would cross town bus. And so, uh, that lasted for a couple of years and mom had enough of it. So she said, hey, uh, we're going to find the money to send. She had, of course, have her brother perish and. And we're gonna send the boys to a Catholic school because Catholic schools are cheaper than private schools, but great education is good education. And so we ended up going to this little private school and she was so pleased. I think, I think it was like $2,000, but you

• 10:42Speaker 02

  know, but for those it was real money, right? And so now it kind of changed the course of my, my life and, and fast forward a few years. So we grew up and grew up there and then went to high school.

• 10:53Jocko Willink?

  When you say that it changed the course of your life, you can't just throw that out there and say, hey, we're moving on. What? Just the, the focus on education?

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the focus on look, discipline, I think is an important part of aspect of a Catholic education. Now, you know, I literally had nuns that were teaching us, right? So you have some discipline that's instilled in that some, you know, we're not Catholic either, right? So.

• 11:17Jocko Willink?

  Did you, did you have to tell, say that you were Catholic to get in there?

• 11:20Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 11:21Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  They, they allow non-Catholics to get in. And so, but I, you know, I, I certainly believe in the morality that they, they teach. And I would literally have to go to, we went to mass every week and I couldn't participate, right? So literally for me, it was like, we're sitting, I just go and sit and I always remember it's nice and cool in the church.

• 11:40Jocko Willink?

  Were they still doing the, in Latin?

• 11:42Speaker 02

  No, no, no, not at this point. No, not at this point.

• 11:45Jocko Willink?

  How long ago is Latin services? Am I, am I crazy?

• 11:48Speaker 02

  No, because they used to talk about that.

• 11:50Jocko Willink?

  Because I thought they did Latin up until fairly recently, you know, the seventies or sixties.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Long before, maybe, I was, I'm not that old. No, they, they definitely did Latin, but, but not for me, not for me. But I just remember, you know, we couldn't participate, couldn't take the sacrament and, but it was cool. I would go, it's nice and cool in there and just sit and do whatever. And there were a few non-Catholics. So we just kind of pal around together. We were that group and just would just chill as people would go through the mass every week and that's cool, whatever. But how it changed my life is, you know, a good curriculum. A good focus on discipline and education and candidly, a good moral compass was delivered weekly, right? Not, I'm not talking about mass here. I'm just talking about, you know, how they went about their education, right? Look, if you look at today, there's a boom

• 12:40Speaker 02

  in Catholic education, given what's going on in education around the country. And so, you know, it was an important part of my kind of upbringing, even though I wasn't Catholic. It was, it was important part of my upbringing.

• 12:51Jocko Willink?

  And how long were you in that Catholic school for?

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Well, I went so second grade, so third grade on through high school.

• 12:57Jocko Willink?

  Oh, all the way through high school?

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, different schools, but still in the Catholic system. So all these little teeny Catholic elementary schools would feed up to the one high school they had in town. At this time, it was called Norfolk Catholic High. And so my brother and I went there. And so my dad passed away when I was 14. So I was a freshman. It was tough.

• 13:20Jocko Willink?

  How, how'd that happen?

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Well, he, so he, he again, grew up in Texas without a lot of medical care. And what they think was, so see, he had rheumatic fever when he was a child and, um, you know, likely, he never got medical attention till it was probably too late. So he literally wore glasses because the, the fever burnt his, his retinas, right? So, I mean, remember, so he was born in the late 50s and, you know, in Texas, not in a big city. He was, he was born in Denton, Texas and literally lived on a cattle farm, right? So different mindset about healthcare and, and, and treating things aggressively. So, oh, he's got 103 temperature. He'll be all right. Just, you know, just lay it out here. Some water, you know, we'll be fine.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  But he, he ultimately wasn't fine. So he had, he had kidney failure, um, a couple of years prior. So he was on dialysis for that. And, um, you know, he would, he would literally go on walks every morning to kind of keep in shape. And he was then built, not built like me. He was then, and we'd go on these walks and, um, one day he just didn't come back. Uh, police come to the house and we're about to go to school. My brother and I and um my brother, he's a couple of years older and he would drive us to school and the cops literally came into, we lived in a court, came to the court, drove through the court. And I remember we're just kind of sitting there, uh, I was getting a drink of water from the faucet and uh, I made some smart ass comment like, oh, they're coming

• 14:47Speaker 02

  to get this guy Roger Baker every year, you know, uh, again, you know, rough neighborhood candidly. So a lot of guys, the police would come by all the time. And so he pulled right in front of the house and I, I said something else smart to my brother like, oh, what'd you do? And so he comes to the door and uh, he brings my dad's wallet and uh, he said, one of you guys needs to come with me. And so my brother was the oldest and so he went, um, he went with the, the police officer and you know, I was there alone in that house and um, that's just a very strange, I mean, when you're a child, I was 14, just turned 14, just entering in high school as a freshman. And uh, yeah, and I called my mom and she

• 15:28Speaker 02

  came home and you know, went to the hospital and he was gone. So, um, at an early age, you know, when that, that, that happens, you, you, you have one or two things, right? You have to, you can either hide within yourself or you can step up and try to be more of a man around the house and, and my mom, um, you know, she, she's old school in the sense that, you know, she was very dependent on my dad. Um, uh, she turned into, we called her Towanda after that. Like she's tried to be strong and do things that, uh, you know, that, uh, she needed to do, take care of her boys and she did. Um, but I had to become, in my mind, I had to become more of the man of the house and, and manage the

• 16:09Speaker 02

  finances and other things like that because she wasn't great with that. And so, um, the interesting thing is she couldn't afford to send us to this school now, Norfolk Catholic. And, and I didn't know this for a few years, but the school came to her and said, hey, listen, if you can pay for one of your sons, child, um, my brother, um, then Matt can go for free. Big deal, right? So that's how I was able to go to high school is that that school stepped up and allowed, you know, two knuckleheads to go to the school and when when I couldn't really afford it, my mom couldn't afford it. And I found out, you know, many years later,

• 16:49Speaker 02

  but my wife Sarah and I have, you know, we've given a lot of money back to the school and we've endowed a few scholarships for athletes to go to the school. It's just more than, you know, the colleges I went to, that was kind of the greatest act of kindness that set me on a course to to be an entrepreneur and a businessman today. And so I just, I love that place. And Sarah and I continue to get back to it. But so that high school, you know, aside from that, pretty, pretty typical existence. I played sports, not great like you guys. I played football and basketball, marginal at football, you know, all conference.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  I think it made all state one time, but not great. I remember like junior year, it's about you getting ready to go to college. And look, to be fair, I was complete knucklehead. Might had a 2.2 GPA. So your grades were not great? No, the grades are not great. Were you just not studying? No. Just didn't care? I don't really think I brought a book home and, and, you know, and I have I factually did not bring a book home. Not that I did not bring a book home. Well, I mean, you have, you have kids and some sons. So I literally, I, I have two sons now, and I would be appalled if that were the case for my sons. So, and looking back, it's like, God, what a knucklehead. So my mom worked all the time. She, you know,

• 18:16Speaker 02

  I was a latchkey kid. I literally, I saw her, you know, right before bed, and that was it. Because she had to work. And so I remember going to a guidance counselor back in the day. And the guidance counselor literally said, hey, You might want to think about a career in the shipyards. And I'm like, what do you mean? You know, mom says I need to go to college. She, she's like, yeah, but uh.

• 18:41Jocko Willink?

  Mom hasn't seen your grades.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  You're not getting into college, the lady said. And you know, Norfolk is a home to a bunch of shipyards, right? And so, um, and nothing wrong with working the shipyards and I'll cover that in a little bit. But she, she, she was like, you need to go work, think about that as a, as a profession. Right. So I go home. That was not a good conversation with mom. Uh, she never went to college, of course, but she'd always, she knew about this thing called college. She said, my, my boys are going to college. I don't know what that looks like, but my boys are going to college. And so thankfully I could play football. Now, um, I should, I should say that, you know, lightly, I could play football, was smart enough to kind of talk my way and play my way into college. But D three, so D three.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  You know, I go play that, you know, D one, so he's legit, but D three, I joke around, it's like 13th grade.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  So, and they also don't give any money to go to play D three, but they, they allow, at least for me, they allowed a knucklehead into, into school. So I was able to parlay kind of my average football skill into, and I'm a decent sized guy, but I could, I could leverage that into getting into college. And so I did, so, um, this is, this is interesting too. So I went.

• 19:59Jocko Willink?

  Which, which college did you go to?

• 19:59Speaker 02

  So I initially went to, you're gonna laugh, Catholic University. So mind you, here's a guy, I'm Episcopalian, like, and so imagine all my career has been educational.

• 20:11Jocko Willink?

  Milking the Catholic system.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  You know, so, so I ended up at Catholic University, which is a division three school, but it's in DC. And, uh, um, so I played football there, but quickly boom, blew out my knee. Yeah. Right. And I remember, I'm not going to that shipyard. I can't go back, right? So, um, so my mind had to turn on, turn the brain on, I remember.

• 20:38Jocko Willink?

  What year was this in college that you blew your knee?

• 20:40Speaker 02

  So I graduated high school in 90, so it was 91, 91 and.

• 20:45Jocko Willink?

  So did you play a season or did you?

• 20:47Speaker 02

  No, never saw the field.

• 20:49Jocko Willink?

  How'd you blow your knee practicing?

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:51Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. And look, I had a couple of looks from service academies and of course, that was never gonna happen given my grades, but um, uh, but it was the, it was the only way I could really get an opportunity to go to college and, and so I went to Catholic, um, blew out my knee, but because of my fear, I decided, okay, there's this thing called a brain. You might want to turn that on.

• 21:15Jocko Willink?

  Did you, you're looking back, you're looking back and you say, oh, this is what I said. Do you actually remember a moment in time when you said, okay, I'm gonna need to, I'm not gonna need to apply myself academically?

• 21:29Speaker 02

  100%.

• 21:30Jocko Willink?

  Okay. So you, that, that actually, cause I look at my people as like, hey, when did this happen? When was this moment? And I, I've always, for the most part, had more gradual sort of, sort of realizations of what's happening in the world, including for myself. But that's why I'm asking, like, did you have a specific, like, all right?

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Literally, it's a binary event, right? So you blow out your knee, you can't walk. I was literally in the hospital, like southeast DC, not the greatest kind of hospital that you want to be in. And I literally in that bed, I said, I'm not going back. Not, I'm not meaning Catholic, but I'm not going back to Norfolk. I'm not gonna go back. What I gotta do, right? So, um, turned on the brain. I finished the semester there, had a 3-2, which is okay. Um, I didn't frankly fit. I didn't like the place. Um, I didn't like, I didn't like living in DC. And so, um, again, my mom, she, she does, she did, we couldn't really afford college, right? So she did a lot of research and she found that there's

• 22:32Speaker 02

  a, a foundation in Norfolk called the Norfolk Foundation. And they literally, for underprivileged kids, they would send, uh, these kids to this, this, this college I ultimately graduated from called Hampton Sydney College is in Virginia. It's a classic liberal arts school. So when I say classic, you know, they talk Greek and Latin. We had two years of something called rhetoric and you had to place out of it before you could graduate, right? It is so old school. It's like a true academy. And I loved it, right? So it was small, less than a thousand students. Um, professor to student ratio was very high and professors that taught there, they wanted to teach. They didn't want to write or research. They wanted to teach and it's a perfect environment for me. And so.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  I went there, the Norfolk Foundation paid my tuition.

• 23:20Jocko Willink?

  What'd you study?

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Economics and religion, believe it or not. So I have two degrees from there, one in economics and one in religion. People always ask me, "That religion thing is late." Once you know me, you realize, "That religion thing, Malone, what do you have that for?" Well, it's just, look, economics was pure. I wanted to learn more about, you know, the economy and how to be effective in business and things like that. But my curiosity was really what drove religion, right? So imagine going to school at a Catholic school for all my childhood. And then, of course, I'm an Episcopal fan, but I was just fascinated with the idea of how religions are historically rolled out and maintained and their effect on, you know, mankind.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  And so we would study all kinds of religions. And so it was just a personal kind of journey of my own intellect, not frankly, not doing anything with this, as you can imagine.

• 24:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, well, no, if I was in the FBI and saw that thing pop up, I would have pegged you as a cult, potential future cult leader. Economy and religion, all right, we gotta watch this guy. He's gonna be making moves.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Well, look, so I wrote my senior thesis on something called the morality of capitalism. So I tried to blend them together.

• 24:35Jocko Willink?

  So did you know you wanted to go into business at this time? Were you starting to think? Did you see some kind of a career path? Was there anything that interested you?

• 24:43Speaker 02

  You know, I knew I didn't want to go into a traditional profession. When I say profession, I mean true profession. So, you know, law or medicine or accounting. Like, my mind wasn't linear that way and I always knew that I wanted to pursue something in business, whatever that might mean. Like, it's so ambiguous when you say, "Hey, yeah, I want to go into business." What the heck does that even mean, right? What does that look like? And, and I just knew I wanted to, to have the tools to do that, Jaco, to go into business and be successful. It was later that I learned kind of what specifically I wanted to be involved with in business, as I met some, some mentors, but at Hampton Sydney, no, I just knew I wanted

• 25:27Speaker 02

  to get some degree and, and that I felt like could best prepare me to be successful in business. And so I did my, as I said, I got this Norfolk Foundation Scholarship, right? So, and I get there, my, my dad's gone, no one in my family's ever gone to college. Mom thought this was, and I thought, okay, look, this is cool. I got this all paid for, right? Well, I get there and what I realized, they pay tuition, but there's a little difference between room and board and things like that. So, I, I'm a hustler. So, I've always worked, even as in high school, like it's just part of the Malone mindset. We've always worked. I remember I was working at a marina at 14, sanding the bottom of boats so they could paint them. Now, mind you, I didn't

• 26:11Speaker 02

  even have any kind of face mask on, like today with my company, like, what were they, what were they letting me do that for?

• 26:19Jocko Willink?

  Cause you were 14.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  14, right. I better not say the marina, but I was paid in cash and my brother worked there and he got the good gig. So, he drove one of these huge forklifts where they store the boats and, you know, they're huge forklift. And I was the idiot that would climb up on the forklift, get in the boat as he put it in the water, so I could drive it and park it. So, when the guests came, they could pick up their boats anyway. So, we'd always been working. And even in high school, I think you appreciate this, and you might know these guys. So, I was a lifeguard of all things in high school, believe it or not. So, I worked at this ocean view life, beach patrol. And a good gig, paid a lot more than marina, didn't have to work as hard. You can kind of work out and have some fun.

• 27:01Jocko Willink?

  You're not breathing lead paint.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  Right down your throat as I look at it. Uh, now, you know, people always joke, hey, were you there for the ladies and stuff like, I don't think you've really been to Ocean View, bro. There's really no ladies there.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  It's a pretty rough place like a, we used to work at this place called, uh, there are a couple of beaches there in Norfolk and we worked at this place called City Beach. And City is a big development now, it's replaced it, but City was kind of way down at the end of the, end of the bay. And there were, that's where you could get the hotels you could get for the hour, right? And hookers on the corners and stuff like that. And they only let the big guys go down there to City and we called it, of course shitty, we're gonna go hit shitty. What I love though is we had rescue boards and so we basically surfed all day because the clientele didn't roll, and mind you surfing out in Norfolk is very different than here, but, but we felt cool, Jaco, come on. So, you know, it was okay, well, you know, you get there, you get on duty at 10. And clients don't really show up at that beach until about three, so we kind of screwed around.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Well, there's a couple of characters that you meet during being a lifeguard, right? So you have the quintessential guy that that's his profession, you know, the dude that's like, you would call him dude, his name is Jed. You know, like he was 40 years old, you're like, okay, I don't want to be that guy. But we had these few guys that went to, uh, that went to college at Old Dominion. And that were just working there for the summer, making good money and, and, uh, I'll never forget this one guy, um, he was a workout maniac, so he was a wrestler at Old Dominion. And we, our lifeguard stands are about 10 feet tall and, uh, he used to hang off these things and do pull-ups. And then he would do one-handed pull-ups, you know, he'd grab his hand to complete the jet.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  And I was in high school, I, this, this, this was cool to me, right? So on his,

• 28:50Jocko Willink?

  Hey, I'm not a, I'm, I'm way out of high school.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  My fat ass can't do that, that's pretty cool. So, uh, on the lunch breaks though, this guy, uh, he wouldn't go on lunch. He would literally jump on the beach, take off his lifeguard gear and dig holes. He'd take out a military shovel and dig holes as deep as he could, as fast as he could for an hour. And then fill them in, that's how lunch break was an hour. And, uh, and I remember asking him, I said, what, what, what do you, what do you, I mean, I love it, but what are you doing? So he says, I want to be a SEAL. I said, huh? What's a SEAL, right? And so at City Beach, it's right across a jetty from the amphib base there, right? And so you'd see copters out there dropping people and I didn't think there were SEALs, but you'd

• 29:37Speaker 02

  they'd drop, you know, divers in or whatever. And because I was so busy down there at that beach, I could just sit there with my binocs and watch. You see them swimming back, right? They just swim back and say, man, these guys are out there a long time. And he would say, well, those are probably SEALs. And then he came in one day and gave me a book Rogue Warrior. The classic, right? So of course, there's a lot of reading time sometimes on these lifeguard stands because no one was there. So Marcin, I read that book and and it was funny, the other day I was working out with retired SEAL. And I had this, I stole, I shouldn't say that, but I have a lifeguard sign in my gym at home, my garage.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  You stole it.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  I found that, City of Norfolk, I found that. But so we're working out and he says, hey, what's that sign? And I said, well, I worked, I worked at, I worked at this lifeguard thing. And then I remembered this story of this guy that wanted to be a SEAL. And I said, hey, did did you ever know this guy? He's in his face. He looked at me and said, you're kidding, right? So, so his name, and I haven't seen him since, Jaco, so you should know this. So his they had two guys that worked there. They're called the Fussell Brothers is what we called them. John and Chris Fussell worked as lifeguards with me back in the day. I had Ocean View.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  John Fussell was the guy that would just work out maniac, like hanging off lifeguard stands, digging holes and you know, when I, when I mentioned it to Flannan, you know, this guy is like, you're kidding, right? So I did use interwebs and check them out. So I I guess they made it and they had a pretty good career in the SEAL team. So but I literally remember this guy hanging off the lifeguard stand doing, you know, one on pearl ups. So he made it. Good for them. So a small story there, but you know, always working. So when I get to college, of course, realizing I had to figure out how to eat and where to live and things like that. So I got a couple of jobs. One, one of those jobs was I was a bartender. Now, so I went to this school is in the middle of the mountains of Virginia. So

• 31:44Speaker 02

  not much nightlife, but I worked for the school. So I would Work for these trustee events. So trustees in college are folks that, you know, kind of sit on a board and give a lot of money and kind of direct the college and where it's going. So they're pretty, typically pretty successful folks that can afford to give a lot of money away. And, you know, I had exposed to any of that world before. And so I was working these trustee events and I had to wear a bow tie and it was pretty horrible. So I stand there and have this bar and this gentleman freshman year came up and he wanted a scotch and eat. Really good at making those. So, and so we just got talking. For four years we talked and again, not about

• 32:29Speaker 02

  business, but about life and politics and sports. And, you know, he, he really became someone that I looked forward to talking to. And his name was Bob Hatcher. And, and Bob had started a company that, called Johnson and Higgins, which was one of the largest insurance brokerage firms in the world. He later sold it to Marsh and they are the largest. And, and, you know, I don't know what he was worth, but it was a lot. And I remember senior year, he says, hey, Malone, if you ever, if you ever need anything, give me a call. And, you know, okay, what does that mean, right? So again, you know, naive. I said, yes, sir, Mr. Hatcher. Thank you. You know. So anyway, so graduate Hampton

• 33:13Speaker 02

  Sydney, the brain turned on, believe it or not, Phi Beta Kappa, which all these, you know, pretty high GPA, which is, what it taught me was like, you, you focus on anything. You bring some discipline to your studies. Most people can achieve anything, right? Especially in school. It's, it's not that hard. You just gotta be disciplined about it. And I took it as my job. Like I was there to find a path to get out, get the highest GPA I could to get theoretically, give me the best job that I could. So as I'm finishing up school, one, one of the deans of the schools comes to me and says, hey, Malone, I want you to apply for the scholarship. And of course, I heard scholarships are free and I said, okay, what's this about?

• 33:54Speaker 02

  And he encouraged me to apply for something called the Rotary Foundation Scholarship. Actually, the Rotary Ambassadorial Fellowship. Very fancy. And through the Rotary Club. Well, apparently I have Rotary Clubs throughout the world. And part of this ambassadorial role is that you go to these countries, wherever country you're designated, and you speak to Rotary Clubs in that country every weekend. So you travel around this country, giving speeches about literally life in America and where you're from. It's truly ambassadorial. And in return for that, they pay for your graduate school. It's a good gig. I'll give that a go.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  And so, now, I can only speak English and so, you know, that limits to where you can go in the world. Australia or the United Kingdom, right? So, being an economist, I'll use that phrase loosely. I knew, of course, of Adam Smith. He actually taught at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. There's a school there called the Adam Smith School of Finance. And I applied to find, the way it worked is you have to apply and then the Rotary Club picks. And so, of course, I pick the big boys. I applied to Cambridge and London School of Economics, just the big boys, right? And on the fifth choice, I applied to University of Glasgow.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Now, what's interesting about Glasgow, it's very similar to Norfolk, in the sense of huge shipbuilding town, depressed economies. Because most of the ships at the, back in, at least, early on, a lot of the shipyards for the United Kingdom, all the boats were really built right there in Glasgow. And so, of course, that's where they select me to go. And so, I ended, I wish I'd gone to Cambridge or Oxford or one of these places. So I, of course, end up, my luck, going to University of Glasgow. But hey, man, it was free. So I went. So off I go to University of Glasgow in Scotland and, yeah, that was a good experience. The school was like $14.91 it was found.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  I mean, so it's you going way back, right?

• 36:04Jocko Willink?

  Definitely back in the day.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  My classmates, you'll love this, my classmates were really, it's an international program. So my classmates from around the world, right? So my roommate was a fellow named Carl Howe, who's from Barbados. And, you know, he spoke a different dialect of English. And then, I don't know if you've been to Glasgow, but Glaswegian, obviously English, but their accents are so thick. So imagine, I got this dude from Barbados, me, and all these Glaswegian, it's like, they're all speaking the same language, but they ain't speaking the same. So I did, I did the master's program there, international finance. I really wanted to get out of there. So I did my program pretty fast.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  I did it in 18 months. You could write your dissertation and finish. And so I finished. But because I finished early, I came back to the States and at that point, Jaco, I wanted to be, I thought, an investment banker. So for your listeners out there, not to offend many investment bankers, but so investment bankers put buyers and sellers of companies together. I have a lot of investment banking friends, I apologize for this, but they're like real estate agents, but really smart and they make a ton of dough. So in my mind, I wanted to be an investment banker, you know, kind of facilitating acquisitions and putting buyers and sellers together for businesses.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  And so going back to the States, I was off cycle. So they have a recruiting class. So they bring in students and put them in the associate program after they get their MBA, which my degree was equivalent to that. And so I was kind of six, seven months early for that program. And so they said, hey, just come back when we recruit for the program because it's kind of a couple of year program. You got to get a spot, a slot, and you'll go through the program. And so I called Bob because I didn't have a job and I said, hey, Mr. Hatcher, guess who? And he says, hey, Milan. So I wrote this dissertation on derivatives in graduate school. And so I went to work briefly for this insurance company. And I, I literally wrote what's called exogenous risk models, where I would invertly correlate

• 38:20Speaker 02

  commodity prices and self-insurance levels. It's very technical, very boring, but. We've both seen trading places, so we kind of. There you go.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Same thing, you're right.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  So I literally would build these models, you got here, I literally was building these models. So a lot of big companies are self insured. Some companies have massive exposure to their earnings based on a commodity price of something. So like, take Reynolds Metals, for example. So Reynolds Metals, their earnings are probably driven by the commodity price of aluminum. Well, if you're self insured to some level, and aluminum prices go through the roof, you had taken more and more risk. So we kind of wrote these and developed these models, derivative products, that as the commodity price of, in this case, aluminum, would go up, your insurance would kick in, so your self insurance would go down. So

• 39:11Speaker 02

  it allowed the company to have less risk. Yeah, I realized in about a month, this is really cool, but it ain't for me. I'm not sitting in a cube doing modeling for my career, right? So I said, hey, Mr. Hatchery, thanks for the look. So I can't do this. I'll wait out for the program that I'm going to go to somewhere else. So he actually called this fellow that ran this investment bank, and said, hey, get Malone on board until he gets to the associate program at your investment bank. And so I went, but again, early, they were in the middle of a big project, and I joined this project. So it was kind of like process, reengineering.

• 39:51Jocko Willink?

  So this is at a new company that you're working at?

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Yes. So I left Johnson Higgins and went to, it's called Weed First Butcher Singers, no longer there, someone bought it, Wachovia, I think, bought it. But imagine clearing trades, again, very, very exciting stuff, right? So imagine how broker dealers clear trades, literally clear trades. Equity trades are cleared, but also municipal bond trades, how the technology works and how the process is, and the regulation around clearing those trades, and how these systems have to work together to do that. And they had started clearing trades for a bunch of different mom and pop broker dealers, and some big ones. And so, you know, think about it from a business standpoint. They were bringing

• 40:35Speaker 02

  in all different types of people to do trade businesses, to do trades. So if the three of us start our own broker dealer, we would hire them, they'd do all our backend stuff. As big as, you know, the big guys on the street, First Cleaning Corp. was the name of it, where they would do their work, too. Well, anyway, I got in this project to figure out how to make that more of a business and things like that. Again, just waiting out to get to investment banking. But I actually started to fall in love with the operational component of what we were building. And, you know, I actually made the decision to decide not to go into investment banking at that point. And the consulting firm that was kind of leading that project, a strategy consulting

• 41:15Speaker 02

  firm called Ernst & Young at the time, they hired me to work with them on doing these types of projects. And so I joined them. So I kind of left the guys hanging there in investment banking. But it's the right choice for me. I just, I didn't, I didn't want to be transactional, if that makes sense. I didn't want to be a middleman. I just didn't want to be in the middle. I wanted to be building things. And I thought, giving, giving input and value to what I was doing. And so, fast forward, joined Ernst & Young, they said, hey, you can go to New York or San Francisco. And that's where they had their offices. And so I went to San Francisco. Not a big fan of New York. And I'd been there

• 41:58Speaker 02

  one time, to be fair. So when I, when I interviewed for the job with Mr. Hatcher, they had this big sky rise down in New York, right? So you go, and they have what's called an executive dining room. Okay. And they all wore white shirts and ties. I never, it's like on the 44th floor, some big high rise. And I was going through this executive dining hall. And that's when I knew I didn't want to have an executive dining hall. So, anyway, so, and I hated New York. So I moved, we moved to San Francisco, I moved to San Francisco and started my career there. And, and, and one of the biggest mentors that I met in my life, shortly thereafter, was a guy that was the COO of the NASDAQ stock market, a

• 42:43Speaker 02

  guy named Pat Campbell, also served Air Force. But he kind of took me under his wing. And at the time, the NASDAQ was, was on a buying binge. They were trying to buy up stock exchanges. And they bought the American Stock Exchange, which is really an option exchange. And I worked for him as Ernst & Young, doing what's called post-merger integration, PMI. So merging these two companies together. And it was, look, it was fun. Putting two companies together, understanding how that works. Frankly, we do that now at Groundworks. So that was, that was, that was a good learning process for me.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  And then a few years later, not even a few years later, maybe 18 months later, I got this call from my friend Bob Hatcher. And he says, hey, Malone, I want you to go meet a guy. And I said, yes, sir, Mr. Hatcher, whatever you want. And this guy's, he's, he's really helped me. And so I'm living in San Francisco. And he says, hey, I need you to go to San Diego. Go meet him in San Diego.

• 43:41Jocko Willink?

  Are you communicating with him on a regular basis?

• 43:43Speaker 02

  Never, no.

• 43:44Jocko Willink?

  He's just reaching out to you?

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:46Jocko Willink?

  So you just made such a good impression over pouring him scotch over those years, whatever gigs you did for him, you did a good job, built a good relationship with him, and he liked you?

• 43:57Speaker 02

  I think so. I think he identified with being, he just loved scrappy grinders. I mean, to be fair, that's, that's what it was. He just, he's, I think he saw himself in me. And when you see, you see the light kinded young guys, you want to help. And I think this was, this was his way of helping. Now, mind you, his way of helping was just a little push and a little nod, like he didn't make it happen. Although maybe in some cases he did, but he didn't, you know, he, he was just, he was there to help push and prod. And, uh, look, it changed the course of my life. This one guy, where I was tending bar in some college to try to pay my way, and, um, changed the trajectory of my whole

• 44:38Speaker 02

  life. And, um, anyway, so he calls, Jock, he calls. Of course, I'd never been to San Diego. Uh, San Diego's good to me. Like, I've been here a couple of times, and big things happen when I get here. So, uh, so I hop on the flight from San Francisco, and, you know, this was, again, this was probably in 97. You know, technology, you know, we don't have smartphones, right? Um, it was, I was going to meet a guy, right? So I get on, I get in the yellow cab. No, we were at that time. And, and I give the driver the address, and we're, we're scooting along, and he's like, are you sure this is the address? I'm like, yeah, this is the address. I checked, I said, yeah, this is the address. So, you know, five minutes later, he's like, uh, mind you, I have a suit on, right? Meeting

• 45:22Speaker 02

  a guy. He says, uh, hey, bro, you sure this is the address? And I'm like, uh, well, it's the only address I have. Why do you keep saying that? He says, well, you're, you're going to San Diego Zoo.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  I said, "Fucking Bob just punked me." You know, that's literally what I thought is, "Okay." I said, "Well, look, this is the only dress I have, so I'm going to continue on." So, we went to the San Diego Zoo and I got out and there was a... This is in the evening times, about 5 o'clock, and people were leaving, but there was a little side thing that they were having this event for. And they had, you know, partitioned it off, so I go there and I meet the guy I'm interviewing with. His name is Marvin Bush. And Marvin is a son of 41 and a brother of 43. And he owned a hedge fund and a private equity fund back in DC. And Bob and he were friends. And the way I understand the story, that Marvin was at a party with him, and Bob was an investor, by the way, in his firm called Winston Partners.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  And Marvin was saying, "Look, I really, I really need a young, scrappy guy to come join my team." Boom. And Bob says, "Hey, I got a guy." So, I go to San Diego, of course, I meet Marvin in San Diego, and boom, got the job. And this was, so this was in the late 90s when, so think about this, so private equity at the time, so private equity for your listeners, so private equity is a unique category in the sense of, it's an alternative investment category. If you think, if you think about why it even exists, you know, many of the investors in private equity tend to be pension funds and colleges and endowments.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  And just the unfunded liabilities, for example, with pension funds today, so unfunded liabilities would be the difference between what they owe the folks that are part of that pension and what assets that they have. There's always a big delta. They always have to pay out more than they have because of cost of medical and whatever they're paying from a pension standpoint is higher than what they have. So, they have to invest that money. They invest that money in a lot of different vehicles, including public markets, but also private vehicles, alternative vehicles, of which private equity is an alternative vehicle. Like, if you were to look today, it's striking that the unfunded liabilities for pension funds in the United States is something like 3.8 trillion.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  So they're trying to make this up. How are they making this up? They're making it up through hedge funds and private equity where they get a outsized return vis a vis the public markets or vis a vis, you know, bonds. And so the growth that you've seen in private equity, when I joined this private equity firm that Marvin was running, so this would, this would be 98, 99, the number of private equity firms at that time were under 1,000. If you were to look at it today, there's, there's somewhere around 4,000 private equity firms and they got, they manage $5.8 trillion. So back when, when I joined this private equity firm, it was, there was a category,

• 48:29Speaker 02

  but it was kind of new, but I knew I wanted to be in it. And by the way, so private equity and venture capital, same category, but different kind of investment focus. Growth capital is different than buyout, things like that. Well, Winston was a buyout shop and a micro cap buyout shop, which meant that they focused on companies sub $50 million in total enterprise value. And he was looking to add an analyst, an associate to that team. And, you know, he, Bob mentioned, you need to go hire this guy. So move back to just outside of Washington DC. And mind you, look, this is kind of surreal for me, right? So went to college, flying around with Nasdaq to buy stock exchanges? That's weird.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  Then working for the president's brother, you know, super nice guy, super smart, hated politics, but legitimate businessman and learned a ton from him. You know, I get to this office and outside of DC in McLean, I thought, bro, I've made it. This is like, this is the pinnacle, man. Like I grew up in Ocean View, you know? So couldn't afford to go anything. And so you're here and it's, it's very surreal. And I remember maybe three or four months into the job and I had my own job, my own office, which is a big deal. Marvin walks in and he sits down just as, just like this. And he kind of sits back and he says, Matty, like he called me Matty.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Don't call me that, but maybe you can, cause you're a monster. But he says, Matty, do you trust me?

• 50:06Speaker 02

  What do you think I said? Yup.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  I said, no. Oh dang. I said, no, I don't even know you.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  And that was a turning point in my career in the sense that, so that's why I was there is.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  So at this firm, there are guys from Harvard Business School and Wharton. Double, you know, my, my direct boss was a guy named Steve Frye, who I still work with today. Went to WVA, I mean legitimate colleges, right? And then you got some knuckle dragger like me. Colleges you've never heard of. But what I think what Marvin wanted was a mutt. And what that means is, and what I've later learned what that means is, so a guy that will always speak the truth, whatever he believes the truth will be, the, the truth is for him. And I think he realized that I wasn't looking to climb the ladder, like I wasn't just a yes man. And I was just so raw. Either naive or stupid, however you want to define it, I was just so raw.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  He loved it and he, he slapped the table, walked out of my office and said, that's why you're my mutt. That was it. Right off. It's so, um, that, that was a. That, yeah, that was in retrospect, you know, that was a, that big turning point in my career and he, you know, he involved me in everything. And there was some trust there because I just wasn't one of those yes men. And I, look, the guys that I worked with are super smart, super talented guys. But I felt like I needed to stay there and earn my spot, so I outworked them. And, you know, mom said a long time ago, and I'm embarrassed to say this, but she said, honey, you're not the smartest one they've ever created. But if you work 10% harder, you'll be just fine.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  And that's literally how I've lived my whole life and my career is I will not be outworked in my mind, right? So I will not be outworked. And so I always figured.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  If I come in an hour before they do, you know, that's, that for me at that point, that was five to six hours more a week. If I stayed an hour later, you double that, right? At the end of the year, effectively, I've gained a month of working time on them. And you also set the tone, right? So you set the tone, is that the young guy's here longer than me? And that's another good message. You know, my, my good friend and partner, Kim McDonald, we call it garden to castle. I still do it today. So I like to be the first in and last out, even at this big company that I run. Cause it sets the tone that, you know, I'm not some executive that's going to mail it in. If we're going to go after our mission, we're going to go after it. I'm going to be there, do it with you. And so at Wentz and

• 52:39Speaker 02

  I spent, you know, close to eight years there doing deals. So private equity deals. So we would buy companies and invest and I wouldn't operate them, you know? So at this point, this is traditional private equity. We'd buy these small companies. We would invest in them, sit on the boards, you know, try to provide wisdom, but in reality, just really providing capital and trying to direct them to good outcomes as, as a, as a business guy. And so I enjoyed it. I loved it. And frankly, I loved working with entrepreneurs because so these are small companies, right? So they're not as sophisticated as you get upstream, you get large cat companies, you have professional managers, you have, you know, professional investment bankers that they're involved.

• 53:21Jocko Willink?

  You're still, you're still buying companies that's being operated by the founder.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  Hundred percent, hundred percent. And it was perfect.

• 53:27Jocko Willink?

  These are street fighters.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  I loved it. You know, there's no like Harvard MBA's running around kind of managing. There are guys literally working, you know, if it's a construction company, for example, they're literally driving hard equipment or managing, they're, they're doing the work themselves while trying to manage the business. And so I thought I could add value in many of those cases. And, and that frankly, is kind of where I cut my teeth for what I wanted to do. Learning and watching these founders and what I would pay them for their businesses. I would sit there and go, oh my God, this guy's about to make, you know, 50 large and I think I can do that, you know? And so I did that for a few years, almost eight years. Great team, great Marvin and I, you know, he's, he took a chance on me.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  We didn't need to, Jaco and that guy, you know, he comes from a great family, but this guy also, he burned the midnight oil and worked hard and it was a pleasure working for him, but he comes in, he comes in one day and says, hey, Matt, you might want to get your CV together. This is, CV is fancy for resume and

• 54:38Speaker 02

  I was like, oh, man, something big's going on or I just got fired. I'm not sure which. And it turned out they were, he had a partner and they were separating the firm, you know, talk about, you know, partnerships sometimes don't last forever. And so they were going to separate the firm. Never forget this. So I get up out of my, my suite office and I walked down the hall to Marvin. I said, Hey, Mar, I think I'm gonna, I think I'm gonna go. I think, you know, you don't want to be a part of a firm that's kind of in disarray. And I said, I think I'm gonna go try something else. And he says, uh, he says, Matt, I knew you'd come down here. And

• 55:13Speaker 02

  literally, uh, I ended up a couple of days later, meeting with a guy named Ray Hunt in Dallas. So Ray Hunt is, at the time was Fortune 50, which means he's a 50th, one of the 50th richest, richest fellows on the planet. He owned a big oil business. But he also owned his own big alternative investment group. When you got that kind of money, you, you invest your own money, right? So he had a team of, of folks that did all alternative investments. So from real estate to venture capital to leveraged buyout. And I joined his leveraged

• 55:52Speaker 02

  buyout team and was offered the opportunity to look, all their offices were in Dallas and, and I was given the opportunity to make, open their first office outside of Dallas, which is a big deal. I was going to build my own team, lead my own deals. And so, you know, I got to pick Atlanta or Charlotte to do that. And I opened my, my office for Hunt Private Equity in, in Charlotte, North Carolina and did, you know, did some cool deals. It was fun. Again, think about the progression

• 56:24Speaker 02

  Marvin to Ray, and these are some, you know, Players. Players, as they say, right? So, uh, fast forward a few years, as you, this was in 08, 09, the world's going badly. Oh, yeah. So what was the, how that all worked out? Well, we had, at that time, we only had three active portfolio companies. We just started actively investing in, and all three of those were my companies.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  And there was kind of this decision to make about what are we going to do with these companies if things go really bad? How are we going to support them? Things like that. And mind you, Hunt, although, you know,

• 57:01Speaker 02

  very wealthy, he has other interests, in particular, energy. And running an energy company takes a lot of capital.

• 57:09Speaker 02

  And so my harebrained idea was I was going to buy the portfolio from Mr. Hunt. And, um, and so I, I went down there and I offered to buy the portfolio and I, he agreed. How'd you structure that deal? So three active portfolio companies. So I knew the enterprise values of all of them. And mind you, look, I didn't have the money to do it. That's why I'm asking you how you structured that deal. You, you, talk about hustling, you'd love this, Jaka. So, um, so I got him to agree to the deal, right? What was going to be? So total enterprise, put them all together, what the total purchase price would be, what the return looked like for him. We would take these portfolio companies into a new fund.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  Now, then I, once he said yes, I was running around trying to raise the money for said investment vehicle to buy this portfolio. Got it. So you did a little raise? Attempted to do a little. I was gonna say, because this is what, 2008, 2009? Yeah. So you weren't raising much, bro.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  Well, the ironic thing is I, I, I found the, but the firms to back me. We were going to pull it off, but the companies that we had invested in were performing so well. Literally, these are, these are kind of recession-proof businesses that. A billionaire says, no, I'm deciding not to sell these companies. That's what he does. And so he didn't, we wouldn't able to pull off that transaction. And mind you, I didn't have any money. So I've spent.

• 58:34Jocko Willink?

  So he, so wait, so he reneged a little bit?

• 58:37Speaker 02

  Be careful here.

• 58:39Jocko Willink?

  He made a different decision. He decided he was going to keep them.

• 58:42Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 58:43Jocko Willink?

  Got it.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  Bro, he looked at the performance. He said, man, I'm not losing money. These things can last forever. I'm going to keep them. And so he did. He did. And so envision this, when you go to your boss and say, hey, I'm going to take you out. I want to take this in different strategy. I know the economy is terrible. You're going to focus on energy. I'm going to buy this portfolio. Doesn't bode well for your career. So that was kind of my end of my career there at Hunt. So I had started this firm that I called, at the time I was doing the raise with these other private equity firms. Called Succession Capital. And it's a private equity firm I own today. And the phrase succession literally means. When you think about all the great businesses built by boomers of the last 50 years.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  And I had always thought to myself, look, I'm going to have my own private equity firm. I'm going to buy my own companies. And if you looked at all the folks that needed to retire, the boomers needed to retire. And the data really is clear on this, that second, second generation businesses never work. 30% success rate. Third generation businesses around 12%. Think that's incredible, right? So you have all this wealth that's been created locked up in these businesses.

• 59:58Jocko Willink?

  So we got the boomer creates the business.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:00:01Jocko Willink?

  And that's, business is doing great. When that boomer steps away, it's got a 30% chance of survival.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  If you give it to your kids.

• 1:00:08Jocko Willink?

  If you give it to your kids. And if that survives, you got a 12, I mean, it goes to the next set of kids. This is just classic, classic. We see this over and over again, right?

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Right. Well, look, they don't work to get it. They never struggled. They never went through everything that's required to get it. Right? So. Hey, man, if daddy gives you a business and you just show up.

• 1:00:28Jocko Willink?

  The business starts interfering with my golf game. It's just not happening.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  Exactly. So that was kind of my mindset. It's like you have all this pent up value in these companies, small companies. And that I would just go and buy them and allow that owner to monetize their life's work. And, and some of this, you, you probably recognize this, so, so, some of the smart business owners, they know they're not giving it to their kids. We see it every day today in some of the businesses that I buy. Not that they're bad kids, but. They're not going to run a business. They're not going to run a business and the owner, the, the person that built it, they want the money to live whatever lifestyle they have left. They don't want the company to slowly pay them out because think about this, how would a kid buy a business? Well, one way to do it is that the company that they were given finances that exit for the, for the, for the parents.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Well, you can't fly around the world enjoying life if that's how it's done. And so my pitch to some of these owners was, hey, look, succession will buy you, I'll allow you to monetize that great build. And then go live your life and do your thing. And so that, that notion was, was, was always in my mind. After, you know, doing private equity at that point for, you know, 15 years or 13 years or something like that. It was always in my mind and then the event at Hunt kind of catapulted that right into existence.

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  I formed it, I was going to put these three portfolio companies in there and then, uh, you know, I ran around, spent, you know, I don't know, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars of my own money trying to get this thing off the ground.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  And of course that's all zeroed out at that point because we couldn't buy the portfolio. And so here I am in Charlotte. I had enough money to kind of keep me plugging away for, uh, maybe a year, 15 months. My goal was to find, try to find a company. That's what I was going to do. So you're still sitting on the money that you raised? No, no, no. Okay. So you didn't do that? We never closed. Never closed. Got it. We turned the purchase agreement twice. That's a tough one. It's a tough one, man. Like, oh, God. Yeah. Anyway, a good, good lesson. Never go against a billionaire.

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  I've done that twice in my career and I've definitely lost twice. So, uh, I'm a slow learner sometimes, I guess. So I'm sitting there in Charlotte trying to find businesses and the problem, Charlotte's a great city. The problem with Charlotte though, it's full of, you know, commercial bankers and investment bankers that all are looking for little businesses they can buy. So they can, and they might have lifestyle businesses, right? So it's pretty competitive to find a business in that market. As I'm looking for businesses, I had a friend Jimmy Flowers that, that, you know, we had bought one piece of real estate Jaco that, so Wachovia was melting down at this point. So this was like during the Great Recession, right? So Wachovia was-

• 1:03:12Jocko Willink?

  So what year are we talking?

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  08, 09.

• 1:03:14Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  God, rough. Brutal. So I tried to make a run of the portfolio, got nothing. And, you know, I really can't really get a job. I could get a job, I just refused to get a job. You know, I'm gonna make a run at this. So I'm looking at myself.

• 1:03:28Jocko Willink?

  Are you married at this point?

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Jocko Willink?

  You got kids?

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, my, my son Aiden Malone is, yeah, yeah, oh yeah, it's, it's not fun.

• 1:03:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, cuz I mean, you could just get away with anything when you're single, no kids. You're like, eh, cool, I'll sleep, you know, I'll sleep in the van. It's all good, we can make it work. But when you got the wife and kids-

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  You know the phrase, burn the boats?

• 1:03:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, man, that was it. Like, I was, I was not gonna lose. Now, I didn't have a path to like where that was going.

• 1:03:53Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I've had that discussion, I had that discussion with my wife. And I've told people about this. You gotta figure out what your minimum standard is. And you gotta figure out what your wife's minimum standard is. And I, I had the conversation with my wife a few times where I was saying, look, if this doesn't work, I'm good with living in our RV. And we're gonna travel up and down the coast of California. And I'm gonna surf and we're gonna hang out. We're gonna go to a bunch of different jujitsu schools and we'll live off my Navy retirement. And I'm good with that. I need to check if you're good with that. And she's like, oh, it sounds good, it sounds like fun, I'll get to see you more. And I was like, okay, cool. You gotta figure out what that minimum standard's gonna be. Cuz if the minimum standard is, hey, I at least need a house.

• 1:04:36Jocko Willink?

  Or I at least need a house, you know, with three bedrooms or four. What's the minimum standard? You gotta have that conversation sometimes. And I gave this advice on, on the academy the other day. Someone was asking about, you know, I'm going through this transition period. How do I address it with my wife? And I said, look, you're gonna take risk, not just with you, but it's with your wife. Figure out what the minimum standard is and then make your decisions. And, and that, you have a lot, your minimum standard is a lot lower when you're a solo dude, right? You're flying like, there is no minimum. I really didn't even have a minimum- Standard as a person, right? As an individual, I had no minimum standard. I could survive literally.

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  Couch surfing?

• 1:05:13Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, we'll, we'll get it done.

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Jocko Willink?

  But figure out what that minimum standard is. So we're, so you had your wife, you had kids.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  So my wife.

• 1:05:22Jocko Willink?

  Was your wife okay with living a van down by the river?

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  She would have been, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:25Jocko Willink?

  That's what I'm talking about.

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  She.

• 1:05:26Jocko Willink?

  Ride or die.

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  Best thing that ever happened to me. So Sarah's uh, is all in. She's always been all in. Uh, you need that when you do, when you, when, you know, it looks from now, you look back and say, oh yeah, easy life, right? Because I've been pretty successful today, but bro, back in the day, it was, it was, it was not always this rosy and, and you know, her being, you know, a hundred percent supportive. Tells you everything you need to know. When, when, when, when, when things are hitting, everything is great. It's easy to have a relationship, right? But when things are bad and you don't know, and we had some money, we weren't living on the street, but you know, it was, it was running out fast.

• 1:06:02Jocko Willink?

  Lean Christmas.

• 1:06:04Speaker 02

  Bringing out the spam. Hey mom, what's that recipe? So, um, you know, I'm just, again, at this point, just scrapping, right? I'm hustling like, like nobody's business and, um, we're sitting there, we're looking for businesses and, and we get a call from,

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  a fellow that, a, a, a family office in Chicago, billionaire, that had put, um, a lot of money in a mezz fund. So a mezz fund for your listeners is, you know, you got, you got traditional equity where you, you know, you, you, you put in your money, you don't get a, a kind of dividend or annual return. You get the upside and the gain. Debt, of course, is your traditional debt where you have to pay some kind of interest on it. Mezz is in between. Well, you have a mezzanine, uh, strip or mezz debt where you get an elevated dividend. So it's, it's higher than a, a bank. The risk is higher too, but you pay more than a bank. You'd have to charge a bank or bank would charge you, but you also get a little bit of equity upside. It was, it's, it's popular in real estate. So

• 1:07:02Speaker 02

  he calls, um, my friend Jimmy, uh, gets the thing and says, uh, the, the call and says, hey, yeah, we're good. They knew Jimmy and they said, hey, look, we have this mezz investment in this fund and this, and they, they're holding this thing at cost, which this thing would be this big building in Shirley was Charlotte. It was, it was a big construction project they had. And if you're in oh nine and oh eight, if you're holding something at cost, you're lying. Because, because they're saying, hey, look, you put 10 million dollars into this, we're telling you it's still worth 10. So the guy calls and says, hey, flowers. Eight more ten. So, um, flowers is hey, Malon, let's go check this out. So we hop in the top in the truck. We drive to this building. We look, it's a hundred nine unit building and

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  and it's literally empty. It's literally like residential, like residential multi family residential condo development. So, uh, we're looking at each other and with, of course, we're scrappers like, how do we monetize this?

• 1:07:59Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, you're looking at that thing. You're looking at that thing like it's a hamburger.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  I don't know much about real estate, but I do now. Um, so, uh, we looked and Jamie said, well, just get a fee. We can help this guy. And I said, no, no, no, we're gonna, we'll do something different. So I called a guy that I knew in town, um, uh,

• 1:08:19Jocko Willink?

  Is the project done?

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  Done. Oh, worst case scenario, right? So if it's in construction, you can delay it a little bit so that you can finish it and sell at an optimal price as, as the economy recovers. This came online, the average square foot cost of this building was likely three X overvalued. So if you're buying a condo in Charlotte at this point, and you're paying this price, you're, you're a fool. It's, it's three X too expensive, which means by the way, your, your mess debt and your equity prior word nothing. So we do this work and we call the guys back and say, uh, hey, listen, uh, we're gonna come see you tomorrow. Now, mind you, broke again. We're flying coach to Charlotte, back of the bus, right next to the lab. And we're, we're getting up there and I put this big proposal together. And

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  so we get up there and, and our pitch was simply this, hey, look, um, I had met the guy, uh, that night I called the banker that I knew who actually was banking the deal from a senior perspective. And he, he controlled the debt. And he shared with me, hey, we're sellers of this debt. And I offered him on the phone, a number. Um, mind you, I didn't have the, the money to do it, but I said, okay, I'll pay you this for it. He said, we're done. I said, we're good. We're good. I said, okay. Next day, I'm on the plane going up to see these billionaires and our pitch was simply this. Let's, your mess is worth zero. The good news is that we're gonna buy this note. We'll capitalize a little more and we'll buy this asset. Here's what your return will be. You give me 18

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  months to sell off this, reprice the asset, and you give me a, a, a, some runway to start marketing this building. You're gonna make a great return.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  Caveat being, we're going to share profits. I'll do all the work. I'll literally sell the units myself with my partner Jimmy at that time. And they agreed. Now, mind you, like, I don't know anything about real estate at this time as a PE guy, but I could learn pretty fast. And no offense, it's not that complicated, right? So we got after it. So our first big project, Excession, was really a real estate project. So we disposed of all those assets, made a lot of money. And second lesson from a billionaire. So we're making so much money, the final payment, the guy calls and says, hey, you guys are making too much money. We're like, hey, well, that's, that's the agreement. We're going to share the profits. We put in

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  the work, you know, roughly, roughly 19 months of hard labor to sell these units, 109 unit building. And he said, no, no, I want another half a million. So what do you say? He said, yes, sir. I mean, what are you going to do? He literally said, look, I'll tie you up in court for five years. You'll never see that money. I'm like, okay, well, there you go. So another lesson, a hard lesson. But we did that. And that frankly helped me capitalize succession and allowed me to kind of push our, our model to where it is today. I knew I didn't want to be in the real estate game, although we have a real estate division today, income producing properties. We have about 30 income producing properties today. It's a great business. Jimmy Flowers, my partner, runs the real estate component of that. But

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

  my passion is operating companies. And so we now, now having a little bit of capital, and you know, no lean Christmas, at least that year. We, I found a company. So ultimately, found a company back in Norfolk that was called Petrochem Recovery. I bought this business from the Fenske family, super family. It was the environmental services space. So think, anything that can't go in a water treatment facility or landfill, this company would clean up and dispose of.

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  Great family, great business. Not as you can, I don't know anything about that either. But literally, I wanted to cut my teeth on being a true operator. So I bought the company, 23 employees. Literally a thousand square foot office. Mind you, so think about this, I'm flying around in private planes, working with some of the biggest guys in the world. Now I'm in Norfolk at 1635 Mulpey Avenue, a thousand square foot building, moving hazardous waste around. My, my office literally was like, it has like the, the old wooden plywood, like they're not real woods, like the plywood stuff. Oh, you mean like wood paneling? Yeah, wood paneling, right. Like you'd see like the seventies and stuff, right? Yes.

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  So, you know, that's literally where my office was and, and right next door to that was the shitter. So it's always a good morning when you have 23 people using one bathroom. But, um, but you know, I loved it, loved every minute of it. So I got my Hazwhopper certification, learned to drive a back truck if necessary, although rarely.

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  But I was able to, at that point, engage in a business from an operational standpoint. Leverage everything that I'd learned in private equity over the years in terms of investing in process, technology, people. And started to realize the importance of investing in skilled tradesmen and women. And it wasn't really till I got there that I realized a deficit in the country as it relates to skilled trades. Now, uh, we'll talk a little bit about that in a minute, but so built that company. We actually tripled that business in about two years, making so much money from that business that I was able to buy another company. Called Shipyard Staffing. So that, that business is skilled trade labor to the shipyards.

• 1:13:36Speaker 02

  So we, we initial business, we eyeballed was little, we rebranded it to Shipyard Staffing. Again, true skilled trades. So I think welders, pipe fitters, ship fitters, uh, ship fitters. Great men and women. So this company would provide temporary skilled labor to the shipyards as they would build, you know, boats.

• 1:13:57Speaker 02

  For your listeners out there, like when you build a Navy vessel, there's a lot of peak demand for labor at certain points of the construction. And so what what companies like ours would do, provide that peak labor to allow them to continue on production and do it in a more efficient manner.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  So built that bought that business, built it. We opened up, we had an office in Norfolk, Newport News, where they build all the aircraft carriers, as you know. We opened up in Jacksonville, Florida, another Navy base. We opened up here in San Diego. The last time I was in San Diego, I signed a lease for a property down the road. So it's been good to me. And then Bremerton, which is near Seattle.

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  That business, again, for me, it really showed me that the deficit of skilled tradesmen and women in this country is a problem for for not only my business, but for the country. So the average age of a welder for us was like 54.

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  Think about that for one second. Like, if you think about how this country is going to protect itself and build and repair it just our warships and our aging workforce, what are we going to do in 10 years?

• 1:15:09Speaker 02

  It's a real national security issue that no one really talks about. I think we could talk a lot about this, but you know, the push for college of the last 20, 30 years, and if you look at the stats, I think since 1990, college enrollment's up 60%. Cost adjusted for inflation is up like 300%.

• 1:15:31Jocko Willink?

  Subsidized.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  100%.

• 1:15:33Jocko Willink?

  Subsidized by the government. They're making loans, just like, just like the mortgage, just like the mortgage crash, they're making loans to people that aren't necessarily going to be able to pay those loans back because you go to college for four years and it costs $380,000. And the job that you get with your degree, when you leave that school is a $32,000 or $38,000 a year job. That's what that's what's happening.

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  So it's a disaster. And there's an impending cliff here, and I know you feel strongly about bringing manufacturing back to the United States. If we don't start building skilled tradesmen and women in this country, there will be a colossal collapse.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  Think about everything we do, like all these great high-tech companies and everything they do, well, someone's got to run the electrician lines there or the gas lines there, or build those skyscrapers, or whatever it might be. The the blue collar skilled trade men and women in this country have been forgotten. And, you know, it really came to roost for me as we started building out shipyard staffing because the age really scared me, right? And so, look, our strategy there, pretty simple. So I got a secret clearance there. So I do my company. My idea was to provide skilled trade labor to, you know, true US Navy shipyards and nuclear vessels. So I could pay my guys more, we could grow our business, and that's what we did.

• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  So we grew that business, we quadrupled that business and pretty fast, which is great. We opened, as you know, a bunch of new offices. And like I, of course, I thought, hey, man, I'm building some great value in these portfolio companies. I'm having fun. And then I met a guy that that kind of changed the course of my career as we got into groundwork. So a friend of mine calls and says, hey, listen, I'm building this software company and I'd like to pitch you on the idea. Me, you and some other guys. And I went to college with this guy and I say, bro, I'm never going to invest with you. You know, he's one of those guys, a good guy, but never going to put my money behind him. And plus, what do I know about software? I'm a blue collar investor. I like to invest in companies that actually do things.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  Manufacture things or service things or those types of things. And so I go because I know him, I were friends, so I go. I go to this big fancy, you know, conference room and I walk in and there's a guy sitting next to me and he's a tax accountant. And I'm like, hey, bro, what are you doing here? He said, what do you mean? I said, you ain't got no money? And he says, yeah, I know. He told me to come and fill the seats. He's putting on a show. I'm like, that's why I'm here. And I whispered to him, I said, well, who's the dude with the money? Is there anyone here? We're just looking at each other? Is he practicing? Supposed to be some guy named Matt. So he looks across the table and there's a guy there, a guy named Jesse Waltz and he was

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  the guy, one of the guys that had real money in the room. And so we listened to the pitch, whatever. But the tax guy is also his tax guy. And he says to Jesse, hey, you and Matt need to have dinner tonight. So we have dinner. And Jesse owned a couple of companies. One company was a software company. And we're having dinner and he's telling me about the software business. It's like a CRM ERP combo for this industry that's around foundation repair, waterproofing, cross space encapsulation. I like to refer to it as water management displacement.

• 1:18:56Jocko Willink?

  Sure.

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  Consumers don't know what that means, but in the investment world, that's what we call it. And he's talking about the software business, right? And I'm literally thinking, I gotta get out of here. This is, this is ridiculous. And no offense, Virginia Beach is not the hub for software development. What's so funny?

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  So I'm thinking, okay, this, this can't be a world-class company. But as we, as he continues to talk, he discloses that the aggregate revenue running through his software was over $800 million.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  I think, oh, not his business, but the businesses that were using his. I think, oh, I mean, I better pay attention. So as I sit there and listen and learn more about the industry, I literally had this crazy idea. So I go home that night and literally get on the internet and start searching to kind of size the industry. Because my mind was like, he's doing 800 million. Again, no offense to anyone in Virginia Beach doing software. But I didn't think he could have 50% of the market, 20% of the market. I thought, okay, wow, he probably didn't have 10% of the market. But this industry has kind of been forgotten. And there's no industry association for this specific industry. So mostly you have an association, windows, roofing, you can size the size of the category. We couldn't do that here.

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  So my idea was was simply this. Look, I pitched him and I put the proposal together that night. And I, I remember my wife Sarah's like, you're just a crazy man. So I put this proposal together, Chalko, and it was simply this. I'll buy your software business. I'm sorry, I'll buy your service business. He owned a service business as well called JES. I'll buy that service business. You can capitalize your software business with the proceeds of the service business that I was gonna buy. So he invented the software business to support his foundation business. And I said, look, I ain't gonna buy that software business, but I'll buy the service business. You do your own thing. Knock yourself out. So like at 4:30 in the morning, I'm about to send this thing. Of course, Sarah says,

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  hey, you idiot, don't do that. She says that a lot. So I wait till like 7:30, truthfully, send this thing out. And, and the rest is history. I mean, so Jesse, we agreed the terms like kind of three or four months after that. And I bought this company called JES Foundation Repair in Virginia Beach. And they had, at that time, they had three offices, one in Manassas, which is effectively Washington DC, one in Richmond, one in Virginia Beach. And he had owned another business that candidly, I think he bought right before I bought him to get some ARB on the, on the, on the trade in Indiana called Indiana Foundation. So we started with these four locations and aggregate revenue roughly $30 million, about

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  190 employees. In my mind, this, what I wanted to do was build a national foundation services business with this platform. Because I had, I had seen there was no national player. It was because there's no association. I couldn't find a national player. And I really cut my teeth on these other businesses and kind of really felt like I was in a position to bring the leadership, capital, process, technology to an industry that time had forgotten. And you mentioned it on the outset, we are really in the construction business, but we don't talk that way. We talk consumer. So day one, we are a consumer business. We don't talk construction. We are certainly a construction company. That's what we do. But we, we go

• 1:22:14Speaker 02

  to market as a consumer business. And the way frankly, the consumer has evolved over the last 10 years, if you don't go to business like that, you're gonna lose. And we win a lot of the, the business because think about your experience with contractors today. It's typically horrible. You know, they say they show up, they don't show up. They say, you know, you know, they're gonna send you a bill, they don't. So it's, it's not a great process for consumers.

• 1:22:39Speaker 02

  Our notion was simply, we're going to build a company that puts a consumer first, that builds a national business, but at the same time, build a unique skilled trades business that honors the men and women of this industry. Well, they can have a profession and not a job. And I learned that mindset through Petrochem and shipyard staffing and it's become kind of a, not kind of, it has become an obsession of mine to build businesses where we celebrate men and women that get it done, not just with their mind, but with their hands. Cause without them, this country falls apart. So that was how Groundworks was

• 1:23:21Speaker 02

  born. And so that was in, that was in May of 2016, we bought our, this first company. And, you know, I think I, when I met you, of course, I, you might forget this, but so of course, read Extreme Ownership early on. And probably late 16, I think the book came out in 15, but late 16, I read the book. And it really resonated with me, especially as it related to Groundworks in the sense that, think about what we do. So we, we are decentralized business. Our crews are three man crews. If we can get them trained on

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  the laws of combat, as you define them, you know, and as we live them, you can empower a business to do remarkable things. Right? And so we adopted this mindset of Extreme Ownership within the company. And I'll never forget, so early on, it was, it was pretty, I had some struggles. So I bought a company, I had to fix up a little bit, to be fair. And so I went to the muster in DC, muster of three. What year was that? I think it was 18. Okay. And so I didn't share this, but look, every penny I had went in this company. I literally moved back in with mom.

• 1:24:44Speaker 02

  To buy this company with a wife and a child. So yeah, so that was a lean Christmas.

• 1:24:52Jocko Willink?

  Back to the Christmas.

• 1:24:56Jocko Willink?

  And that's why your wife was like, don't send that freaking emails, jackass.

• 1:25:01Jocko Willink?

  That's our money.

• 1:25:02Speaker 02

  That's right. So to make a run at this, we put everything in it. And, and you know, you, I hear you talk quite a bit, but to be successful in anything, there has to be a degree of obsession. There's no plan B for us here. It is, this is it. There's, we're all in on this and it there's, it has to work and it will work because I'll put everything we have into making it work. And so we're cleaning up a few things that we needed to, we spent probably over a million dollars of, of going back and doing jobs for consumers to do them correctly. And so the price tag for the musters, it's, it's, it's real. And so I was going to bring some of my leaders.

• 1:25:43Speaker 02

  And I have a partner. So this fellow Jesse Waltz invested back into the business with me and he's a minority shareholder at the time. And, and

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  you know, I was like, I can't run this through the company because, you know, he's not really happy with me at the moment. Anyway, even though it was a minority guy, I wanted to keep him happy and respect him. So I tell the wife, hey, guess what? Uh, is it okay if I spend X amount of dollars to go this muster? I'm going to bring these guys. And you can imagine the look. You're like, what, what are you doing? Right? So go to the muster. I bring eight guys. Uh, one guy is one of my best friends, a guy named Tom Girardi, who doesn't work for me, but is a huge fan of yours. And he was like, well, you gotta go to these musters. I'm like, bro, you ever been to a muster? He said, no. And by the way, he played football at Harvard, so he's, he's a bond trader. He ain't worried about living with mama, but he's like, Malone, I'll pay my own way. I said, you should pay my way.

• 1:26:33Speaker 02

  So we go, we go to, uh, we go to the muster and, and candidly, it, and I say this internally with my guys. I was like, man, this is going to either be like some Tony Robbins bullshit. We're going to hug it out and sing kumbaya and it'd be a waste of money, or it's going to be the real deal. And it was the real deal. It was literally the real deal. And I said, I gotta get me some of this. I gotta figure out a way to weave the mindset. And the cadence of what we talked about and all, all the laws into our business to empower this business to be as special as I want it to be. If you're going to make investments in people. And you're gonna, you're gonna build a business where the profession is honored.

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  You have to give them the tools in order to do it. You just can't, you know, for example, Jack, we can teach sales, we can teach production.

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  Well, how do you teach leadership? How do you really teach it? And how do you measure its effect? And what's the return on investment on that?

• 1:27:30Speaker 02

  And that was, look, the way you did it and Leif did it, SEAL Teams, and how you wrote about it. I said, well, there's no one on the planet that can do, I mean, if he can't do it for us, it can't be done, right? So I'm driving back from DC and I'm all jacked up. And I call, I don't know, back in the day, your headquarters were in Seattle.

• 1:27:52Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  So we call out to Seattle and, and I get a young guy on the phone and he's like, listen, we don't really, we don't really do long-term programs. If we're effective at what we do, we don't really need to be there. Cause I pitched him on, hey, look, I want a multi-year deal. So that I can, I can send new leaders through this program constantly, so that I can transform my business, so that we have a bunch of savages walking around that care about the customer, care about themselves, and are passionate about leadership and development. And so he said, no, initially. And then, so we called back, said, look, I don't think I've explained myself right. Well, here's kind of what we're looking for. And

• 1:28:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, interesting little backstory on that. That's sort of is the, you know, failure on my part. Because one of the things that I would tell the team at Echelon Front is I'd say, listen, I don't want to be like these consulting companies that go in and hang on, put their hooks in and claws in, and they, they're just going to milk a company for everything that they're worth. Listen, guys, if we're doing our job correctly, we're not there for five years. We're there for six months, we're there for a year. They understand these principles and they take them and run with them. What I didn't clarify is, hey, if we've got a company that's growing rapidly, we may need to help them along the way. And, and that happened with other companies. And your company is one of the ones that it happened to, it was happening to very fast. And so I had to kind of, I, I mean, I forget how it got back to me, but I remember

• 1:29:13Jocko Willink?

  rebriefing the team and saying, listen, if we have a client that's growing rapidly, we can train all their trainers, but they're still going to need people, they're just going to need support. I mean, you, when you, when you're absorbing two or three companies a year that have two or 300 people each. They're probably gonna need help.

• 1:29:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:31Jocko Willink?

  We need to help them. So there's a little backstory there.

• 1:29:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, they certainly echoed your first sentiments right away. They said, no, no. And it makes sense, but we had to re-explain, look, it's not the same people going through the program. And, you know, at that time, we didn't have the bandwidth to have true trainers. We were so, okay, we're gonna hire the firm, we're gonna send new leaders, new leaders through the process. And look, our growth rate, we are acquiring businesses. And we wanted to make sure that those businesses, they keep their culture. We celebrate that culture. You know, our average brand at Groundworks is over 26 years old of the companies we buy. We buy businesses as small as three million, as large as 80. So they're a big dichotomy in terms of the size of the businesses.

• 1:30:17Speaker 02

  And when we buy them, we would celebrate their culture, but we're gonna bring them on to the Groundworks way of culture, which you can marry those two.

• 1:30:24Jocko Willink?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:30:25Speaker 02

  And the way we married them was by leveraging extreme ownership as our culture. And so it empowers a given culture if they embrace these things, and they do. And so every acquisition now, we run an FTX for the partners that we've just brought on. I think we've run 16 of those now. All kind of senior level leadership go to musters. You know, we're gonna send 23 folks to Dallas. It's part of our leadership development training program at Groundworks. And, you know, we have, I think the last number, we've spent, we've sent 530 folks through training

• 1:31:07Speaker 02

  directly with the Echelon Front team, you know, JP, Danell, Carlos, Corey, Cody, rather. And then this young guy, Flynn Cochran, back in the day, you know, they would lead that process for us. And really,

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  Again, not to sound like a commercial, but they became part of the team. Like JP knows my team and he can relate the stories of our business and the construction component of our business in a way that ties it into Extreme Ownership and how it applies to our business every day. And that is how you really learn and that's how it's absorbed. And so your team's done a really good job at that for us.

• 1:31:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, you know, when you talk about merging, hey, this idea, this, these principles into some other company. And sometimes I'll, people will, I'll have discussions with leaders about that. And you'll say, well, I don't know if it's gonna, I don't know if, you know, our culture's gonna match. And I always say, like, I have like, I've answered this question so many times that I kind of just go, oh, you don't think the culture's gonna match? You, you maybe think you have some different leadership principles that you, yeah, you know, we're just, we're not in the military, we weren't in the military, so we're just, you know, we don't have that mindset. And I said, well, you know, let's talk about it a little bit, you know, for instance, we teach cover and move, which is teamwork, which is supporting team. Are you teaching that you should all stay in silos and work against each other? We teach about keeping things simple.

• 1:32:33Jocko Willink?

  Are, are you teaching that we should make things so complex that no one knows what's going on? We talk about prioritize and execute. Do you think that in your company, what you'd rather do is spread yourself so thin over so many different things at the same time that you can't effectively do anything? Is that what you're thinking? And decentralized command, are you, are you thinking that you don't want to empower your subordinate leaders? You want all decisions to be run through some central location? And, and even the idea of Extreme Ownership? Are, are what you thinking is this doesn't match with your culture because your culture is we're gonna all sit around and blame each other and point fingers at each other? So like, there's no leadership human in the world that disagrees with these principles. You just can't.

• 1:33:15Jocko Willink?

  They're, they're, they're universal principles that are foundational to leading other human beings. So the, the fact that you've, that you recognize that, that you saw, oh, I see this. And then the, the step that you're talking about, that, that JP and, and the rest of the team, that JP does well, but he's been working with you for a long time. We do this all the time. We do it with finance companies. We do it with manufacturing companies. Like the principles apply. To any organization, the thing that's nice is that you were able to sit there at that muster and go, oh, I see the alignment between, oh, decentralized command. Well, let's see, I got a bunch of disaggregated people. I got small elements that are going out in the field. They've got to understand how they're going to interact with the customer. That's how we're going to get good feedback. That's how we're going to grow our business.

• 1:33:59Jocko Willink?

  Okay, that makes sense. Oh, what about prioritize and execute? Oh, yeah. Well, we've got all these things that are going to go wrong on a job site. If we don't have people that understand, if we don't have people that understand how to react to those things and how to figure out what the most important thing is and execute on that. And you just were able to see that and therefore take it and go, hey, we need to run with that. And that's, uh, that's an impressive call to make.

• 1:34:23Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you. Okay. In retrospect, it looks like genius, right? But, um, but candidly, at the time, it was, it was back to that simple equation. How do you build leaders? Right? I truly believe that, that, and you've said this a thousand times or more, that you can teach leadership. You can teach it and you should teach it. And you should learn to be a student of leadership, right? And so, look, you've got so many war heroes on this podcast. I'm the opposite of that. I'm just a normal knuck and dragger, you know, entrepreneur. But you don't have to be in the military to embrace these principles. If you, if you, if you lead anything in your life, these principles apply. And again, just a walking example of that, and my company is as well.

• 1:35:05Speaker 02

  And so what you've seen at Groundworks is, is the belief that if you unite people on a mission and you empower them and train them and believe in them, you can do the impossible. Part of, part of the notion of Groundworks, and we've taken Extreme Ownership a little deeper than just the laws of combat.

• 1:35:33Speaker 02

  At our company, we have over 235 owners. So, think about the decentralized business, right? So, today, the business, again, north of 800 million, we have 49 locations. At each one of those locations, there's a general manager, a sales manager, a production manager, and office manager. My managerial philosophy, before even reading the book, is pretty simple. Want to hire the best possible person I could possibly hire and afford. That does change over time, but you want to do that. You want to give them the best equipment you can afford to as a business. Training, equipment, whatever it might need. You want to build incentive programs that allow them, as an individual, to win when the company wins. And then you want to hold them accountable.

• 1:36:17Speaker 02

  So, if you believe in that concept, again, that's a pretty simple management philosophy. If you believe in that concept and you superlayer in the principles of extreme ownership, and then you say, one step further, all you leaders in the branches, you're going to be literally owners of our business. So, I don't want you just to adopt extreme ownership, live that way. If you do that, and you really believe it, and we, as a company, win, you and your family will get the benefit of that by ownership. And so, look, at Groundworks, we're going to make over 100 millionaires out of this company for men and women that work with their hands. Think about how many companies out there in the valley and software companies, startups.

• 1:37:00Speaker 02

  You have all these young, and they've earned it, but all these young overnight millionaires walking around. I always felt like you can bring that same mindset to a skilled trades business. You could, and we're going to prove that it can be done. And by doing that, I'm going to attract world-class talent to this business. If you're at another home services company today, if you're at, you know, a window company, or I won't say any company names, but if you're at any company and you want to get after it, and I don't mean just believe in the philosophy of this and also what we are building as a company, but if you care about working with people that care, and you want to build something unique

• 1:37:43Speaker 02

  and get rewarded for that as a business and as an individual to help your family, we're the only business that I think at Home Services adopted that mindset. And that's why we're winning. Like...

• 1:37:56Speaker 02

  Groundwork success has nothing to do with Matt Malone. It has to do with the 4,200 people that make it up. Only thing I did was kind of push and nudge, shut the strategy and adopt all these different strategies, not just EO strategy, but how we incent. We have profit sharing programs, for example. We have good benefits. You know, we have a career path where men and women can join here and have a profession. The many of the companies that I buy, man, it is a job. Here's why. You buy a family owned business and Mr. Smith is at the top and Mr. Smith's kids at the business. Let's say it's a $10 million business. You're the third man down. How are you going to get any more money? How are you going to grow? Well, in that kind of environment, you're not going to grow. So family owned businesses are great. We love them.

• 1:38:39Speaker 02

  But in our business, I want someone on our staff to take my job. They should. That's what we're built to do is that if we build an environment, respects the men and women that get up every day and work with their hands shot, go in the mud. Like we have office in North Dakota and Fargo. These dudes are out there in 10 degrees. We got offices in Miami. It's 110 degrees out there some days. These guys get out there, protect consumers' greatest asset, their home. It's not sexy. It's hard work, but at our company, we can make it a profession and a livelihood that recruits the best possible talent in the world in home services to do something that's never been done. And it's, it's a big dream, but it's not me. It's my team. The team is building it.

• 1:39:22Speaker 02

  And that's what's great about not only our company, but this country is that you can do that. You can do that here still. And you're an entrepreneur, you know what I'm talking about. So EO has been a big, big part of our internal mindset and culture and still is. Like we have meetings, they're called cover and move. So when sales and production get together every week to talk about their week and the jobs that we have to do, it's literally the cover and move meeting. Debrief and read back, that is a, those are phrases we use every day.

• 1:39:55Jocko Willink?

  Yep. Standard protocol for you guys.

• 1:39:57Speaker 02

  It's, but having worked in other businesses and owning other businesses, the power of just a read back.

• 1:40:05Speaker 02

  It's hard to explain. I even use it with my wife, which she hates. I said, let me give you a break on that. Here's what I heard. Or your kids. My Logan, I said, okay, we just discussed this. Tell me what daddy just said, you know, so you know, you live it. But to, you know, look to, to some of your listeners out there that are in the service of thinking about getting out of the service one day, to all the business guys out there, all the entrepreneurs. Look, it's real. It's real. If you, if you adopt it and live it, it's real. And I have this phrase that I use all the time internally. It's a, you get the life you give yourself. Like there are externalities that have happened in your life, and sometimes you can't affect them. You can't, you can't do

• 1:40:49Speaker 02

  anything about them. But at the end of the day, if you decide to get up, you have the discipline to get up and get after it every day, and you make it a priority, you can change the course of your life. And all we're doing as at Groundworks is using that mindset on a business that changes 4200 lives. Sounds cool now, but when, when, you know, those slim Christmases, when, you know, when, when I'm begging my wife to, to allow us to send, you know, eight dudes to a muster in DC, it wasn't that way. So.

• 1:41:21Jocko Willink?

  The, the, the investment that you make, right? So this is, this is the thing that's very interesting. You, you are investing in your leaders, and you've been investing in your leaders. You know,

• 1:41:32Jocko Willink?

  when I got back from my last deployment, when I was in Ramadi, came back, and took over the West Coast training, and I was just so focused, Charles focused on the shooters, focused on making sure that the young guys understood that as SEALs, they needed to be thinking shooters, absolutely. But I really, really was focused on the leadership and making sure that the leaders, leaders understood how to lead. And it was one of the things that really opened my eyes is on that deployment, and really on previous, my previous deployments through my whole career, the Army and the Marine Corps had absolutely professionalized and doctrinalized how they trained leaders. So the, the Army, the Army would go to this, the,

• 1:42:18Jocko Willink?

  Company career course, their career course, they call it, which is a company level commander. And this is like a six month or a year long school that these guys would get trained on how to lead their troops. And they have that at every level enlisted and officer in the army and in the Marine Corps. And in the SEAL teams, there was almost nothing. There was almost nothing. There was a little junior officer training course. That was, Leif ended up taking it over. When he took it over, it was, hey, this is where you're going to learn how to write evaluations. This is going to, you're going to learn a little bit about writing Navy message traffic. It was, and you'd get some debriefs on some stuff, but you weren't going to actually learn any principles of leadership.

• 1:43:01Jocko Willink?

  And it was just, it was unbelievable that this was taking place. And I remember as I started to try and push this hard. The, I went, I started going up my chain of command. And one of the things that I bring up the chain of command was, was Hamburger University. And Hamburger University, if you don't know, it's up in, um, I think it's in Schaumburg, Illinois. But if you're going to run a McDonald's, you've got to go to this, this course. And it's like a six month school that you go to. And so I remember sitting down with my boss and saying, hey, have you heard of Hamburger University? He's in the, what's that? I said, it's if you're going to run a freaking McDonald's, you're going to go to a six month training course on how to lead a McDonald's.

• 1:43:43Jocko Willink?

  Where you flip burgers and fry french fries. And we've got guys that have, are going to go out and oversee combat operations and have lives at risk. And we give them, they don't go to any school. This is a problem. And, and, and part of the problem is because we're a victim of our own success. So, hey, you know, hey, Jaco, you just went on deployment. You came back. You did a good job. You were in charge. Okay. So what we're doing is working. And hey, this other guy, you know, Leif, you, you did good. You got mentored and you got trained up. So that what we're doing, the on the job training works. And, and it does work sometimes. But it, but it also fails sometimes. And this is, so now we find this in every industry, every industry.

• 1:44:24Jocko Willink?

  Hey, oh, we, we got, we got Echo Charles here. He's a good salesman. In fact, he's our best salesman. Let's put him in charge of sales. What does he know about leadership? He knows how to sell stuff. He doesn't know anything about leading. Oh, we got Echo Charles here. He's our best. He's our best mechanic. Okay, great. What are we going to do? Let's put him in charge of all the mechanics. He's good at turning the wrench. He's not good at leaders, leadership. And we just throw him in there. And for some reason, people think that leadership is something you're just born with, or that you, you know how to do intuitively. And it's just factually not true. So what we encourage and what you're actually doing is, oh, Echo, you're the best mechanic. We're going to take you and we're going to elevate you into a leadership position.

• 1:45:09Jocko Willink?

  And we're going to train you how to lead, just like at one point we trained you on how to turn wrenches and repair this carbureator. We're, we're going to, we're going to train you the same way. And you've put a massive amount of investment into your leadership. And one of the earlier questions, you know, when we started Echelon Front, you know, I get asked, well, how are we going to? How are we going to know if this works? What are the metrics to know if this succeeds? And I still, to this day, I just had this conversation the other day. Whatever metric you're running at your company that means you, you are successful. So whether you're trying to cut the cost to produce, or you're trying to improve your time to produce, or you're trying to grow, or whatever metric you're looking at. If we do our job, training your leaders,

• 1:45:53Jocko Willink?

  that metric, all those metrics that you're trying to improve on, they are all going to improve. That's what's going to happen. And, and that's where you say, hey, look, we actually have, we do some of these like, you know, soft skill surveys now and, you know, what do you think your leadership? And that's good too. That's good feedback. It's good feedback to say, hey, the leadership is now, has a better relationship with the troops. That's great. The troops think the leadership is more in tuned with what they're thinking and what they're saying. Those are, those are great things to do as well. But for me, where the money, where the rubber meets the road is, hey, we're trying to produce this widget in this amount of time. And now we're doing it. We're cutting our costs. We're, we're getting it out. Our salespeople are doing better. That's how we measure leadership success is what is the success of the company?

• 1:46:37Jocko Willink?

  So as you, you invest, you get that ROI. And that's what I. You know, that's what I love about seeing the success of your company and some of the other companies that we work with that. We get to see this incredible growth and you know, I started this whole thing off saying leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield in business and life and to look at a company like yours where you are proving how that works and how important it is. And how you can grow things and how you can have forty two hundred employees. And I'd love to, you know, if you were fishing for a compliment, say, no, but Matt, it all starts with you. Hey, it does. I'll give you a compliment. It does start with you, but let's face it.

• 1:47:19Jocko Willink?

  You've got employees that haven't seen you in three months. You've got, you've got someone right now making a decision in a basement.

• 1:47:27Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 1:47:28Jocko Willink?

  On a, on, on something that's happening and, and that individual is making the right decision. As a leader on the front lines, he's empowered to do that and you. You couldn't see that if your life depended on it. You couldn't help that person make that decision. Except for the fact that you already have helped them because you trained him as a leader. They understand the culture. They understand the mission of the company. And when you do that, it allows you to, to, to drive a company forward with people at every level. Leading, making the right decisions and moving in the same direction strategically.

• 1:48:03Speaker 02

  It's the only way to scale, right? So you, you, you just gave that great example. You have, I, we have forming right now, forming right now, probably anywhere in the country, right? So say he's in Kansas City. And the footer's not where he needs to be and he's laying down what he needs to lay down. He's thinking. Wow, shit, what I gotta do here? He's been empowered. He knows that the number one objective, take care of the customer. If it costs a few dollars more, no factor. If it costs a couple hundred dollars more, no factor. If it costs like a thousand dollars, I'm gonna probably call my soup to make sure it's cool, but that soup's gonna know, no factor. Go serve the customer. Okay? But that mindset is, is, is, is part of our culture and that comes from the investment that you make in a business.

• 1:48:45Speaker 02

  We see it all the time when we buy businesses, you know, this, this, this, this old, and I call it lazy. The notion of on the job training is lazy. It's lazy. If you, if you say to yourself, I want to be world class. I want to be good. You don't stick just a guy with a guy and say, go learn from Jaco because he's really good at this. That's lazy. Small businesses do that that don't want to grow. If you want to take an institutional approach to changing an industry and being the best possible business you can possibly be, it has to be part of who you are, and that takes time, investment, and energy. And our KPIs at Groundworks, they've exploded over the last

• 1:49:25Speaker 02

  four years, five years. A lot of factors. One key factor, one key factor is investing in leadership training. You can't be a leader in our company unless you go through it. Every employee gets a book. I mean, it's, you can't get away from it. Now, do they read it? I don't know. But you can't be a leader and a manager, I'm sorry, you can't be a manager. You can be a leader without being a manager. You can't be a manager at Groundworks without going through a course. And that's just who we are. Now, as you know, human beings are human beings, and some people take it better than others. But on average, I think our culture's such that if you don't live that way, you're kind of weeded out. Because there's a complete

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  alignment on what we are doing as a business. Not just our mission of building a great, world-class home services company. But there's a culture internally of, we're going to do it the right way. We're going to care about the men and women that work here. We call it walking in the light and living with the servant's heart. And yes, we serve the customer. But my leaders, we serve each other. And if the, the overall goal is to build a great business where we all win, and where we're literally making millionaires out of men and women that never have gone to college, we are serving one another. Yeah. And that's, that's the powerful thing. I gotta share this one bit with you. So,

• 1:50:49Speaker 02

  fast forward, I'm running out of money. So, this was in 19. Sarah and I, you know, we put everything we had in this business. I sold, I should, so I sold Petrochem, that company I first started with, to, to put back into Groundworks. So, I sold it to a big-time private equity firm out in San Francisco. Huge return for, for me and the missus. I can't say it publicly, but it's, it's way north of five times, over 20.

• 1:51:21Speaker 02

  Shipyard Staffing, I have a great partner that, his name is Jack Anthony, that I partnered up with to run that business for me. He absolutely crushed it for us, sold that to, of all, of all funds, the Founders Fund, the most legitimate VC firm in the world, probably, Peter Thiel and his team, and all the great investments. Some knuckle dragger from Ocean View, sold his company to Peter Thiel, the guy that, you know, SpaceX and PayPal, all those things, right? He started a company called Workrise, they are in the oil and gas industry, they bought our little platform to enter the marine industry and the defense industry. Like, it's surreal, only in America, right? So, we took every penny that we had from those

• 1:52:04Speaker 02

  things, potted right back in the groundworks, but still wasn't enough. So, in 19, you know, we decided, now, I had outside investors, I had some friends and family, you know, like folks that I've seen and been friends with, no institutional, no big money guys. We wanted to continue this mission, and I had worked for four or five years developing relationships of companies to buy, some big ones. And so, I finally had to bite the bullet and, and bring on a financial partner. So, we are fortunate enough, I have a really good friend that is a great investment banker, John Noonan, for home services. And I literally saw him on a sunrise service on Easter, you'd love this. So, he don't live in VB, but, you know,

• 1:52:47Speaker 02

  I have this little guy, Logan, and, you know, we can't take him to church on Easter Sunday because he's a madman, he'll run around. So, Sarah's like, hey, let's go to the sunrise service, but he'll just run off and surf, or whatever he does, we're still gonna be able to go to church, right? So, he's running around, and we're at this sunrise service, and I look behind me, there's this guy, John Noonan, who I hadn't seen since college, by the way. I was his RA. One of the other jobs I had in college, I was an RA, it's terrible, don't judge. It's not a good gig. But, there's this guy, John Noonan, he says, hey, Malone, I've been following your company. So, this was in, this was April of 19, and I say, this is great timing, because we need, we need a financial partner. So, we talked to 13 private equity firms, some of the greatest brands in the world, 13 offers, which, again,

• 1:53:31Speaker 02

  that's surreal, right? You build a company, and you, you know the names of all these firms, right? So, it's kind of like, whoa, it's pretty exciting. We, we took it down to three, and ultimately picked one, we picked a group called Cortech, out of New York. They have a guy that is our chairman, a guy named David Schnodig, who is legitimate savage. He's more aggressive than me. But they had great experience with Yeti, so they built Yeti. They were the private equity firm behind Yeti. You know, they took that thing from whatever 40 million to a billion and it's public now. But they're really good at marketing. And I wanted to transform my business into a consumer marketing company. Yes, we do construction. Yes, I have the horsepower behind the scenes. There are men and women that do it with their hands.

• 1:54:14Speaker 02

  But how we win in the marketplace with consumers is being differentiated. So that when, like it's the Amazon approach. When I'm coming to your house, you say you're going to get a text. It's going to show where my car is, is going to say, hey, this guy's going to show up. Here's what he looks like. So you want to leverage technology and really leverage how we attack the consumer side of our business. And I thought they were good at that. And so we partnered up with them. And then, you know, COVID hit, right? So imagine, big investment, COVID. Everyone is scared at this time, right? Thankfully at Groundworks, we were, we were, we were a essential business, which I love. So we have these shirts that we gave out called the Essentials. But I remember how to get lawyers to give letters to every driver.

• 1:54:58Speaker 02

  So as we went down the road, you know, if they got stopped, they could put out this letter and say, look, we're, you know, we're essential. So we went to work. And, you know, some parts of the country took COVID a lot different. I'll tell you this, my guys, was there COVID? Like, we just got after it. Now, the only thing we did cancel was the kickoff, of course, which you're part of that. But we just got after it. And which even crazier, so this, this, this group, Core Tech, I had lined up four or five big deals, big companies to buy. And, you know, what we haven't talked about is so the founders that I bought these companies, I call them the founders, made up some of the best men and women in the country. We've been very lucky. Our strategy is we buy the best brand in a given state.

• 1:55:42Speaker 02

  We expand from there, opening new offices.

• 1:55:46Speaker 02

  And as you look at the map today, you know, we're, we're, we're getting there. We're kind of really southeast, Midwest, Mid-Atlantic. We're not West Coast. We're not Texas yet. We're not Pacific Northeast or New England. But we're a multi-billion dollar business just in our current footprint. Well, I buy these businesses from these founders who were guys that started with nothing. They built these businesses and we give them good money for their businesses, great money. Many of them, most of them reinvest a little bit into groundwork. So they're my partners and they, you know, they give me counsel and things like that. So as we're, we're building these businesses, buying these businesses, I needed to buy a few of these big ones and, you know, and I didn't see Cortech for many, many months.

• 1:56:27Speaker 02

  I think I've seen them five times since they've invested. And they've given us a lot of money. So we started on a buying binge and I bought four of the best brands in the country. We do all our M and A in-house. So I do all the M and A with my team. Cortech allowed us to do that. They were exactly as I thought they would be. Part of the reason I picked them, going back to what we were talking about, the importance of investing in ROI and leadership development and training. They completely bought off on that. It was net, most PE firms, I should, some PE firms, you know, they're looking for every penny to go to the bottom line. Never, ever once have they said, don't do that, or why are you doing that? Because

• 1:57:09Speaker 02

  it's part of who we are and the magic sauce. And like we, look, we've gone from 30 to 800. We'll do cross a billion this year. You don't do that without investing in your people. And you can't do all in the job training when you grow that fast. So when I say it's lazy, it's lazy in the sense that a small business can do that. Cause Echo and I can go and he'll teach me how to swing that wrench and hopefully I'll be a good mechanic at some point. But you can't do that when you, you go from 190 people to 4,200 and, you know, 360,000 in payroll. That was, that was, that was payroll when we first bought the company. I knew my wife and I could cover that maybe for a month or two if we had to. It's like 20 plus now.

• 1:57:54Speaker 02

  Uh, it's, so it's all surreal for me. So, um, the importance of investing and not doing on the job. The ROI for us has been, I don't know if you could calculate it candidly because it's built into everything we do at the company. So it's not like one specific thing that makes this company great. It's, it's thrown into the, the, the mindset, the culture. It's thrown into everything that we try to do and it's a big piece of it, as you know. I mean, but it, but it's thrown into that. So I've never been asked from my board. Um, and I got some, I got a legit guy, some legit guys on my board that have run public companies. Some of the biggest home services companies, they've never said, hey, what's this line item here? Leadership development. They've never said it because they know who we are. Cause I gave them a book the first time I met them.

• 1:58:40Speaker 02

  I think it was Project Jaco, actually is what they, oh, but anyway.

• 1:58:45Jocko Willink?

  The, uh, when you were talking about how the, the culture gets into the system and it becomes part of who you are. I was thinking, so I was going to officer candidate school. And when you're at officer candidate school, you, when you first show up there, it's, you know, it's a total indoctrination, bootcamp style indoctrination. And you, one of the rules, they have all these weird rules. One of the rules is that you can't look at your food. So you sit down to eat and you can't look at your food. You can only look straight ahead. And I, remember I was an enlisted guy for my first eight years and I'm kind of street smart. So I'm sitting down and I gotta eat and I, I think it was like chicken breast, right?

• 1:59:27Jocko Willink?

  So how are you going to eat a chicken breast without looking at like, how's that even going to work, right? But also I'm thinking, how are they possibly going to see if I glance down at my food, right? So, and, and really the people, there's drill instructors. So there's Marine Corps drill instructors there. But there's also the senior officer candidates are there. So there, so there are, everyone's watching you when you get into the chow hall for the first couple. Well, they're there all the time, but the first couple of meals is where this happened to me. So I'm sitting there, I sit down, you know, and people are yelling and screaming. You know, don't look at your food, look straight ahead. And they call it squaring your meals. Also you have to lift your, your food has to go up straight, you know, 90 degrees up from the ground. Uh, from the plate, you have to bring it up straight and then, you know, 90 degree turn into your mouth.

• 2:00:10Jocko Willink?

  That's how you gotta eat. They call it squaring your meals. You have to look straight ahead. So as I'm sitting there, I'm thinking they're never going to be able to tell that I'm looking at my foods. I'm just going to glance down and get it, you know, see what part of the chicken breast I'm about to eat. So I kind of glanced down there and as soon as a millisecond after I looked down, they're like, ah, what the hell are you doing? And they get it. And I was thinking to myself, how did they see that? So fast forward 10 weeks or 11 weeks. Now I'm one of the senior people.

• 2:00:37Jocko Willink?

  And I'm standing at the end of the table and everyone is staring straight ahead. And it, and when one person glances down for a half a second, it's so blatantly obvious. It stands out so much, even though you wouldn't think they could see you. It stands out blatantly obvious. And that's the, that's what I think happens inside these companies that we work with where you get this attitude of ownership. And when it starts to sink in, anybody on the team that's like, well, you know, this actually isn't my fault. It is like so obvious to everyone. And eventually it becomes obvious to yourself. Eventually, as you're about to say, well, you know, this isn't really my fault. This is eh. And you can't even get those words out of your mouth.

• 2:01:21Jocko Willink?

  Instead you say, you know what, what can I do to fix this problem? And it's, it's a beautiful thing to see. It's a beautiful thing to see. And when you get that, when you get that whole attitude, that culture in so deep, man, it's really becomes unstoppable. It really does. Because everyone on the team now becomes, they're looking to solve problems. They're not looking to blame. They're looking to solve problems. You combine that with decentralized command. They have the authority to solve problems. They know they can fix that problem for a hundred dollars. And you know what's even also, you know, we're talking about that example. You got some, it's part of the foundations, a little bit messed up.

• 2:01:58Jocko Willink?

  The attitude, he fixed that problem. That, that problem's probably not happening. Because going into that moment, when they were about to set that fixture, that guy says, hey, you know what? If this isn't good. I know I'm gonna have to fix it. And I know if it's not good and it's gonna cost money to fix it, I'm gonna have to call my supervisor and say, hey, I messed this up and you know, we're gonna have to eat this one. So you get that preemptive ownership where people care more about the job. They wanna do it correctly the first time because they are taking ownership. You know, that's the, one of the bad things about extreme ownership is the first book's all about, oh, extreme ownership is in the past. It's a mistake that happened and oh, it's my fault, which is good. But what's even better than that?

• 2:02:43Jocko Willink?

  I'm not even gonna let that mistake happen. And that's what, when you, when you have it infused, like you have it at your company, people aren't allowing that, those things to happen. And, and that's a powerful thing.

• 2:02:53Speaker 02

  And then you reinforce that behavior by, uh, when they're, when, when they, they do make the decision, or there is a mistake, you say, no problem.

• 2:03:00Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:03:00Speaker 02

  I'd rather make that mistake and, and not get on the guy for over correcting than under correcting. And that feeds on itself too. Like if they know, okay, look, I was empowered to make this decision and I might've gone overkill. And maybe I laid down more track than I needed to, or maybe this is, oh, but it's perfect, it's a perfect job. You say, okay, you probably overbuilt that behavior, bro. Good, good on you, you took care of the customer. We call it, you know, protecting the patch. You gotta protect the brand, right?

• 2:03:24Jocko Willink?

  So, you know, um,

• 2:03:28Jocko Willink?

  a little bit, you know, you've, you've glanced on this a couple of times and we've been on for a little bit, but I just wanted before we, before we kind of close out, you know, one thing you, you mentioned a couple of times was, you know, that the fact that we, we got an average age of welders at your company, your prior company was 54 years old. As you know, I'm also in the business of people working with their hands. We've got, we've got people that are manufacturing things in America that haven't been manufactured in a long time here. Passing on, we were lucky enough to grab some of that knowledge, you know, Pete was lucky enough to grab some of that knowledge from some of these people that were older than 54 years old, you know, that were 65. We've lost some of those, those mentors at origin that were passing on firsthand knowledge of how to do this stuff.

• 2:04:12Jocko Willink?

  Is there something that we could do better as a country to help steer people in the right direction? I know I just worked with a university up in Indiana called Ivy, Ivy Tech, and they teach trades. That's what they're doing. And, you know, I had an interesting conversation with them. It's like, the highest paying job that you can get out of Ivy Tech is elevator repairman. Elevator repairman. And they make like 80 grand coming out of that school. You make 80 grand a year. And you got a job, a career, a life. What do,

• 2:04:51Jocko Willink?

  how are we failing to educate the young people in America that they don't necessarily have to go to college? They don't necessarily have to get a degree. And they don't necessarily have to look for some kind of a job, some kind of a white collar job, that if you go and you get a trade and you learn how to do something, and I always say this, the SEAL Teams, on the enlisted side, this is as blue collar as it gets. I mean, that's what you're doing. You're working a machine gun, you're building demolition charges, you're, it is, and you're a moving company. We always joked about the fact that we're always moving stuff. But where are we making that mistake? How can we do better in America?

• 2:05:32Speaker 02

  Well, I think it starts with the perception of these jobs, right? So if you think about at home, right, the parents think now, hey, I don't want you to be a plumber, I want you to go to college. Well, if you look at the data, you say, okay, look at, you got a, was it 1.6 trillion of college debt, and you have no, and I don't want to offend anybody, but this will, you have, you're getting, you know, degrees in like art history.

• 2:05:58Jocko Willink?

  Right.

• 2:05:58Speaker 02

  Now, no offense to art history, but how many historians of art do you think there are in the world that actually operate as art historians? Seven? There can't be many, right? I mean, I don't know, but they're not thousands of these jobs. And what do they pay? So there's this perception, hey, you go to college, it's your ticket. Well, the data would actually show if you do a skilled trade, at least my experience, so we own a plumbing division as well. Look, you have plumbers that easily make 80, 90, six figures. I know welders that worked for us at shipyard staffing. If you're not making six figures, you're not any good. At Groundworks, you know, a good foreman, a good foreman, it's 90 to 120,000 dollars a year.

• 2:06:44Speaker 02

  Now, you've got to work for it. But think about, think about the perception of a kid in high school saying, hey, look, I'm going to go do, be electrician. Now, that's a skill that will, they can go anywhere and do anything. And I would argue economically, in today's world, their value is only increasing because there's fewer and fewer scarcity does cause, does drive value. So it's a, I believe it's this, this, we've been shoved this idea for the last 20, 25 years that you have to go to college to be successful. That has to change. How does that change? It's, it's candidly, parents. I always believe it starts at home. The perception of, hey, my Johnny and Sally or whatever, they need to go to college to be successful. Not for everyone. I'll tell you just a quick story at Groundworks.

• 2:07:29Speaker 02

  I have a, and you know, Flynn Cochran joined our company, used to be with EF, you know, Harvard Business School, McKinsey. He's Divisional Vice President of our East Coast Division, our Eastern Division. He is a counterpart out West. His name is Jeffrey Martin. Jeffrey Martin went to Moverly High School.

• 2:07:47Speaker 02

  That's where he went. So this notion of meritocracy is alive and well at Groundworks, and that's just a perfect example of it. If, if, if we, if we celebrate the men and women that work with their hands and not demean them, we'll get more of them. And then I think, look, there has to be some kind of mindset that that says, oh, we as a country need to unite around developing more skilled trades and pushing it back down to the high school. I don't know if you know, but I don't know any high schools that really have, you know, that kind of craft anymore. And it's not for everybody. Look, going to college is not for everybody, but there are, there are, there are things we need to do as a country. And I know you, you know this better than me, you know, men and women that lead this country from a legislative

• 2:08:29Speaker 02

  standpoint, need to figure out a way to push this agenda because if they don't, national security, national security, in my view, will be at risk. I only know that from shipyard staffing. And if you can't repair these boats, you can't build them. And I don't even, that's not even including planes and tanks and everything else. They have, steel has to be welded.

• 2:08:50Speaker 02

  And our history degree is not going to get you there. So how, how we solve this as a country? Look, again, my view, it has to start at home. Parents need to think, okay, there's still a great livelihood for my, my, my son or daughter by being, being a skilled tradesman. And we have to, as a society, celebrate it. Like, part of the thing at Groundworks is we're celebrating profession. We, we honor you because you work with your hands. You're, you're not beneath me. Now, most of these art history majors, they end up slinging you coffee at Starbucks, right? So, you know, you look at them and you say, okay, there's 200 grand down the toilet that you and I will have to pay for. Conversely, you, to all the parents out there, if you have kids, they can go to a, a trade school. They come out not in debt, but making money. And they, you know, they,

• 2:09:34Speaker 02

  they have a nice six-figure job, ultimately make a ton of money. So it's, it, it has to start at home, but I think legislative, legislatively, we, we need to do better at celebrating the skilled trades and put a concerted effort on building it, just like you would build a military. It's, it's really what we're building.

• 2:09:54Jocko Willink?

  And then, like you mentioned, I'm in the manufacturing business as well, doing it here in America.

• 2:10:00Speaker 02

  Beautiful.

• 2:10:02Jocko Willink?

  You guys are, are you, how much are you able to keep your manufacturing in America?

• 2:10:07Speaker 02

  It's all in America. So I didn't mention this, but we're vertically integrated. As you know, we have our own software business, but we make our own steel products as well. So I get too technical because you fall asleep. But you know, when we, when we secure foundations, we get to the footer and we put brackets on and we drive steel to support the foundations of a home. Well, all that steel, we patented our own products and we actually make it in 120,000 square foot facility in Rosewood, South Carolina. You know, we have, we have lasers and machines and you know, 40 guys out there getting after it. So that's not imported steel. We do it right here in America.

• 2:10:43Speaker 02

  You know, all our pumps and D Hughes also made here in America. It's, it's our little part to serve the countries. If you can do it, you should do it. And again, we were not big manufacturers like you guys. But if you're going to serve the country in any little way, you need to serve the country. And part of the way of serving the country is making it here in America. I think we saw with pandemic and what's going on in China and the rest of the world. Hey, man, it'd be nice to have a supply chain from, from some South Carolina versus from India that's sitting off the coast here right now in a boat.

• 2:11:16Jocko Willink?

  I've always, I'm a very lucky person in, in a lot of different ways, but certainly the luck, the luck of being a kind of obsessed with building stuff in America and having that supply chain up. And you know, Pete and the rest of the team at Origin, you know, we, when COVID hit, we were kind of looking around. Look, we were, it was horrible. You know, people are losing their jobs. It was horrible. But we were kind of looking around like nodding our head going, we were on the right path and we're not worried about, we're not, we don't have, we don't have containers sitting off the coast of wherever waiting to, waiting to get here. We have our supply chain. It's an American supply chain. And then like you said,

• 2:12:00Jocko Willink?

  We're employing Americans and we got people that are are building this country and and taking these skills. You know, I had a conversation with someone was talking about, you know, people, people not being fit for the military. Right. You sure you've seen articles like that, you know, they say that the kids are spending so much time on video games or whatever, that they don't, won't even be fit to join the military, you know, and I kind of said, well, who's going to fight the wars? If a war comes, well, this is a very similar thing, right? Who's going to weld the ships? Who's going to manufacture the weapons? Who's going to actually have the skills to do that? And yeah, this, uh, the idea, I, I think you, you mentioned that who's going to, uh, technical schools nowadays?

• 2:12:45Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's just, I don't even know. Uh, the, like, the high school where my kids went, they, they don't, they are trying now to reopen the, the, the automotive, you know, repair section. When I went to high school, all the kids were working on cars. It was part of, you know, everyone was building their own car and, and doing that. And then a lot of them went on to do that for, for a living. Where's that, where, who's going to do this stuff now if we don't refocus America on, on the, the skills that we need as a nation to be self-sufficient?

• 2:13:20Speaker 02

  Could not agree more. I just don't need to say more, could not agree more. And if it's not done, Jacca, there'd be real ramifications to it, right? I mean, it's, it's a silent killer at the moment because it's getting done. People don't even know it. But again, average age, I've read that average age of even manufacturing job in the country is 55. Average age.

• 2:13:43Jocko Willink?

  Yep. I, I gotta throw one more thing out there because I've, I've just, just for anyone that's 18, 19, 20, 22 years old, whatever you are, a lot of times I, I talk to people and they say, well, you know, I don't want to be doing that kind of physical labor my whole life. Well, I'm going to tell you right now, if you go, if you become an electrician or you become a plumber. You're not going to do that. If you're, if you're smart and you're hardworking and you really get after it and you have the intention of elevating in that environment, you'll absolutely do it. I mean, who's the guy you were talking about that's a high, high school graduate?

• 2:14:18Speaker 02

  Uh, that's Jeffrey Martin.

• 2:14:19Jocko Willink?

  So, so Jeffrey Martin, is he, is he right now? How old is Jeffrey Martin?

• 2:14:23Speaker 02

  Thirty-two.

• 2:14:23Jocko Willink?

  Thirty-two.

• 2:14:24Speaker 02

  His dad owned the business he started at. So he was slinging steel at like fourteen or fifteen, right? So his experience level is crazy, right? So.

• 2:14:33Jocko Willink?

  But he did twenty years of sling and steel. He's not in a crawl space anymore, you know? And so my point is that, and I've got, I've got multiple friends like this that started off, they were an electrician. And they were an electrician for four years, six years, and then all of a sudden they got put in charge of two electricians. And then they got put in charge of four electricians. Then they went and said, you know what? If I'm going to be running four electricians, I might as well just have my own business.

• 2:14:59Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:14:59Jocko Willink?

  And they start their own businesses and now they have twenty-eight electricians working for them. And you can go in any one of these trades. If you have the mindset and you want to learn and you want to grow and you want to, you want to take a little extra time to understand the financial part of it. If you have that mindset, you can run, you can run any kind of business that you want. So don't think when I'm sitting here or Matt's sitting here saying, hey, we need people that are gonna know how to weld. We do, but this doesn't mean you're going to be necessarily welding until you're sixty-two years old. You can if you want to.

• 2:15:31Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 2:15:32Jocko Willink?

  But if your goal is to, i- is to grow out of that role, you'll have the experience to do it. You'll have the money to do it and you will definitely in this country have the opportunity to do it. That's what America provides.

• 2:15:45Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. The notion that, by the way, you can't be educated

• 2:15:50Speaker 02

  by not going to college is false. The notion is you go to college, you get educated. You can be educated by doing your craft and still learning and being a learned adult. You just have to take the time to do it. You'd have to read the books. You have to study on your own. There's the notion that these some things are 100% correlated are wrong. That's part of the mindset is I know a lot of very smart foremen. A lot of very smart foremen. You join our company, you start as an installer. Takes your year to get to a foreman. If you're any good, then after that, a couple of years, you can move to super and then production manager. And then ultimately to general manager, then ultimately to regional manager and then divisional. And then hopefully one day CEO, but the point is you still have to take and do the work. Do the work of growing your mind, investing in yourself.

• 2:16:35Speaker 02

  And you don't have to have a sheepskin to say it. You just have to have the mindset to go learn. And, and, and the notion that the two are separated is, is a fallacy in my opinion.

• 2:16:47Jocko Willink?

  And it's, it's just all, you know, he, you mentioned, uh, Peter Thiel, right? Peter Thiel, like he's, he's hiring people and he's been doing that. He doesn't care if he went to college or not. And he's running a freaking, you know, he's running a giant, uh, giant company that's, that's moving money, billions of dollars.

• 2:17:03Speaker 02

  Look at all these founders out, these big founders, the big name founders that you see out there. Musk and Thiel and, and, uh, Zuck and all these guys. They don't have a degree. I, I call him Zuck, like I know him.

• 2:17:15Jocko Willink?

  He's your bro. Awesome stuff. Probably a good place. We get to the, so we, let's just look where we at right now. Groundworks. What's the, what's the future?

• 2:17:27Speaker 02

  Well, I, I think ultimately we want to continue the mission, of course, expand. I, I look at, I think ultimately this is a public company. I think we're, we're getting to the point where we're going to be so big. You're going to need the capital to ultimately go public. I think right now, if you think about our business, we are in the water management displacement business. But, you know, we operate with an MPS, um, over 70 MPS is net promoter score. It's how you measure your performance with consumers. You know, we're going to move into other home services lines. We, we, we believe our, our mindset and our ability to service the customer. We think there are other lines that we can get into to further expand our business. You know, gutters and, um, plumbing and other things. I think we're just beginning to build this business.

• 2:18:09Speaker 02

  And so ultimately I think groundwork will be, my passion will be that this, this is a, a business that lasts 100 years. That. A business that celebrates, again, men and women that work with their hands, they can go for a, not a job, but for a profession that's built with a, with a common sense of respect and dignity, where it's a true meritocracy, that doesn't matter where you come from or what degree you have, that you can come to a company like Groundworks and, and make it to the very top.

• 2:18:40Speaker 02

  That, so that's where we're going. That's where we're going. Do I have, look, you heard my career, it's a little bumpy and, and it's, you know, my buddies call me the Forrest Gump of finance and some of these stories like that, bro, that can't be true. I swear it's all true. But I don't know. I just know if we build something great, you invest in people, you surround yourself with really smart people, and you, and you, you push them to grow and be better, you can do anything. Okay. I think that's, that's where we're going. And if I could, just make one final comment.

• 2:19:11Speaker 02

  As you, as you think about, your listeners, as you think about kind of how we started, I would just say this, if, if you truly, sitting there and you want to be in business, you want to be an entrepreneur and you, you want to invest in yourself, and you believe that, that ultimately you get the life you give yourself, that you can do it. You can do it. If you put in the time, you have the discipline, you're obsessed about whatever it is, I hope, you know, the dialogue and you've gathered from our conversation that you, you, in this country, if you can do it. And a guy like me, you know, knuckle dragger from Ocean View,

• 2:19:52Speaker 02

  you know, sitting down here with the, you know, Jaco and his team and the, the best podcast in the country and the folks I've been able to, to, to meet in my career, but most importantly, you, you can, you can really do the impossible if you really just go after it. And. That's, that's I hope your listeners take away is that anything is possible. It truly is. You just, you just gotta go do it.

• 2:20:17Jocko Willink?

  And it's not easy.

• 2:20:18Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 2:20:19Jocko Willink?

  And there's gonna be nights and your wife's gonna look at you and say, don't send that email. And you're gonna have to get up and you're gonna take risks and you're gonna do things and you're not gonna win every time. And, and that's when it counts. That's what, when you say you gotta keep going, that's when it counts.

• 2:20:35Speaker 02

  Well, character is defined by hardship, right? That's the only way to get better. Looking, I'm not a SEAL, I never served, but I'm sure that's how you guys look at it, but business, business is no different. And you know that, you're an entrepreneur. The ups and downs, characters really, you, you learn more on failure than you do on victory and, and they just, the character is defined by the things that make you a better person and a better business person. You know, we, we believe that at Groundworks. We talk about walking in the light. The goal is to make everyone a better human. And if you're a better human, you're a better professional. And, you know, I joked about the Catholic thing to begin with, the morality that kind of instilled. But you can do the impossible if you do walk in the light, you care about others, you lead with a servant heart.

• 2:21:21Speaker 02

  You, you make the mistakes, you do, you, you, you make the investments, you take the risks, you get up every day, even if it's off the ground, and you do it again. If I can do it, anyone can do it.

• 2:21:33Jocko Willink?

  That's America. Echo Charles, any questions?

• 2:21:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you ever watched Shark Tank?

• 2:21:38Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:21:38Speaker 01

  Is that your jam?

• 2:21:39Speaker 02

  That's not my jam. You know, it's funny, I actually tell Sarah, I say, hey, they're stealing these companies from these people. You know that, the valuations are given these guys.

• 2:21:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so if you, if you ever have an idea, don't go on Shark Tank, you come to see me.

• 2:21:54Speaker 01

  Yes, sir, I understand. Okay, all right. Oh, you also said, uh, we're kinda in passing, you mentioned lifestyle business. You said it was a lifestyle business and you kind of, what does that mean, lifestyle business?

• 2:22:05Speaker 02

  So there, there are a lot of owners out there that don't reinvest in their business. They, they take money out of the business to, you know, buy a house or a second house or a boat or, you know, that, that we call those lifestyle businesses.

• 2:22:20Speaker 02

  They're a nice lifestyle business, but there's no long-term viability and health for those things. They they'll they'll die as soon as that that owner dies.

• 2:22:27Speaker 01

  So what like kind of almost like they have the business just so they can make money for their lifestyle.

• 2:22:32Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 2:22:32Speaker 01

  As opposed to.

• 2:22:34Speaker 02

  Reinvesting every penny they have to make it grow and to build it, etc. You see a lot of the looks a lot, a lot of small businesses are lifestyle business and there's nothing wrong with that. But when you can, when we compete with lifestyle businesses, you can imagine it's it's ugly.

• 2:22:50Speaker 01

  Not much competition. Understand. Cool. Good. Good to see you.

• 2:22:54Jocko Willink?

  Right on. Well, Matt, thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing some of these lessons. And most important, thanks for what you're doing today. I mean, you can probably hear when I talk about this and I talk about all the time and I live it too. The fact that you're building a company that is. Well, it first of all, it's providing a much needed service, right? I mean, like you said, it's the American dream to have a house. It's not the American dream to have a house with a basement full of water. But but you not only provide that service, but you know, you you give ownership to your workforce and they get a skill and they get a career.

• 2:23:30Jocko Willink?

  It's just powerful and that that helps. That is, that is what drives the American economy. That's what does it. And that attitude, that attitude, that work ethic, that's the American culture. And and look, the American culture might get might get pushed around a little bit. It might get, it might get some layers put on it by various things that are going on in the world, but the American culture of hard work, the culture of entrepreneurship and the culture that supersedes all those is the culture of taking care of your family, taking care of your friends, taking care of your community, taking care of your people.

• 2:24:11Jocko Willink?

  That's the American way and that's how you win. And thank you for being an example of making that happen.

• 2:24:18Speaker 02

  Thank you, sir.

• 2:24:21Jocko Willink?

  And with that, Mr. Matt Malone has left the building. So. Echo Charles. Yes, sir.

• 2:24:29Jocko Willink?

  Did you get a little bit of the beyond the shark tank on that? Because for you, I think, I think, I think in your mind, business is kind of like shark tank.

• 2:24:40Speaker 01

  Actually, you're kinda right.

• 2:24:43Jocko Willink?

  No, I think like legit.

• 2:24:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, well, like anything, you know, you have kinda what's in front of your face and that goes through like your life, I guess, when you kinda go through it. And then every once in a while, you get reminded that there's this bigger game being played. Or even a smaller game being played that plays a bigger role in your life, you know, like that kinda stuff. And this is like one of those reminders where he's over here talking about like he, early on in the, in this episode, he was, he just mentioned like derivatives. Oh, I didn't wanna do that. Like, kind of like he was just this foregone, everyone knows that kind of a tone. And a lot of these terms that he was using was like, wait. And I was gonna interrupt, but you know, in the spirit of keeping the flow, I didn't.

• 2:25:27Speaker 01

  Where I wanted to interrupt, be like, wait, what's that? Wait, what's that? Wait, what's that? Because it would tell a clear story for us. Who are not in that big game. To understand a little bit more about how it works.

• 2:25:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, the, I, I guess, the, trying to get, like you said, trying to get to the kinda ultimate position where he got to, where he is now, I think was cool. Uh, and I think that's, and plus, maybe I was just like going, yeah. Derivatives, you know?

• 2:25:54Speaker 01

  Right, yeah. It was clear that you understood.

• 2:25:56Jocko Willink?

  Probably not the best, uh, person to filter some of that stuff out. Or to inquire about it. But what's interesting to, well, the, the, the, each one, like each one of those things is its own world, right? And what'd you, what were you calling it? Next level? What were you saying? Big game. No, play, there's different games, man. And then there's games within the games. But then more importantly, to remember you're in, there's a game that's bigger than the game you're in. And that's what's always happening. And you gotta be careful in life that you don't get trapped in the game. And think that you won that game. Cause there's a bigger game going on. So you need to watch out for it. Now, listen, here's the thing. You could never.

• 2:26:41Jocko Willink?

  Very few people are just gonna win every game. Like all the games, the big game, right? What do you gotta do? What's the winning the biggest game? Is it Elon Musk and he won like the big game? It it could be, but also there's some people that don't care about any of that. So it's important to remember that. Do you care about the game that someone else is playing? This is comes back this whole discussion we had one time. Where I was, I compared basketball and soccer, right? Like someone's playing soccer, they're the best soccer player in the world. In their whole season, they score four goals. And they're the best at that game. Meanwhile, someone plays basketball, they score four goals in the first minute. And in the season they play, they score thousand points. So what game are you playing?

• 2:27:24Jocko Willink?

  And you gotta be careful, cuz you might be, I've known plenty of people in my day, and I'm sure you have too. That worked really, really, really hard and won the game that they were playing and were winning that game.

• 2:27:37Jocko Willink?

  But it, but it was limited. You know, they weren't really barely even getting on the board. So you wanna make sure that you're playing a game that you can win. And then you also, at a certain point, you say, look, I don't really care about that next level game. I don't, I don't care about that. I don't need to win the game above my game and the game above that game. I don't care about those games because basically the games we're talking about right now are all business, financial, earning games. Cuz what, you know, you got a game that you're playing to win with your family, to win with your legacy, to pass on good behaviors to your children. To help your community, to build good relationships, like there's that too.

• 2:28:19Speaker 01

  Your health.

• 2:28:19Jocko Willink?

  Your health, right? So we're gonna abandon those things, so I think it's important to, and I think, I think Matt spent quite a bit of time doing that. Playing a game and not necessarily winning a game, but saying, I don't even wanna play that game. Oh, I'm gonna try this other game? I don't like that game. Oh, I'm gonna try another game? I don't really like that game. And finally he figured out, oh, here's a game that I like. I actually wanna be an operator that makes stuff happen. I wanna interact with people. I mean, look, there's some people that don't wanna interact with other humans. Leadership is something they don't even wanna do.

• 2:28:53Jocko Willink?

  They just wanna be in charge of like their computer screen. And that's cool. So.

• 2:28:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the money part of things is a real easy one to kind of gravitate to as far as your attention. And like maybe even a lot of time your value system because like, like obviously guys like Matt where that's they're interested in that part of things, you know, the fine, he wanted to be an investment banker. And you know, that's not like a rare thing or nothing necessarily, but bro, I'll tell you right now. I never even considered thinking about even that whole industry. And I'm sure a lot of people like that too. It's like, hey, what do you want to be when you grow up? Investment banker is not part of that thing. But investment banking is in or uh what's involved in investment banking is a very specific type of thing

• 2:29:39Speaker 01

  that people like Matt are like, that's part of their interests. Like, man, it has to do with something like that. So when you see the results of a successful guy who's into that kind of stuff, it's easy to be like, oh yeah, he's winning a bigger quote unquote, bigger game than me. But I feel like the bigger game that I'm talking about is the game that's like, like if you were to structure your life, then uh what did he say? What did he do this? Scale. That's what you guys use, right? Business guys. Scale it. It's like you can make this, right? But to scale it means you're above maybe 10 people making that same thing 10 times the amount, right?

• 2:30:20Speaker 01

  And you scale it. A lot of times that scale game, that's the part we all miss. But investment banking is kind of like, it's part of it anyway, given what I understand, which is not that much. Part of what would drive maybe interest in that industry is the same stuff that's going to draw your interest towards things like being able to scale X, Y, Z thing. Cause the interest isn't on the X, Y, Z thing. It's about the scaling part of it. See what I'm saying?

• 2:30:49Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:52Jocko Willink?

  It's good stuff.

• 2:30:53Speaker 01

  It is interesting.

• 2:30:53Jocko Willink?

  Well, what I was gonna say is that the also like for instance, at Origin, right? We're making jeans. We could make more money making jeans in China, right? So we could, we could allegedly win a certain part of the game, but we're playing by other rules and we're not winning the game that we want to win. We want to win the game, bring it back to American manufacturing. So you gotta, it's not, it's quite so cut and dry. And the other thing I was thinking about, when you just talk about raw money, what are people gonna use that money for? A lot, if you think about like an end game is you're gonna use that money to buy time. Oh, now I don't have to work anymore. I can do whatever I want.

• 2:31:35Jocko Willink?

  Well, how much, how much time did you invest into getting the money so that you could buy time? So you gotta run that game, gotta run those numbers in your head. Cause if you're investing all your time into, into make money so that you can buy your time back, you might be losing, you know? Unless you figure out a way to scale it, which is what you were just talking about. Unless you figured out a way to scale it, you're gonna have a hard time doing that. So that's why it's important, in my opinion, to be doing something that you really love doing. You know, I, I never even ever thought I was working in, while I was in the Navy. Probably, let me rephrase that.

• 2:32:09Jocko Willink?

  I, I was very seldom considering what I was doing work. Just didn't seem like work ever, like just didn't seem like work. So that's a really good life, you know? I had, I didn't need money to buy time because I had all the time in the world because I was doing exactly what I wanted to all the time.

• 2:32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:32:26Jocko Willink?

  So, so that's good stuff. All right, um, hey, if you want to invest in your health, get yourself some stuff, some healthy things to put in your body.

• 2:32:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:32:39Jocko Willink?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 2:32:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, you noticed, you know, when we offered Matt some go.

• 2:32:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:46Speaker 01

  What flavor he chose.

• 2:32:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:47Speaker 01

  I am a clean energy champion.

• 2:32:50Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's right.

• 2:32:50Speaker 01

  Undisputed.

• 2:32:51Jocko Willink?

  That's right.

• 2:32:52Speaker 01

  Factually.

• 2:32:52Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:53Speaker 01

  You know, it's a good deal either way. We did notice Matt chose it and you know, it is what it is. But good news, either way, whatever flavor you pick, boom, you got some clean energy, healthy energy.

• 2:33:04Jocko Willink?

  Which is not a common thing. You wanna talk about uncommon?

• 2:33:07Speaker 01

  Yep, that's true.

• 2:33:07Jocko Willink?

  These other, you know, drinks.

• 2:33:12Jocko Willink?

  They, they, the funny thing is, there's no, there's, there's like, there's no truth in advertising. They don't say, they don't say, hey, we're, we're not that good for you. But we'll give you like a, an hour and a half of like hype.

• 2:33:28Jocko Willink?

  They don't say that. They can throw, they can throw, they can actually use the term clean energy.

• 2:33:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:33Jocko Willink?

  And you could, they could be feeding you arsenic. They don't care.

• 2:33:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, because, because there's water in it and water's clean.

• 2:33:39Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, water's clean.

• 2:33:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's the thing.

• 2:33:42Jocko Willink?

  Three Mile Island.

• 2:33:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it depends. The, the, so there's, there's a difference between lying and then not telling the truth. You know how there's like half truths and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, it comes from like deception, right? It is like, are you being deceptive? So my, my wife used to, and I used to pull this when me and my wife, my girlfriend at the time, started dating, she would be like, oh, she's like, hey, you're lying. I'm like, no, no, I'm not lying about this or whatever. And she'll be like, no, you're being misleading. And I was like, ooh, can't deny that part of it. Cause you know, you know, like you know, when you're hiding something on purpose, or you're adding something, making it look bigger than it is on purpose. It's like you're misleading. Same as lying, bro. That's what these energy drink companies do sometimes.

• 2:34:25Jocko Willink?

  So don't fall for that misleading lies. And sometimes I see them and I just want to tell the truth about what they're actually doing. But we, we, we are telling the truth about ours. It's good for you.

• 2:34:36Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 2:34:37Jocko Willink?

  It's good for you. It's good for you. Get yourself some of that jockofuel.com, uh, get it at Wawa, get it at Vitamin Shoppe. We're rolling out a bunch of other stores.

• 2:34:48Jocko Willink?

  Continual growth, which is pretty cool.

• 2:34:51Speaker 01

  We're scaling. Scaling man, all day. For good reason too, because you do want to stay capable and healthy, of course. Health is a game that we're playing.

• 2:34:59Jocko Willink?

  It's a game, it's the one game you can't afford to lose.

• 2:35:02Speaker 01

  You cannot afford to lose. Yeah, but here's the thing, a lot of people are losing that game and wouldn't even realize it. Why? Because like you said, he might, some people focus on the wrong game. So a lot of times this health thing, got to focus on that one. Stay in the winner's circle. So yeah, we got the stuff for your joints, some protein. Vitamin D for your immunity, all kinds of stuff.

• 2:35:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:21Speaker 01

  OriginUSA.com. That's where you get it.

• 2:35:23Jocko Willink?

  No, that's where you get Jiu Jitsu stuff, actually.

• 2:35:26Speaker 01

  And JockoFuel.com, that's my battery.

• 2:35:27Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, look at you.

• 2:35:29Speaker 01

  JockoFuel.com, that's where you can get the supplementation stuff. Origin USA is where you can get the American made, from beginning to end, American made clothing. They got some good hoodies on there, by the way. I just use the heavy.

• 2:35:43Jocko Willink?

  Where were you?

• 2:35:44Speaker 01

  Snowboarding big bear. All day.

• 2:35:46Jocko Willink?

  Legit. How was, how was the snow?

• 2:35:48Speaker 01

  Held up. It was right after a storm, so.

• 2:35:50Jocko Willink?

  Pow, pow.

• 2:35:51Speaker 01

  Pow, pow, all day.

• 2:35:55Speaker 01

  Anyway, speaking of pow, pow.

• 2:35:58Speaker 01

  JockoStore.com. Uh, JockoStore.com is where you can get your Discipline Equals Freedom stuff. Your gear, your apparel from there. If you want to represent while you're on this path, playing the game of health and capability and strength and endurance, by the way. I feel like we don't talk about endurance as much as we could.

• 2:36:14Jocko Willink?

  Get on the mats, man. Get on the mats, that endurance shows up real quick.

• 2:36:18Speaker 01

  It'll help.

• 2:36:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:36:22Jocko Willink?

  But when you want to. Like you getting that, that, that, that freaking hardcore guard passing game? That's a fatiguing game. Like you gotta be, you gotta be metabolically conditioned in the modern day to, to pass guard.

• 2:36:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:36:34Jocko Willink?

  It's a new game.

• 2:36:35Speaker 01

  Well, you, uh, I agree with you, not hundred percent, hundred ten percent, because you, in the guard passing game, if they're active, we'll, we'll call it an active and or aggressive guard passing game. You can be the giver or the receiver. If you're defending that same game, right, you better have your conditioning. I'm saying.

• 2:36:51Jocko Willink?

  Good stuff to think about.

• 2:36:52Speaker 01

  You are correct. You are correct. But yes, if you're, you know, you want to represent apparel wise, when you're on this path, JockoStore.com is where you can get the stuff. Shirt Locker is a subscription. It's called Shirt Locker. It's a subscription situation where you get a new shirt, different design, creative design every month. What? They are creative.

• 2:37:12Jocko Willink?

  They are.

• 2:37:12Speaker 01

  You created some of the designs.

• 2:37:15Jocko Willink?

  Creative guy. Somebody said, we, we have one that says, everybody must get stoned.

• 2:37:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37:20Jocko Willink?

  Which is based on the Stoner sixty-three machine gun that the SEALs carried in NOM.

• 2:37:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:37:25Jocko Willink?

  And I saw Twitter.

• 2:37:27Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:37:27Jocko Willink?

  Feedback. Someone said, I can't wear this because it's, you know, has to do with smoking marijuana. And I was like, no, it doesn't have anything to do. Here, well, I guess it does have a, there's a dual meaning.

• 2:37:40Speaker 01

  So here.

• 2:37:40Jocko Willink?

  But that's not how we mean it.

• 2:37:42Speaker 01

  Here's how the shirt means it in my view. Tell me what you think about this. So, and I told someone this too.

• 2:37:52Speaker 01

  I forget who I told, but, okay, so you got, everyone must get stoned, right? Wasn't there like a marijuana issue in Vietnam?

• 2:37:58Jocko Willink?

  There was.

• 2:37:59Speaker 01

  It's like, there was a guy smoking or whatever.

• 2:38:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:38:00Speaker 01

  So it's almost.

• 2:38:01Jocko Willink?

  And heroin.

• 2:38:02Speaker 01

  So there's like, when you say there, there's a dual message there, right? So it depends on who you are. Everyone must get stoned. Like, at its surface values, like, oh, what, everyone must get, everyone must smoke weed? Or, from a warrior perspective, or whatever. Everyone must get stoned. You see what I'm saying?

• 2:38:20Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:20Speaker 01

  So it's like a dual meaning.

• 2:38:21Jocko Willink?

  That's what I'm saying, it's so legit.

• 2:38:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's very legit.

• 2:38:24Jocko Willink?

  This guy wasn't down for the cause, kind of.

• 2:38:26Speaker 01

  Basically, we see it as.

• 2:38:27Jocko Willink?

  And, and just to repeat the story. I, I heard from a Vietnam guy that he got his weapon from the armory. After someone else had used his weapon in NOM, he would like, took a, whatever, a year off, went back to get his weapon. And he went to get his Stoner sixty-three, and on the buttstock, someone had written, everybody must get stoned. And if that's not badass, come on, dude.

• 2:38:49Speaker 01

  Yet another layer, yeah.

• 2:38:51Jocko Willink?

  That's the deal. So if you want to get those kind of cool shirts with layers.

• 2:38:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:38:56Jocko Willink?

  Go there.

• 2:38:57Speaker 01

  Sure, look, Jaco's store.

• 2:39:00Speaker 01

  Also, subscribe. If you haven't. You want to leave a review? If you're in the mood to leave a review, there is that option. Leave a review.

• 2:39:06Jocko Willink?

  You ever see a review? I saw a review the other day, said, uh, we came for Jaco, we stayed for Echo.

• 2:39:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, alright.

• 2:39:13Jocko Willink?

  You think they're being nice, or you think that's true?

• 2:39:17Speaker 01

  Say they both have their prob- equal probability, to be honest with you. Um, either way, hey, I'll take it. Thank you for saying that, for feeling that, really.

• 2:39:27Jocko Willink?

  Uh, Jaco Underground dot com. Come and check that out. Eight dollars and eighteen cents a month. We got our own little platform that in case things go sideways, we'll still be here. Um, if you can't afford it, then email assistance at Jaco Underground dot com. We got a YouTube channel, Jocko's Podcast. We got Origin USA. Check out that YouTube channel. Psychological Warfare. Got all that stuff going on. Flipside Canvas, Dakota Meyer. By the way, he's, I don't even know when this podcast is coming out, but he's in Ukraine right now. Just, just be in Dakota. God bless him. Uh, if you want to support his company while he's over in Ukraine, like saving people. By the way, he saves people in America too. He's a firefighter and he's a Medal of Honor recipient, in case you weren't aware of that.

• 2:40:08Jocko Willink?

  He's got a company here in America. It's called Flipside Canvas dot com. Go and check that out. Buy some cool stuff to hang on your wall. I've written a bunch of books. You can read those. We got Echelon Front. You heard me talk about it today. That's, uh, you know, Matt and, and Groundworks is a one case study of what we do with businesses. How we help them align their leadership and help them learn how to lead and help them develop leaders. So if you want to check that out, go to Echelon Front dot com. And, and part of what we're doing there is an online training platform. You know, like you heard Matt today say he's got forty-two hundred employees, forty-two hundred workers, forty-two hundred owners.

• 2:40:47Jocko Willink?

  This is not the biggest company we work with. We work with companies that have thirty thousand, fifty thousand, a hundred and fifty thousand employees globally. So originally we created a online training platform for that. We decided to open it up to everyone. It's got courses you can take. It's got live interactions. Go to Extreme Ownership dot com if you want to check that out. And if you want to help service members, active and retired, their families, Gold Star families, you want to, you want to get involved in an awesome charity organization, check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, she's got an awesome organization, really, truly helps

• 2:41:25Jocko Willink?

  veterans and their families. Go to Americas Mighty Warriors.org if you want to help out. And also check out horses. And also check out Heroes and Horses.com. So Micah Fink, just up there. He's out, he's out in the bush right now, by the way.

• 2:41:44Speaker 01

  I do.

• 2:41:45Jocko Willink?

  Going on whatever 78 day expedition on horseback, cold water baths in the morning, resetting people's brains, bro, and their hearts, how you like that, and their souls. Micah, you can use that if you want. You can use my verbiage that I just, just made up. As far as that going, I go, we are, we are both on social media. We're there. We're not getting sucked up in the algorithm, though. So watch yourself if you go in there. Echo that, Echo Charles. I'm at Chalka Willink. Thanks to Matt Malone for coming here today, sharing his lessons. And thanks to all the workers out there across the land. The tradesmen, the skilled laborers, the men and women that toil every day to build, to construct, to

• 2:42:30Jocko Willink?

  fabricate, to repair, to manufacture. We know, we know that that is the strength of America. That's what builds America. So thank you to the American worker. Thank you for what you do. And thanks to all the military personnel out there who work their craft to keep America free, so that the workers can work. And also thanks for the work done by our police and law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, Border Patrol, Secret Service, and all first responders who protect us here at home. And

• 2:43:08Jocko Willink?

  to everyone else out there, there is opportunity. But it's not going to knock on your door. In fact, it's not really even going to let you know it's around. Like the lights are off. That's what's happening. It's not easy to find. You got to work for it. You got to kick in some doors and there's going to be struggles along the way and you'll have ups and downs.

• 2:43:33Jocko Willink?

  But if you get started and you can start in any position. This is America, start anywhere. But if you're willing to work hard and you don't give up, you can find that opportunity and you can turn that opportunity into a reality.

• 2:43:53Jocko Willink?

  So go out there and get after it. And until next time, this is Echo and Jaco. Out.