Veteran Founder Podcast Startup Radio Network

A Veteran of the Marine Corps, Josh Emison is another Vet from a military family. With an Army Aircorps veteran grandfather and a Navy Veteran for a father, Josh grew up all over the world. In the mainland US, England, Puerto Rico…well, you get the idea. Josh knew early on he wanted to have a military career, and his father’s advice was, not surprisingly, go to the Naval Academy. Not really knowing what to expect, Josh applied and was accepted and met a bunch of terrific Marine officers. That directed him to the Marine Corps where he spent five years as an infantry officer. He had two non-combat deployments. First to Spain where he got to work with the Spanish military, then to Okinawa, where he trained with the Korean Marines. In Okinawa, he also got to do a lot of scuba diving, so not all work! He then went to Jordan for 13 months working at the embassy in charge of administration and logistics. Josh worked with the Jordanian military, but also got to interact with a lot of the civilians. The Jordanian culture and the people really appealed to Josh and remains one of his fondest memories. The biggest takeaway from all that travel? At the basic level, all people are the same. Yes, we may dress differently and eat different foods, but we are all going through the human experience together. And if you can embody that philosophy, you can be comfortable almost anywhere. As rich as his Marine experience was, Josh was wanting to do other things besides a military career.

Interestingly enough, Josh also had a fascination with Jackie Chan Kung Fu movies, so spent 6 months in China once he got out of the Marine Corps so he could learn Mandarin and Kung Fu. After returning to the states, he still had 6 months before starting his teaching job so he decided he wanted to start a business. Not knowing what kind of business to start, he eventually landed as a franchise consultant, which meant if nobody bought a franchise, he didn't get paid.
Despite starting the business during the period of strict Covid restrictions, he was able to make it work and successfully placed over a dozen people into franchise ownership.
During this time, he began learning more and more about real estate investing and realized many of the best investment opportunities were reserved for non-accredited investors. He also was learning about block chain at the time and wondering how this world-changing technology could work. So how could he help the non-accredited investor world participate in building wealth? Josh came up with the idea to use blockchain to offer fractional real estate ownership and own real estate debt. This gave high, stable returns to “regular” people, and that was the beginning of Sansbank. For as little as $100, many people can participate in real estate investments. You can sign up for early access to the app at sansbank.io or follow them on Twitter at https://twitter.com/sansbank

Navy Veteran Sean Bonner started his military career a little later than most. At 28 years of age, he was the “old man” as he began. Growing up in the Philadelphia area, he was an athlete through high school and college. He had a friend who had joined the Marines and Sean had an interest in the military, but it was the 90s, nothing much going on and he had an opportunity to join a stock exchange, so he went to work with them. With the financial markets taking off, Sean did well and started his own business in the financial markets in 1997. During those times, trading was done person to person and Sean saw the day coming when electronic trading would replace him. As with many of our military, 911 was a big turning point for Sean. When the planes hit, Sean was married, and their first child had been born. Wanting to serve and with a background in complex industries because of his financial experience, Sean found out that the Navy offered a commission path in the Intelligence Department. A program left over from World War II; the Navy was the only branch offering this opportunity. It was a very competitive program, tailor made for our competitive man. Sean was even turned down the first time, which made him even more determined to qualify, which he did on his second try. Commissioned in August of 2003, he was then sent to Direct Commissioning Officers School. Iraq had just been invaded by the US and instead of the more “country club” training, his group was thrown right into the OCS school along with the other candidates, so the D.I. hard core routine was the program of the day. After training, Sean went to a couple of other specialist intelligence schools. Although never placed in combat, Sean did experience operations in the Reserves and was part of the group always ready to be called up. Sean served 13 years in his Reserve status before leaving. A legacy neck injury had to be nursed along and in 2016 it was time for Sean to transition out. The entrepreneurial streak plus the financial experience made Sean look at the funds-to-broker-to-client relationship and he decided he could come up with a better model. Then, as with many entrepreneurs, it dawned on him he could help Veterans just getting out of their service to begin building their financial future right away by investing and not spending that money they had coming out of the military. The huge, unmet need for solid financial advice for these new private sector citizens made Sean realize there was a big business for doing good things for our Veterans. He founded Guild in 2018 to not only help individual Veterans but also to help find investment for Veteran-founded startups as well. Venture capital was a new area for Sean, and he interviewed many VCs who cautioned him that the consumer market was very expensive to crack, but Sean knew his market of Veterans was right in front of him and incredibly accessible because of his own service. Sean has found, to his surprise, how uneducated the young Veterans are as consumers. So, the basics of saving as well of investing are very important to Guild. Sean feels that the ease of moving money around and the method of digital management has diluted the appreciation of money to the younger generation and caused them to spend it unwisely. Therefore, besides allowing users to invest and bank on their platform, Guild also offers many videos that train their clients on handling their money responsibly.

Zachary Green is living the American dream. As a boy, he had three “sparks” as he calls them. First, to be a Marine. He had to wait until he was 18 to do that because his parents didn’t want him to join. Second, he wanted to be a firefighter. He did that. Third, to be an entrepreneur. He has done that one to the max, building a company that saves firefighters’ lives, and now inspiring others with speaking and his book. The military dream started early. Zachary was G.I. Joe every Halloween. While his friends were out riding their bikes, he was in the woods practicing his own maneuvers. When he was finally old enough to join, Zachary directed fire control first for artillery, then mortars in the European theatre. He then applied for Officer Candidate School but when it came time for graduation, he decided he did not want to serve any longer and resigned. It was the Clinton years, lots of attrition and no deployments, so he was frustrated his combat skills were unused. Two years after leaving, 911 happened and Zachary has regretted that his talents couldn’t be used to help his brother and sister warriors. He felt he absolutely had to give back and around 2002 he joined a volunteer firefighting group while still in sales and marketing for Eli Lilly. So that covers spark numbers one and two, but how did he get that far? Zachary credits the Marine Corps. As he says, you don’t join the Marines, you become a Marine. It’s a brotherhood, a family that one is a member of forever and it happens because everyone has to go through the crucible. The crucible, as defined by Zachary, is where you have faced challenge after challenge but come to a challenge for which you are not prepared and you must fight your way through. That is what you must face and defeat, but after that you are undefeatable. This is the crux of his book, but we are skipping ahead. Spark number three: Zachary has become a firefighter and gets lost during a fire. He eventually found his group, but the experience made him determined to invent a material that would make firefighters visible to each other and help firefighters keep their orientation under the worst conditions. He invented it and started selling to the fighters in his station. The word got out and he began selling to other locations out the back of his car (Phil Knight of Nike fame did the same thing). The first six months, Zachary had $5,000 in sales, not enough to quit his day job. After time, his fire chief sat down with Zachary and told him he was sitting on a gold mine and should make his business full time. After a heart-to-heart with his wife, Zachary went to the biggest firefighting trade show of the year. In three days, he sold over $100,000 worth of product. But how do you fill the orders? That’s where the can-do Marine came out; adapt, improvise. So the family mortgaged the house, maxed out the credit cards and began shipping. However, bravado doesn’t guarantee success, and the company was three days from running out of money and closing the doors at one point. This was Zachary’s crucible. And his transformation was to recognize he was a founder and an idea person, not the day-to-day operations person. They hired a CEO from the outside and sales last year were $30Million. And continuing with spark number three, Zachary has shared his experience and provided inspiration to many more with his speaking engagements and now his book, “Warrior Entrepreneur”.

Charles E. Gaudett II started his entrepreneurship journey early – at age four to be exact. Never one to take on a traditional “job”, Charles was always fascinated by building and growing companies. After college he founded a company voted one of the most successful seed companies by Ernst and Young CPAs and he was just getting rolling. He continued his start-build routine until 2010 when someone offered to pay him to help them build their company and the consulting career began organically. He named the company Predictable Profits because in his mind, the basic building blocks for every business were so established that earning a profit was very predictable. The International Business Times even did a featured story on him call him the “Go to guy for 7 and 8-figure companies”. Charles sees a difference between Veteran CEOs and non-Veteran. Charles was selected to attend the US Army War College during a training session for Colonels. They wanted to have a dialog with business leaders and Charles’ humble awakening was he had no doubt that any of the officers in that meeting could run his company better than he could! He decided that because of a couple of things: Military personnel were not afraid of hard work. On top of that, they were not afraid to do the hard things either, and that’s a trait that separates the entrepreneur from the rest of the pack that tends to look for the “easy button” and do things by the traditional formula. The key to success, in Charles’ view, is doing the stuff that most people don’t want to do; it’s the hard stuff that often produces the best results. The other big AHA was the analysis the Colonels would do thinking through a situation. Charles was stunned by how emotion was completely missing from the analysis so as not to cloud their judgement. He has since morphed this discipline into one of his pieces of advice: A good entrepreneur lets the data do the talking. They look at the problem and not ask how they feel, but ask “what is the data telling us?”; that is the trait of a leader. And leadership is the other trait that military Veterans bring to the business world, mainly the ability to remain calm. As an example, Charles points to the initial pandemic lockdown. When it hit, employees look to their leaders to see how they are reacting and react accordingly. When the leaders are calm, resolute and stay focused on solving the problem, the rest of the organization falls in line. Again, the discipline, the work ethic, the attitude of completing the mission is the military background that makes Veteran business founders the most successful group business people.

Veteran Founder Podcast with your hosts Josh Carter and Cynthia Kao

We record the Veteran Founder Podcast inside NedSpace in the Bigfoot Podcast Studio in beautiful downtown Portland.

Audio engineer, mixer and podcast editor is Allon Beausoleil

Show logo was designed by Carolyn Main

Website was designed by Cameron Grimes

Production assistant is Chelsea Lancaster

Theme music: Artist: Tipsy Track: Kadonka Album: Buzzz Courtesy of Ipecac Records

10% of gross revenue at Startup Radio Network goes to support women entrepreneurs in developing countries thru kiva.org/lender/markgrimes

Retired Army Colonel Rob Campbell really preferred basketball over the military, but getting cut from the college team his freshman year – he says not having a “left hand” finally caught up with him – plus the fact he ran out of money nudged him toward the Massachusetts National Guard, which had some education financial packages. Rob’s father having been a Reservist was some familiarity, so Rob decided to give it a try. In 1987 he went off to boot camp and decided he really liked what he experienced. It was the challenge and the opportunity to lead that really got Rob’s interest and his excitement going. He had found a part of his life that he hadn’t really explored but had always yearned for: Leadership. He jumped right in, went to ROTC, got his commission and by 1990 he was off and running. Infantry was his area of choice and the challenges he knocked down one by one made him stronger for it. Rob never intended to make the Army a career, but the process of facing and winning challenge after challenge was so interesting and stimulating he wound up with a 27-year career. And that career gave Rob his definition of being a professional. It’s meeting one challenge after another, climbing up the ladder of your chosen field and understanding the greater picture. And Rob got that picture of the “greater Army”, sacrificing for the team and the mission. Obviously, Rob interacted with tons of people, but the military is working with people knowing that lives were at stake. Transferring that leadership skill to the civilian world is different. One huge difference is the large amount of responsibility that is put on the shoulders of a 20-year old military personnel versus a 20-year old civilian. Another huge difference is resources. The Army can afford to pull someone out of their job for a year and send them to leadership school or to a foreign country for an intensive education that increases their worth exponentially, while a private sector company cannot. Rob’s big awakening was 9/11. Before fighting in the middle east, the battlefield in the Cold-War linear; Rob is not a linear thinker, he’s an artist. But Afghanistan changed all that because the battlefield became very murky and fluid. Rob’s command as a Lieutenant Colonel leading the counter-insurgency effort gave him a chance to flourish as a creative problem solver and make him an even stronger leader. And an entrepreneur, even in while in the military. So when he retired, he had the entrepreneur and artist skills and the time to enhance them. It started with book writing. He decided to take a year off after getting out of the Army. His wife was working and it was just Rob, the cat and his computer. He was surrounded by a great team and got out Book One about, of course, leadership. The books led to blogging, which he still does, more books, then speaking, then consulting. Companies need that leadership element desperately, and Rob’s demand has grown considerably. His company is himself, his background and his inspiration, all in high demand right now.

Veteran Founder Podcast with your hosts Josh Carter and Cynthia Kao

We record the Veteran Founder Podcast inside NedSpace in the Bigfoot Podcast Studio in beautiful downtown Portland.

Audio engineer, mixer and podcast editor is Allon Beausoleil

Show logo was designed by Carolyn Main

Website was designed by Cameron Grimes

Production assistant is Chelsea Lancaster

Theme music: Artist: Tipsy Track: Kadonka Album: Buzzz Courtesy of Ipecac Records

10% of gross revenue at Startup Radio Network goes to support women entrepreneurs in developing countries thru kiva.org/lender/markgrimes

Olaseni Bello moved to the US from Nigeria at age 10. Calling his transition “challenging” to say the least, his assimilation into a radically different environment happened successfully over time. Enrolled in martial arts – Taekwondo specifically – by his mother, learning self-defense is evidence to the challenges Olaseni faced, but that which does no kill us… He went on to be a gold medal-winning Junior Olympian and found his second family with his martial arts community but it happened because he just missed a gold the year before. He was most unhappy, but his sensei (teacher) told him to just work harder. The time Olaseni spent training in the gym, visualizing winning the gold in his meditations, then having his vision come true taught him that anything is possible if you are willing to work hard enough. He then received an invitation to try out for the US Olympic team, but he was not a US citizen at the time and had to pass on what could have been a life-changing path. Undeterred, Olaseni started looking for his next move. He loved the outdoors and adventure, and he loved discipline, in particular how the military marketed that pillar of their foundation; the refinements of their process and continuing march for perfection. Only 18 years old, he went back and forth with his mother about joining. Olaseni appreciated so much about America and was so appreciative of the opportunity to live in it that he wanted to give back. So, college satisfied his mother, and his sense of adventure dictated he study abroad also for one year, putting off military service. Then it was on to law school, where he graduated and passed the New York State Bar exam and suddenly the concept of being a JAG officer (Judge Advocate General’s Corp) became intensely intriguing. He got the military training and the opportunity to advise and direct in the field and stay on top of the law. The path was tough, as for all in the military, and “you don’t know what you don’t know” became his mantra. But Olaseni always remembered the people who had served before him and honored them by being the most polished version of himself possible. Transitioning out into civilian life, he decided a finance career would be exciting, even with no background. Again, his military training and background made him confident he could figure out anything he wanted badly enough, and wound up on Morgan Stanley’s foreign exchange department. Then the entrepreneurial affliction hit. Curiously when he was still in the Army, he wanted to have a positive impact on the world and decided he and his fiancé (now wife) gathered up clothes donations and headed to a small village in Tanzania for some do-good. They were bitten by mosquitoes and the short story is they saw doctor after doctor who misdiagnosed his fiancé’s condition (turned out to be Meningitis, a common virus for the area which all the doctors should have known) and rather than a week of therapy, she wound up taking two years to heal. So Olaseni set out to fix that with CarpeMed, an app that sets you up to deal with health issues in countries around the world, with connections to doctors, hospitals, even a “911” connection for an ambulance in the country in which you are located.

Veteran Founder Podcast with your hosts Josh Carter and Cynthia Kao

We record the Veteran Founder Podcast inside NedSpace in the Bigfoot Podcast Studio in beautiful downtown Portland.

Audio engineer, mixer and podcast editor is Allon Beausoleil

Show logo was designed by Carolyn Main

Website was designed by Cameron Grimes

Production assistant is Chelsea Lancaster

Theme music: Artist: Tipsy Track: Kadonka Album: Buzzz Courtesy of Ipecac Records

10% of gross revenue at Startup Radio Network goes to support women entrepreneurs in developing countries thru kiva.org/lender/markgrimes