S1E12. This week we speak with Marine veteran and keynote speaker Shawn Rhodes. Shawn spent a few years in the Marine Corps as a combat correspondent before jumping out and ultimately making his way into the business of public speaking. Shawn shares with us some incredible perspective, we talk about mental health, the mind of a veteran, being the solution to a problem, and so much more. I also share with you some EXCITING news about the podcast at the very end.
Shawn’s LinkedIn profile.
Shawn’s company, Shoshin Consulting.
Link to Shawn’s book, Pivot Point, on Amazon.
AUTO-TRANSCRIBED – PLEASE FORGIVE ERRORS OR TYPOS
Shawn Rhodes 00:00
When we get out we have a mindset and a set of life experiences that give us a different perspective of the world than even the college professors that are, you know, twice or three times our age.
Aaron Spatz 00:15
You were listening to America’s entrepreneur, the podcast designed to educate, entertain, and inspire you in your personal professional journey. I’m your host, Aaron Spatz. And on the podcast, I interview entrepreneurs, industry experts, and other high achievers that detail their personal and professional journeys and business. My goal is to glean their experiences into actionable insights that you can apply to your own journey. If you’re new to the show. We’ve spoken with successful entrepreneurs, Grammy Award winning artists, best selling authors, chief executives, and other fascinating minds with unique experiences. We’ve covered topics such as how to achieve breakthrough and business, growing startups, effective leadership techniques, and much more. If you strive for continuous self improvement, and enjoy fascinating and insightful conversation, if the subscribe button, you’ll love it here at America’s entrepreneur. Sean, thanks so much for taking time out of your day. And we’re excited to have you here on the show. And so if you wouldn’t mind, just quickly share with us some of your background, your backstory, what what made you crazy enough to go join the United States military and give us a little bit of context as to what you did?
Shawn Rhodes 01:28
Well, is there so again, my name is Shawn Rhodes, I was in the US Marine Corps from 2001 to 2005. I joined prior to 911. So I thought I was going to have a nice easy tour. But like a lot of service members, we discovered that we were going to be serving during a wartime period in our nation’s history. So I was able to do two deployments to Iraq with the Marine Corps and I had kind of a unique job with them, which we’ll get into in the course of this interview, I’m sure. And then after I got out of the Marine Corps, faced the same hurdles and struggles and transition that all veterans seem to face from the ones I’ve spoken with anyway, I kind of reintegrating back into a society and not really having a clear idea about what our place purpose might be. And so I can share with you a little bit of the things that, you know, I went through, and hopefully some of the resources that have helped me out as well, that it’s been a heck of a journey. And I just realized recently that it’s been about 20 years, since I first joined up, and it’s amazing how fast time passes. And as some veterans listening to this will say, Dude, you’re a you’re a young kid, only 20 years. Come on, but yeah, it’s been 20 years for me. So that’s pretty impressive. I’ve lived this long.
Aaron Spatz 02:33
Wow. That’s, that’s a fantastic and it is it is crazy how quickly time time passes. And next thing, you know, you look up and wow, you know, it’s been, it’s been quite some time. So that’s, that’s crazy. Yeah. Share with us a little bit about a little bit more of the specifics as to what you did, and in some of the things that you that you’re able to do.
Shawn Rhodes 02:54
Absolutely. So when I joined, I took the as fab like most of us did in high school. And the recruiter took one look at that and said, You are pretty much unqualified for just about every job that we have. And this was a Marine Corps recruiter at the time. Why I chose the Marine Corps I’ll get into in just a second. But he said, you know, listen to all the stuff we have you, you have a predilection to defy authority, which is really not going to do well. If you decide to be in the infantry, or any job really in the Marine Corps whatsoever. You have no math skills, you can engineer yourself out of a wet paper bag. The one thing that you rated highly on is verbal comprehension. I was off the charts in that area because I love to read and then I was in, you know, Debate Club and the high school newspaper and all that stuff. They said if you’re really set on joining the military, and you really think the Marine Corps is the way to go. Marine Corps recruiters have a good way of trying to disqualify candidates just to make us want it more. But he said if you’re really interested in it, there’s one job that you might be a good fit for. And I’ve never actually enlisted anyone into that military occupational specialty that MLS so he had to get you know, clearance from the regional office. And the job I went into was to be a combat correspondent. What you might think of is like Joker and Full Metal Jacket, Stanley Kubrick movie, absolutely rolling around with a camera and a notepad and embedding in different units and basically hopping around the battlespace reporting on what these men and women across all branches of the service were doing. And so that was the job that I ended up getting into that why I joined the Marine Corps. I had a fascination my whole life with the martial arts and warrior culture and learning about Spartans and Thermopylae and all that. And when I looked at all of the military branches that were out there, they were each promising a different set of benefits. It was maybe travel for the Navy, maybe it was a good lifestyle and educational benefits for the Air Force. The army, you know, not quite sure what the Army promise I didn’t remember I never investigated long enough. But the Marine Corps was really more about service. It was about not what I could get out of it, but what I could give and at that period of my life being just 17 That was really appealing to me because I had never been called into anything higher than my own self interest. And suddenly, I had an opportunity to do that for a couple of years, get life experience that I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else, and get to see a little bit of the world outside my hometown in the mountains of western North Carolina. And so when I finally ended up in the Marine Corps, it was not a match made in heaven, I still defy authority even to this day, and it’s done quite well for me and my business, because I’m an entrepreneur, I run my own business. But for the Marines, it taught me a lot of life skills that really served me well in my civilian life. And when I began to realize that I had these skills, because no one says you’re leaving the military with XYZ skills, they just expect you to either have it or, you know, get out, here’s a quick, you know, ticking the button, you know, be on your way. But we actually leave with a lot of valuable skills that help us in the civilian workforce. When I began to realize realized and leverage those, I began to understand I really done myself well, by my time in the military, even though not every memory is one that I want to dwell on. There are plenty of things they taught me that have really helped me be successful.
Aaron Spatz 06:00
Yeah, no doubt. And, and I can’t help but imagine your tendency to defy the chain of command, I guess, in the in the, in the role that you held actually probably served you quite well, because you were probably able to go places that other people probably wouldn’t have been able to. If they get told no, they just walk away and say, okay, but Right. I’m sure there was plenty of instances where that tenacity, and just that party personality really came through. And for whatever reason, it really helped open some doors for you as you traveled the world.
Shawn Rhodes 06:36
In my like you mentioned, my job was kind of unique in that I wasn’t put inside of one unit and told, you know, these are the 30 men and women that you’re going to be around every day for six to eight months or longer. If you’re stateside and you’re just stationed somewhere. I was kind of a lone operator, the most, you know unsexy, nerdish kind of lone operator, think, operator, you know, the guys with the beards and all the tactical gear and stuff like, that wasn’t me, I was the opposite of that. But I did have the freedom and the order from my chain of command to not stay in any one place too long. Because they were there weren’t very many of me with that job field out there. And they needed a lot of coverage. And so for much of my time deployed, I was given free rein to travel in between units that I would Yeah, I had to learn how to check in somewhere quickly ingratiate myself to the people that could get me where I needed to go, which was out on a convoy or on a patrol or whatever, and then get pushed out into the field. And the challenge, of course, then is how do I get back to the rear because these these cats these men and women are out there for you know, months at a time without showers or good shower, any of that, and I I’m running out of battery in my camera, you know, I’m running out of space on the on the SD card to store all this stuff on my laptops about to die. That’s how I do my job. So yes, I’m a rifleman, first. But if I stopped sending copy back to my home office, they’re going to start getting angry. So I had to figure out how do I convince them to let me on the patrol when all the Marines would prefer to be on the patrol to go back home to the Forward Operating Base to get a hot shower. Right? It was it was always a learning experience to figure out how do I how do I learn what I need to know, in order to convince these folks that I’m a value enough to take a seat in their vehicle, with not only the fact that you know, I could shoot if I had to, but also that I have a job that’s not going to get done, except with my skill set, which is to share with the world sacrifices that you all are making out here in the field.
Aaron Spatz 08:25
Wow. That’s an incredible perspective and a shoot it would have been, I’m sure it would have been entertaining, just to have another correspondent follow you and just document your journey, because I can’t imagine some of the things that you saw some of the conversations that you had, either, you know, with, with guys serving there at the very front, or people in support, or, you know, if you interact with any of the locals, I can’t imagine the things that you saw,
Shawn Rhodes 08:56
it was very interesting, I often refer to myself as a battlefield tourist. And that I was I was just visiting these places, a lot of times, I would spend six or eight months, you know, on a forward deployed, you know, kind of a situation where I was outside the wire, but I didn’t have to manage checkpoint on, you know, a main supply route for, you know, 74 hours waiting for the attacks to come either. That didn’t happen to me very often. But it happened to so many men and women that I reported on that I served with. And so it was, you know, my, my calling my role, if you will, was to get in there and discover the sacrifices that these men and women were making with their time and often their health and their safety in order to serve a higher purpose. And for that reason, I feel like you know, I’ll never measure up to them, I have no desire to they sacrifice the way more than I ever will. If somebody wasn’t there to tell the stories, and nobody would know. And so while I can’t hold myself on the same playing field as a lot of those men and women, I you know, very proud of the service that I was able to give just like any service member should, whether you were changing tires back in the day You know, in the motor T shatter whether you are out there on the Ford line with a sniper rifle, or everybody has a part to play in making that mission happen.
Aaron Spatz 10:08
Absolutely. And that story needs to be told. And so I mean, the role and the shoes that you filled, I mean, no doubt, incredibly, very critical role in terms of people. People want to know, people want to know what’s going on. And I think, and I think we owe it to them. Tell that story. So no, that’s a that’s a fantastic, fantastic experience. So tell us about how the transition process for you worked out like, when did you realize you’re, you’re gonna decide to leave? And then what did it look like for you when you punched out?
Shawn Rhodes 10:41
Well, because I went in the Marine Corps, knowing what I wanted to get out of it, which is pretty rare thing from when I talked to other service members, as most of us join it 17 or 18, or, you know, major, we’re still in our late teens, and we’re trying to figure ourselves out and in life in general. And this seems like a good way to get some kind of compass or some kind of directional setting on that. When I went into the Marine Corps, I knew that I probably wasn’t going to spend a lifetime in there. But I knew that I also was lacking some things that I wanted in order to be successful in life, to have confidence to know that whatever challenge I was presented with, I would either succeed at overcoming it or die trying. So those are kind of the mindset and skills that I wanted, I didn’t have 17. And so because I knew what I wanted going in, I realized probably after my first tour in Iraq, that this wasn’t going to be a permanent gig for me. Because that might just like a lot of people kind of know when they’re going to if they reenlist Well, or the station next? Well, for me, this was 2004. And they told me, If you re enlist, we’re going to attach you with a reconnaissance unit that’s shipping off to Afghanistan. And I thought to myself, you know, I think I’ve been shot at it enough for one lifetime. There are some folks that love it, they get a charge out of it for me, no, we’re good couple of times, I got what I needed out of that experience very, very much. So I was actually the stories that the transition planners talk about, they probably still share this story because I like I said, I knew I was going to get out. And this was maybe three years into my four year enlistment. And so I was in Iraq, second time around at a forward operating base south of Baghdad, and I was putting in my college applications from the field. So whenever I had a free moment to get into like the, you know, the MWR shed where we actually had Internet access, I was filling out college applications. And I would stay up until 3am, get on the field phone dial back to the admissions office at these universities I was applying to and, you know, make sure that they had all they needed, because it would take, you know, eight weeks to get mailed back and forth to us out there. So it was much easier for me just to wait for the phone. And you know, they always say your connection is really bad. You know, are you are you muffling your voice that live south of Baghdad right now, come on, man, help me get this application through. So I can, you know, attend your college. And so by the time I get out of the Marine Corps, I knew what classes I would be taking when school was going to start all that stuff was already mapped out for me, because I knew University was the next thing on my my kind of life path. And so three or four months after I got out of the Marine Corps, I was in university 22 years old, had been asked the world multiple combat tours, and my roommate, my college roommate turned 18, a few days before school started. And so I was like a lot of veterans that decide to go to university after school, I was surrounded by kids, you know, there’s really no other way to say it, because they still had that mindset about them. And I was, you know, far and beyond that at that point, that I take care of myself, you know, pay my bills, run my own finances, take care of my car, all the stuff that I’m kind of surrounded by people that are still in high school. And so it was always a very surreal experience for me and all the veterans that were attending school right after the military kind of dropped in this environment where it’s like, oh, dear Lord, what did I do to myself,
Aaron Spatz 13:49
Man, and I can imagine just what the stark contrast between, you know, 18 year old guy going to college, and then you just just a few years later, I mean, yeah, I mean, it’s just we’re talking a matter of three to four years and just look at how much life you lived in that time. And, you know, and how that experience contrast? Because I’m sure they looked at you like, what is this guy doing? Like he’s got this crap together?
Shawn Rhodes 14:14
Well, that does. And there’s there’s often something that’s very alienating about that. And this is something that a lot of veterans face when they enter the civilian workforce, or the university setting after they get out of the military, is that there feels like such a separation between them and the people that are around them. Because like you said, we packed a lot of life experience into a couple of years when we’re in the military. When we get out we have a mindset and a set of life experiences that give us a different perspective of the world than even the college professors that are, you know, twice or three times our age. We’ve seen more of the world we’ve seen the good and the bad of the world a lot more than most humans ever get the chance to. And so, being able to connect with folks and make friends and have a social circle that not just a bunch of salty old guys Unlike yourself, that’s a big challenge for a lot of us whether we’re in the university setting or in the work setting. And so for me, it was my, you know, I had to really lean into finding ways to connect with the people around me because I didn’t want to go through a couple of years of college, you know, just being a loner, you know, that sounds really bad things happen with mental health. So I wanted to connect with these folks. So I had to look for ways that we did have things in common, maybe we had a completely different life experiences, but I love to play the guitar. So I found people that love to play the guitar and love music, people that love the outdoors, I love hiking, so I’d go find the people that were doing that and, you know, connect with them on that level. So it’s really about, you know, taking the effort to make this step. I never really who I tried this, and I failed, you know, the first couple of days, it’s like, well, I’m, I’m friggin awesome. You know, Sergeant, US Marine Corps, you people should really respect me. And they don’t, because they don’t know you, and it comes off as arrogance. And you’re you, you know, sound and look and talk like, you’ve got more life experience than everybody else, even if that’s the case, right? And so it was really an ego drop. For me, I had to kind of, you know, let it all go there and say, Alright, yes, I do have these life experiences. But I also have to live the rest of my life with people that don’t have wartime experience that don’t have military connections. So how do I find ways to connect with these men and women so that we can live together in a community and I can get what I need, and what they need out of me. And we can all kind of be together in a way that doesn’t make me feel like I can’t be connected to humans, again, unless they have that work experience.
Aaron Spatz 16:30
That’s such a great mindset. And I, unfortunately, I feel like it’s kind of rare. I mean, there’s a lot of guys that transition, and they and they do they do a good job with the transition, don’t get me wrong, but your mindset and approach to it. Very rare. And I it probably has a lot to do with your upbringing, in the way that you know, I mean, we’re talking like the years leading up into your decision to, to enter the military. There’s this, there’s this element about you that’s very highly resilient, and very highly adaptive. And so you’re able to really bounce back and push through. But beyond that, you’re able to really look at it from a whole different perspective, or your ear will see the bigger picture. And I think that that has obviously served you very well. And so that that’s just observation, just as I’m hearing your target,
Shawn Rhodes 17:15
and then there was there was something that really led into that. And it was, this is one of those resources I mentioned that I’ll pass on to your listeners, it’s easily available in any public library, quick story around it, when I was at one of these forward operating bases, I dropped in after a really nasty admission, you know, we’re just getting torn up. And I had maybe, you know, 1214 hours to write my copy, get some sleep, take a shower, and then I was in the back out on another patrol. So it was one of the more trying times of that holiness. And when I got back to this board operating base, there were pallets of books that had all been shipped up and created over from the US that were just sitting out there in the open. And this is something you don’t see a lot in Iraq, especially at a military base, you know, we do love to read, but our our base libraries are like one shelf. And then they’re all, you know, they’re all, you know, like action novel. So this is books of a wide variety and sort. And so I went and found the supply officer. And I said, Sir, what’s, what’s the story with these books, thinking that, you know, stories that I could write where I didn’t have to get outside the wire and, you know, put my life on the line yet again, like all the other men and women, if I could get another hour to write these stories, that’d be good for me. So he said, well, the libraries in the US had this initiative, they heard that people in Iraq didn’t have books except for, you know, really conservative religious materials. And so libraries, you know, it’s kind of donated all the books that they wanted to give away, and they’ve shipped them over here. Now we have to disseminate them into the communities. There were a couple of problems with this plan, I immediately realized it really conservative religious culture, you don’t want to pass out books that have like shirtless guys on the cover, like really juicy romance novels. That’s a bad idea. They were working that out on their own. But I went looking through these books, and I found one that I’d heard about before, never read. And it was The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. And we random book in the middle of all these, you know, like paper romance novels. Yeah. And so I picked the book up, and it was the very first habit that really struck me. And it was, you know, right, what I needed to hear at that point in my life. And it was that we can’t control always the things that happened to us. But we have complete control over how we react to them, or how we perceive them. And at that point in that combat tour, that’s exactly what I needed to hear, because I wasn’t gonna, you know, lost, I got injured, I wasn’t gonna give up my position. I wasn’t going to get sent home early. So I had to deal with what was being presented to me. It was a crappy situation, there was no way around it. But how I perceived it, how I chose to deal with it was completely in my control. And I could choose to make that an experience that was going to help me or one that was going to harm me. And that helped me a lot the rest of that tour and then in the life that I’ve led since the military, starting businesses and running things and doing what I do now. That’s still something that stuck with me one of the life skills that I think all veterans leave with, because we’re presented with really crappy situations that most of those With buckle under. And because we have you know that calling we’ve made that commitment, we have that that service within us that we want to give back, we pursue it we push through. So I may sound resilient, I don’t think I’m any more resilient than any of the men or women that are out there that have raised their right hand in the past or will in the future. And a lesson that we all get is how to perceive situations how to push through how to be resilient. And that’s something that can really serve us well. Assuming that we balance that with a little bit of self care and mental health, our way to being resilient, full time is a quick way to burn out. But if we can find the balance in there, and really connect ourselves to why we’re doing what we’re doing, we have all the ingredients necessary to be very successful post military.
Aaron Spatz 20:43
So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about some of these businesses that you started and some of the challenges and lessons that you learned if facing those. So you and you transitioned out you went to school. So walk us through what’s after that?
Shawn Rhodes 20:55
Sure, sure. So the school was very easy for me after the Marine Corps, because all I had to do was show up on time and turn in work. And the work didn’t even have to be excellent. Like, like just meaning the bar was fine for these professors. And the fact I would argue with them in class showed them that I was engaged. So that was great. I this is an easy gig. So in three and a half years, I left with two degrees. And I thought because of my time in the military, I was going to go after a secure position, the military is pretty secure, assuming you don’t get, you know drummed out for health or you don’t get downsized, you could make a career out of it very easily. And so I thought, Well, being a high school teacher would be a pretty good gig because that a lot of them were impactful for me. And so that’s what I got my degrees into the high school history teacher realized in my first semester of doing that, that as far as teaching goes that they wanted about 80 hours of work out of me for $35,000 a year, this is about 20 years ago, so teachers are getting paid. And that wasn’t going to work for my lifestyle plans. I like nicer things than a $35,000 salary can provide. Yeah. And so I bounced over to the National Park Service. Because being a veteran, you get veteran’s preference, something a lot of veterans don’t know or take advantage of, if you decide you want to work for the government, or you want to work for a lot of state agencies, they’ll give you preferences a veteran over other candidates that may be more qualified than you with experience, because they recognize the value that veterans bring to the workforce. So I was able to do that work for the National Park Service, and then moved over into the Department of Defense. And I was working for an Air Force unit talk about, you know, seeing things from the other side of the fence from the Marine Corps to the Air Force. They got to stay in the nicest hotels, they were always blind to Hawaii, it was a really great lifestyle. But I realized very quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to make the type of life that I wanted for myself working in a bureaucracy. And they’re, you know, bribed bureaucracies have their purpose, I’m not downing them, I just wasn’t going to be a good fit in there. Because again, my predilection to defy authority really wasn’t good to me well, and so this is about 2013, I asked myself, because I didn’t have any kids, I was newly married, you know, but didn’t have a lot of responsibilities. Outside of that. I asked myself, if I’m going to try something in my life that has the, you know, the large possibility that it might fail. But it also might exceed, this is the point in my life to do that. Because my decisions weren’t going to affect anybody’s quality of life. My wife was supporting herself, I was supporting myself, you know, we’re living, you know, happy, you know, newly married couple lives with not a lot of burdens, right? So at that point, I turned in my resignation letter, and gave up a permanent party status position with the US government, I was a GS rated civilian employee could have stayed there for another 30 years, and started my own business to do that, and this was kind of the journey that I went through very briefly, I asked myself, What are the things that people say I do naturally? Well, that I find just extremely easy. You know, I could do them all day, no worries, but people look at it and say, dang, that’s, that’s your unique gifts. That’s the thing you do that everybody else struggles with, that they you find easy. And for me that was communicating for me that was looking at systems and figuring out ways through and around them, because that’s a job the Marine Corps taught me how to do you know, the ingratiate myself into a system or a unit, get what I needed out of it, provide value and then move on to the next unit. Right. And so that’s what I began looking at doing. Now, when I opened my business, I didn’t know the difference between an LLC or an S corp, or how to find customers or what numbers I needed to be tracking in my sales, none of that it was all new to me. And I’d liquidated my 401k and my thrift savings plan to provide a little bit of cushion so I could pay the bills while I was learning these things and ramping it up. But it was a crash course in reading books, attending events, networking, trying to throw a lot of stuff, throwing a lot of stuff at the wallet and and seeing what stuck and what didn’t. Right. And so eventually, this was probably two or three years in. I was at the end of my rope financially. I was running out of money hadn’t produced enough sales to stay in business. And so I asked myself, if I was going to consult my company. So what I was trying to do was provide value to other companies to be a speaker and author, a coach, a consultant. And I wasn’t getting a lot of business that way. I was, again, throwing stuff at the wall to see what worked and not getting a lot of stuff that stuck on the wall, and asked myself, well, given the fact that you know, the last, the last couple of dollars I have here to try before I have to go back to work for the government or somewhere else. If I was going to insult myself and say, Shawn, here’s what I advise you do? What would that piece of advice be? And for me, it was you’re trying a lot of different things. Why don’t you do something consistently, to stain that for as long as you can. And if it doesn’t work, then you’ll know that at least that failed, and not do that anymore. Because what a lot of entrepreneurs do is we try everything. And then we wonder why we don’t get but very minimal results. Right? And so I began to do that with you know, a couple of things very consistently to generate business in it began to generate business, learning what the Marine Corps had taught me, I looked at the overarching system and thought to myself, well, what’s not working as well as it could? How do I improve that? Or how do I scrap it all together? For the things that are working? How do I do those five times more or 10 times more, in order to get more results. And so I began to kind of play with it, if you think of the structure of an engine, I was learning how to put better fuel into the engine, learning how to engage all eight cylinders, instead of just one or two. And when the engine began to really run, with good fuel, and on all eight cylinders, that’s when the revenue really began to gain you come in. And that’s when I could also hire more people to take those tasks off of my hands that I wasn’t really excited about doing any more that I could systemize so that I only focusing on the things I was uniquely qualified to do in my business.
Aaron Spatz 26:44
Wow, phenomenal story in terms of just having to really ramp it up having to learn and just, I mean, probably the most, the most pivotal moment for you there was really having to do your own self assessment and treat yourself as if you’re a client and figure out okay, like, what what should I be doing? Or, you know, what, what advice would I give myself? So I very, very impactful. What, what kind of business? Was it that you were starting?
Shawn Rhodes 27:11
Yes, I was looking at the the, again, you know, when I asked myself, What is my unique set of gifts, that everybody says you do really easily, that comes more difficult to most people. Most folks in the world are terrified of standing on a stage and addressing a group of adults, whether it’s a group of five or a group of 5000. For me, I really got a charge out of doing that it really excites me even to this day. So public speaking. And then I asked myself, Okay, well, if that’s what I really do well, and most people struggle with the thing that I find easy that most people don’t, who are those people that are getting paid the most to do that? Who are the people making the biggest impact? And names started to come up like Tony Robbins, and Les Brown, and Marie Forleo. And you know, people that are out there in the world of social media, they’re really big influencers. And so from the Marine Corps, you know, if I was going to model what a successful mission was, I would look at what had been successfully done in the past. They took a similar Hill in Vietnam, they had these challenges, they did this and it worked. So let’s model that. Let’s figure out what can we pull from that to this hill, we’re about to take in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. And that’s a very military kind of thing to do to pull lessons learned in. And so I asked myself, well, that those people out there have marketing assets in play, what are those marketing assets? How are they going to market? How are they selling themselves? You know, what logos do they have on their websites? What are their websites look like? What’s their social media following look like? How often are they posting? Who are they connecting with? Who are they bringing on their shows? Do they have podcasts? Do they have video blogs? are they writing a column? You know, I began to look at what are the things that these people that I want to emulate have in play? And how do I begin to put those pieces on the board, I may not be able to get where they are, because they’re 30 or 40 years into it at you overnight. But I can begin to place those things now. So that I can at least get my start, I can get my flywheel going to hopefully it has enough momentum at some point where I don’t have to really crank it hard to keep it in motion. And when I begin doing those things, suddenly, you know, the assets are in play the when people look to buy what I have to offer, they can go to my website, they can see that I’m a professional speaker that on large stages. I’ve got a lot of namebrand corporate clients behind me now. So I was just modeling success and figuring out okay, where are the open spaces that I need to fill? What are the steps I can take today to begin to get those pieces into play? So that one day maybe I’ll have you know, the the assets that will give me the type of impact that Tony Robbins might have.
Aaron Spatz 29:37
That’s great perspective and like no doubt that’s a it’d be a lifelong pursuit. But at least now you you see kind of how it’s modeled for you and you’re able to kind of derive things and apply it in really apply it to your situation what would have been some of the challenges like as you’ve as you’ve gone down this road in business, from a business perspective, what are what are some worse Some things that you’ve had to overcome, or maybe some things that you weren’t, that you didn’t think you’d have to face, but you find them, you find yourself facing some of these some of these challenges.
Shawn Rhodes 30:10
Yeah, one thing that was a big learning experience for me that will apply to any veteran, whether they’re trying to start their own business, they’re running their own business, or they’re just trying to enter the workforce, is that nobody cares about your military service, people will give a lot of lip service to it, you know, thank you for your service is something that we all hear a lot when we mentioned that we’re in the military, but nobody really cares. It’s not the magic key to the kingdom, you mentioned that you were in the military job offers, don’t just start, you know, dropping into your mailbox. And so what I had to realize whether I was trying to be hired by a company, by the government, or by a client, you know, now that people hire me on an individual basis, I had to discover what is it that you are trying to achieve? Whether you’re a large company, what is the company focused on this quarter or this year? What you know, in your last annual report, what did you say the new market was you wanted to open up, expand into or start chasing? If you’re the government, you know, what are you trying to accomplish at this governmental office? Whether you’re the Department of the Interior, Department of Defense, whatever? And how does that apply to you uniquely, in your geography? It’s a client, I always take the time to ask what their event? Why are you having your event? What are the challenges that you’re going to be addressing the you need experts on your stage to help your audience get through that once I learned those things, now I can match my skill set the value proposition that I have the unique set of experiences that I picked up in the military, and since afterwards, now, I can match those as solutions. But I can’t do that by stepping in and saying, Hey, I’m an expert in communication, you know, do you need some of that? Well, not really, we’re all set there. Thanks. But if I take the time to learn, what are you challenged with right now, if it’s a company? Well, you know, Sean, we’re really challenged with expanding into a new product line we just released last quarter, it’s not getting us the results we need right now. We’re just not able to get that clearly across to the people that we know needed. But sounds like what your challenges is communication? Well, it’s funny that we’re talking right now, because I happen to be an expert trained by the Department of Defense and how to communicate ideas to a large population. And so now all of a sudden, what they didn’t think was going to be a need at all, is actually the solution to the problem that is top of mind for them. And that’s how I’m able to work across industries to match myself as a solution to a lot of different problems and challenges. And I believe every veteran has this ability as well, because we’re all taught to do things on the fly. We’re taught to innovate solutions, we’re taught to, you know, go into a situation where we don’t know what’s going on, assess what the problem is, fix it as quickly as possible so that the mission can continue. It’s just what we’re taught to do. That’s an extremely useful skill set in the civilian workforce, whether you’re running your own business or working for somebody else, if you take the time to figure out what is it are you trying to achieve here, rather than here’s what I have, do you need some of that, that’s a completely different way to go to market, it’s really helped me out.
Aaron Spatz 32:56
In really, I feel like that is like the one pivotal thing that organizations really grasp on to when they really grow. And something I’ve seen and without getting myself a commercial here, but one of the things that we’ve talked about it was, like, it’s important to solve the problem of the customer. Like we want to talk a lot about how great we are. And we go through our whole resume and our work experience and things and case studies of why we’ve been so successful and what we’ve done, and that’s great. And your, your, your clients, your customers may may want to see proof of that. The ones that are doing their due diligence, will absolutely want to see some kind of track record. But they’re most interested in how can you solve my problem, like I have a real issue right now, I need help. I don’t even know really how to articulate it, I just know that I don’t have x, or we’re not meeting these certain KPIs or whatever, like, whatever the case may be. And I and I, you hit it right on the head. As veterans, we have that ability. But I think what happens is we if, if you’re joining an organization, a lot of times, it becomes about, hey, you need to learn our product, need to learn our services, you need to learn like how we’re better than everybody else, and so on. And so then when we get in front of people, we do have a tendency to talk more about us and not make the conversation or the solution geared specifically towards the customer. It sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing. Like
Shawn Rhodes 34:25
it’s all about them. There’s a great old motivational speaker line that everybody’s favorite radio station is wi I fm. And that’s the radio station of what’s in it for me. When we approach the world of sales from that aspect, the words open up that we didn’t even know existed. And whether you’re selling a physical product or service or whether you’re selling yourself on a resume into an organization, you’re in sales, and you’ll be in sales the rest of your life, if you want to have any upward mobility, you’ll constantly be selling something whether it’s an idea or yourself as the product or whatever that might look like. So I encourage you everybody to never stop learning one. And as veterans, leverage that skill set you have against the challenges that other people have. Don’t come in and say I’ve got a hammer, what nails? Do you need whack today? You know, ask them, What are you trying? Are you trying to build a house? Well, it’s funny, you mentioned that I happen to have a hammer. Right? Right, either be the solution, but don’t be the solution, before you figure out what the challenge is that you’re there to solve. And the ogre really go far in life and in all aspects.
Aaron Spatz 35:27
And it’s so good. So good, what, what advice would you give to veterans out there? Because I have a theory about guys and service, and guys and gals in service. And a lot of us will find our way, you know, as we’ve exited the military, some people have a very, very focused exit. I mean, you’re, you’re certainly one of those people, you knew exactly what you wanted to do, you knew where you’re going. Some people know, like, Hey, I just want to go to school, or, Hey, I just want to get a job in this city, because this is where I’m from, or my wife, or her family lives here, whatever the case may be, but, you know, one year, two years later, three years later, kind of find yourself in the spot where you feel like you’re floundering or you’re you’re frustrated by your, by your circumstances, or you feel like you’re not really making the impact of the difference that you once did, what advice would you give to, to that group?
Shawn Rhodes 36:23
So we’re jumping into personal development here. So this is my go in a direction send me the listeners things a little crazy, a little woowoo. But this is just work for me. So take that for what it’s worth. I had to take a hard look at what my purpose was. And you think purpose in the holistic sense, you know, why am I here on Earth. And for some people, for some veterans, that purpose has always been and will always be about service. And it might have been service to your country at one point. Now, it’s service to your community or service to your family or service to your employer. And those are all great methods of service, none of them’s higher than the other depends on what your value system is. But we don’t take the time as veterans to sit down at some point and ask what our services because the military define it for you for a period of your life. Here’s your mission, go do it. That’s your that’s your method of service. You know, think about it very much like the hill, okay, great, I’m gonna take the hill. Now you’re your own commander, you’re your own, you know, general, you’re your own commander in chief of your life, we have to figure out what are the things that I’m here on earth to do. And there’s a lot of different organizations to do that. Some are faith based, some are spiritual based, some are based on gender, you know, there’s men’s groups, there’s women’s groups, go find those in your community, the ones that align with you in your, in your belief system and your value system, get to get involved, get into those, any any place that is really, you know, trying to show the way or help you find a way, it’s not based on their way, it’s kind of helping you discover what yours is, those are the places that I would go, if I was better in those positions. In that situation where I’m a year or two out, life hasn’t really taken off for me yet trying to figure out if this is really where I need to be, and I’m feeling lost, because I don’t have someone you know, kind of pointing my own value system in my direction for me anymore, I’ve got to do it myself now. And ask yourself at the end of your life, and this is just more, you know, my own personal value system and my life experience. There’s another, you know, great motivational saying, because I studied professional speakers, so I get to hear a lot of these. The saying is one day, you’ll have the opportunity to meet who you would have become, or you could have become, had you really excelled in your life and taken all of the opportunities and advantages that were made available to you. Make sure that when that day comes, that is you looking in the mirror. And so that that was a very impactful statement to me, because I fully believe that whether you have a belief in the afterlife or not, I know one day spiritually, I’m going to run into the version of myself that I could have become. And I want to make sure that when I do meet that person is life for the next that I can say, you know, I’ve I’ve done everything I could to maximize this little slice of time that I’ve been given on Earth, as a father, as a community member, as a leader, as a business owner, as an employee, have I really done everything in the course of any given day that I could have done to make sure that I’ve maximized this piece of valuable space that I’ve been given in the universe? If the answer is yes, then I got nothing to fear about what comes in this life or what comes after? If the answer is no. And I’m not, you know, really disciplining myself and taking advantage of all the opportunities available and being present as a father and as a husband and a community member or a church member, all the things that I value. Well, now I have an opportunity to start making up for that. Now I have an opportunity to step more fully into my purpose and my mission and why I’m here on Earth. And again, if you’re stepping forward, then you got nothing to fear in this life or the next that’s just my personal belief system and other resources. This is funny for entrepreneurs, they’re always provided to us at the exact time that we need them. And if you have to shut down a business and open up another one and I’ve shut down plenty of business projects and had to try other things, like I said to a lot of stuff against the wall, as long as I was moving forward, and I wasn’t dwelling in failure, and in the past, the resources I needed were provided to me either through, you know, GI Bill benefits through governmental programs through my community through that client that drops out of nowhere that I lost contact with years ago, but now suddenly needs to have the offer, or that employer that, you know, I was trying to get in their company for years, and suddenly, they have the exact right position in the right geography, really weird, this stuff works out if you’re leaning forward. And that’s something that all veterans are taught to do in the military. Every day, we’re leaning forward, if you start to lean backward, there’s an NCO there to correct you to push you forward. Again, that’s, that’s the NCOs job. So we all have that ability, we need to just begin to provide that service for ourselves. Because there’s no staff NCO behind me today, maybe my wife, she definitely consider yourself a staff NCO in my household or an officer for that matter. But you know, lean forward on your own into whatever life it is that you want to build.
Aaron Spatz 40:56
Fantastic advice, and I hope those that are listening, that that may be struggling, defining their purpose. I mean, there’s, there’s plenty of resources there, there is community, there are options for you, and hopefully, take some, you know, some of your bits of advice to heart. You know, we’ve we’ve brushed now, I think, a number of times on the topic, and I think we should finally just go there. We talked about mental health. And so how have you seen that play out in the in the civilian space, and feel free to take this in run with us any direction that you would like to go with it? Because I don’t even really know if I can ask the question, or really articulate what I’m trying to say. But how do you stay in, you know, in that positive frame of mind, you know, after, you know, you get punched several times, like you’ve you’ve mentioned, some of the things that you saw, you know, when you’re overseas and the things that you had to ride on, you know, the experiences of, of other marine units. And then you talked about some of your business challenges and things that didn’t work for you. And yet, you figured out a way to keep going forward to like, talk us through like, what does that mental, that mental health aspect of things look like? What would you say has been important to you in terms of helping you get through? And how have you been able to bounce back? I mean, even recently, through any, through any business deals are situations that haven’t gone the way you wanted them to go? Do you still figured out a way to keep going?
Shawn Rhodes 42:30
Absolutely, yeah. So I’ll start with the psychology piece of it. And then if you want me to move deeper in any area, we can go from there. As I mentioned, one of my core beliefs is that I may not always be able to control what’s happening around me. But my reaction to it is completely within my control. How I react often determines the outcome of that situation. How I react often determines, can I find the silver lining in this particular incident? And so, you know, if I’m in a car accident, I was able to get out of there with my life. Car Accident sucks. But what’s the good piece, you know, in this story, so I’m always looking for that. I’m always trying to, you know, you can call it you know, Pollyanna syndrome, or whatever you want, but always trying to spin any given situation. And so, you know, the maximum benefit this might have for me, even if I don’t see the long term impact, what can I look at today? That’s a good thing, by lose a client? Will do I still have money to keep the lights on for the rest of the month. Sure do. That’s the positive. So I’m constantly looking for that. Now, that actually isn’t something that I invented. It’s something that researchers have been studying for a long time, that the field of psychology, if you look back to its earliest inception, you know how the human brain works, okay? It was originally developed to try to figure out how do we take people that are dysfunctional, however you define that and get them back up to a functional level of society, you know, help create productive members of communities again. And that worked up to a time but then people began to look at while they’re there are some of us that are going through all the incidents that you might consider cause dysfunction. They were put into concentration camps, they were raised in an abusive household, they were, you know, downtrodden, because of their gender, or sexual orientation, or whatever. They were put into jail for 30 or 40 years of their life, and yet they come out and still create positive change in the world. By all of our data, these people should be massively depressed, they should be addicted to drugs, they should be alcoholics. They should be homeless, and yet they aren’t. And granted, this is, you know, not not a large subset of society, these people that go through these experiences and come out even better on the tail end. They’re rare. So a psychologist began to study these people and figure out how do we model whatever the psychology is that these high performers have, they still go through these crappy situations. They weren’t born with a silver spoon. They didn’t go through, you know, all of the blessings of you know, Ivy League education, and they didn’t come from good families, but yet they’re creating empires. How do they do that? And so the field of positive psychology was born around that time, where people like Maslow like me, hey, Chuck sent me high, which don’t ask me to spell his name, but he wrote the book on flow. And he was asking himself, you know, what are the attributes of high performers? How do they go through these bad situations and still come out ahead. And so when I began to research that area, there’s an incredible amount of really well written books on how do you take a bad situation and grow from it. One of the books that’s on my shelf right now I’m looking at is called What doesn’t kill us. And of course, that comes from the phrase, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. And it’s written by a doctor named Joseph J LSE pH. And it’s just a great primer on positive psychology on the idea that there isn’t just such a thing as post traumatic disorder, or post traumatic stress. There’s also a field called Post Traumatic Growth, where they were looking at people like people that survived concentration camps, and yet still want to make a positive difference in the world. Well, they had the ability to take a really bad situation, whether that was seeing something in combat, and plenty of veterans fall into this camp as well. Being something that was really, really nasty, like, by all accounts, this should put you in therapy for the rest of your life. And yet, these folks figured out a way to perceive it. That it, they were they were able to draw strength from it. It’s not that they ignored it, not that they tried to forget about it, they fully integrated as part of their past experience in their life. But then they made the conscious decision, where do I go from here, I can’t change the past. But if I can figure out how to leverage it to make myself stronger, or to make me more resilient, or to help me do something positive in the world, so that others don’t have to go through that. I’m kind of called as a human being to make that happen as part of my life purpose, that that’s where they came from the perspective of and I share that with them. And so from the field of mental health, if you find yourself not fully optimized mentally, in that you’re struggling with depression, post traumatic conditions of any kind, and Lord knows, we have plenty of those, if we went through any experience in the military boot camp for many of us is traumatic enough, let alone combat, find resources in your community, the VA now really doesn’t stigmatize mental health at all, I’ve been seeing one of their therapists, I think for almost a decade now. Love it, absolutely love it. And there’s no shame in that. Now, if it helps me become a more present family member, a better business owner, or a better member of my community, I’ll take all the therapy and mental health I can yet and I encourage any veterans to do the same, don’t put the stigma on it. You have these resources available for you, many of them are free from the Department of Veterans Affairs from your home community, many spiritual organizations and churches offer these counseling services as well. Take advantage of them. Really, if you’re if you’re in a bad place, mentally, I hate to say this to another veteran, but I can because you’re a veteran, you got nobody to blame but yourself. Get online research, find counselors find therapists, if you can’t pay for it yourself, you know, find the people that are providing it as a as a service back to their community, for veterans, get the help you need. Because you have so much to contribute to society, because of the service you’ve done. Because of the lessons you had to learn. If you’re not really optimizing yourself mentally and spiritually and emotionally and physically, you’re holding yourself back from what you could be giving back to the world, how you could still be providing service to your community, your family, your business, your organization. So go find the help, no stigma around it at all, get what you need to be a better human being what however you define that for yourself.
Aaron Spatz 48:19
That’s great. And I think it’s phenomenal how you mentioned just just a moment ago, of how the stigma of mental health and seeking counseling is, I really do see that that’s really been going away. And not the image should have never even been there in the first place. But for whatever reason, a lot of a lot of us tend to look at that as weakness. And I in my response to that is like, well, if you got a broken leg, are you just gonna walk around with a broken leg forever? Are you gonna go get it taken care of. And right. And it’s important. I mean, we, there’s, there are things that happened, that happened, you know, in the minds that need that need help also, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with and it’s like you owe it to yourself to go get some help and go see somebody actually knows what they’re doing. And it’ll make you it’ll help you become the better version of yourself. And so I want I think it’s phenomenal that you know, one you’re being so open about your own experiences, but to just how raw and real that is, and how you’ve shared how it is very important that we as veterans, if we need to help or if we’re struggling, you’re absolutely right. Like nobody can read your mind. So like go out and get the help that you need. I mean, bottom line, go, go get the help and just pick up the phone call buddy. Call, you know, any number of these nonprofit organizations and see what see what resources they have. So no, I think that’s phenomenal. You wrote a book a few years ago, pivot points. Would you here Would you care to share with us a little bit about that book?
Shawn Rhodes 49:55
Sure, sure. I was one trying to check that off my bucket list. So check mark on things I wanted to do with my life was bruised at least one book, I’m in the middle of my second one. So expect that out later this year. But the book itself, I was writing for a business audience. And so if there’s anybody out there have the mindset that you’d like to produce the book, there are two reasons to do that. One is you have some kind of revenue model behind it, either in the book or in the services that the book is talking about. Or two, you just want to do it just to get your story out. And both of them are very valid reasons to write a book. You don’t need a publisher to do that these days, mine has been self published, sold 1000s of copies, I have made a good deal of money off of it, because I didn’t have to worry about Wiley or Random House taking, you know, 90% of the books value away from me. So I made all the profit from the book, which is cool. But because mine was written, not just tell a story mine was written to generate business on the tail end. All a book can do if you have any listeners on this podcast that are, you know, in business trying to figure out how do I write a book, the leverage that a book is really just the thick of business card? And so yes, provide value in it. Yes, you know, lay out all of the methodology and resources and everything that you can think of to put into a book, don’t hold it back by any means. But understand that the books purpose in and of itself, doesn’t hold a lot of value. If it’s sitting on someone’s shelf. If it’s a fictional book, if you just want to write that great story that you’ve held in your heart, and you want to be the next Hemingway, yeah, good, but get the book in as many hands of people as you possibly can. And that might mean you buying copies and just handing them out. And that’s cool, too. Sure, if it’s a business related book, you’re trying to generate leads back in your own business, or generate consulting clients, or whatever that looks like, give enough in the book to help people understand that there’s just a surface, you know, just the tip of the iceberg is all I could write about in 180 pages, because you have that depth of knowledge for whatever it is that you do. Encourage them to reach out to you to get more and that might look like hiring you as a speaker or a consultant or writing some, you know, specialized industry publication for them. Maybe you wrote it for realtors, and now you want to write it for accountants, you know, and then accountant picks it up and says, Hey, this is great, but we really need it in our industry. Great. Now you’ve got another way to produce that value to add back to the world. So writing books, a lot of fun. Some people are listening to this probably thinking, good lord, that’d be the like, I could think pulling my own teeth out with a pair of pliers could be more pleasant than writing a book. And that’s okay, maybe that’s not for you. But for what I do, it’s a great way to kind of get the word out and also that provide value back to the people who I want to serve.
Aaron Spatz 52:18
Talk with us a little bit about the content of the book, what’s the message of the book.
Shawn Rhodes 52:23
The title of the book is pivot point. And the subtitle is turn on a dime without sacrificing results. And so it was actually written as a fictionalized story of a patrol that I went on during my second tour in Iraq. I was actually attached underneath, then General Mattis later on to become the Secretary of Defense, James Mattis. And it was a story that they never let me publish while I was in the Marine Corps, because the time it came out and what was going on around Volusia at the time they didn’t want that publicized. And so what I did was wrapped a business parable inside of that book and that story, so that people could follow along, whether they were veterans or whether they were running businesses themselves to figure out how do we adapt to change on the fly, which the military is really good at and what we had to do during that patrol into Fallujah. Just, you know, a brief overview of it, there were about 30 vehicles that were sent into the heart of Fallujah, with no other air support, no snipers, no artillery, and nothing else inside the city to help us in order to negotiate a ceasefire. And General Mattis was leading the charge because he was expecting that he would be captured. He was expecting to be captured and had been held hostage, which would give our military forces permission to lay waste to the city to get him back, which is really all they wanted to do in 2004. Anyway, so we put himself on the line to do that, which is a very General Mattis kind of thing to do. They never let me wrote about you and write about it, because they want the, you know, American public or our enemies to know that General was willing to do that. And so, you know, I waited about 10 years until after the fact and then I was able to publish the book and release it. But then wrapping that into if you’re a business owner, how do we take the lessons that the military learns every single day on the fly, and make ourselves better, so that if a unit in Afghanistan makes a mistake, my unit and Iraq doesn’t have to suffer the same mistake next week? We all learn from each other at an incredibly rapid pace as part of our lessons learned system? How do we begin to apply that into a business context to make our organizations continuously better, but that’s really the crux of
Aaron Spatz 54:19
the book. Oh, that’s, that’s fantastic. Well, Shawn, thanks. I mean, thanks for so much for taking time out of your day. But it final words I mean, I’ll give this last segment to you like what you know what parting comments, thoughts, words of wisdom and words, words of advice that you may have here.
Shawn Rhodes 54:38
The way to get in touch with me best way is to cruise by my website, which is shoshan consulting.com. That’s sh Oh, sh i n consulting.com. You can see a little bit about what I’m doing with my post military life there. And then parting words to all of our veterans who are going through transition or are coming out on the other side of transition. Is that you have been built by the military to essentially have a Porsche engine inside you psychologically, physically, emotionally, mentally, you have a Porsche engine, the highest performing type of human that exists in the world is a veteran, because we’re put into situations where we perform or die. So if you’ve lived this long, you’ve made it through boot camp, you made it through your tours, in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or wherever you went, You are a high performing human being congratulations, challenge you’re going to have and if you haven’t noticed this already, you soon will, is that you’re going to be dropped into environments where everybody else is taught, operated about the level of a Model T Ford, just getting by by fillable gets you from A to B, it’s not going to be very fast or efficient, but they’ll get you there, where you’ve been trained to, you know, crank up, you know, all eight cylinders of your engine, inject a whole bunch of nitrous oxide into there and get somewhere fast, because life was on the line. And if you didn’t do it, people weren’t going to come home. So the challenge we have is learning how to operate with a Porsche level engine inside of us around the world that’s only trained to expect Model T results. And what that might mean for you, at least initially, is cranking back the number of cylinders you have engaged, keep them there for when they’re needed, don’t let them go to rust, you know, find other ways in your life to continue to operate as a high performer. But realize that you have to crank it down to the level of the people around you, until you can find ways to bring them up a cylinder or two, if you you know, follow this engine analogy I’m using, so that you can make everybody around you better. I learned this from bitter experience, drop yourself into an organization try to operate at a model or is trying to operate as a Porsche engine immediately, or as a Ferrari engine immediately. Bad things happen. Because people see that and they’re scared, they’re fearful that you’ll take their jobs. They think that you’re arrogant that you don’t know what you’re doing, even if you do succeed. So learn from Shawn’s experience here, dial it back a bit. And so you can figure out a way to bring everybody else up with you. And when they see that you are making everyone better, that’s when your team will allow you to begin to engage your full level of function. That’s when your supervisors will begin to see you belong in a supervisory position in a managerial position, that NCO or officer position, if you will, inside an organization, or like me, you’ll realize that in the field that you’re in, no one’s ever going to operate at higher than a Model T Ford level. But I can be a Porsche out there on my own. And so that’s the best piece of advice I could give to a transitioning veteran, understand the environment you’re being dropped into, just like you had to breathe into the military, understand the limitations of that environment and how to succeed once you’re there.
Aaron Spatz 57:33
And honestly, I think that’s a great reminder for those that have been out for some time, and they’re in there. And they are, maybe they maybe they haven’t been firing on all cylinders for a long time. And maybe it’s time to waken some of those cylinders back up. Or maybe they find themselves consistently frustrated because they keep burning relationships, because they’ve been operating on on all eight cylinders, for the last 510 years. And so I mean, I think it’s a great way to, it’s a great illustration and a great, great thing to reflect on as you go about your own business dealings, whether you own your own business or your VP or director, somebody in some form of management. I mean, it really, it really doesn’t matter. So, thanks for sharing that.
Shawn Rhodes 58:16
My pleasure. So thanks for having me on.
Aaron Spatz 58:21
Thanks for listening to America’s entrepreneur. If you enjoyed the show, please leave a review or comment on your preferred social media platform. share it out with friends, family, coworkers, others in your network. And of course, you can write me directly at Erin at Bold media.us That’s a Ron at Old media.us Till next time