EntreLeadership - #375: Operating with Mission Focus with Evan Hafer

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

Black Rifle Coffee Company founder Evan Hafer says building a successful business over the past six years has been the most difficult thing he has ever done—and Evan has done some seriously hard stuff, like 43 overseas rotations in nine years as a Green Beret in the United States Army. One thing that has made it easier, he says, is locking in on the mission of his company. Tune in to hear Evan explain how maintaining mission focus at all times not only allows you to make the right decisions and crush your goals, but also makes you a much better leader.   entreleadership.com/podcast Black Rifle Coffee Company website Good to Great by Jim Collins Follow Black Rifle Coffee Company on social Instagram—@blackriflecoffee Twitter—@blckriflecoffee Mission Statement Mapper Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   As an Amazon Associate EntreLeadership earns from qualifying purchases.   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you noticed that there's a trend in business today? We all want to get bigger, better, faster, stronger, and business owners are all focused on scaling their organization. But too often, in the process of scaling their business, leaders end up losing the soul of their business. From the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership podcast where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host, Alex Judd, and today we get to talk with the CEO and founder of an organization, that has experienced outrageous hockey stick growth. Like in the first year, they generated over a million dollars, and in the second year, they were an $8 million top line revenue company.

And that growth has just continued. But in the midst of all that growth, they haven't lost the reason why they started. They figured out how to scale with soul. Evan Hafer is a retired Green Beret who loves two things, coffee and America. and it was out of these two passions that he created Black Rifle Coffee Company, a company that has taken the world of coffee by storm while simultaneously maintaining the mission and values that they started with. The mission for Black Rifle Coffee is to serve coffee and culture to people that love America.

Content is kind of the internal classification or definition of that, but kind of the overarching term that people can kind of digest is just culture. So to serve coffee and culture to people who love America. That feels like it's a pretty intentionally worded statement. So I'd love to jump into some of those words. So let's start with obviously kind of what you do, coffee. Yeah. Why coffee, Evan?

I think, you know, from my perspective, you know, you have to be passionate about your profession. And I've been roasting coffee and developing different roasts for close to 15 years. now. And, you know, I think where it started for me and not to jump into the origin story, but, you know, I developed kind of a profound love and then eventually a hobby for coffee back in the late 90s. I was in Seattle. And I was working on accomplishing a degree from the University of Washington. And then I was trying to become a green beret. And as a young man, I think, you know, finding coffee and then looking at the culture and what's happening around coffee back then, it really galvanized this interest. And so when I became a Green Beret and went on

and started deploying, I still had the love for coffee, right? It didn't go anywhere. It just changed and it became more about where are you drinking coffee? And for me, it was finding great coffee and random and dangerous places. And ultimately, when I decided to get out of government service, it was a natural progression. And ultimately, it was kind of a planned exit and exactly where I wanted to take my next evolution and professional development. I love that line, great coffee and dangerous places. That sounds kind of awesome. It's amazing. We asked a bunch of your team in Manchester about what they loved about coffee. And it was crazy.

It was like almost an emotional experience for some of them. I was like, holy cow, when they used the word love, like they're not joking around here. They really love coffee. What is it about coffee for you that just gives you kind of that visceral experience? Or what is it that you love about it, Evan? Well, I think there's so many different things about it, right? So even if you just start to unpack it a little bit around the history and the way, that America's DNA around coffee is kind of its foundation in the country itself is around coffee.

So when we dumped a bunch of tea in the harbor in 1773, America at that point made a very definitive shift to the hot drink of choice, which was coffee. At that point, it was seen as unpatriotic essentially to be drinking tea because of British tyranny. So just the history of coffee is so interesting. when we look at it from the American perspective and then even getting before the American perspective in coffee and then the history with it. It's so interesting. So you've got this really interesting piece of history that's just around a commodity itself. Then how coffee is

is woven into the fabric of America and around service to America. You've got this incredible hot drink that's grown and all over the world, obviously, in very specific places, but then it's imported here. And what it does is it activates your senses around an experience. So if you're drinking a great cup of coffee from, from my perspective, the greatest cups of coffee that I've ever had have just enhanced the overall experience itself. So it could be from the lookout in a very remote place in the lower 48. It could be, you know, from the back of a Humvee in the middle of a desert somewhere. But you're unifying kind of this physical experience with a taste and ritual.

So all of these things can activate at the same time. And it creates, from my perspective, a much better and memorable experience. So I like to roast coffee around specific experiences for, instance, I roasted a coffee around my elk hunting last year, which was called Flying Elk. I did a moose hunt last year, and I roasted specific coffees around. Where am I going? I'm going to British Columbia. It's going to be cold. It's going to be, you know, I'm going to be out in the middle of the mountains somewhere. What kind of coffee do I want to roast to really enhance these experiences? So I think from my perspective, it just really, it's an experience

enhancement device, right? If you have a great cup of coffee and you have these great experiences, now you can have that same coffee somewhere else and you can move yourself back in time or look forward to something in the future where you can have this, you know, confluence of really interesting things. Okay. So now let's jump to that word culture or you said internally, you all use the word content. When you think about, the culture and the content that you want to serve to your customers and to people who love America. What is that? What is that culture? What is that content that you're trying to pump out into the world through your organization? I think it kind of exemplifies service and freedom. And when we look at

serving our communities and how we serve, you know, there's a wide variety of ways you can serve your community. For the majority of Black Rifle Coffee and how we've served, it's through military service. So we've taken our military service and we're trying to activate that through forms of media that ultimately speak to our subculture, right? So, you know, the veteran subculture. And a lot of people ask me, well, do you have to be a veteran to drink black rifle coffee? And it's like, well, no, that's not. That's, no, absolutely not. It's, that's, that's, that's, that's, no, that's not a good business model. No, yeah. You know, granted, there's 20 some million veterans. United States, but you kind of cap out, right? I think it's what expands past that is when we look at

what exemplifies individual freedom, right? So when we take the word freedom and then we put that into action, what does that look like to the human perspective, right? So America, I truly believe this is a country. We've been able to exemplify freedom, I think, more than any other country in the history of countries. People might take, you know, issue with that. And I mean, I would be more than happy to debate that issue. But I truly believe we've been able to, to take, you know, a Democratic Republic and then unify an entire country around this pursuit of freedom and happiness, right? It's literally written into what we're trying to accomplish as a nation. So when we look at, You know, we're serving culture to people that love America.

It's fairly easy. It's what's exemplifying individual freedom. It could be a wide variety of things. But for us, we have a very specific stake in that, right? So we really try to kind of exemplify that through hard work, like what does hard work look like, you know, what does selfless service look like? What does being mission specific or mission oriented look like? These are all things that we've decided to kind of do. define together as a company.

And then ultimately, we're trying to unite what we do on the coffee side with our customer. I'm trying to create one big ecosystem, company and customer that's one. Right. So when we look at a lot of companies, I think, their CEOs and their executives and a lot of the people within their corporate infrastructure, they look at their company as something that they need to generate. revenue and they're running it from a P&L perspective, right? So what's the most profitable

decision to make? What's going to create their strategic advantage over their competition? I'm trying to create something for my customer. I'm trying to create a community and an ecosystem. I think the bottom line will ultimately, if you've done that correctly, the bottom line will follow your results. In five years, I've been negative two months. And that was a very definitive choice. Yeah. That's crazy. Okay. And I've heard. heard you talk about this a lot and the word it seems like you use a lot whenever you're talking about kind of you choosing to serve your customer and build an ecosystem around that is that word tribe. What does that word tribe mean to you? I think it's overused at this point, right? So you

have a bunch of internet marketers and a bunch of people that kind of talk about tribe and they actually don't know a thing about it. They don't. And what they're using and what they're trying to accomplish is, you know, activate their followers on, you know, social media or whatever it is. But if we were to say, if I were to define tribe, it's who do you have for Americans? We're self-opting into a specific element of culture around values, right? So I have values of the company, and I think those values directly translate into the type of values that my customers have as well. So patriotism is not a value, for instance, a black rifle coffee, because when we look at patriotism, it's actually defined through service to your community.

So we're trying to serve the people who serve their communities. So it could be an EMS or law enforcement. It could be a school teacher. It could be the military. So when we look at this, blind follow ship to what the United States government does is not. patriotism. Patriotism is actually celebrating a unified goal as a country and then accomplishing those things, right? So for us, people always look at it as like we're uber nationalists, right? That I've gotten that one a lot and I'm like, ah, that's not, I love my country. You know, more importantly, I love the community that I grew up with. I love, you know, the mountains of Idaho. And then if I go from, you know,

sea to shining sea, there's this specific, you know, specific, you know, unified culture that Americans have. And it's not united by xenophobia. It's what is uniquely American. And it's so eclectic. It's so interesting. It's this foundation of results that are built around being a little bit different and a mixed bag of people. You know, anywhere I've gone, and honestly, I've been to too many countries to kind of count at this point. I think Americans have something so special and so unique that it's really hard to say, you know, it's just unified by, you know, this blithful follow ship to, you know, whatever the executive office says. I think that's not, not necessarily correct. So I like to put that out just as a disclaimer,

you know, you can love America and still question your government. That's pretty easy, too, right? I think that's part of it. Yeah, that is kind of uniquely American. It's like we kind of start We kind of started by questioning a government. That's kind of what we do. Okay, man, there's so much in here that's so good. It's like we've just started. We've been talking for what, 10 minutes? And already, like we've talked a little bit about coffee.

And then at the same time, you made a bunch of pretty big, audacious line in the sand political statements and kind of address some principles as what your company stands for. And that's one of the things that I've noticed about your brand is it's like, yes, we believe in our product. but it's almost like it's not even fair just to call it a coffee company because there's all these other principles and values and mission and vision that are associated with that product that is coffee. So was that always the dream from the beginning or how did all of that get interwoven, Evan? It definitely wasn't a dream from the beginning. I think the way that it was

interwoven was because of my service and because of my experience, I don't know how to build things in any way other than this. So you have to have values. You have to have a mission. You have to recruit and attract other people that will be mission focused with you. And that has to be a self-identified opt-in. And they can't just be purely money-driven. When we look at the overall value of Black Rifle Coffee, we have to look at the values and specifically how mission-focused are we. And then how good is our team at working together in order to, to accomplish those goals and objectives. So for me, I don't know how to build things otherwise. So, you know, 20-pound brains that build financial institutions and hedge funds and all these other things, like, I'm sure they have missions. And, you know, Ray Dalio would probably be one of those guys that you could say did a very good job of building a unique culture and ecosystem around very defining goals and objectives

that are very mission-oriented. Now, you had to buy into something more than just your P&L on that, anything that he built, right? So Bill Gates is the same way. These guys have much bigger ideas than just driving profit, right? So I think the really good companies, they do build brands that are like this. They do build companies that are mission-focused, that are goal-oriented, where you have a unified culture that speaks to everyone, or at least in bigger companies. as I continue to grow, you have to get to the majority of the company, the majority of the time. You're not going to get everybody because you're going to have people that come and go and they're

going to look at your company like, yes, it's just a job. But the goal is to have 100% uniformity that is driving towards your mission, your goals, your objectives, and you have unified conformity across the line to your values. That is the goal. That seems a little bit crazy. People might say, well, that sounds like a dictatorship? No, because it's volunteer, right? So it's unifying a company and a culture around people that agree. These are the things that we believe in. So I don't want there to be a differentiating difference between what happens when you're at home and then what happens when you're at work. Your family, when you go home, you should be in love with being home and spending time with them and curating these great experiences and unifying your family around

your own values. And then when you come to work, those things should be dovetailed. You shouldn't have this great break of personal interest between what you're doing as an individual, as a family and as a company. You shouldn't have these crevasses where you have to break and jump over those things. Where you talk about people saying, well, that sounds like a dictatorship. It's funny. We'll get loons on Twitter that look at us and see that we're a value-based organization.

start calling us a cult and they're like, oh, that Ramsey group, they're just a cult. And Dave, I've heard him address this before because, I mean, you know the people that are actually on Twitter now. They're all crazy. Except I'm on Twitter. So I don't know what that says about me. But he says, he's like, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, we are not a cult. And the reason why I know that is because we regularly ask people to leave. But it's like you said, it's culture because people are opting in and we kind of say people like us, if you're going to be in this building, you're going to do things this way. I guess my next question for you would be, where did those values and that mission? Because I think people a lot of times have it generally, but you have it,

I mean, you've got it specifically. Like it is, it is HD vision crystal clear. How did you find that level of clarity on the difference you want to make and on the values of how your team's going to operate? Goes back to military experience. I wrote mission. statements. I wrote thousands of them with multiple different iterations because every day if you stepped out to go do something, right, any mission, you had to have a mission statement. So the who, when, where, why? You have to define that against your regional and strategic interest. So you're looking at, you know, your command levels up and you have to make sure that what you're doing is completely in line with what's happening within the country, within the city, within the

specific area within the city. So every day we would have to write what's called the five paragraph operations order. So you have to go into your situation. So what's happening within your enemy situation, what's happening within your friendly situation, then you get into your mission, you get into your execution. So how do you do it? Right. And then the individual aspects, which be the actions on piece of that, your communication is signal. So who's in charge? How are we communicating? I wrote thousands of these. So I don't. don't think in any other way. I have to think this way. That's unified with, you know, your army values, your strategic goals and interests as far as like your government. So how is your government looking at

things? And all you have to do is a veteran is pay attention to that stuff. And then ultimately, all I did was take what I was doing over here and then apply it over here into business. I write mission statements every day for individual projects. How do we look at an individual project and then how does it move across the divisions and apartments in the company? It's so interesting to me how directly this stuff translates and then you get your reps in over on the military side and then you can come over on the business side and ultimately it makes life much easier because you get managing very complex teams, making, you know, split

decision-making, complex problem-solving. You've got so many iterations in that that I don't want to say business is easy because it's been the most difficult and challenging thing that I've ever done in my life and I've done some fairly difficult things. But it makes it easier. There's a very specific group of people that I think that have a definitive leg up when it comes to this because we've had so many iterations in leading and accomplishing goals. Are you a Jim Collins fan, Evan? I'm a huge fan. Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Very good. Good, yeah. So one of the things he talks about, and I can't remember if it was that book or if it was a different book, he talks about the 20-mile march. And he talks about how the businesses and the leaders and the organizations that win, it's not like you're going 500 miles one direction and then the next day you go 15 miles another direction and then you go 10 miles another direction. He says the organizations that win are the ones that go 20 miles in the same direction every single day. And he says they get on their 20-mile march and they do their 20 miles every single day without fail. doesn't care if it's raining, doesn't care if it's sleeting, doesn't care if it's snowing, doesn't care how they feel,

20-mile march. And you strike me as someone who is on their march, right? And you've been on this march for, what, six years now? And your business has now been on this march for six years now. I think I can tell you for myself personally, but I've also seen a lot of businesses get trapped by this. We get paralyzed because we don't know how to define what our 20-mile march is. And so we end up going a bunch of different directions or worse yet not marching at all. So what would be your advice for defining and figure out what is that 20 mile march that we're going to go towards every single day? Man, I talk about this all the time. I talk about it in the company all the time. Maintaining mission focus is one of the single most defining things of any entrepreneur,

of any CEO, founder, president, individual, executive, whoever it is. It's, you. You, You have to look at your business and say, these are my goals, right? So, and I think he's the guy that framed the big, hairy, audacious goal, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the B-Hag, absolutely. The B-Hag. Yeah, so the B-Hag. And you have to look at these and you have to say, okay, and these are, you know, my five,

I know my five-year vision, I know my two-year vision. I put it out in the company. I put it out every year. And then I get my executives together. I get everybody to write mission statements. and I get my individual departments and divisions to write mission statements, and everything has to dovetail against where we're headed as a company as far as our five-year, two-year, one year, everything has to fit.

Because when we accomplish our goals, meaning if I paint the future for everyone, and I say, I'm looking out five years, this is what the company looks like. These are the things that we have to accomplish in order for, that vision to come to fruition, right? And then you have to pare that down because that's a little bit hazy. Five years is a little bit hazy. You have to drive that back down and you have to make it more crystal clear, more crystal clear, more crystal clear. So you can start to chop out the white noise is what I call it of a business, meaning everything else dies. It dies. And what it is is it's time triage. So what you have to do is you have to get up every day and you have to look at your time

individually and how that time has directly paid off or returned an ROI against what your ultimate vision is. Then you have to invest more of your time, right? So you chop away your dead result time and then you focus more of your time on the things that are paying you the dividend against where you're trying to go and take the company. So if you're not doing time triage against your direct actionable results and your goals every day, I did it every day. Every day for at least the first three years, once I started doing this, because I'm a very task-oriented person. I make lists and lists and lists and I did it every day where I would go and just start scratching stuff off my list.

Triage. Even though it was stuff that I loved and I was passionate and wanted to do, I couldn't do it because it didn't directly contribute to where I was trying to take the company. And you can't save all your projects. And you can't be in love with a lot of your stuff either. You can't be in love with it. Make enough money where you can have your own passion projects on the side ultimately. And then if you're turning a profit and growing your company and accomplishing the big

goals, well, then you'll have time to mess around with some of the stuff that you might need to test a little bit longer, it takes a little bit more time. But you can't get distracted with that. You really can't. I see it every day all the time with great, smart, intelligent, driven guys, people across the board where they fall in love with their projects. And they're like, I just, you know, I'm just really, really trying, working as hard as I can. I'm like, well, if you can't turn a profit out of it, man, you're going to have to cut it away. Gosh, that's powerful. And I think that idea of identifying and defining with crystal clarity, that five-year vision, I think most people agree in principle, yes, I need to do that. And still, so few people actually do it. And what I've seen is a lot of times it's because there's a level of fear associated with the opportunity cost. Because it's like they know, okay, if I say yes to this thing for the next five years, that's, That means I'm saying no to a bunch of other, not even bad things, good things for five years.

And that's a long time. What do you say to that person that is a little bit paralyzed by that fear and doesn't want to make that decision? Suck it up. Do you want it or not, right? I don't know how else I could put that other than like suck it up. You either want it or you don't. You can't be in, you know, personal, professional purgatory. because what that circumstance is, and this is what I've said for multiple years now,

so the difference between being drawn and quartered and then taking four horses and driving you in one direction is maintaining mission focus and one thing moving in that direction. That's four horses moving you in one direction and accomplishing exactly where you want to go. Or if you want to be pulled in four different directions, you're going to be ripped apart. So you have to decide what you're going to do and move towards that with maniacal, sociopathic drive. And if you're not ready to commit at that level, you're just not ready. Like, you're just not ready. Like, I would say maybe, you know, go find a different job.

I don't know if that sounds too harsh, but it's like. I think that's just perfect, Devin. I think that's a, I think hashtag sociopathic drive should be the hashtag for this episode of the podcast. That sounds perfect. I love that. Okay. So, man, I believe that when a leader does find that level of maniacal focus, they are serving the people that work for them. Yes. So can you speak to what that gives your team whenever you find that level of clarity and stick to that focus? Well, psychology is more contagious than the flu. If you are dedicated and driven towards accomplishing your goals and objectives, and you're speaking internally to your team about it, and there's limited deviation from where you're headed,

not only with your mouth, because your mouth can say a lot of pretty things, right? but your actions will ultimately define how committed you are to everybody else around you. And a lot of people say, well, that means I'm the first person in the office and the last person out. I don't agree with that because I think that is just one level of action-based commitment that people can see. And that's one thing that might work for a wide variety of CEOs or, you know, founders. but for me, I also have a commitment to my family, right?

So I have a commitment to my family. I have a commitment to my company. What I have to do is daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, I have to continue to push the company, pull the company, and then I have to also rely on them to do the same thing for me. It's one cohesive team. I can't deviate from where I'm moving in not only my articulation, but also in my actions.

So I always look at my rank and file priorities. It goes me, my family, my company, in that priority. But the company allows me to feed my family, and it also feeds directly into my priorities as far as me. I'm typically the last one. So when it's like when you reverse that, the company, family, me. I'm the last one to eat always, right? So I'm the last one to be fed because I'm the owner.

If I don't make my profit, I don't get paid. If I need to sacrifice different elements financially or time, I've sacrificed a lot when it comes to individual time so I can spend more time with individuals within the company and company growth and objectives. So when we look at a company and your employees, I have to look at it as this is my team and they're all one interactive entity. me, my family, my company, my customer, they're all one ecosystem that has to be balanced against our entire objectives. If you look at them as compartmentalized and you're not trying to balance each one of these things, one thing will not get fed. And trust me, I've made those mistakes too, you know, not sleeping, not taking care of yourself, not working out, all of those things because you think it's the right thing to do. And eventually it directly

contributes to negative results, which are not long-term yield, that will directly contribute to your goals. So I don't know if I answered the question, but I think it made sense in my mind when I was saying it. Well, no, and I think all of the competing priorities, but aligning all of those priorities around a singular vision for that ecosystem, that's a pretty powerful idea. I can't help think as you lay out, you know, kind of that pyramid of the customer, the company, your family, you, you're the last one to eat, right? That just, like, it feels like it's a lot of burden, a lot of responsibility. And I think a lot of times we see stories of owners that are crushed by that responsibility.

And it seems like the faster a business grows, the more likely it is that the CEO or owner gets crushed by the thing that they built. How do you guard against that here in year six of Black Rifle, Evan? Oh, man. I mean, I felt the crushing weight of that, right? So my analogy to that is as the company gets bigger, I feel like I'm scuba divers will understand this, but I feel like I'm getting deeper and deeper in the water.

So a small mistake at a very deep depth can cost you your life. When you're at the top and you're a small agile company, it's just like you working in your garage. You can make a ton of mistakes because air is right there. You're swimming on the top layer. Right. But then as you start to get bigger and bigger and bigger, you can feel the crushing weight of the company. And the only thing that I've been able to do, and it's not, it doesn't happen overnight.

You can't snap your fingers and make it happen. You still have to be able to carry the weight of the company. You have to carry the weight psychologically. You have to carry the weight physically. If you can't, then you need to tap out and try to find another CEO that can fill your slot. So for me, I went out a few years ago and I've made very specific choices with the company and then how I pull in partners. So I, first and foremost, I went out and I didn't know anything about building a board. So I don't want anybody to think I did.

But I went out, said, you know what? I'm going to pull in some guys that I trust to help me on my CEO board, right? So how many years ago is this, Evan? Four years, probably. So even after a year, I was trying to find mentor. I was trying to find a mentor. I was trying to find a mentor. I was trying to find people that I could ask questions to.

Because sometimes you know it's the right thing. You just need outside validation, right? That's what consultants most of the time do. And I had to get varying opinions because I didn't want to rely on just one piece of information or one piece of information from one person. That's one of the reasons why I went out and found a private equity group that I could work with. and I interviewed about 24 different private equity groups. And I had to find one that matched my personality

and that we're also willing to accept the terms that I put out there, which is you won't control the company. You'll have all common stock. You might get a vote. You might not. I don't really need the capital because I'm generating profit. What I need is I need that intellectual capacity of a partner that and maybe a series of things within another.

company that can help me grow the company in the way that I want to grow it. I needed smart capital. I need a really smart and experienced partner. And, you know, it was a wide variety of people. You know, it was like, you know, old cowboy petroleum guys from, you know, Texas and, you know, some really expensive shirts and, you know, shiny cufflink guys from, you know, New York. And I found a really good partner in somebody, Stephen Taslitz's name, he started a private equity group out of Chicago. So we just became really good friends. And somebody that I could trust you, somebody I could call rain or shine, didn't matter time or day. He was different.

So he had been a Democrat for a long period of time. And obviously, I'm a conservative. But I wanted those varying opinions, right? I didn't have a gun to my head to make the decisions that I made. But it was somebody where he's very intelligent. He's got a lot of experience. And more importantly, I just got along with him. you know, and that really helped me a lot.

But a lot of guys, they rush into that, right? So it's like rushing into a marriage with somebody that you don't really know. And there's so many guys that think, well, I'm going to go out and I'm going to find private equity group and, you know, I've got my money and, you know, everything's hunky dory. Yeah, okay, wait a year, wait a couple years. Like, weather a storm with those guys and see how that stuff rolls. because oftentimes it doesn't work because it's just not a good marriage. Your goals and objectives are not in line.

And, you know, I think I took a little bit of heat, too, from some people, when I say some people, just because it wasn't really what you would say, a black rifle coffee kind of branded guy because he was from Chicago. And what I said was like, hey, listen, he's my friend. I trust him. and he's willing to do a deal on our terms, which says an incredible amount. And more importantly, for seven, eight months, it didn't matter. If I called him at 1.30 a.m. or 1.30 p.m., guess what?

His phone answered, and he had really, really good sage advice. So that's just one point where I looked at the things that I would, need in order to offload the weight of the company psychologically. And then I brought in a co-CEO at the beginning of last year. And one of the things that I wanted to do is already build in my exit strategy because I think it's also important. It's important for a company. It's important for you psychologically.

A lot of guys, they don't want to do that. It doesn't work for them. But I wanted to have the ability to, if I decided to say, okay, I'm going to go and and take a year off and spend time with my family or whatever reason I needed to be able to come to work with a better version of myself as far as like who runs the company with me. Tom Davin came in and he was the CEO of a company called 511 Tactical. Before that, he was the president of Panda Express. Before that, he was the president of Taco Bell.

Before that, he was at PepsiCo. And, you know, he had a lot of experience. I built a good relationship with him early on. He was on my board for over a year before I offered the position. He was somebody that I trusted. I could call. He was seen as he still is a mentor to me. So what I've tried to do is pull in a bigger team to offload the weight of the company

in order to have a more Socratic decision-making process that ultimately I can lay out the vision, the mission, the goals, but I'm not doing all the work. So if that makes sense. Not bearing all the risk, too, because you're not the bottleneck on making a decision anymore, which is a big deal. Gosh, I love what you said about walking through some turbulent times with these guys before you just say, okay, your partner or you're now part of this thing, or you're now part owner. Dave is famous for saying the only ship that doesn't sail is a partnership. And he always says that not because it can't work, right? We all know it can't work.

But he says that more often than not, the people that he talked to, it doesn't. And the reason why is because the idea that most people have of a partnership in business is two guys drinking too much beer on the back porch saying we should start a freaking business. And that just is not a good idea. But what you're talking about is a very methodical approach that is not just the good times and not just rose-colored glasses on everything that's going to be great. It's walking through those tough seasons together over an extended period of time. I think that's a big deal. Take us back to the first year. I think Black Rifle, it started growing fast, correct? After you started it in 2014. Can you

explain to us a little bit of how fast that growth was year one? Yeah, and even kind of going back, my two partners that I've had from essentially the beginning, Matt Best and Jared Taylor, We've not argued in six years. Like, we've not argued. Now, we've had disagreements, but those guys are my brothers. They're my family. They're my closest friends. They are the guys that if I'm feeling low, if I need something, anything, like, those

guys are there. Like, 100%. There's zero deviation from that trust whatsoever. Like, those guys are rock solid. and more importantly, they let me manage and lead, right? So they're not trying to piss on my leg, meaning they're not trying to run the company. They're not trying to compete with me. We've sacrificed, and this is another important piece to this, which is you have to sacrifice

your ego on the altar of business. You really do. Like part of the ego is why it's driven and everybody has it. But your ego can't become the opposite. obstacle, right? It can't become your obstacle to accomplishing your goals. You have to make those really, really introspective conversations with yourself real. You have to have those. You have to have people that are close to you that you trust to tell you the truth about what you're good at, what you're bad at, and you have to rely that they're also have your best interest in heart. Those guys have

been incredible as far as my partners. They've been incredible. I've had bad partners. I've had bad partnerships. I've had bad partners. Like, it's not, you know. Okay, we can't move on to year one too fast because that line, you have to sacrifice your ego on the altar of business. That's a, that's a pretty intentionally and probably intentionally worded line, but also probably because you've lived that out. Yeah. That can be a pretty gut-wrenching experience, sacrificing your ego. Is there a moment that stands out to you, where that was hardest but necessary? Yeah, you know, I worked for the CIA for nine years.

And, you know, I was a Green Beret and I worked for the CIA. And, you know, I was pretty wrapped up into, you know, I'm a commando guy. You know, I was pretty wrapped up into the entire identity of it. You know, I got fired essentially. I got termed out of the agency. And when I say that, you know, it wasn't over one mistake. And, you know, I could get into a laundry list of reasons of why, right? You know, countless rotations, you know, 43 rotations overseas.

And from, you know, 2000 to 2015, I was burnt out. I should have been out, right? I absolutely should not have been trying to contribute to the overall, you know, mission and objectives. And I think it took me a minute to come to terms with that, right? Because my entire identity was wrapped up into three-letter acronyms and a green, hat. I had to have a real honest conversation with myself very early, which is I was unhappy professionally. I wasn't fulfilled. Why? Right. So all those like, why, why, why, you know? And I knew that if I, if I was going to succeed, I was going to have to make a full transition away from anything

that I knew professionally before that. And it was hard. It was psychologically, it was, psychologically, it was, it was somewhat devastating. It took me a minute to get a, you know, you're trying to point blame at other people and, you know, just really kind of just self-defeating, not honest conversations. And I eventually reached a point where my businesses,

because I had a couple of them at the time, they really weren't turning a profit. And I wasn't growing them. And I was just kind of fairly rock bottom in the sense of I had my first daughter, You know, my wife was pissed off at me. You know, I was working all the time, working on a bunch of the wrong projects, you know. And I sat in my garage and I was, I was crying, you know.

I was, I was crying. I had sold everything that I had owned. I'd gone so chipskin on everything. But the last thing that needed to be put up, like the last thing that needed to be put up and sold was my ego, which was it's my fault. Like it is my fault that I'm not succeeding. It was my fault that they asked me to leave. And if I let this thing beat me now, then I will have bought into a narrative of inaccuracy.

If you take responsibility for your actions and what you've done or not done, and then you own that with clarity, things become easier. then you're like, got it. I'm going to work on these things. These are the things I need to work on. So I'm not the coolest guy in tactical gear. I'm not, you know, God's gift to, you know, CIA agents. I'm not those things.

Like I can shoot relatively well, right? Now, but what I have to work on is running a company and feeding my family, right? So feeding my family, running a company. I needed autonomy. And ultimately, your ego is the last thing that, for me, at least, it was the last thing to get put up on the auction block. And it had to die. So as much as I could kill it. I don't know.

I mean, you know, I mean, guys like me, there's a reason, you know, like we have egos. But it's crazy. I feel like I understand the brand of black rifle. coffee so much more now after hearing that story because it's it's almost like I mean one of the things at least from the outside looking in that it feels like black rifle stands for is the idea that victimhood is not the answer right and the idea that you're going to sit here and give excuses and blame other people for the things that are going on that's not helpful for you and it sounds like that's at the root of your personal stories when you started to own your crap and

started to say like, okay, that was my fault. And until I confront it, I will not move forward. But it sounds like that was a turning point for you. And at least from what I've seen, that is reflected in the brand of the company as well as that idea of personal responsibility. I think so. Because once you've had those honest conversations with yourself, you know, once you've had those, it makes other things easier to kill, right? So now you can, yeah, you can kill it all. Like, you can shut down. a business and it's like, oh, great, it doesn't matter. You can shut it down. If it's not working, turn the lights off, walk out, throw the keys to the next guy and do something else. Start another

company, right? And my goal, I wrote a mission statement for myself, which was to transition away from government service and to live a happy and fulfilling life. Okay. So how do I feed into that? How do I accomplish my individual missions? I had nothing to do with money. Not that money is a bad thing. I'm just saying that money is a conduit to accomplishing much bigger goals and objectives that I think are more fulfilling and sustainable, right? There's plenty of old CEOs and founders that are, you know, going to be on their deathbeds and okay, well, you made a billion, two, three, four billion, but they're going to die really incredibly unhappy people. They're going to die unfulfilled. They're going to literally think about the things that they've done. They're going to do

audit, they're going to look in the lower right-hand corner of their life, and they're going to go, so I'm not going to do that. For me, you know, the business itself and building an ecosystem between customer, company, this is a much bigger task, right, for me. And we're profitable because we're accomplishing, I think, the big goals. And the money itself, I guess, that we generate, you know, I mean, I can say that, like, I'm a wealthy person because I have a wife and family that love me dearly. I get to cook my girls oatmeal in the morning and read stories in the evening.

You know, those are the things that are going to last. I'm never, you know, the last minute of my life, I'm not going to go, man, I wish I would have had a, you know, a bigger private jet or something like. That's not what I'm pursuing. So I've met plenty of really wealthy people and they don't have some of the things that I have, right? They just don't have it. three quarters of their time has been spent away from their families. And maybe that's what they're after.

But at the end of the day, I know what I want. I'm very clear in that, very clear in what I want. I'm very clear with what the company needs to accomplish and the individual people associated with it. And I don't have a problem being honest with those things. So I can come in and talk to my company about it, the entire company and be like, guys, I love my family, just like I love the company. You know, I can talk about my kids and like I want them to go home.

and live incredible lives with their families and their kids. And honestly, I don't want people in the company that don't have a good, healthy work-life balance either. I don't want them. I think it's an unhealthy work-life relationship. I don't want executives on my team that don't want to talk about their families and their kids and what they're trying to accomplish in their personal lives. It just doesn't make sense to me.

If you want to work 80 hours, 100 hours a week and if they're self-absorbed, you know, chasing the P&L, probably not a good fit here. Probably just not a good fit. Those people are good on a lot of different companies. They're just not good in my company necessarily. I think I'd rather have a less optimized performance executive staff as far as being able to drive pure performance of the company and have a much healthier ecosystem where we lead by example in both love for company and love for self and family.

I think the journey to get to where you're at now, which is make an oatmeal for your girls in the morning, reading them a story in the evening, and getting to play the role that you're playing now, it sounds like that was always a part of the goal, or at least that became a large part of your goal and your vision for yourself personally. But I can't imagine that that was truth from day one in terms of it probably took a lot of grit and a lot of grind to get here. Yeah. So can you speak to because I think we see from the outside, okay, this thing was rocket ship growth from day one, it seems like, are there some stats or are there some numbers you can put to that that really capture for us how fast this thing grew? You know, it wasn't profitable because the growth was we were selling coffee, but I was also selling more coffee than I could buy. So I was selling more coffee than I could buy. my first year in business we did just about well we did 1.37 million gross revenue and and that was me working working at it part-time roasting coffee in my garage answering all the emails my wife was doing customer service we were roasting and packing all the coffee we took all the product shots for the

most part we built the website we did everything and I was working in another job at that time. My wife was a stay-at-home mom, but we were feeding the company as much money as we could to just maintain the growth. So when people look and say, oh, 1.37 million in year one, that Evan, he's really lucky. What do you say to that person? I say, okay, that's 20-hour days. That's a sustained 20-hour day for me. I was slept roughly four to five. hours every night for three and a half years running this company for the first three and a half years, four years almost. And that's selling everything you own. So because I just started the company, I couldn't get an SBA loan. I couldn't get an SBA loan. I couldn't get a loan from a bank.

I had to ride the entire company on my personal credit cards. So my personal credit cards were maxed out for inventory. I sold any and everything that wasn't nailed down. To this day, I have a shadow box above my office, above my desk in my office in San Antonio. It's two tactical pouches. And those were my last two magazine pouches that I had left. I'd sold everything else on eBay. And I felt that was another sacrifice, right? So you have to sacrifice all the things that you used to care about, right? So in order to transition into a new life, I sold every firearm, and I'm a firearm enthusiast, obviously, because black rifle coffee. I sold every firearm.

I sold two houses that I had collected. I'd sold my equity in another company. Everything and anything I could sell, it was all sold. Sell everything you own, build your inventory, and then keep your fingers crossed, right? What are you paying yourself at that point? My first year in business, I didn't pay myself anything. And the reason for that was I had, what I was doing was I had a part-time job. So my part-time job on the other side was paying me $4,000 a month.

And so I was living on $4,000 a month, which there was enough there for rent, groceries, insurance. There's just enough there to get by. I was still on the National Guard. So I was doing, you know, $500, $600 a month from the National Guard. So I was living on less than $5,000 a month. And I did that for the first almost, I gave myself $60,000 a year in 18 months after I had started the company and I'd made over $4 million. Jeez.

Were there moments where you thought about calling it quits? No. No. Not one. Not one day. Not one second. I've never had a glimmer of doubt, which is, it's good because, you know, it's, People asked me that when I went to Special Forces Assessment, Selection, or the Special Forces

Qualification course, not one day to ever think about quitting. Like, the forced, there's a forcing function in these things, which is the forcing function would be the only way I would have quit was if I would have looked around in my life and there was nothing left to sell. And I had a really hard time figuring out how I was going to feed my family. Yeah, I would have probably thrown in the towel, depending on if I could have found some other way. But if I decided to do something, I just try to do it. And then the forcing function is your body will quit before, if you quit, then that's a mental

issue, right? If your body physically quits, you don't have a choice, right? So that's the way that I look at things, you know, I'm not geared for that. I just, I can't, I can't really quit. Now, you can't chop away a bunch of other stuff to get to your ultimate goal, but there's never a time where I was quitting. I grew the company by year two. I grew at my second year. We did over $8 million revenue. I'd still only taken less than $60,000 out of the company at that point. I'd made almost $10 million. Early on, what do you think were some of the biggest leadership mistakes you made? Yeah, these are, I don't know how to rank them, but I made some pretty good ones, which is my hiring process was flawed. I should not have hired some, like, I made some bad decisions hiring people.

Like, you should always check recommendations. You should always do background checks. You should always do your due diligence on people. I've had a couple of those bite me. You know, I had one guy specifically who came in, sounded great on paper, great resume, you know, come to find out he'd been fired from every job that he had had in 10 years. and then he had filed lawsuits against every one of those companies. So what do you think that he did in my company?

Golly. So were you just moving? Were you moving so fast with the growth of the company that you didn't take the time? Well, and you have this like ego again, right, where it's like, oh, I'm really good at reading people. This guy's a good person. Okay, but validate. I'm a very crass. person too at times, you know, and I had been, I had grown up in war zones and team rooms and

military style of leadership works, but it's not for everybody. So, you know, you really have to conform to the environments that you're trying to manage people. You know, I've termed people that's probably incorrect, you know, or it's like, okay, today's your last day, you know, conversations like that. And I think from my perspective, the leadership of the company, there are definitely times in the last five years I could have been more professional. And when I say more professional, I could have done a little bit more research around specific departments and divisions that I needed in the company in order to manage them more effectively. So HR was my weak spot for years. It was just really difficult for me to manage recruitment, hiring, retention.

HR was such a hard position for me. And I've learned. You know, I've learned. I've learned. I've learn the hard way, which is, you know, you once you have a, you know, a couple EEOC complaints under your belt and a couple lawsuits, you're like, okay, well, I'm going to change. I'm going to change the way I do business. We might want to fix this a little bit. Yeah, I'm going to fix this. I'm not meant for general consumption sometimes. So it's, it's, I could have done a much better job early on in that. But there's got to be a part of it because you were growing so fast. And, I mean, there's no way something grows that fast in multiple locations without developing people as a priority. And so you at least had enough of the right people on board to get this thing up and running.

But I think, I mean, it can almost be hard to guard against that corporate, stale, cold feeling if you're growing so fast. We've experienced that here, but I've also seen small business owners experience that. I was higher, I think, 523, four years ago here at Ramsey. and we are now at 950. Wow. So we're growing really, really fast, just like y'all are. And so any business that's growing fast, you start to have this recognition. We need system.

We need process. There's got to be a correct way of doing things. But at the same time, we're constantly fighting and scratching and clawing to keep a little bit of the scrappiness that got us here. And like, we don't just want to become some corporate bureaucratic nothingness, right? So how do you fight that battle or how do you wrestle with that tension? It's one of my primary goals within my HR department. So I put that as their goal, which is the way we define it is it's kind of a soft mentality.

So we have to maintain scrappiness. And a lot of times what I do is I just inject people into the company to throw a little bit of chaos. So because it's good for a company to have to solve those problems, which is all, all hire guys just based on a resume and throw them in a department and say he's yours to manage now. And these are not, I've got a few guys out here. These are former like force recon Marines that worked for the CIA. These are these are alpha meat eater guys that are not their break glass in case of war type people. So former sergeant majors and, you know, seal.

And you're literally just dropping these guys in there just to say like, okay, let's see what this does for a second, right? Yeah. And so how does that go? What does that do for the organization? One, it causes a little bit of disruption, which people would say, yeah, you shouldn't do that because it's disruptive. And I say, yeah, but a little bit of chaos is actually, like, what we do here is disrupt. Like, that's what we do. and it gives them management problems that they have to solve in order to, one, develop their

management technique and style. Two, it injects people within the DNA that are directly representative to the way the company was founded. And what that continues to do is people have to go, okay, I've got to solve this problem and put this person into a position where they can create value for the company. And, oh, by the way, they probably don't know how to do. what I'm trying to get my entire team to do. So I'm going to have to train them, which is one of the best ways you can actually start

to learn your job is by training new people that don't know how to speak your language. It's actually, it's a brilliant way to learn your job more effectively because you have to explain it in I get it over and over and over again, which is when you start to explain things to a person that doesn't have a clue what you're talking about, now you have to get into all the little details that you forgot about. And it forces you to kind of go back to go forward. So for me, I'm injecting people into different departments. I've got a great relationship with a lot of the, I should say, joint special operations

command. I've got guys coming in from other units. They'll come into the company. They'll work with us for a certain amount of time. I've got some very reliable creative problem-solving techniques with, like, University of Austin, a few of these other places. So I'm constantly kind of throwing things in in order to make this forced outcome, which is it sometimes pisses people off. You know, it does. I want him to get a little bit mad.

I want him to get a little bit salty. I want them to kind of dig deep on it. I have open and candid conversations with people where this is where, this is where, you know, you disappointed me. This is where you failed. I don't know how many bosses have these conversations will or call somebody on a director or department level and go, you failed on these three things. And I need you to either fix it or I need you to find your way out. And that's what was remarkable to me about visiting the plant was, I mean, I know you're not able to get there. I mean, you're certainly not there 100% of the time. And you can't be there all the time. You just can't. It's not possible. I know you're on the

phone with them a lot and y'all do video calls and all that. But what's amazing to me is, nevertheless, that culture that you're talking about where you hold people accountable, you're willing to call people out. Right. Like, I was blown. I literally asked them the question, like, how does that happen? Because Evan isn't here right now and you're still doing it. Were there some intentional things you did early on as different locations were getting established to make sure that that culture was carried on with the company as it grew? not intentionally. I can't say that that was an intentional process.

I think it's just a management style, right? So for me, I have a very specific management style, and then I only attract other managers like me that exemplify the same management style. And my school of management, I actually have a more refined process for managing manager development training. and it's very military.

It's built on this command directive type thing where this is the commander's intent. We're going to move with commanders intent and design our mission and then continue to push each and every individual towards the mission. And I think that people, what will happen is when you have a group of managers

that are managed by somebody like my personality, they start to take on the specific management attributes or personality attributes at times because they're emulating the culture, right? And I think it wasn't something that I was intentional about. I think it's just I'm not a very muted personality. So I think they just continue to take on those types of personalities. And two, I think the other, the junior guys in the company

that have spent a lot of time around me know that's the way I behave. So it's relatively accepted behavior. behavior across the board. And then HR is there to pick up the mess. What's the thing you're most excited about right now? We've just been working so hard on the media that we put out. We've got an incredible team with across the board. I couldn't be more proud of the company just in general, but we've been working so hard at really challenged and we've kind of accepted that as we want to be the best at generating media, commercial-based content of any beverage company in the industry. That's what we're trying to accomplish.

That's what we go to work every day doing. So I'm really excited because we've got some incredible content that we're releasing over the next eight months. We've got a ready-to-drink coffee option that's rolling out to all the convenience stores. So I'm so excited about the blend of media and product that we're pushing out. It gets me up every morning at like five, and it's just like I'm so fired up about this stuff that it's even hard for me to just sleep because I'm so excited about what we're rolling out and how it looks and how it feels.

And it's such a level up for us. Like we've got these cinematic cameras that we're using now. We've got just a more professionalized team. And we're writing and developing more music. and it's just like everything is kind of firing in this sequence where you know I guess kind of one of my other terms is you know when you split an atom you can destroy a city or power one right so you can either put put the lights on or you can destroy it for us in the media department we have so much power and you see fractions of what's actually represented in how much

creativity the team has because we've been challenged to create the correct direction and the correct assets to put all the creativity in. I think people are going to be blown away by what we're doing in the next nine months. And I think the most exciting thing about it is it's done by us. You know, we're making this stuff. And, you know, we're not outsourcing these big commercial entities at a half a million dollars a pop or something, right? It's like, it's us learning how to use the cameras and the audio equipment and, you know, we're editing. And it's just so incredible to see the media department just like crush it. And, you know, in my coffee side with the products that we're releasing, man, those two things, coffee and content, they fire me up.

And I could not be more excited about what we got for the next literally. I'll be so excited for the next two and a half to three years because I, I've got so much work on my plate for the next three years that I've got my work cut out for me. I know what I'm going to do every day. There's zero questions. Now it's just a matter of like, okay, I have to sleep. Got it. All right.

I got to sleep. I got to find some time to sleep in there. So we look up in 18 months and what is the impact that that media has created within our country if it was an absolute home run for you? What will happen, I think, is like corporate America is going to, corporate beverage company America is going to look around and they're going to go, who in the hell are these guys? That gets me so fired up, Evan. I'm so pumped about that. They're going to go, oh my gosh, who in the hell are these guys?

Like, where did they come from? Because they're, I mean, they're just like a bunch of old pleated front docker wearing, you know, back slapping, back. Act nine dorks, and that's what they do, right? And they're going to roll out of bed one day, and they're going to go, man, we got to buy these guys. That's what's going to happen. And they're going to come knocking on my door, and I'm going to tell them, ah, give me like another seven or eight years and I'm going to knock on your door.

That's exactly what they're going to say. And they're going to go, you arrogant, bleep, bleep, bleep, and then I'm going to do it. That's what's going to happen. And they're going to roll out of bed. They're going to go, who are these guys? I'm going to have a bunch of suits coming in and knocking on my doors. And I'm going to stiff arm every one of them. I'm going to take the company public.

And my shareholders are going to be my customers. I'm going to galvanize my entire ecosystem. It's going to be too late. It's already too late, to be honest with you. It's too late. It's already passed. They're gone. There is not going to be a guy that's going to knock on my door from JAB

that owns like Pete's or or Duncan or any of these other, you know, iconic companies that are owned by a German holding company, by the way. There won't be one of them that will not be incredibly surprised and almost overwhelmed with how far behind they are. And they will not be able to spend enough money to attract the appropriate team to catch up. Man, I get so hyped about that. And I feel like we just found our brother coffee company here at Ransy. We've got, we're on a mission right now. I don't know if you've heard about this, but we're on a mission right now that we want to change the toxic money culture in America by so affecting the way financial institutions do business that they're forced to change their strategy is what we are saying. I love this conversation and I love everything about that vision you've laid out for the next three, five, ten years.

years because it essentially says that if you don't like the way things are going in your country, that's what small business is about. And you have the ability to take on the industry. You have the ability to take on the man. And I think that's what this country has founded on. That's why, I mean, we believe small business is the backbone of America for that very reason, because America does not exist on Wall Street. It exists on Main Street. Oh, man, Evan, that gets me so fired up. I want to go run through a brick wall right now. So whenever we were in Manchester, and this is how we'll close out, I was talking to one of the girls that works at the front desk. Her name was Ali.

And I asked her, I asked her if Evan was sitting here across the table from you, what would you want to tell Evan? And she said, this gets emotional for me. She says, before my husband worked for Black Rifle, I always had a steady job. I was in hair. So you can find a salon anywhere. He was in the oil field. We bounced around and bounced around and did that stuff. And then Lars started working for a black rifle.

And it just kind of gave us that steady stability. And so it's like, I can't tell you how much it's changed my life. So that's why I get so emotional because it's like if I had a minute to talk to Evan all by myself, I would probably just like tell him, thank you really from the bottom of my heart. because he's made my life better. What does that mean to you as the leader of this business, Evan? One, I think that warms my heart. I think primarily, you know, I think defining the feeling it warms my heart.

Two, it also says I'm accomplishing what I'm trying to accomplish. And I continue to talk to people in the company about this, which is you need to leave the home that you love for the company that you love and you just have to create the flywheel, right? So I think I'm going back to Collins, right? It's flywheel effect. I'm like, you have to create the flywheel and your own life in the positive direction. And it's truly the power of that is all driven on love, which is also a value of black rifle.

And the flywheel in your own life continues to spin faster and faster in a better direction and more effective direction. So I think it makes me proud to think that what I'm. putting out is not falling on deaf ears, one and two, that it's actually having real impact in the exact impact that I'm trying to have within my employees' lives. Well, we're grateful for the work that you're doing for the way you're leading your team, for the way you're leading your customers. We're grateful for your time today. So thanks so much, Evan.

Thank you. I couldn't have been happier. This is a great conversation. Hopefully I can come back on another one or have you guys online. We're going to do it in 18 months whenever you're. taking down Starbucks and pizza and Dunkin' Donuts. This is going to be awesome. Oh, man.

I just had an absolute blast talking with Evan. That guy is the real deal. I swear, we almost talk for nearly two hours. And I think the reason why I like him so much is there's zero pretense with that guy. Like, he kind of reminds me of Dave Ramsey in that way and that he's not really going to respond to what's politically correct or what people want him to say or what people expect him to say. He's going to say what he believes is right.

And that's the way his company operates as well. And I think the reason why they're able to do that is they're crystal clear on their values and their sense of purpose. Well, that's one of the reasons why our team created the mission statement mapper. This is a free resource that walks you as a business owner through the creation of a single statement that defines why your business exists. It creates great guardrails for you to make sure that you are operating as a business with an absolute crystal. clear sense of purpose. So if you want to take advantage of this free resource, just text the word mission to 33444. Again, that's the word mission to 33444 or just click the length that's in the show notes. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Entree Leadership podcast. If you did,

please give us a five-star review and tell your friends to subscribe. For a chance to win a $25, Amazon gift card, you can review this episode by clicking the link that's in the show notes. And be sure to follow us on social media at Entree Leadership. This episode was produced by Tim Hull, and it was edited and mixed by Will Rudder. I'm Alex Judd, and on behalf of the entire Entree leadership team, thanks for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon. If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like the Christie Wright Show. Hey, y'all, I'm Christy Wright.

You know, it's so easy to feel stuck. You live life, just going through the motions, doing dishes, doing laundry, carpool lines, and a whole list of commitments that bring you no joy. We say yes to what everyone expects of us, and we have no energy or time for what we want. And let's be honest, most of the time, we don't even know what we want. Why do we live like that? God certainly never called us to. You know, I believe that the life God has for us is bigger and more amazing than any of us realize.

That's why I want you to check out the Christy Wright Show. Every week, we will fire you up to break through what's holding you back and inspire you to create a life you love and are proud of. Each episode will help you build confidence in yourself and the God that created you. To hear full episodes, just search Christy Wright wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to ramsysolutions.com slash shows.