EverydaySpy Podcast - Day 4 | How CIA Skills Helped Me Build a Multi-Million Dollar Business

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

Find your Spy Superpower: https://yt.everydayspy.com/4iw8BGq It can be daunting when you have to do something new, something scary, or something for the first time. Luckily, there are very few things you have to do that haven't been done before. CIA taught me the value of trusting the process. Even though it may not be perfect, it's better than starting from scratch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I launched my company, Everyday Spy, in 2019, I had no idea what it would become. I really didn't know what I was doing at all. I was a career intelligence officer, and I transitioned from CIA into business intelligence. So all I had ever known was the business of finding and analyzing and collecting secrets. I knew nothing about business or entrepreneurialism or how to run a business, how to run a payroll, how to manage HR. But I was at church one day and a member of the congregation knew that I was former CIA and actually came up to me and started asking me some interesting questions about everyday life. But they wanted to know about whether or not I as a former CIA spy had the same problems, the same solutions, or if I had different ways of dealing with everyday problems. Things like how I parked or what I wore or what I carried in my wallet or what I carried in my

backpack. It was a really fascinating conversation, and they were so excited to hear what I had to say. So from that conversation was born this idea that maybe there's some way that I can share my experience at CIA, my experience as a spy with the world. And if I can do that and if I can do that well, maybe I can even turn that into a business. And that's how we got here in 2025 with a multi-million dollar business and worldwide fans and people who love to learn from us. and love to hear what we have to teach, who buy what we sell, and who want to work closer with us. It's a phenomenal privilege to be able to run a business doing what you already believe in. And for me, that is very much sharing spy education that breaks barriers.

My company is growing fast. It's grown by two to three hundred percent every year since it was launched in 2019. And this year doesn't look to be any different. In fact, our conservative estimates have us growing at about 220 percent this year in large part because of big projects that we have ahead of us. My wife and I wrote a memoir about our time at CIA and that memoir was picked up by a major top five global publisher, Hachette, and will actually hit bookshelves in September. The rights to our memoir have also been sold to a major television production company called Legendary Pictures here in the United States and they're already

looking at options to turn our story into a television network series or a mainstream movie. Now, yes, there's a part of me that's very excited for all of this. It's a part of me that that recognizes that I am going through a cycle of life that nobody really gets to experience. A major book publisher, a major television and movie production company, all this fancy talk and multiple viral videos and everything sounds like it would be really top notch. But what nobody talks about is the fact that when you're on the edge of success, you have no idea what the fuck you're doing. I have no idea what tomorrow will bring.

I have no idea how to make a movie. I don't know how to write a memoir. I had to learn all of these things. And then even as I learned them and executed them, I didn't know for sure if they were going to work. What happened is that I was perpetually in this cycle of always learning a new process just in time to execute that new process.

And that is actually something I'm very comfortable with because of my time at CIA. CIA used to have a saying for all of its new officers. And that saying was, you have to trust the process. You have to trust the process and move forward with courage. You never know if it's going to work. You never know if the process that was taught to you is a process that still applies today. The process that CIA used to fight the Cold War was the same process that they used to start the global war on terror.

But only after that we realized that that process wasn't working against terrorists, did we ever change the process? And now as CIA faces a whole new decade of challenge from China and North Korea and Russia, they have to figure out a new way to invent a process all over again. The fact is, there are always times in our lives where we don't know what else to do, but we know that we can fall back on a previous process. And I had an excellent mentor at CIA who used to say, it's better to have an inefficient process than no process at all. Because you can take something that's inefficient. You can take something that's not a perfect fit, and you can improve it 10 or 15 or 20 percent, and you can make something great. But if you start from nothing. If you start from scratch, the odds of you creating something that are highly

effective are very, very low. So you start with what you know. You start with what has worked in the past and you trust the process. And I will say that trusting the process got us through writing a memoir, trusting the process, got us through three years of legal debate with CIA so that that memoir could be approved for public dissemination. That process is what got us rights sold to a major publishing company, that process is what I will be executing throughout the rest of 2025 as I learn what it's like to promote and launch a book. I will be following a process to try to make that book a New York Times bestseller. Do I know whether or not the process is going to work? I do not. But because you're here with me, I am looking forward to sharing with you every step of the process

along the way and doing so with radical transparency so that you can see what it's like to feel the pain, feel the pressure, feel the excitement of having this much success in such a short period of time, knowing full well at any time the success might all come crumbling down. The book might be a flop. The movie might never get made. The TV series might never get picked up. I might never go viral on the internet again. And that is a reality of facing the unknown.

And that is why I will do my best to trust the process I have for now. moving forward and I hope you will trust whatever process you are following in pursuit of your goals and your ambitions also. Thank you so much for joining me for another spy journal conversation and if you want to know what it's like to see the world through the eyes of a spy, make sure you click on the link in the description below. Take care.