Start With A Win - Leadership Tactics Part 2 with Sergeant Major Kyle Lamb

Episode Date: August 17, 2022

Sergeant Major Kyle Lamb spent over 21 years in the United States Army, with 15 years of that time with Delta Force. He has participated in many conflicts, including Desert Storm, Bosnia, Iraq, as well as in the battle made famous by the movie Black Hawk Down in Somalia. Sergeant Major Lamb is the Founder and President of Viking Tactics, a tactical training and tactical gear business. He has also written a number of books, including his latest Leadership in the Shadows.Main TopicsWhy COVID was the best thing to happen to Kyle’s family, his business and his leadership (1:12)Our country was founded by business leaders and entrepreneurs. (7:12)How Viking Tactics began with shooting classes and grew into into tactical gear sales and leadership resources (9:06)Leadership and entrepreneurship tactics needed in seasons of change (11:32)How to live every day with a mission (16:30)Episode LinksLeadership in the Shadows: https://www.vikingtactics.com/product-p/vtac-lits.htmSig Sauer Academy: https://www.sigsaueracademy.com/instructors/kyle-lambConnect with Kyle:https://www.vikingtactics.comhttps://www.facebook.com/Viking-Tactics-Inc-170871879632771Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://twitter.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://www.instagram.com/adamcontosceo/Listen, rate, and subscribe!Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts

Hey, welcome back to Start With A Win. This is a two-part episode, and this is part two of that two-part episode. So if you haven't listened to part one, make sure you go back and listen or watch part one on YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts, and come back here and listen or watch part two. I hope you enjoy. Welcome to Start With A Win, where we give you the tools and lessons you need to create business and personal success. Are you ready? Let's do this. If you think you're just born with leadership, man, I feel bad for you because you're, you know, like the guy that's the smartest dude in the room. He's probably in an empty room, I guess.

That's a good point. Let me get a leadership lesson from you here real quick because I know we've been talking for a little while and kind of, and kind of pontificating about some of these aspects that really are so true. And I've heard you mention it before. Leadership wasn't invented yesterday. And it's just not like a 21st century philosophy. You go back to Plato or Aristotle, Socrates, and some of the human nature aspects of it. And then really the foundation of emerging with leadership is, I guess, fear from a bad situation or a challenge that people are put in. Let's go to 2020. The pandemic hits. And we saw – you've got – I love this.

This is probably one of the best leadership lessons of our generation because the whole world shut down. And you've got people who are in this massive economic upswing. Their businesses are doing awesome. You know, probably 2015 to 2017. 2017 to 2019, they're like, yeah, hockey stick growth. Money's flowing like crazy. It's just stupid leadership out there where people are just getting by. And then the pandemic hits, and everybody turns off the lights and goes home. And employees, followers, I guess, if you will,

that are looking for leadership are going, where are my leaders? And then we started slowly seeing this reemergence of leadership come out of that. What were you thinking during that time as a leadership instructor, a leader in many aspects of your world and life, and somebody who goes around and teaches leaders in major organizations? What I was thinking was it was the best thing that ever happened to me. In my entire life, other than my kids and my grandkids being born, the pandemic was the best thing that ever happened to me in my, in my entire life, other than my kids and my grandkids being born, the pandemic was the best thing that ever happened to my wife and I, because we were able to spend more time together than we've ever spent. We've been married 36 years and we'd never spent six months in a row together. And then we got to do that. We got to get our grandkids and

bring them little whippersnappers over for the first seven weeks of the pandemic. And their mom and dad come to visit, but we wouldn't let them out of Tennessee. We had them safely tied up here. Our business doubled during the pandemic. And I think the, you know, the reason it doubles because probably people were sitting there either with their money or with our money and spending it to buy tactical gear as they're sitting around. Maybe they were a little scared. I don't know. But we keep a very large inventory because of our dealing with law enforcement and military where they have to have the product. Like if you don't have it in stock, you lose the sale.

So we keep a lot of product on inventory. So we continued to ship. We saw other people struggling, but I also became aware that I don't need to leave my house to be a leader. What I mean by that is how can you positively influence people? Does the pandemic suck? Yep, it sucks. Did I lose friends? Yes, I lost friends. Did it the pandemic suck? Yep, it sucks. Did I lose friends?

Yes, I lost friends. Did it crush some people? Yes, it did. But guess what? We've got to figure out how we come out of the end of that. And being negative does nothing to make you more successful. There's no way that you can show me somebody that's a super negative person that they've had life success.

And life success is not business success. Life success is, you know, what's your legacy? If your legacy is that you are the CEO of some company, man, I feel really sad for you. Your legacy should be what you leave behind, which is, were you a good person? Do you mentor people? That doesn't mean you have to have children. That means that, you know, if you do have children, mentor them. If you have grandkids, mentor them. If there's other people that you can mentor, you know, do that.

So I don't know. I don't know if I answered your question or not. Other than it was a rude awakening to me that I could be, I could work in a different space. And man, I loved it. I mean, I absolutely, and I'm still trying to maintain that. I really like not being around people. So that's a, that's probably a plus. And I say that kind of tongue in cheek. I love going on the range with law enforcement, military people, civilians. I love that. But you know, the other night we're in downtown Nashville for the fireworks. And I don't love that. I love the fireworks, but just stay away from me, you know,

just give me my, give me my space. And then they had a checkpoint set up to get into downtown Nashville. So you had to, you know, drop your gun and your knife out of your pocket before you could go downtown, which I just normally, you know, normally my rule is if I can't have my gun with me, I just don't go to that place. But there I had the grandkids who were like, yeah, we're going to go. So I went back and ditched my blaster and went in there and did it. But I did not care for that much. But anyway, that's a long, kind of a long version of what the pandemic did.

But I think that there were people that they, what'd they call it? Those that they needed. Oh, essential. Oh, essential. Yeah. Well, here's what we ought to do. there were people that they, what'd they call it? Uh, those that they needed, um, Oh, essential. Oh, essential. Yeah. Well, here's what we ought to do. Then fire everybody. That's not essential. I mean like immediately if, well, if you're not essential, then why do we even have you as part of our team? Right. Let's, you know, that, that was a completely ridiculous, uh, I don't know. It was just weird, but anyway, sorry. No, you're, uh, you're, that's an interesting concept because we were looking at it. I was – and housing is deemed essential. So in the real estate space, I was writing letters to senators and governors and everybody else saying, hey, you can't shut down everything in the economy.

We have people that are homeless because they're in between transactions. Every real estate transaction has multiple others tied to it where it's like dominoes and you get the pandemic hits and they're like, OK, Monday, nobody's doing anything. And everybody's going, well, wait a sec. I don't have a house on Monday. And there's a moving truck sitting in front of some place that needs to be moved in. And who knows what else is going on? The electricity needs to be turned on. That's a good question.

I mean, what's essential and what's not essential and who gets to deem that other than, I guess, the CDC or something like that at that point, which, you know, that's another discussion that could get political. Well, yeah. And then not to be political, but we should just, we should just look at it this way. Have you ever had a job? Yeah. Have you ever, have you ever had a job? Have you ever run a business? Do you know what it's even like? No, you haven't. Okay. Then guess what? We're going to go to somebody that has, right. Okay. Let's go to somebody that's run a business, and they're going to be in charge of how we deal with businesses when we have a pandemic or a war or whatever it might be.

But let's not deal with some talking head. A lot of people want to say, oh, the leaders in D.C. I must have missed it because I haven't seen a bunch of leaders in D.C. in years. So they're elected officials, but that doesn't mean they're leaders. So where can we go for that leadership? Let's go to common sense people that actually have done this. And how do they you know, how do they deal with it? And I would I would even go out on a limb there.

Military and law enforcement, you are not who I'm talking about. I'm talking about people that have run a business. If you're in the military, you're part of the welfare program, just like I was. I mean, same thing with law enforcement, whether you went to work or not, you got paid. Well, guess what? That's not how it is in the business world. You don't go to work. You don't get paid. So you may not understand that as a law enforcement guy, or I may not understand that as a military dude, but the guy that runs a business understands that. And that's where, that's initially when our country was founded. Look at what those guys did previously. They were business

people. They worked hard for their money. You know, you look at even, I mean, any of those guys. Yeah, they were shopkeepers, blacksmiths. I mean it was – you're right. It was a hodgepodge of entrepreneurs that came together with thought to build what they see as a great entrepreneurial environment, capitalism and things of that nature. So real briefly, I want to talk about your company real quick. So you, you got out of the military, you started a Viking tactics and tell us briefly what, what does Viking tactics do and where can we find that? So just Viking tactics.com tactics is T A C T I C S.com. Some people spell it a little bit weird Viking,

like Viking, like the dude that raised a village. The, the thing that we started with was instruction. So we were doing tactical instruction, whether it was shooting or, or, or tactics,

you know, CQB type instruction. It morphed more into a, a gear, a gear business. And then I've written three books. Those are also something that we sell a lot of. We have a line of DVDs that we do. Those, we also offer streaming on those, but you got to go to gununiversity.com to get the streaming if you want any of those streamed. So that's kind of where we started. Now what I would

say is we're doing the same thing, but the leadership thing has expanded more because the Leadership in the Shadows presentation came out before the Leadership in the Shadows book came out. I had another military dude, a Navy guy named Matt Buscella. He shamed me into writing the book, and I'm glad he did because it was a great learning experience. But that's Viking tactics. A lot of folks say, well, how do we get in one of your classes? Go to SIG Sauer, the SIG Academy, and look on their website. Those are really the only open classes that I'm doing.

And you can get in there. Other classes, we've ran stuff for Dan out in your neck of the woods. But we don't do that very often. And normally normally we would leave that up to guys like Dan to book that. We don't have open enrollment on our website or anything like that. I often tell people, I'm kind of joking, you know, don't worry about finding me, I'll find you. But really, that's kind of how it is. If you want to get in, go to SIG Academy. If you want to order product, just go to vikingtactics.com and you'll see we have products for hunting.

We've got a lot of tactical products, law enforcement products, you know, things like that. Awesome. And it sounds like you have it in stock usually. So thank you. Yeah. If we don't have exactly what you want,

we have something almost identical. Yeah, it's going to be, it might not be the right color, but we have, we keep a lot to identical. Yeah. It's going to be, it might not be the right color, but we, we have, we keep a, we keep a lot of inventory. Awesome. So, um, I also want to ask you, you, you dig deep into leadership and you've been through so many different leadership concepts in chaos and horrible, crazy environments and changing environments. And we talked about the pandemic. We're facing a change in another cycle in change, I guess you could say. I don't know how else to describe it other than the economy's changing, interest rates, housing. Who knows if we have more

efforts with pandemics or anything like that? I don't know. But what do you have to say for those people out there who want to know what leadership principle should I keep top of mind right now in looking for this changing environment and being willing to adjust and do what I need to do with that? Well, I mean, you almost said it there. Like, you've got to be able to adjust. What's your inspiration? Well, your inspiration should be get up every morning and like you say, you know, get a win. Well, what's a win? Get a job. I'll tell you, you can drive to any place in Nashville and they will hire you. They will hire you right now. So if you're worried

about money, then go get a job. If you think that, you know, the, maybe you've been playing a shell game with, maybe it's real estate. Maybe it's, maybe you're, you're putting your money into the stock market. I mean, I like real estate because then I have something that I can actually touch. So, you know, if you, if, if real estate costs too much for you right now, well, then don't buy real estate, you know, put your money, well, then don't buy real estate. Put your money in the bank. Oh, by the way, if you put your money in the bank right now, what do they give you? They give you interest because the interest is up and the stock market's down and you only get mugged if you go downtown.

That was a song somebody wrote a few years ago, right? It really does apply. So I'm not a smart guy. So don't think that I'm some whiz-bang business dude. I'm not the business guy. I'm the leadership guy. And I think there's a big difference there. Some people have made a gazillion dollars in the stock market.

I can tell you that we put money in the stock market. We put money in Viking Tactics into us, my wife and I, running that business. By the way, my wife is the CEO of Viking Tactics. Our business is worth a lot of money. And our stock market stuff is worth about the same as it was when we put it in there. But what we've tried to do is put money in the bank, let it draw interest. And a lot of people would say, well, you never make any money with interest. It's free money. You put your money and it's completely safe as long as you abide by the laws.

Man, it's free money. So, yeah, I would say be be diversified. You look at what I'll use you as an example. You are like a you're like a monkey like I am. You can't keep your focus on one thing. Right. Would you agree with that? I would agree with that, Kyle. Yeah. So, so, so what does that do for guys like us? And this is where I was going to, I was going to talk about this earlier, but little boys are very busy, right? Some people don't like that. So they drug them. So they're not busy. And now we've ruined what I call an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is somebody that is always looking for what's next, what's here, what's there. Hey, I'm going to start. I got an idea. I'm a former military guy. I'm law enforcement. I'm going to start an online military products outfit. Oh, wait, you and I did the same thing. Yeah. And then what did we

do? And then you realize, well, maybe that wasn't for you, but it was for me because my wife was handling most of that while I was out doing the training, which was the next thing that you got onto. There we go. Consulting company. Yeah. So once again, get out there, consult with people, get out there. And one of the things I tell a lot of the guys that are getting ready to retire, they're like, what should I do? And I said, you should work. Well, yeah, but what should I do? Well, don't go to somebody with your handout and say, you owe me because they don't owe you anything. The only people that can do that are Navy SEALs because everybody wants to hire a Navy SEAL. But other than the SEALs, the rest of us military guys, we got to work for it. If you walk in and say, I'm a Marine, they're going to be like, okay, well, what are you going to bring to us? I don't have anything for you to break right now. Sorry. Yeah, it's fine to be a Marine, but you also have to offer them something. That's how this business works. You

offer them something and they give you this stuff called money. And then you can use that to buy food and shelter and do whatever you got to do. So get a job, get a real job and do it. And you, there's, there's a bazillion things that you can do. I love it. Create value, people. So you can be like my man, Mark. I mean, he's doing what he loves to do. He is. He's mixing this thing up and it's going to be amazing. And that's what he likes to do.

And guess what? He's going to make money doing it. Like I said, anything that you want to do in this world, you can do it. Exactly. But be prepared to not just do that. Do a few other things that is going to keep money flowing into your bank account. Totally. Hey, Kyle, I got a question for you. I ask everybody on this show, and I know you've got a great answer for this as well. Uh-oh. This is the big question here, buddy. How do you start your day with a win?

Have a mission. I love it. Every day has got to have a mission. You got to have a mission. And can I dig into this a little bit too? You sure can. Go for it. Mark is like, this guy won't shut up. That's what he's saying. No, I like it. So I've seen a lot of my friends struggle. And a lot of them have struggled to the point of taking their own lives. That's absolutely tragic. So why did they do that? Okay, there's mental issues. I get that.

There's depression. You know, where does depression come from? I don't know for other people, but for me, if I don't have something to do, a mission, if I don't have that, I start to go down a bad path. Now, what is that mission? When I went to bed last night, my mission was I was going to get up. I was going to do the Kung Fu workout with my grandkids for four miles, which if you haven't been beat up by two young kids going through martial arts training as you try to walk for four miles and run and do all this stuff with them. It's a pretty good workout. And so they're putting the wood to grandpa as we're going down the trail. It's awesome. And I'm fighting back. I can defend

myself. But then I said, and I'm going to be on this podcast. And my mission was to focus on, okay, what can I do to be positive? Because I want to be on this podcast. And my mission was to focus on, okay, what can I do to be positive? Because I want to be a positive influence on people. This doesn't just, you know, this isn't like, it doesn't just happen. You've got to think and you've got to pray to be positive because guess what? There's this dude that sits on your shoulder that's not good. And he's trying to push your head down and make you do something you're not supposed to do. Whereas if you'll, and for me, I pray about it. If I pray about it and say, okay, God, I'm, I'm, I'm sucking right now. I need some help. Well, guess what? You're going

to get help. So that's one thing. And then the other thing I saw this question that yesterday, when I got an email from you and the first thing is have a mission the second thing is think about other people so a lot of times we get the world closes in on us and we say it's just I got it I got to get my mind right before I can help other people yep you know how you get your mind right help other people because you're gonna realize open your eyes to your community. Don't get off the internet, get off social media, go and talk to something that's actually a living, breathing organism that can talk back to you. And guess what? They might

be in worse shape than you are. And you talking to them today might be something that pulls them out from that. And guess what? You're going to fill your cup up by helping that person out. So have a mission and that mission should include helping other people. So that's what I would say. Thank you, sir. And Kyle, thank you for being on Start With A Win. You're an American, a hero, a warrior, and just a great leader and a great guy. So thank you for being on the podcast today. Thanks for having me. Hey, and thank you for listening to the podcast.

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