50Pages: Recent Episodes
Zac Northup
50 Pages Project is a podcast series that tells the story of young Americans working to transform their lives and communities through entrepreneurship.
Tyr Symank is the special projects manager for the phenomenally successful Black Rifle Coffee Company. BRCC is unique in several ways. First, its management team is comprised almost exclusively of current or former members of the special operations community. Second, since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, unlike other companies that have gone out of business, Black Rifle's sales have increased 15%. Lastly, while experiencing triple-digit growth since 2014, it has given away literally tons of its product to members of the military deployed overseas, police and fire fighters here in the United States, and most recently, to health care workers on the front-lines of the pandemic.
After launching a FinTech company around 2012 that ended up not working out, BRCC's founder, Evan Hafer picked himself up, took the only money he had left in the world (somewhere around $1800) and got into the subscription gourmet coffee business. Over the last six years, that gamble has paid off in a huge way. While most of its revenue is, and will continue to be generated through online sales, Black Rifle Coffee Company just inked a multi-million dollar deal with Bass Pro Shops and Cabela's to sell coffee in their stores, and will soon be selling one specific product in Walmarts across the country.
It's been an amazing success, and Tyr Symank has witnessed much of it. This is his story, and the story of Black Rifle Coffee Company.
StandWatch Academy’s Innovation Builders Zoom Conference featured eight of the area's most dynamic young entrepreneurs as they presented their ideas to investors, peers, education leaders, and the larger business community. As participants in StandWatch Academy’s i3 Entrepreneurship Program, most of the speakers come from areas that are often overlooked by investors and business leaders. Individually, these young men and women are amazing. Collectively, they represent a future where the state’s economy is transformed by a vibrant class of young entrepreneurs who see a brighter future for the Mountain State.
Times have certainly changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but one thing is certain: The heroic doctors, nurses, physicians assistants and the entire medical community will save America. But eventually, entrepreneurs – innovation builders – will have to rebuild America.
We have to start preparing innovation builders of small businesses like never before. The new world of successful entrepreneurs will not focus on creatively disrupting global markets. Post-pandemic entrepreneurs will disrupt the hopelessness, fear, and panic that COVID-19 will leave behind on main street. Restarting a bakery, restaurant, welding shop, or IT services company will be far more disruptive for most Americans than the person who builds the next Uber. The impact of entrepreneurship must shift from scaling-up to world markets to scaling-down to main street USA.
Entrepreneurship is now a trade skill. People who take risks in rebuilding America aren’t entrepreneurs any longer, they are builders. They are innovation builders. And just like their great grandparents in the 1930’s WPA, they will reconstruct America, one business, one main street, and one town at a time. Our task is to create as many of them as possible.
This special edition of 50 Pages is the audio taken directly from the Zoom video conference. The video is available on YouTube if you prefer to watch rather than listen.
Bob Schmied is the Operating Partner of Atomic Provisions, a small restaurant group located in and around Denver, Colorado. Fifteen years ago the chain's founder, Drew Shader, launched, "the nicest seedy bar in the not so best part of Denver," and grew it into a restaurant group that now features great dining venues such as the Denver Biscuit Company, Fat Sully's Pizza, the Atomic Cowboy Bar, and their newest concept, Frozen Gold Ice Cream. Both Bob and Drew have been great supporters of StandWatch Academy and were actually featured in Unwritten, the documentary about our entrepreneurship program that was aired on West Virginia Public Broadcasting in 2019.
Like every restaurant chain in America, Atomic Provisions hasn't gone unaffected by the COVID-19 pandemic, but due to the company's excellent management, they are weathering the storm better than most. Their crisis management plan has allowed them to stay open, and even though they were forced to furlough all 240 of their part-time workers, Bob, Drew, or one of the other senior managers calls each employee every two weeks to make sure they're okay or need anything. I would say that's uncommon. So far, of the 240 furloughed workers, Bob expects all but four to be willing to return to work at Atomic once the restrictions are lifted. That says a lot about the positive culture that's been a hallmark of Atomic Provisions' management style.
Bob took some time to speak with our students about how great management can help small businesses work their way through major storms.
Neil Jorgensen grew up in Summersville, West Virginia. After attending college in Germany and West Virginia University, he earned a PhD in Mathematics and went to work for Intuit as a Data Scientist at its headquarters in Mountain View, California. A couple years later, wanting a new challenge, Neil left the security of Intuit and went to work for one startup that failed, but eventually landed at another new company called Skupos. Along the way, he gained some incredible insights into what it's like to both lose and land a job in one of the most intense job markets in the world. This is his story.
Ryan is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of UV. Ryan’s commentary on where the puck is going in higher education regularly appears in the Gap Letter, Forbes, TechCrunch, Inside Higher Education, Fortune, HR Dive, and VentureBeat, among others. He is the author of A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College (Ben Bella, 2018), which describes the critical importance of last-mile training and the emergence of bootcamps, income share programs, staffing and apprenticeship models as preferred pathways to good first digital jobs, and was named in the Wall Street Journal as one the Books of the Year for 2018. He is also the author of College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), which profiles the coming shift toward competency-based education and hiring.
Prior to UV, Ryan led the Education & Training sector at Warburg Pincus where he was the founding Director of Bridgepoint Education (NYSE: BPI), one of the largest online universities in the United States. His prior experience in online education was at Columbia University. From 2004 to 2010, Ryan founded and built Wellspring, a national network of boarding schools and summer camps for overweight and obese children, adolescents, and young adults. He began his career at McKinsey & Co.
Ryan received bachelor's degrees summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University, and his law degree from the Yale Law School.
While Ryan knows where the puck is going in higher education, he actually knows what to do with a puck because he hails from Toronto, Canada.
Isabelle Rogner grew up in the small town of Lewisburg, West Virginia. In 2016, she was about to graduate from Marshall University with a degree in international business and happened to attend a small meeting with a couple student leaders and Brad Smith, who at the time was the CEO of Intuit. The meeting ended early and as people filtered out she noticed that Smith wasn't in a rush to leave and was "kinda standing around". Not really knowing Smith, or the size of the company he ran in Silicon Valley, Rogner asked him if he needed any directions or help. He said since their meeting ended early, he was just killing time until his next meeting. In Isabelle's words, "So being the hungry college student I was, I told him I was going to go get a burger in the dining hall and asked if he wanted to come along. He said sure." Before lunch was over, Smith asked Isabelle to come work for him at Intuit. The company's recruiters called for an interview a few days later, and after graduating in May, the girl from small-town West Virginia started at one of Silicon Valley's most respected and successful companies.
Today, Isabelle is one of five product managers for Intuit's flagship program, QuickBooks. She recently did a Zoom video-conference with fifteen of our students. This is what she had to say.
Matt’s company, Combat Flip Flops is a small business that has taken him and his team of former Army Rangers into the public’s eye more often than most businesses of similar size. Going by his preferred nickname, Griff, he’s been featured in multiple business publications, did a TED Talk about his experiences in Afghanistan, and even appeared on NBC’s Shark Tank where he ultimately received funding from Mark Cuban. He’s done all of this without buying-in to the go big or go home mentality that a lot of successful small business owners dream about; he still runs his company out of his house in Seattle, Washington and outsources nearly all his key business functions to trusted third party service providers. Griff believes in keeping his business as successful, profitable, and as flat as possible. A good lesson for any new start-up. He's learned a lot of things that every new entrepreneur, or "innovation builder”, should consider as they launch a new business. Honestly, some of them are profound enough to write down on a sticky note to remember each day.
These days, I think it’s safe to say that the American diet has changed. With sit-down restaurants closed due to COVID-19 pandemic, for better or worse, carry-out venues and drive-thru windows have probably become mainstays in many people’s daily eating habits. But traditional brick and mortar locations are hurting. The revenue models that restaurants’ are built around can’t support the new carry-out only way of doing business. Buildings, rent, electricity, and wait staff cost money – a huge amount of money – and a handful of brown-bag orders going out the door every hour just won’t keep a once thriving sit-down establishment in business.
David Bailey knows this. As the co-founder of two very successful restaurant chains that were originally started in Fayetteville, West Virginia, the Secret Sandwich Society and Pies& Pints, David has years of experience starting and growing food establishments that redefine the culinary tastes of towns and cities around the eastern part of the United States. After selling most of his share in the Pies & Pints chain, he and his wife moved to Richmond, Virginia and started their second Secret Sandwich Society downtown in the heart of the city. Together with investors, they built out a beautiful brick and mortar space that, before the pandemic hit, was doing more than $2,000,000 in business and was projected to hit close to $3 million in 2020. But the Richmond Secret Sandwich Society wasn’t built to be a take-out restaurant. And David had to make the decision to temporarily close his doors and wait things out.
This past Monday, David spoke with our students about his history in the business, the current challenges he and his employees are facing, and has some great recommendations for those innovation builders who want to start their own restaurants businesses.
Here’s what he had to say….
I’m Zac Northup, welcome back to The 50 Pages Project.
A lot has happened since the last episode of 50 Pages. When the latest class of StandWatch Academy’s entrepreneurship program started in August of 2019, I was introduced to 75 students from four different schools who expressed interest in joining what we are now calling our i3 Entrepreneurship Program – by the way the i’s standing for ideas, invest, and impact.
So starting out, I had 75 students interested in learning the basics of entrepreneurship. After giving an orientation brief, by September, 52 students decided to attend our kick-off design-thinking workshop and began working on developing their own business ideas. By the end of December, we were down to 43. By the end of January 2020, our class had reached 21. It was about that time period, when we were floating around 50 active students when I came up with the idea for a podcast series called… you guessed it, The 50 Pages Project.
Today, eight months after that first brief in August, we’ve got 13 of the best student entrepreneurs in the state still working. These young men and women are smart, their ideas are awesome, and they are self-motivated. How do I know this? Well, first I have spent over 70 sessions at their schools working with each of them on their ideas, coaching them, and teaching them how to present to customers and investors. So I not only know them by name, I know their personal stories, their backgrounds, and their strengths and weaknesses. Things were going really well.
But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit and students were sent home… basically, for the rest of the semester. All of those school visits where I interacted with students, driving around 700 miles each week. All of that stopped in one day. The backbone of StandWatch Academy’s i3 entrepreneurship program was shattered, and I’ll admit, I was at a loss at how to proceed.
Within a few days, though, I decided to try and continue with the weekly sessions using LinkedIn as a messaging platform, and Zoom for the face to face contact. Now to be perfectly honest, given everything that’s been going on, after scheduling the first call, at best I was expecting five or six students to call in.
But here’s the amazing part; even though none of these students receive a grade for participating in StandWatch Academy, when I launched the Zoom meeting, 13 students and all their teachers logged into new remote classroom. I was amazed and humbled, but it made me think back about the initial interview.
Before the course began back in August, I interviewed each student and asked them one simple question: “If I walked out the door today and never came back, would you still want to start your own business?” If they answered yes, I knew they would have the proper motivation to make it through what some teachers have characterized as a college-level course. These kids are the brightest part of West Virginia’s future. And now that the economy has been so devastated by COVID-19 – current projections are putting the state’s unemployment rate at somewhere around 19% - they are still logging in, practicing their presentations, meeting with guest speakers and looking forward to the time when we can move on to Level Three of the course.
Now, the stimulus package that Congress passed and the president signed is huge. As a historian, I liken it to a modern day version of the Great Depression’s WPA program that employed millions of Americans through some of the nation’s hardest times in the 1930s. And we should not be deluding ourselves, the hit the U.S. economy has taken is just as bad as the economic devastation that my grandparents, and generation Z’s great grandparents lived through. It’s huge but the stimulus will save thousands of businesses. But here’s the truth, we will see thousands more small businesses that will never come back. It will take years to recover from this pandemic. Years. And that leads me to the most important thing we have to remember, as business educators:
The heroic doctors, nurses, physicians assistants and the entire medical community will save America. I have no doubt about that. But eventually, entrepreneurs – innovation builders - will have to rebuild America.
We have to start preparing these young builders of business in new ways like never before. Entrepreneurship is now an economic soft power that will save nations, and the go-slow rule book the education community has been using over the last few years is useless. We must produce innovation builders now. Not four years from now. Today. Our future depends on it.
So that’s one more task that I have assigned to StandWatch Academy’s i3 Entrepreneurship Program – in fact, I’m not going to call it an entrepreneurship program. It’s now an innovation builder’s program that will rebuild Main Street, communities, states, and nations. I’m going to keep using the same curriculum, but add more items focused on start-up finance and even courses that try to teach grit, leadership, and determination. That’s what it’s going to take. It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be hard. I’m going to need some help from the finance community. But I know we can do it. We have to do it. Our nation depends on it.
When I first developed the concept for this episode, I was in something of a funk. I had just returned from a meeting where the discussion centered on some of the issues that young people in West Virginia face after they leave school each day. It’s no secret that drugs, poverty, and a whole host of other cultural factors impact our kids, but what concerned me most that day were the stories of parents and caregivers who were actively discouraging students from seeking better lives and self-improvement. This led me to the topic of wounds. More specifically, I wanted to know what we are doing to our kids that prevents them from even considering new opportunities and possibilities.
Now, even though one mission of 50 Pages is to document the culture our kids have to overcome in order to become successful entrepreneurs, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to dedicate an entire episode to such a dark subject as wounds. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure I knew how to do it. But after one interview with the two young ladies featured in this episode, I realized that I may have been overestimating the power that negative cultural and environmental influences have on teenagers who have been toughened up by life’s circumstances.
Pepper McCorkmick and Rhiana Radcliff are students at Calhoun County Career Technical Center. Both are involved in the school’s fantastic culinary arts program. As you will hear, they have both faced different challenges that would shake even the strongest person. But these young ladies have a resiliency that has pulled them through difficult times. They carry scars from severe verbal and physical bullying, but still want to create a better life for themselves and the people in their communities. They’re smart, caring, funny, and I believe they can succeed in whatever they set their minds to.
Now, even though the podcast interview is about 30 minutes long, in real time, the three of us talked for a little over an hour in the school conference room. Pepper and Rhiana’s honesty, sense of humor, and strength even caused me to lower my guard and answer some of their questions about myself, and what motivates me to want to help students like them. I came away understanding that everyone can be wounded but only the best of us like Pepper and Rhiana move on.
Dan Davis is one of those guys whose life is made for storytelling. He and his wife, Hillary founded Kin Ship Goods in 2010 and have taken what started as an art gallery in Louisville, Kentucky, to a fast-growing quality of life retailer that sells merchandize around the country. In 2013, the couple relocated back to Hilary’s home in West Virginia, and now have a very successful brick and mortar location in Charleston’s Elk City district.
Dan credits most of their success to being stubborn. But even to a casual observer, Kin Ship has a lot more going for it than just the owners’ persistence. Over the years, Dan and Hillary have created a brand that very few small businesses can replicate. The unique designs of their t-shirts and other products have a quality that is just… well, cool. Walking into their store, customers are instantly drawn in and surrounded by a vibrance and authenticity that you just don’t get at other retailers. To say it’s appealing is an understatement. Kin Ship produces stuff that makes people feel like they are part of a club where only the people who wear the apparel, drink from the mugs, or wear the hats know the secret handshake and get the inside joke. This has won them an amazing amount of recognition and even landed them several product placements in Hollywood shows including The Mindy Project and Roseanne. Having shirts on the stars of those two shows alone produced tens of thousands of dollars in sales. All of this without Kin Ship ever spending a dime in promotion and advertising, or even making a phone call to try and talk someone into wearing their stuff. To this day, Dan says he doesn’t know how his shirts ended-up in the shows’ wardrobes. His designs are just that good. People thousands of miles from West Virginia want to wear it.
So, to see just how he does it, I sat down with Dan in his office at their store.
Every young person in West Virginia knows that one day, they will probably have to decided whether they want to stay home or move away. Home has a special meaning for people here, and the thought of leaving familiar surroundings is always a scary proposition, no matter where you are from. But often, the decision to stay or go in West Virginia comes down to family rather than anything else. As hard as it may seem, being close to family even trumps economic opportunity. Some people would rather struggle with unemployment and poverty rather than leave their homes and families. But not all of West Virginia’s young people have this issue.
McKenzie Ashworth and Elizabeth Beller are two students from Poca High School who have a lifetime of memories that draw them to their small town, but both also have ambitions that extend beyond the borders of the state. They are the types of students that concern state leaders the most. Intelligent young people who have a plan for the future that will possibly take them away and contribute to the so called brain drain of West Virginia’s youth. In order to help keep the McKenzie, Elizabeth, here we have to understand what is truly driving them away, and what will ultimately keep them here.