Chapter 3

VIOLENCE OF ACTION

Imagine you are on a plane flying at, say, twelve thousand feet. The flight is smooth; the view is great. You get out of your seat, step over to chat with a colleague. Just another ordinary day. Then you step over to the open hatch.

And throw yourself out of the plane.

I’ll never forget the first time I did this. As a new SEAL, I had lost a good friend, Mike Bearden, in a parachute training accident. Now it was my turn to be trained to skydive, and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a little voice in the back of my mind trying to talk me out of it. Another guy in my jump class let that same little voice get to him. “That’s it,” he said after taking one look out that open hatch. “I’m out.” He sat down again, and that was that. He wasn’t budging from his seat until we got back on terra firma.

I understood where he was coming from. It’s a sobering thing, looking out at the world from cloud level. We have an expression in jump school, “Why would you want to throw yourself out of a perfectly good airplane?” and it’s only partially a joke. There is nothing quite like the experience of jumping out of an airplane at twelve thousand feet. It’s not something you can ease yourself into or try out for a bit to see what it feels like before you decide to commit all the way. You can’t float a trial period, run a straw poll, or hire a focus group. You can’t test out a beta version.

All you can do is jump.

So I did.

The next moment I was in the air, with twelve thousand feet of empty space below me.

•   •   •

Years later, I thought back on that moment. It was the middle of 2006, and I was about to throw myself out the hatch of another plane, only not the kind that flies through the sky. After thirteen-plus years of life in the service, I was about to leave the military.

The past few months I’d been taking stock of things. As course master of the SEAL sniper program, I’d had a great career. But my fun meter was pegged, my knees were a wreck, and my back hurt constantly. (The life of a SEAL is not exactly easy on the body.) I did some simple retirement math: if I stuck around another seven years, which would put me at the requisite twenty years in (what it takes to receive a pension based on 50 percent of your base pay), or another twelve, putting me at an even twenty-five (which gets you 75 percent of base pay), I would be not only physically broken but financially broke as well. As a Navy SEAL, I had great income because of all the “special pays” added onto my base pay, but only my base pay would factor into what I got paid on retirement. In essence, I would get the same retirement as a navy cook. (No offense, cooks.)

There were guys who thought I was crazy to even think about leaving before I’d qualified for full retirement, even some who were angry at me for it. But I wanted a better life for my family, and for myself, too.

Still, it felt a lot like that moment when I gazed out the plane’s open hatch at twelve thousand feet. I was about to leave a known environment and structure with its fixed routine and black-and-white rules. I had lived my entire adult life in the military. Tomorrow morning I would wake up to find myself in a totally different world, a world where the only real rule was that there were no rules. I could understand and exploit that sort of environment as an unconventional warfare operator working in overseas theaters—but back home, in civilian life? Totally new territory to me. This must be what it’s like when you get out of prison, I thought. I was scared shitless.

Okay, Webb, I told myself. It’s a simple three-step process.

One: Open the hatch.

Two: Look out at twelve thousand feet of air.

Three: Jump.

I jumped. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.

•   •   •

SEALs are famous for their intense physical training, but what most don’t fully grasp is that surviving BUD/S and the rest of SEAL training is less about your physical ability and more about your mind-set and habits of operation. To a SEAL, there is no such thing as doing something halfway, or even nine-tenths of the way. There is only full-on doing. Storming the castle.

Violence of action is where front sight focus and total situational awareness come together in a moment of decisive initiative, swift as a bullet and just as deadly. Do your homework, take every factor into account you possibly can, focus unwaveringly on your target—and once the instant for action appears, act boldly and without hesitation.

General George Patton put it this way: “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”

There’s a reason they call a business leader the chief “executive.” Smart planning is important, but the crucial point is that you have to execute the plan, period. Wait too long in combat, and you’ll find yourself dead. Do this in business, and you’ll find yourself out of business.

To give you a sense of what I mean by violence of action in the context of business, let me walk you through some initiatives we began at Hurricane Group in our first few years.

•   •   •

Violence of action is burned into the DNA of Hurricane, right down to the name.

Although I did not adopt the Hurricane Group umbrella structure until the spring of 2013, that impulse we call “business by storm” was driving our operation right from its earliest days. My fledgling team and I launched SOFREP in February 2012. Within thirty days, we’d launched a second site.

Back in 2011, when I was working part-time for that other military site, I had a few guys who wrote for me. One of them, a former Army Ranger turned novelist and journalist, came with me to SOFREP. Jack Murphy was a talented writer and proved to be a golden asset to SOFREP; today he serves as our editor in chief as well as a roving reporter in trouble spots around the world. (More on that in chapter 4.)

The month before launching SOFREP, Jack and I went to the annual SHOT (Shooting Hunting Outdoor Trade) Show in Las Vegas and were surprised to find ourselves greeted almost like celebrities. We realized we had a significant following of gearheads from the blog we’d been doing, and we couldn’t serve them adequately in the pages of SOFREP. So in March we launched the Loadout Room (LoadoutRoom.com), a review site covering gear and the adventure lifestyle—“extreme reviews for the everyday adventurer,” our tagline goes. As of this writing, the site gets a few hundred thousand unique visitors per month. Not SOFREP-level traffic, but not bad.

It wasn’t long before we launched a third site, the Arms Guide (TheArmsGuide.com), as “the place to learn about all things firearms in a friendly and professional setting.” After the site had been up for a while, we started getting major pressure from mainstream advertisers who were nervous because of all the Second Amendment and gun violence controversy, so we let it lie fallow and stopped updating its content. Still, it kept getting a ton of traffic. Eventually, we reactivated it and brought on a dedicated writer for the site. Within two months, we took it from thirty thousand uniques to over a hundred thousand.

We launched a fourth. I noticed there was no Web site dealing authentically with military and law enforcement aviation. There were all kinds of fanboy-type aviation sites, but no serious aviation-focused site with a Spec Ops point of view. Aviation is one of my passions and the topic felt personal, so we started FighterSweep.com. We brought on board some really good writers who were also pilots and started seeing solid engagement in the site right away, especially from the active-duty community. One day the wing commander of some air force squadron commented on one of our articles, and it kind of blew my mind.

There were other sites, too, more than a dozen in all, some of which we stood up and then retired again when they didn’t take off. But it wasn’t just Web sites. In our first year, we also began launching other types of media initiatives, starting with SOFREP Radio.

Early in 2012, I was a guest on someone’s podcast, and when he saw the kind of audience we drew, he encouraged me to start a podcast of our own. So we did. In mid-June, we published our first SOFREP Radio podcast. It immediately shot to No. 1 in its category (government) on iTunes and stayed there. We’ve kept it going weekly, and it’s been in the No. 1 spot or somewhere in the top ten ever since. We’ve had a huge range of guests—Spec Ops vets, bestselling authors, prizewinning journalists, characters from Chris Kyle to Buzz Aldrin. As of this writing, we’ve got nearly 250 episodes online.

Then there was SOFREP TV. We started out that first spring with a video series, Inside the Team Room, that featured a group of Spec Ops vets gathered around a pitcher of beer, talking about their experiences. It was enormously popular and sparked a series of sequels and spin-offs. We did a Team Room series with SEALs, one with Green Berets, one with Army Rangers. We flew to Poland to shoot a piece with GROM, the Polish Spec Ops unit. We talked to members of the British and Rhodesian SAS (Special Air Service).

Then we decided to raise the bar on ourselves and relaunch our video offering as a paid service, the Spec Ops Channel. My goal with this one is to disrupt the whole cable-military-history-content space. In other words, to scare the crap out of Discovery Channel, Nat Geo Channel, and A&E’s History channel. As of this writing, we’re gearing up to launch in early 2017. We’ll see what happens.

And of course, no media company would be complete without a publishing branch.

In September 2012, we published No Easy Op, the first in a “World Report” series that covered breaking news as it related to military, intelligence, and foreign affairs. No Easy Op was a short e-book discussing the content and circumstances of a newly released firsthand account of the operation that killed bin Laden, itself titled No Easy Day. On the heels of No Easy Op came Ranger Knowledge (August 2013), Africa Lost (August 2013), The Syria Report (November 2013), Operation Red Wings (December 2013), Navy SEALs BUD/S Preparation Guide (April 2014), and The ISIS Solution (November 2014).

But the book that put SOFREP publishing on the map was our May 2014 release, Benghazi: The Definitive Report, which hit the New York Times bestseller list.

Most of the titles listed above we published with St. Martin’s Press (SMP). Ever since SMP bought my first book, The Red Circle, I’d had a close relationship with our editor there, Marc Resnick. At the same time, I was bringing a lot of military authors to Marc for their own book deals, including Mike Ritland (Trident K9 Warriors) and Nick Irving (The Reaper), who both became breakout sensations and huge bestsellers. After Benghazi (which we published as a one-off through William Morrow), we started talking with Marc about establishing our own imprint with SMP so we could really help our guys and have a solid outlet for these stories that needed telling. In 2016, we published our first book together under the SMP/SOFREP Books imprint, Raising Men, by my BUD/S teammate and sniper school training partner, Eric Davis, and had close to another dozen books in the pipeline.

But I wasn’t happy. It wasn’t enough. I felt we were still bottlenecked.

While I was in Europe for that fact-finding “vacation” in the summer of 2016, I read a handful of books, including Richard Branson’s Losing My Virginity, in which he talks about Virgin Records and the various distribution deals he put together. I put that book down and thought, We need to be our own label.

So that’s what we’ll do next. It’ll probably be the end of 2017 before I can hire the team to put behind it, but we’re going to become our own publisher. We’ll start with a hundred titles. And then see where it goes.

One more initiative: the clubs.

In November 2015, we had a company strategy meeting and pulled in the members of our advisory board to brief them on our plans and ask for ideas. One of our advisers asked, “Why aren’t you doing a gear club?” We had a huge existing audience coming to us and asking for information and advice on what to buy. We saw how well Birchbox and a handful of other box-subscription businesses were doing. Instead of just giving our readers advice and having them go buy from other vendors, why not do our own subscription box?

We knew absolutely nothing about this business model. That, of course, only made it more interesting. (It’s called “violence of action,” not “violence of contemplation.”) We launched the SOFREP Crate Club in January. By June, we were on a run rate to do well over $3 million in revenue, just on the box business.

So I said, “Let’s do books, too.”

People were coming to us asking for good titles to read. So we launched the SOFREP Book Club. This is not your typical discount-type book-of-the-month club. We pick books that we like, in some cases first run, hot off the press, and we also create a community around the books themselves and, periodically, a live experience.

We did our first live event in the spring of 2016, when we had Dick Marcinko, the legendary bad-boy founder of SEAL Team Six and author of the bestselling Rogue Warrior series, come speak to a packed house of SOFREP Book Club members. It was a great way to inaugurate the series. You can see highlights of Marcinko’s visit with us on the Spec Ops Channel.

So there you go. What started in February 2012 as a blog within a few years became a network of Web sites, a podcast, a video channel, a monthly gear subscription company, a book club community, and a publishing house. That’s how Hurricane Group happened: one part plan, ten parts execution.

Violence of action.

Get off the X

In the SEAL teams, violence of action typically means using the element of surprise to overwhelm the enemy to the point of immediate submission. Assaulting a compound in the Afghanistan hills, we would pour into that place like a tidal wave—kick open a door, toss in a flashbang (stun grenade), and have everyone in the room zip-tied and blinded by a hood over the head before a single one of them was awake enough to complete a thought.

The term “violence” in this context doesn’t mean busting people up or tearing around, breaking things. (No actual physical violence was used in scenarios like the one I just described, unless some foolhardy soul put up resistance, in which case he would simply get a muzzle pop! in the chest to quiet him down.) Violence refers to the speed of action.

Actually, to be more accurate, it’s not speed but velocity. Speed is simply doing something fast, but not necessarily doing the right things fast. You can be in a rush and screw everything up. (Speedy but ineffective.) Velocity is speed plus direction. In other words, not just fast action, but directed fast action. That kind of rapid, focused action is what would give us the edge in any assault operation.

It’s also one of our trade secrets at Hurricane. When we do something, we do it fast, typically faster than anyone expects, because we don’t accept industry norms. (Remember: norm = average = mediocre.) Not long ago, we had to put up a new landing page for a fairly sophisticated marketing initiative. The woman who was editing copy for us expected that we’d need a week or ten days to get it completed, coded, and live online. We had it up in two days. “I’ve worked for a lot of companies,” she told me, “including some major brand names. I’ve never seen anyone do something like that even half as fast as you guys did.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I’ve been pushing so hard for content.” For us, that’s normal.

I was talking recently with Hoby Darling, CEO of Skullcandy, who prior to Skull was an executive at Nike, and Hoby said something interesting about velocity. Years earlier, when he had worked for a small athletic-wear start-up, he saw that everyone in the company was afraid of Nike, this big monster company with all these resources that they didn’t have.

“Later, when I found myself running a division of Nike,” he said, “I realized we’d had it upside down. Now I was working for the big monster, and what we were all afraid of was the small start-ups, because we knew they could outmaneuver us and execute much faster.”

We have an expression in the SEALs, “Get off the X.” The moment you take fire, you want to get away from the point of contact. You don’t want the enemy targeting you; you want to maneuver around to where you are targeting the enemy.

Here’s how I see it, though: In business, the “enemy” is not the other companies in your field. Here, the real enemy is mediocrity and complacency. Blockbuster wasn’t destroyed by Netflix; it was destroyed by its own inertia and irrelevance. The digital revolution happened, and it failed to get off the X quickly enough to survive the hit.

Take the Shot

As important as it is to act quickly, here is what is even more important: to act, period.

During the stalking (stealth and concealment) phase of the Navy SEAL sniper course, students are trained to sneak up unobserved to within meters of their instructors, experienced snipers who are looking for them with high-powered optics, and take a shot, either a blank or, in some cases, a live round fired at a steel target. When I was the head instructor of the program, it amazed me how often I saw students make the stalk successfully, get within range, set up position for firing on their target with time to spare, but never take the shot. They would be sitting there in their FFP (final firing position), checking and rechecking their camouflage, going back over their mental checklist to make sure they hadn’t overlooked anything and were as sure as they could be that they would not be detected when they actually took their shot. And they would still be doing that when their time allotment ran out.

There is no “close” or “almost” here, only pass or fail. In the course, “fail” meant they were sent home, never to become snipers. On the battlefield, “fail” means someone dies.

In business, here in the civilian world, I see the same thing happen all the time. I see people trapped in bad jobs they hate, careers they’re unhappy with. They know what to do but fail to take action.

I have a friend I’ll call Dan, a software engineer, about fifty years old. Dan is always on the verge of doing this big thing. “I’m going to sell my rental property,” he says, “and get out and make a change.” He’s been saying this for three years. It hasn’t happened—and it never will, not unless and until he pulls the trigger. He’s a victim of his own paralysis by analysis.

Dan has been interviewing for a better job for a while, but so far nothing’s worked out.

I tell him, “Dan, you’re fifty years old. No one’s going to hire you. They’re going to hire someone younger for less. Why don’t you just buy a business and get out of this rut you’re in?”

He tells me he’s got some sort of tax thing going on with the IRS and he’s just waiting for it to get straightened out.

I say, “That’s just a bullshit excuse, man. Everything you’re saying is nothing but a smoke screen for the fact that you’re not taking action. You’ve got to pull the trigger.”

Dan is like a lot of people I see: making reasonably decent money—$150,000, maybe $200,000 a year—but in debt up to their asses and just getting painted farther into a corner. They know what they have to do. They just don’t do it.

I see this in entrepreneurs, too, like the graphic design shop owner I mentioned earlier. She has a business partner whom she leans on a lot, because she doesn’t really love the business herself. She wants out but feels stuck.

“Look,” I say, “it’s not a problem that this thing hasn’t worked out. I test things all the time that turn out not to work. I’ve stood up Web sites that have been complete flops. But you have to be able to say, ‘Okay, that didn’t work,’ and take action.”

Honestly, the best thing for her would be to just get out, right now. Walk away. But she won’t do it.

One of our Web developers who lives in the Philippines tells me how they trap monkeys in his country. They dig a hole and place a coconut in there. The monkey reaches into the hole and grabs the coconut, and once he’s grabbed it, his fist is too big to pull back out. He’s trapped.

All he has to do is let go of the coconut. But he won’t unclench his fist.

Remind you of anyone you know?

Make Action Your Default Mode

There’s a phrase from psychology that people sometimes use in business: “a bias for action.” That describes perfectly the SEAL mentality. Given the choice to do something or sit there, we’ll always favor taking action.

Just to be clear: a bias for action doesn’t mean that you always pull the trigger, in every situation and circumstance. That’s just being headstrong. There are times when the smart thing to do is to wait and watch. (Again: observation and reconnaissance.) Sometimes a situation needs a certain amount of time to ripen before you can see clearly what the right next move is. So no, having a bias for action doesn’t mean you shoot off your mouth at every turn and jump off every cliff you see, and it doesn’t mean making impulsive decisions.

It simply means that taking action is your default mode. That when you’re given a range of options, your first choice is to act rather than sit back. Which puts you in the minority, because most people have a bias for inaction. (Inertia = mediocrity = the Law of Most.) By having a bias for action, you have an automatic edge over everyone else in the field.

Although I’ve had a rocky relationship with my dad, he has also inspired me in many ways. His dogged self-taught entrepreneurialism is one; his bias for action is another. He and my mom talked for years about taking the family on a boat and sailing around the world. So what; lots of people talk. Only he didn’t just talk. He said, “I don’t want to be the guy who keeps talking about taking this sailing trip but never actually takes it. I’m going to untie the boat and sail away on the journey.” And son of a bitch, he did. Suddenly we were all out on the Pacific, heading for Tahiti.

This is what I learned from my father: untie the boat and go.

A bias for action means that your preferred way of learning is to learn through doing, rather than to try to get the learning done before you start the doing. In every one of the initiatives I described above, from our weekly podcast to our monthly Crate Club to our paid TV channel, we’ve started out not really knowing anything about how to do it. Not because we’re brash and impulsive, or that we act without forethought or any preparation at all, but because we have a very high preset of expectations.

My time in the SEAL teams expanded my view of what is possible. In the teams, you quickly realize that most people have preset limits on what they believe is normal and possible and that most are capable of at least three to four times the output they think they are.

My guess is, by virtue of the fact that you picked this book up and have read this far, that includes you.

Create Action-Focused Work Habits

For my twenty-sixth birthday on June 26, 2000, I got something that is to this day one of my most prized possessions: a certificate stating I’d successfully completed the Naval Special Warfare (SEAL) scout sniper program. The signature on that certificate reads “Captain William H. McRaven.” Captain McRaven was on hand to officiate.

Fourteen years later, McRaven, now a four-star admiral, delivered the commencement address at the University of Texas, in a widely circulated speech called “If You Want to Change the World.” In it he talks about ten lessons he learned in the course of SEAL training that he offers up as behaviors that can change the world. The first is this: Every morning, make your bed.

This is the man who organized and executed Operation Neptune Spear, the Spec Ops mission that killed Osama bin Laden. A month after giving that address, he was appointed commander of SOCOM, the entire U.S. Special Operations Command. When this guy talks about changing the world, he’s not just making noise. (The whole speech is worth watching. Just google “McRaven make your bed.”)

His point? If I look through your bedroom and poke around your kitchen, I don’t need to see your financials, because I already have a pretty good idea of what kind of shape your business is in. The Buddhists have an expression: “How you do anything is how you do everything.” How you manage the smallest mundane details of your life will add up to your success—or failure—on the largest scale.

Winston Churchill ran the war effort in an underground complex called the Cabinet War Rooms in London. You can still visit the war room today, and when you do, you’ll see his desk, preserved in his office. On it sits a box with a label that says, “Action This Day.” Notice, Churchill didn’t have an IN-box. He had a TODAY box. He also didn’t clock out at five in the afternoon. Didn’t matter if it was midnight, or two in the morning, the man didn’t leave his desk until he’d handled the last thing in that box.

Develop the habit of doing it now. Refuse to let yourself procrastinate.

Never Use Money (or Lack of Money) as an Excuse

I hear people talk about this great idea they have that would be a huge success, if they just had the funding to get it off the ground. Worst bullshit excuse ever. What makes this hackneyed rationale so destructive is not that they say it but that they believe it.

Money, or lack of money, is never the problem. It’s what people use as an excuse to avoid facing the real problem, which is unwillingness to take action.

The most surprising thing to me about financing in business has been how insanely available it is. The Small Business Administration (SBA), for example, presents a low-risk way to borrow money from the government to buy or start a business.

A few years ago, I needed some working capital to invest in a few key personnel I wanted to hire to help take us to the next level. I went to a billionaire friend in the city and explained what I wanted to do.

He listened to my pitch, nodded his head, and said, “Okay, that all sounds good. So go borrow the money.”

“What do you mean, borrow the money?” I said. “I was going to raise it!” (From him, of course, though I hadn’t gotten to that part yet.)

He looked at me and said, “Brandon. Why raise the money when you can just borrow it?”

Shit, I thought. That’s a really good point.

I went to the SBA, got a loan application, forced myself to sit down and go through all the rigmarole of filling it out, and submitted it. Ninety days later, I had $250,000.

Yes, I hate filling out forms as much as you do. Get over it.

Not that working capital is always to be had at the snap of your fingers and filling out of a form. Sometimes getting the funding you need takes a little creativity.

I recently went to a bank looking for a line of credit to do a specific advertising campaign. This is a bank that lends to companies with box-subscription programs like our Crate Club.

“Wow,” the guy said after he’d finished looking our business over. “You own the business, you make a profit, and you’ve got great growth. However, we typically lend to companies that lose money but are venture backed.”

I said, “Why would you do that? They lose money.”

“Well, yeah,” he said, “they lose money, but they have venture capital behind them, so if things go wrong, we hope that the VC will save them.”

I have to admit I could not compute what the hell he was saying.

“But . . . we’re profitable,” I said. “We’re hitting all our numbers. We just want access to a little capital to grow this same program further. We know what we’re doing, we know it’s fully scalable, and we know how to turn the dial and make more money with it.”

“Yeah, I know, that makes perfect sense,” he said. “It’s just against our lending parameters.”

I said, “So wait. You’re saying you guys only loan money to companies that are growing but losing money, on a wing and a prayer that their VC backers will keep pumping money in if the shit hits the fan and it all goes south?”

He nodded and smiled. “Yeah. Pretty much.”

At this point, I felt as if I were in a freaking Ayn Rand novel. Some bureaucratic banking officer was telling me he couldn’t loan us money because our model worked and our business was thriving? (And we wonder how Wall Street crashed?)

The hell with it, I said. We’ll do it ourselves.

I gathered up all my credit cards and built a credit card system: we spend up to the limit, then pay it off and hit the next one. Using all my personal credit, plus one company business card, we essentially arbitraged ourselves up to spending a good half a million dollars on Facebook. Worked just fine.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that this would have been a smart thing for us to do in year one. It wouldn’t have. It makes sense now only because we’ve been in business for a while and we know from past performance that what we have going works and we’ve proven its scalability.

Be Confident—Not Arrogant

People often think of Spec Ops guys as people with a ton of attitude. You know: swagger, overconfidence. But that’s the movies, not the reality. In the real world of combat, swagger gets you killed, and probably a bunch of your buddies with you. In business, you may not get physically blown up, but you will get fiscally blown up.

SEALs do have a level of confidence that is unusual and unshakable. But that’s not attitude—the opposite, in fact. You have to be open-minded, to be able to listen. Be flexible. Adapt. I have very strong opinions, but I can also pivot on a dime and completely change my viewpoint, even a long-held opinion, if someone presents a clear and cogent argument for it.

When Chris Kyle published his memoir, American Sniper, he wrote about an encounter with Jesse Ventura that Ventura claimed never happened. The dispute ended up in court. Then Chris was killed, but if you thought that would end the lawsuit, you were wrong, because Ventura continued to press the suit against Chris’s widow, Taya.

The SEAL community was outraged. This guy is going to sue Chris Kyle’s widow?! It seemed as total a betrayal of the brotherhood as you could think of. For weeks, we had people venting on the pages of SOFREP and on our SOFREP Radio interviews. And then I did something I don’t think anyone on the planet expected.

I had Jesse on the podcast as my guest. Not only that, but I didn’t attack him.

To be fair (to me, I mean), I did hold his feet to the fire. But I was respectful throughout. Some of our readers were incensed with me, which I completely understand. Chris was a friend. Did I think suing his widow was the right thing to do? Are you kidding me? I thought it was as low as it gets. But here’s the thing: the man still deserved to be heard.

Having a strong opinion is one thing. I have plenty of those. (Ask anyone who knows me.) But having a point of view doesn’t mean you close your mind. If you don’t maintain a genuinely open and curious mind, if you don’t listen carefully to the cues and clues around you, to the input of your team and the advice of your best advisers, then your violence of action stands a good chance of being impulsive and/or misguided, which will kill you dead, and sooner than you expect. The only way you can employ violence of action effectively is by coupling it with a thoughtful, open mind and a reliable ability to put your ego in the backseat.

This isn’t easy. I’m not going to pretend I don’t have a big ego, and I’m also not going to pretend you don’t have one. That’s normal; in fact, it’s essential. Who ever heard of a successful entrepreneur without a healthy ego? It’s your passion, your drive, your ambition, and your aspirations that make this thing work. That’s all your ego.

But you can’t let your ego drive the car. You have to be able to put it, if not in the backseat, at least over in the passenger seat.

Then who drives the car? Your better judgment, fueled by total situational awareness—that is, by doing your homework.

Plan for Disaster So It Won’t Be a Disaster When It Happens (Because It Will Happen)

I don’t just jump out of planes; I also fly them. Flying is one of my three favorite pastimes (the others being skiing and surfing). I don’t own a car, but I own several planes. If you follow me on social media, you’ll see a constant stream of photographs snapped from over the Statue of Liberty, Manhattan skyline, and other New York landmarks.

Here’s the main thing you need to know about flying: it’s not a casual activity. You can hop in your car and drive off on impulse without thinking much about it. Doesn’t work that way with a plane. Climb into the cockpit of even a fairly small, simple plane, and you’ll notice it looks a hell of a lot more complicated than the dashboard of your car. That’s because it is a hell of a lot more complicated. There are a hundred things you have to check before you leave the runway. Preflight routine is no joke. If you don’t have backup plans for your backup plans, you can end up dead before the day is out.

Running a business is a lot like flying a plane.

Again—and this is worth repeating—violence of action does not mean being careless, acting on impulse, or committing to a course of action without forethought. If anything, it’s the opposite. The only way you can genuinely give yourself over to violence of action is if you are as prepared as a human being can possibly be. That’s why this chapter is preceded by a chapter called “Total Situational Awareness.”

Contingency planning is an essential part of any mission, because inevitably something will go wrong. In the 2011 raid on bin Laden’s compound, the team that went in suddenly lost one of their helicopters. That could have been catastrophic—but it wasn’t, because the SEALs had a contingency plan in place, which they executed. They didn’t waste any time running in circles or freaking out. They blew up the downed chopper, went on with the mission, and got everyone out of there without losing a single member of the team.

Whether you’re flying a plane, assaulting an enemy compound, or launching a business initiative, you want to plan for as many contingency outcomes as you can think of so you’ll know what to do when it all goes sideways. Because if you have to stop and think about it when it happens, you’re screwed.

You find this out really fast when your business is digital and depends on an uninterrupted online presence. Servers crash; hosting issues happen. At SOFREP, we learned really fast that it’s worth the money to pay for excellent hosting.

In 2015, Facebook tightened up its guidelines on who can advertise on its site. At the time, we had a landing page—not the Facebook ad itself, but only the landing page that you clicked through to from the ad—that featured a picture of a Gerber multi-tool with its saw blade flipped open. Facebook interpreted that as a weapon and killed our entire ad set. Not just that ad. Our entire ad set.

It was maddening. As far as we could see, we were in full compliance with its guns-and-knives policy. But without warning, we were shut down.

By this time, Facebook advertising had become a central plank in our business model, and at the moment we happened to be having a really good run. Having the whole ad campaign shut down cost us a lot of money. It took a few days to get hold of a representative, find out what the problem was, get it fixed, and get that particular ad back into compliance. It hit our cash flow hard.

I know we can’t afford to have that happen again. As I write this, in the fall of 2016, we’re preparing for the holidays, which we know are going to be big for us this year. We anticipate taking down as much as $50,000 a day in new revenue. We cannot afford to have the whole thing go dark. Going into this season, we knew we needed a contingency plan, so we designed a separate landing page, with its own URL and an alternative ad set attached to a different credit card on our advertising accounts with plenty of credit on it, ready to plug in and go. Now, if anything unforeseen goes wrong and something interrupts our ad campaign again, we can immediately switch on our backup system.

Understand: we’re not running these ads. The entire alternate system is just sitting there. We’ll most likely never use it. It’s like having a backup generator in case the power goes out. It took a lot of work to build, but it was worth it, even if all it does is sit there and we never have to use it.

By the way, this is one reason not to be afraid of failure: often failure, crises, and setbacks are the only way you gain that invaluable insight you need to anticipate future problems and design the right contingencies. Which is another reason an imperfect plan executed now is so vastly superior to a perfect plan executed sometime in the vague future. Your imperfect plan will lead to some gains and probably some setbacks, too—which will give you exactly the information you need to design a more perfect plan for the next move.

Don’t Be Afraid to Pull the Plug

One of the most important decisions you’ll ever make is the one when you say, “I’m pulling the plug—now.”

There is a world of difference between failing and quitting. The concept “quit” simply isn’t in my vocabulary. But failing? That’s something else entirely. You can’t be a winner, in my book, without having drunk deeply from the well of insight and humility that comes with failing. And while I don’t condone quitting under any circumstances, there are times when the smartest move is a tactical retreat.

I told you about the winners our company launched—the Loadout Room, the Arms Guide, Fighter Sweep, the Spec Ops Channel—but there were losers, too. I’ve stood up at least half a dozen new sites at Hurricane that haven’t worked out.

We created a site for military spouses called Military Posh. I still believe that space has potential, but at the time we couldn’t get it right, or at least not fast enough. My model is, start a site, do our best to build it, and if it doesn’t grow or we can’t figure out some way to monetize it adequately, then we kill it. Typically, you’ll know within six months whether or not a site is working. In the case of Military Posh, the page views just weren’t there, and we weren’t able to get the sponsors we needed. So after six months, we shelved it. We might find the right sponsor at some point; it’s still there, and we could have it back online in no time. But for now, it’s mothballed.

We started another site, Transition Hero, a military-to-civilian transition advice and jobs portal for vets, the only one of its kind on the Internet. We had a sponsor for a while, but we lost them and didn’t have the manpower to maintain the site properly without any solid ad revenue. I really believe in that concept and have high hopes that we’ll find a way to bring it back at some point. But I had to yank it. As with Military Posh, we took a loss on that one, but it wasn’t huge, because we hadn’t poured a great deal of investment into it.

For a while, we had a site called Hit the Woodline, a satirical blog in the style of the Onion, about military life. This was one of the few sites that we bought as an already-existing property and brought under our umbrella. I paid about fifteen grand for it, but we never found the right person to run it, so it, too, is sitting on the inactive shelf.

I spent even more on SpecialOperations.com, which I bought for forty-five grand. To be clear, that $45,000 outlay was just for the domain name. Once we owned it, we scraped the site clean and started over from scratch—analogous to buying a physical property for the land and road frontage, tearing the existing structure down, and rebuilding from the foundation up.

I worked with NavySEALs.com for a while, a site run by my friend and former SEAL Mark Divine. Mark is a great guy and it’s a fine site, but once we built the site and Facebook page to over a million followers, he took it independent again. I’ve tested out bringing other popular blogs into our network and monetizing them, too, but found that a lot of these smaller site owners had unrealistic expectations and lacked business experience, which caused problems. They thought they were going to make money right away, and it just doesn’t happen that way. Eventually, I decided it wasn’t worth the headache and that we should stick to investing in our own properties.

My point here is that every single one of these sites was a great idea, and I could have easily kept them going for a lot longer than I did—they could still be going today, draining our cash, our effort, and our focus—if I didn’t have a strong belief in recognizing when something’s not working and calling a tactical retreat. Fast.

My six-month yardstick generally works well for our Web sites, in part because the ongoing operational cost is not that high; if you were keeping open a retail storefront, it might be very different. Every project has its own tolerances and critical metrics. You have to establish your own key performance indicators, whether it’s revenue targets or traffic goals or profitability (or the break-even point) or whatever matters most, and decide ahead of time how long you’ll give it before you pull the plug. And then follow your plan.

You have to get off the X.