Chapter 6

ONE TEAM, ONE FIGHT

The sound of the choppers slowly drains away, taking the last of the day’s light and warmth with it. It is January 2002, and my SEAL platoon has been out in the mountains of Afghanistan since dawn with a twenty-man marine security team and a handful of techs, doing a one-day search-and-destroy sweep of the notorious al-Qaeda cave complex at Zhawar Kili. Those choppers were supposed to be for us, to take us back to base, but at the last minute command had them turn around and leave us out here to expand our mission. We only planned for a dawn-to-dusk operation. Now we’re out here on our own for the night. (For over a week, as it will turn out.)

The commander who opted to accompany us at the last minute decides to take charge. “Okay,” he says, “we’ll go up into the hills and lay up in the bushes.”

Our senior enlisted guy, Chief Dye, and I look at each other in disbelief. We are both thinking the same thing; I’m the one who opens his big mouth and says it.

“Hey, that’s a bad idea. Our guys are freezing here, and it’s going to get worse. If we just lay up in the bushes, we’re going to have some cold casualties.”

This commander, Smith, shakes his head. “We’ll just have to suck it up.”

Suck it up? This is a truly terrible idea. Nobody’s brought any warm clothes or cold-weather gear, and temperatures have already dropped to near freezing. If we follow what this commander is saying, we’re going to end up with some serious cases of hypothermia. But what are we supposed to do? There’s a chain of command here. Strictly speaking, our No. 1 guy is our platoon OIC (officer in charge), Lieutenant Chris Cassidy. Then there’s our assistant OIC, the No. 2 guy. Next comes Chief Dye. And me? I’m just one of the guys in the platoon. Commander Smith, even though he was not assigned to this mission and is not part of our platoon, has placed himself on top of that pyramid of command.

Chief Dye and I glance at each other again. This time he gives it a shot.

“Uh, sir, with all due respect, that idea sucks. Let me take Brandon and a few other guys, we’ll go clear and occupy that village we saw today a few klicks away, and set up a perimeter so we have a place to light a fire and stay warm for the night.”

“No,” says Smith, “we’re not going to do that—”

“Yes we are.” That’s our OIC, Cassidy, giving the order. He doesn’t give a shit if Smith outranks him. This is his platoon—and he’s been listening to what his guys have to say. Cassidy nods at Chief Dye and me, and we set off to clear and secure the village, where we end up staying for the next week. And nobody freezes to death . . . not even Commander Smith.

Our week in Zhawar Kili turns out to be one of the most successful missions in the entire Afghanistan campaign. We capture or destroy roughly one million pounds of enemy ordnance and equipment, capture a ton of intelligence, and destroy one of the largest terrorist/military training facilities in the country. If our OIC hadn’t listened to his team, it could have been cut off at the knees the first night out.

Unlike Smith, Cassidy is an excellent leader, one of the best I’ve had the honor of serving with. And unlike Smith, he understands the value of his team.

•   •   •

There’s a popular image of the successful entrepreneur as a loner, a rugged individualist who bucks the trends of conventional thinking and goes it alone, ignoring the doubters and forging on to the beat of his own drum. The fool on the hill, as the Beatles put it. This goes really well with the American mythos of the lone frontiersman with his musket, beating back the savages and saving his farm against all odds.

Reality isn’t like that.

We have a saying in the SEALs: “One team, one fight.” This principle puts all the others in context, because no man or woman is an island, and no successful business is a solitary enterprise. It doesn’t matter if you are in manufacturing or IT, marketing or service, technology or trucking: you are in the people business. No matter what your business model or your industry, people are key to your success. Having the right people is far more important than having the right tools, the right technology, the right plan, or the right financing. With the right people, you are unstoppable. With the wrong people, you are screwed. That naturally starts with hiring and working with the right people, but just as important as whom you work with is how you treat them.

In chapter 2, I mentioned Dale Carnegie’s classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Sure, I know the book’s been around forever, but there’s a reason it’s so popular: Carnegie nailed it. Success in business comes from caring about the other person and developing a legitimate, authentic relationship.

My friend Joe Apfelbaum, whom you met in chapter 1, says, “Don’t look to build business; look to build relationships. The relationships will bring you the business. Learn to be great at that.” As usual, Joe is right on target.

•   •   •

I told you about the $15 million offer I had in the spring of 2014, but we didn’t really get into why I turned it down.

When I was first contacted by an analyst for Scout Media, I couldn’t work out exactly what the people at Scout were asking. It sounded as if they were talking about our partnering with them in some way. I wasn’t interested, and said so. Soon after that, I got an e-mail from the CEO, who said the company was creating a big media roll-up targeted at men and they were interested in us as the military/outdoor component. They didn’t want to do some vague joint venture. They wanted to acquire us.

The negotiations took a few weeks. The company flew me out to New York (I was still living and working in Nevada at the time) to see its operation and meet with its employees. I told them my number was $20 million. The CEO said, “What if I can give you fifteen, and a pathway to twenty?” I asked him for more details, and he put something together, mostly stock and some cash. We kept talking.

Something felt off.

For one, I didn’t quite click with the CEO. Not that I didn’t like the guy, but I had a sense that our core values didn’t line up. It seemed to me that these people were purely financially driven. Don’t get me wrong: I like making money. I like it a lot. But it’s not my No. 1 driving force.

Here are the four core values we subscribe to at Hurricane:

People First. We take care of our audience, sponsors, partners, friends, and family. This gives us a strong foundation in all we do.

Honesty and Integrity. Both are valued in everything we do, and we see doing the right thing and brutal honesty as competitive advantages.

No Limits. We see endless possibilities to what we can create together. We are solution-based thinkers, welcoming new ideas and personal growth.

Giving Back. We are committed to giving back to military and civic charitable causes that align with our core values. We want to help make America a better place to live.

Financial profit is important; do you see it in here? It’s in value No. 3, “No Limits: We see endless possibilities to what we can create together.” That includes creating top-dollar financial return. But there’s a reason that value is No. 3 and “People First” comes first on this list: it’s because it comes first.

This shows, for example, in how we relate to our customer base. We have a highly engaged audience, which is exactly how I like it. This morning when I stepped out for coffee, I ran into a SOFREP fan at the coffee shop. Here was this dude, dressed in a business suit, meeting with other businesspeople—and he interrupted their meeting to come over and say hello. “Hey, you’re Brandon Webb, right?” he said. “I read your book, and listen, I love what you guys are doing at SOFREP.”

I love that.

And I worried about that. I wanted to take care of this community we’d built. I had a relationship with my audience and my customers, and I was concerned about whether Scout would take care of them or just treat them as a number.

Then there was my staff. I’d put a lot into building this group, and I cared about them like brothers. How would this deal affect them? Would I be putting them in a situation where they had to work for someone who wasn’t a good fit?

Instinctively, I already knew the answer.

I declined the offer.

You know what happened next. Scout raised some money, part of which came from a group of Russian investors who turned around and fired the CEO, threw the executive team out, and started from scratch on their own terms. If I’d gone down that road, all our hard work at Hurricane would have wound up in the dustbin of entrepreneurial history. (To appropriate a phrase from an old Russian takeover artist.)

It’s now more than two years later, and our business is thriving—and so are our staff and our community.

Treat Your People Like Family

Executives pay major bucks to learn from consultants who promise to tell them the secrets to creating a strong company culture. Everyone knows that culture is a company’s lifeblood, and everyone wants to know the inside story, the tricks of the trade, the secret sauce. How did Apple do it? How did Zappos do it? How did Southwest do it?

But you don’t need to spend a hundred grand to get this. It’s pretty simple. We have a pretty low turnover rate at my company. The people on our team who have stuck, who’ve been around for years now, are tremendously devoted to the company. People ask me why. Here’s why: I treat them like family.

One of our people recently went through a really bad divorce. “Look,” I told him, “don’t worry. I’ve got your back.” I gave him some stock options to help nail down his situation, just so he wouldn’t feel as if he were going off a cliff. This wasn’t promised or even expected. I just did it. At the same time, I gave some stock options to another team member who had been working with us for a while and had gone way above and beyond the call of duty. I told them both, “You guys are getting this because you’ve earned it, and I want to take care of you.”

One of my IT people in the Philippines had to have a minor procedure. It was only $300, but for him that was a lot of money. I told him not to worry about it. If this was my brother, or my son, what would I do? I’d take care of it. Case closed.

These guys treat the business as if it were their own. It is their own. They treat it the way I treat them.

Hurricane Group is a digital business, which allows us to operate with our team physically spread out all over the planet. Ben, our COO, is in Connecticut. Jason, our brand director, is in Oregon. Drew, our SOFREP-TV director, is in Boston. Our media director Nick is in Lake Tahoe. Emily, our customer service person, lives in Indiana. My personal assistant Angie is in Pennsylvania. We have sales guys in Massachusetts and Arizona. We have writers all over the world, from Iraq to Japan. All our tech is in the Philippines.

Which is great, because it gives people a lot of freedom—but it also could be a handicap if I let it, because nothing can really replace the experience of being face-to-face in a room together.

So we address that. When we hire someone new, he or she meets with me and the core team, in person, right away. Unless you’ve sat down with people, talked with them about their kids, their spouse or girlfriend, their life, and humanized that experience, then they don’t tend to work as closely together. It’s hard to let someone down if you’ve had that person-to-person interaction, even if you then go work on your own.

In the SEAL teams, it didn’t matter if you were a sniper or a heavy weapons gunner, if you were part of the team, you were part of the team. We all trained hard together, fought hard together, and had hard fun together. That built chemistry and alignment, and it created an unbreakable bond within the SEAL platoon environment. I’ve sought to create the same in my business with team-building events, dinners, outings, and creative off-site meetings. (Skydiving, anyone?)

Once a year, we have a strategy meeting, and everyone who’s core comes to that. We do a two-day retreat—this year it was at my home in Puerto Rico—where we have a series of structured meetings and then all go out and have a great dinner together. Every year I throw a holiday party for everybody. This year I’m flying in all the spouses and significant others.

We do a lot of videoconferencing, which helps. One guy who’s been with me for four years, Cris, I flew over here from the Philippines so we could spend some time together. It was his first time in America and he had an absolute blast, did the whole tourist thing in spades, posting photos on social media of every location you can imagine. But even before we did this, things were already solid: we’d developed a close connection just through phone and Skype. It took a little more effort to establish, because we’d never been in the same room together—hell, we’d never been in the same country together—but we did it.

Take Hiring Seriously

My experience in the military taught me that people are not what they say or what they put on their résumé. They are what they do. And not just what they do right now, today, sitting across from me in a coffee shop booth or at a boardroom table as we conduct our interview, but three weeks from now, three months from now, when they’re on the phone with a customer or a client.

In other words, you have to base your hiring decision on behavior you won’t get to witness until well after the decision is made. It’s a conundrum. What do you do?

You take the interview seriously.

When I finally earned my Navy SEAL Trident, after making it through BUD/S and then six more months of intense post-BUD/S training, I had to go before a board of crusty, grizzled Vietnam-era SEALs. These guys ate cigarettes for breakfast after running fifteen miles in the soft sand. When it was my turn to go before the review board, they asked me some of the toughest scenario-based questions I’ve ever been asked. They grilled me hard.

“What would you do if you saw a fellow teammate take drugs?”

“If you had total failure in your closed-circuit [bubbleless] breathing device and had to surface in an enemy harbor, how would you handle the situation without compromising your fellow teammates?”

“What would you do if a superior officer asked you to take out a civilian who wasn’t an immediate threat?”

The hard questions kept coming. What they were doing was brilliant: while they were deciding whether or not they wanted to work with me, they were also painting a portrait of the kind of SEAL I would be. It was an incredible experience, and I use a similar format when I interview a prospective hire whom I haven’t had the chance to work with in the past. I ask questions that force critical thinking, induce stress (a favorite technique from my sniper instructor days), and allow the interviewer to slowly build background on what the person is really like. I want to get as much insight as I can into who he really is. Is he passionate about what he does? What kind of standard does he hold for himself? How does he think?

For example, here’s a question for a prospective digital advertising sales executive: “What would you do if the decision maker on your biggest account asked you to lie for him?”

One of my favorite interview questions (which I got from an Australian entrepreneur friend) is, “Do you believe in aliens?” I love it, because you can’t get around with an easy yes or no; it forces a thoughtful reply, and that’s what I want to see. (You’d be amazed at the answers and rationales I’ve heard!) I don’t really care whether the prospective employees believe in aliens or not, but it opens up a fascinating window into what kinds of people they are, how creative they are, what kinds of minds they have.

When Betsy Morgan was in the process of leaving CBS and looking for what to do next, she spent months going through a lengthy recruiting process at Apple, where she was interviewing for the position of running iTunes. This was 2007, the year the first iPhone shipped, and there was a lot of buzz about what Apple was up to. Every month or so, Betsy would get another call saying, “Hey, can you come out and meet so-and-so?”

Finally, after nine months of this, she got a call asking if she could come out for one last interview. The caller said, “We want you to come meet with Steve.”

So she flew out to Apple headquarters in Cupertino and spent an hour talking with Steve Jobs.

He didn’t ask her a thing about her work at CBS, or her work anywhere, for that matter. He said, “Listen, if you’re going to be a top executive in this company, I want to know who you are. I want to know what keeps you up at night. I want to know what your values are. I want to know what you care about.” They talked about things like: When did you first fall in love? What cities have you visited? For an hour they talked about . . . well, about everything. About their lives.

At the end of the summer, she was offered the job, but by then her mom had fallen critically ill, and she realized that she just couldn’t leave the East Coast for a job in California. It was a heart-wrenching decision, but she had to decline the position.

She says she’ll remember that conversation for the rest of her life. That’s the kind of impression I want prospective employees to take away from an interview: this isn’t just a verbal punch list of skill sets and qualifications—it’s a probing conversation to learn as much as possible about who this person is.

Hire People Who Fit Your Culture

When I was a freshly minted SEAL, stationed at SEAL Team Three in Coronado, I saw an entire sixteen-man SEAL platoon disbanded because it just wasn’t working. This is SEALs, remember, men who have already gone through one of the most rigorous and demanding selection processes in the world. There was no mediocrity here. It was just that there were people in the unit who weren’t meshing. The chemistry wasn’t there.

In a way, the men on this SEAL team were extremely fortunate: leadership had the option to disband and restructure this team before its weak chemistry did any lasting harm. In business, it often doesn’t work that way, and dysfunctional teams like this all too often inflict mortal damage on the company. Which is why it is so important to hire people who fit your culture in the first place.

It’s crucial to have chemistry in any organization. In SEAL teams, lives are on the line. In a business, the life of that business is just as much on the line. Creating a business that survives and thrives is only going to happen when you have employees who genuinely enjoy doing their work, and that is only going to happen when the chemistry works.

I talked in chapter 4 about hiring only excellent people, people who will do a stellar job and raise the level of the company, not lower it. But it’s not just about excellence. It’s also about finding people who are coachable and who are a solid fit with the company culture. Typically, a company’s culture starts with the founder, but it can’t end there. Ultimately, the culture has to be carried by the people who work at the company. Your culture may be defined by your stated core values—but only if those core values actually express themselves through what your people do and how they behave day in and day out. Values don’t do any good sitting on the page.

I recently hired an extremely smart and productive employee. Within two months, I fired him, based purely on his poor treatment of another employee, a trusted team member who had been with me for years. This guy was talented (and knew it), but he didn’t know how to respect other people and work as part of a team. I saw the early warning signs and took swift action to resolve the situation. Yes, we lost a talent, but talent is easy to replace. Esprit de corps and a solid team ethos are too precious to let anything threaten them. A team with average ability but great chemistry will win out over a team with extreme talent but lousy chemistry. Character counts more than talent, and attitude counts more than skill.

Another example: I interviewed someone to work remote ad sales. She showed up at our interview a little bit late and disheveled looking. To me this was a red flag, and my gut said no, but she’d come strongly recommended from my sales guy, who said she could really sell, so I overrode my gut, went with the recommendation, and put her on a sixty-day trial on retainer.

Turned out, my sales guy and my gut were both right. She really could sell, but I started getting customer complaints that she was too abrasive. I told her, “Look, I’m sorry but this isn’t working out.” She sued me (using age discrimination as the basis), but it never got to court. Remember when I said sometimes it makes more sense to settle than fight? This was one of those times. I settled and moved on. Worth it.

This taught me a lesson: to make sure we always choose people who mesh with our existing culture. That is a lesson we have followed to the letter ever since.

We recently hired a customer service ambassador, Emily. This position was so important that we interviewed ten people for it, and there were some great people in the mix. But Emily was clearly the best fit. She was a military spouse, which was a plus, but more than that, it was evident that she really cared about our customer base. That authentic caring is something you can’t fake. People try all the time, with slogans and lifetime guarantees and canned scripts, but you can’t build that kind of attitude with corporate Legos and Tinkertoys. It has to be real, from the person him- or herself.

It’s really pretty simple: if you’re genuinely willing to go the extra mile, people notice that and appreciate it.

To me, the true litmus test of a company’s culture is the “hit by a bus” scenario: If the founder were hit by a bus tomorrow, would your company culture continue without you, or would the mice come out and play? Steve Jobs’s passing is an excellent example; the culture he created at Apple continues today. Sure, Tim Cook and whoever succeeds Tim will have to continue fostering it, but I’m betting that what Jobs built culturally will survive for decades to come. Everyone knows what Apple stands for as a brand, consumers and employees alike. Part of that is the strength and total focus of Jobs’s personality—but a bigger part of it is that he successfully built up a company of people who bought into his vision wholeheartedly.

Don’t Wait Long to Fire Someone Who Isn’t Working Out

There’s been a lot of buzz, both positive and negative, around the phrase “hire slow, fire fast,” and as with most catchphrases there’s both truth and bullshit to it. Sometimes you can’t afford the luxury of hiring slow, because you need the position filled now. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend hiring slow; I say, hire carefully. Hire with thoroughness and patience. Even if you have to do it damn fast, like tomorrow, you can still be careful and thorough.

But fire fast? Yeah, I definitely go with that one.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in business is to wait too long to fire someone who isn’t working out. In my experience, a problem employee spreading hate and discontent is cancer to the organism, and the quicker you get rid of that employee, the better off your business is, and the better off the employee is, too. (Don’t kid yourself: you’re doing the other person no favor by prolonging the inevitable.) One bad apple can demoralize the entire team and bring down the performance of your operation. When there’s a problem, I deal with it, completely and immediately. Violence of action.

Early in Fighter Sweep’s history, our editor got a big head. We had a lot of active-duty guys writing for him, and the site grew to the point where we were able to put him on a part-time retainer. Which was a great step, but we obviously wanted it to go further. The plan was to grow the site to the point where it had enough traffic to support itself, then use that demonstrable traffic to land an anchor sponsor, and then bring him on full-time.

We had just about gotten to that point when I got a call from our managing editor, Desiree. “Hey, Brandon, I’m concerned about this guy.”

She said this editor was bitching about my flying around in my plane, as if I were some kind of billionaire showing off. (For the record: I’d worked hard for the money to buy that little plane, which I purchased for cash; I didn’t even own a car; and at the time I was taking less than minimum wage in salary from the business.) He was harboring all this resentment about me, smiling to my face, and then trash-talking me behind my back—to my own team!

I asked my COO, Ben, to talk to him. Ben gave it a shot, then came back and said, “This guy’s not salvageable.”

I had Desiree talk to him one more time and explain to the guy that we were just about to make him a full-time offer. His reply was, “I’ll only come on if Brandon is prepared to meet my demands.”

Meet my demands?

I called him up and fired him that same day.

He was on location for some big aviation event where he was being treated like a VIP. I got him on the phone and said, “Look, you’re done, and here are the reasons why. I’m sorry, man, but that’s how it is.”

I don’t think he was expecting that.

People tend to overestimate their own worth to an enterprise. (I saw this quite a bit when I worked in the defense industry.) The best place to be, when you’re part of an organization, is to be irreplaceable. He might have thought he was in that category, but he wasn’t. I had him replaced in ten minutes.

Become an Excellent Judge of Character

To achieve what you’re here to do, you need to become an excellent judge of character. If you don’t already have this ability, you’ll develop it. You’ll have to. Learn to listen to your gut instinct—but don’t necessarily trust your first impression. People can surprise you.

I’ve gotten much better at evaluating people quickly, whether or not they’re a good fit. How do you do this? Same way you do anything. Practice. With everyone you interact with, do business with, ask yourself, Who is this person? What are her values? What’s important to her? How does she interact with other people? The more you ask those questions, the better you’ll get at knowing the answers.

One of the best lessons I learned in the military was never judge a person by his appearance. If you lined up the two hundred plus starting students in my BUD/S class, chances are excellent that you’d never have picked out the twenty plus who made it all the way through training and became Navy SEALs. Me included. You never know what people are capable of until they show you, or until they demonstrate it through some other credible means, such as school grades and verifiable work achievements. Frankly, I place a much higher value on the “until they show you” side. Past accomplishments and credentials are a solid way to judge if someone is worthy of your trust, but don’t go in blindly.

So many people told me I would never make it through the qualifications and become a Navy SEAL. Many more told me I would fail at business. You know what most of those naysayers said when I eventually became successful? “I always knew you’d make it.” (Uh-huh. Sure you did.) You’ll run into these doubters yourself. Use their negative comments like kindling to stoke your internal fire and help you succeed at whatever you set out to accomplish.

To “never judge on appearances,” I would add another important caveat: never judge someone based on rumors. I’ve seen so many good people taken down by vicious (and false) stories, viral bits of pseudo-information fueled by nothing but jealousy and personal self-worth issues on the part of the rumormonger. I have been a target of this destructive process myself and know firsthand just how nasty people can get. Sometimes those rumors follow people from one workplace to the next, through no fault of their own. Don’t buy it. Investigate, and form your own opinion.

You’d think this would be an easy one for people to figure out, but surprisingly it’s not. Human beings are a social species. We love to talk, and it’s part of human nature to spread the news, both the good and the bad. Especially the juicy stuff. It may be a natural impulse, but it’s one that a good leader works diligently to eradicate. Spreading rumors and gossip without verifying the source and motive is foolish. You are whom you hang out with; avoid the bottom-feeders.

You also have to develop the judgment to know where each person fits in the organization and what he wants to do. This was something I’ve had to learn by doing—that is, by realizing I was doing it wrong. I’ve looked at people I was hiring and said, “This person is really talented; he can do anything,” which might well have been true, but just because someone can fulfill a certain role doesn’t mean that’s going to be fulfilling for him.

For a while, I had Jack, our editor in chief, doing a lot of management tasks—things that a managing editor would typically take care of. It didn’t take long to realize he was miserable in this role. Jack is a brilliant writer and majorly talented in a dozen directions. But having him doing the kinds of things a managing editor does—measuring output every day, tracking which author has done how many posts, keeping track of our freelance budget—was driving him crazy. On the other hand, Desiree, our managing editor, is great at that stuff and has a natural feel for it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Jack as happy as he was the day she came on board. I was, too, because if Jack had had to stay in that role much longer, I don’t know if I would have been able to keep him.

I see a lot of people put in roles that, yeah, they can do, but they’re not really excited about. That’s a big mistake; long term, it never works out. Just because you think someone will be great at something doesn’t mean he wants to do it.

Reward People the Way They Want, Not the Way You Want

The way I’ve set up our business gives our employees a lot of autonomy, and to some people that’s very appealing. That’s another reason we have such a low turnover rate.

I met our brand director, Jason, when he was freelancing for a client of ours. I saw how good his work was. He was having some turmoil in his life and needed flexibility in his schedule that the client couldn’t give him—but I could. I hired him away. Since then, I’ve hired away two more guys from that same firm. There are good people out there, and if you create an environment where they’ll be happier to work than where they are now, they’ll join you. Especially if you support their extracurricular passions.

It’s not a question of offering more money. Compensation is important, but good money isn’t everything. Take Jason: I told him he was so valuable to us that I was giving him a raise at the end of the year. “Look,” he said, “I really appreciate that, but I also have to tell you, for me a lot of it is that I get the chance here to create and execute a lot of cool ideas.” He’s a creative type, and the artistic fulfillment of the job matters a lot to him.

For Nick, our media director, the “compensation” that matters most is the freedom to be able to take time off and go do things on his own. For example, I know he wants to go to Burning Man every year. I also know that when he comes back, it takes a while to get himself back into gear, and every year I have to crack the whip on him for a few days. He knows it, I know it, and we laugh about it—and I let him go back every year. It’s worth it.

I don’t give out big cash bonuses at the end of the year. Instead, we have a nice dinner together, and I buy people personal gifts—not just the standard sort of bullshit generic gift, but something I’ve given a lot of thought to picking out for each person, a gift that means something to that person. Something he’s interested in, something heartfelt that he’ll remember. And, typically, expensive. I’ve bought quite a few watches for people. It’s something they genuinely appreciate—and because it’s on their wrists every day they always remember where it came from. (At Hurricane, a watch from Brandon has come to signify “You’re officially on the team.”)

Another key piece of compensation, if you want to call it that, is praise: genuine praise, well deserved, not just gratuitous glad-handing. We have a meeting with our core team every Monday, and every Monday I make the effort to find something that someone’s done that I can publicly recognize. I go out of my way to let people know I appreciate their hard work, or their loyalty, or their ingenuity in solving a tough problem, or whatever it is that I notice. (And by the way, everyone on the core team also meets with his team weekly and duplicates this process.) It’s so easy just to file away the observation and say nothing in the moment, because you’re busy, and you figure, hey, you’ll wait for the right time. But you’re always busy. The “right time” never comes. I’ve gotten into the habit of putting the thought in an e-mail right away. “Hey, thanks for doing that; as always you have my back and I see that and appreciate it.”

It goes a long way. People want to be appreciated.

Choose Business Partners as Carefully as a Marriage Partner

Sometimes I ask myself, if I were starting the Wind Zero project today, from scratch, with what I know now, what would I do differently? The answer is easy. I would vet potential partners very carefully, and I would end up with different partners from the ones I actually worked with.

In my ten years of post-military business life, I’ve had partners who actively sabotaged me (at Wind Zero); an early writing partner who was so problematic I had to break a publishing contract to sever my ties with him; a friend who participated in some early SOFREP TV videos and then sued me for them; an old BUD/S teammate who mounted a vicious smear campaign against me (not the Wind Zero one, another one since then); and a core player from my original SOFREP team whom I eventually had to let go.

All of these were painful experiences, but they were also a critically important education. One of the most important decisions you’ll ever make in your business is your choice of partners. On the field of battle, the wrong partner will get you killed. In business, the wrong partner will sink you. I’ve picked the wrong partner. And I’ve picked the right partner. One decision nearly ruined me. The other has taken my business to a whole new level.

I see so many people in business getting involved in instant partnerships. They meet someone at a networking event and get talking about an idea, and next thing you know, they’re in a venture together. I’m watching this from the sidelines and thinking, Oh, boy, I see where this is going. Because I’ve been down that road.

The other day I was talking with an entrepreneur who’s starting a new project, and he said, “Hey, I’m looking for a partner on this, if you know somebody, let me know.”

I said, “So you’re just throwing this out there, like you’re willing to jump into bed with anyone who comes along? Man, that’s a recipe for disaster.”

I’ll make this simple: think of a partnership as a marriage. This isn’t like hiring an employee. You’re going into this thing together till death do you part. I’m no expert on marriage, but I do know this: you don’t marry someone after two or three dates. You can’t know if a given relationship is going to be worthwhile, dependable, in alignment, and valuable enough to raise it to the status of a genuine partnership until you’ve spent some serious time together.

As the old knight told Indy, “Choose wisely.”

Treat Your Customers Like Family, Too

There is no separate chapter in this book on how to treat your customers, because this is that chapter. And it’s not “A few teams, one fight.” It’s one team, one fight. Your customers are part of your team, just like your employees, contractors, partners, suppliers, and shareholders.

When we started our gear club, we went through a period when our fulfillment wasn’t well sorted out yet. E-mail got out of control, our customer service couldn’t keep up, and hundreds of e-mails were going unanswered. People were messaging us on Facebook, saying they couldn’t get hold of us through our regular system. It was bad. It wasn’t that we didn’t care; the thing just grew way faster than expected, and we got swamped.

I started taking the really nasty complaints myself. My approach was simple: I would flat-out own it and then offer to do whatever it would take to satisfy the customer, even if it meant losing him. “Look, we fucked up,” I’d say. “What can we do to make it up to you?” In most cases, the customers were shocked that it was me calling them or e-mailing them. Why was the CEO reaching out to them? But there isn’t any function more important than customer service.

We dealt with it aggressively, threw ourselves at it full force (that was when we hired Emily), and before long reversed the tide.

Still, service is never perfect; there are always glitches. And I’ve stayed involved. In the past month, I’ve had probably ten customer interactions with people who got pissed off about one thing or another: they got their box late, or they signed up for a digital subscription and no one got back to them so they couldn’t log in. I approach it the same way, every time: I own it. “We let you down. What can we do to make it up to you?”

Ten times out of ten, it saved that customer, because he could tell I was genuine about it. Whatever we can do to make it up. One guy said in his e-mail that he was “ready to punch somebody.” I wrote back and said, “Hey, before you punch anyone, let’s get this sorted out.” He LOL’ed back, and we got it sorted out. “I can’t believe you are taking the time to write me,” he said. Of course I am. It’s important.

Another reason you have to communicate with your customers is that it’s the only way you’ll know what they really want. Too often businesses assume they know what the customer wants, usually because it’s what they would want. But you are not your customer.

I went out the other day to buy some ski boots. While I was waiting to get fitted, I stepped over to the coffee shop next door and ordered a small mocha. The guy screwed up my order, apologized, and made it over again, only this time he handed over a giant mocha in this huge cup. “Hey, I gave you the extra-large size,” he said, as if he’d done something wonderful.

But I didn’t want a giant mocha; I wanted a small. That’s what I ordered. A large was too many calories. Now I had to carry this awkward, big-ass coffee around, and it wasn’t the one I wanted.

The point is, he thought he was doing me this big favor. He didn’t understand what I really wanted, because he didn’t take the time to ask. He thought he was giving great service. He wasn’t. He was actually giving me lousy service; he just didn’t know it.

Put Trust and Loyalty in Front of Everything Else

In the military, it didn’t take more than a moment to establish trust with others, because the people I worked with wore their accomplishments right on their uniforms in the form of award ribbons and rank insignias. That made it a hell of a lot easier to trust someone right off the bat.

It doesn’t work that way in the civilian world. Trust has to be established by some other measure, and like the SEAL pin I used to wear, you have to keep earning that trust every day.

Some people simply don’t get this. A good leader never forgets it.

Trust is an incredibly valuable gift and should be cherished as such. You need to earn the trust others place in you every day. In business, I see so many people who view trust as something they can simply bank on once it’s been established, as if they can slack off from that point on and don’t need to continue demonstrating that they are trustworthy. Learn to spot these people quickly, and stay away from them. They are not who you want on your team or in your life.

Trust goes hand in hand with loyalty. I’m surprised how readily some people change teams and say, “Hey, it’s not personal; it’s business.” Let me offer some perspective: That’s a bullshit statement. It’s all personal. Business is made of people; there is no such thing as business that isn’t personal.

This is a key I’ve observed in those who are tremendously successful in business: they establish a small group of extremely loyal and trustworthy friends (sometimes in the same industry, but more often not), and they value that small circle over those who are in only until the chips are down. This isn’t just true for business; it’s true for anything you do.

I once gave a talk about teamwork and leadership to some players and coaches in the Nike high school basketball program. These were the best coaches and teams in America. After my talk, the Nike representative told me that in previous years a few of his sponsored teams had switched to different sponsors, only to realize how much value they had given up in leaving Nike. And when they came back, hat in hand? He said he was sorry but could no longer offer them a sponsorship. They had broken loyalty. To Nike, this is a core value and an extremely important one. Nike is smart, and that’s part of why it has such a powerful brand.

I’ve sought to apply what that rep told me to my own core values. I’ve had more than a few people, some of whom I placed a lot of trust in, try to get back into my inner circle after a break in loyalty, and I’ve compassionately turned each of them away. Hold true to your own core values and make no exceptions. People will respect you more for it.

I’ve told you about that terrible day when my wife and I took our kids to a park they didn’t know and told them that our marriage was over. As I said, it was one of the worst days of my life. But our family didn’t end that day. After we said what we were there to say, and they cried, and we did, too, in the end we all hugged together as a family, and that was the moment when the healing began. We made a commitment to the kids right then and there that no matter what happened, we were still a family. And they believed us. It hurt like hell, but it got a little better each day from that moment on—because we made sure they knew that we were both still there for them, and they trusted that we meant it.