IAM1029- Founders Find Opportunities for Veterans

Jordan Foley and Charlie Mcgovern of Chow

Jordan is on active duty in the Navy and served on submarines for the first six years of his career. He is now training to be a Navy attorney in the JAG Corps and finishing his final year in law school. After watching many of his friends struggle when they chose to leave the Navy, Jordan became disenchanted with the process of finding opportunities for veterans to succeed. Combining his passion and love for cooking, he decided to start a nonprofit that helped veterans become successful in the culinary industry. In January 2020, he founded a nonprofit called “Chow” (www.LetsChow.org). Chow gives military veterans the opportunity to own and operate food trucks.

Charlie is high school friends with Jordan. He is also a photographer and videographer. He is from Pittsburgh and is the COO and Co-founder.

• CEO Hack: Leveraging the power of a paper planner
• CEO Nugget: You are a steward of the donor money
• CEO Defined: (i) Outlet to make an impact with one's skillset (ii)Opportunity to help out

Website: https://www.letschow.org/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Chownonprofit/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Chow_nonprofit
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chow_nonprofit/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/chow-corp/

Full Interview:

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Transcription

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00:27 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:55 – Gresham Harkkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have two very special guests on the show today. I have Jordan Foley and Charlie McGovern of Chow. Jordan and Charlie, it's great to have you on the show.

01:05 – Jordan Foley

Thank you. Awesome to be on the show.

01:06 – Charlie Mcgovern

Yeah. It's great to be here. Appreciate aggression.

01:08 – Gresham Harkkless

No problem. The pleasure's definitely all ours, and you're doing so many phenomenal things. I want to read a little bit more about Jordan and Charlie so you can hear about all the awesome things that you're that you both do. Jordan is on active duty in the Navy and served on submarines for the first six years of his career. He's now training to be a Navy attorney in the JAG Corps and finishing his final year in law school. After watching many of his friends struggle when they chose to leave the Navy, Jordan became disenchanted with the process of finding opportunities for veterans to succeed.

Combining his passion and love for cooking, he decided to start a nonprofit that helped veterans become successful in the culinary industry. On January twenty twenty, he and Charlie founded a nonprofit called CHOW. CHOW gives military veterans the opportunity to own and operate food trucks, and Charlie is a high school friend of Jordan and a photographer and videographer, he is also the COO and cofounder and is from the great land of Pittsburgh. Charlie and Jordan, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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02:01 – Jordan Foley

Yeah. Let's do it.

02:02 – Charlie Mcgovern

Yep. Let's go.

02:02 – Gresham Harkkless

Awesome. Let's do it then. So to kinda kick everything off, I know I touched on your background and what led you to kinda get started. Could you take us through a little bit more of your story and what led you to get started with all the awesome work you're doing?

02:11 – Jordan Foley

Yeah. Absolutely. So, you know, being in the military, everybody knows this. You move a lot. Moving once every two years to the point where we're moving maybe every six months as a family, We're we're even hanging up pictures or unpacking boxes at some point, so let alone we weren't engaging in the community. Right? Like, I used to go coach football, and then it just got to the point where I just didn't have the time or knew we'd be moving so soon. So I wanted to create something that moved with me. And I  always thought about starting a nonprofit but didn't know exactly how I would focus it. And then, in two thousand nineteen, I had a Naval Academy buddy who was actually starting his own businesses, fell into a lot of debt, and died by suicide.

And, I got upset at the fact that there are so many programs out there that are a mile wide and inch deep for veterans but don't hyperfocus on anything. And and they they touch a lot of lives, but they don't touch them deeply. So Charlie and I sat at my mom's house on Christmas dinner, that year, and we were just talking. And I was like, well, let's we both love to cook. Let's some so many military people are interested or are already trained in the culinary arts. Let's start something that hyper-focuses on the culinary industry and takes you from digital training.

Which we've developed, all the way to pretty much a business school class teaching you how to run a culinary business. So we can take a select number of veterans and military spouses every year and put them through pretty much a food truck MBA now. So we wanted to take you along the journey and make you successful, rather than just the outreach. We wanted to hyperfocus, and we picked the culinary industry, and we picked food trucks to be the perfect training ground for that.

03:43- Gresham Harkkless

Yeah. Absolutely. Appreciate that. And I love that food truck MBA, for age. You might have to trademark that one. If you did it is.

03:52- Charlie Mcgovern

Yeah. When he came up with that one, I was like, that's pretty good, Jordan. Let's go with that. Yeah.

03:56- Gresham Harkkless

Absolutely. And so I wanted to drill down a little bit deeper in here. I know you touched on how you serve your clients. Can you take us through a little bit more about that and what that process looks like?

04:05- Jordan Foley

Yeah. Absolutely. So, Charlie, you wanna start with this five-step procedure that we got?

04:09 – Charlie Mcgovern

Yeah. So we, you know, we wanna have a lot of on-ramps and off-ramps. So the main thing we start with is a five-step program. So step one is additional training. It's at your own pace. And we wanna make sure that you know, even at the end of that, you're ready for something. So we have that gets you to serve a serve certified. And then from there, we move you on to we'll go right to the kitchen. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, we have the same ball kitchen with a mission where you cook out of our brick-and-mortar kitchen for a bit to get used to cooking in a restaurant environment, develop the skills that you learned in training. And then from there, we put you in the truck, and you learn about mobile business, how to source food, how to get out, how to market, all of that.

And then at the end of it, we have a capstone project where you have to source your food, you come up with a menu, and then you serve it, you know, to, you know, upwards a hundred, two hundred people. And then from there, we have business resources, to help you start your own business once you're ready to go. You know, we're not just gonna be like, well, good job. See you. You know? But we've made all kinds of grounds or, connections with people, you know, just to help you get your business off the ground and running the right way.

05:22 – Jordan Foley

Yeah. And something Charlie mentioned too is the on-ramps and off-ramps. That's really important. And the self-paced is also really important because we wanted to be a different model. There are plenty of predatory for-profit training programs that take the GI Bill and tuition money from veterans without giving them actual things that are really translated to the real world. We said we can start with digital training at your own pace because we need you to know that you can't cut raw chicken and then put raw vegetables down that you're gonna be serving. Right? Like, we need you to have a baseline level of knowledge, but we wanted that to also result in National Restaurant Association certifications.

So if at the very least, you you conduct digital training, which is free to veterans and military spouses, you can step into any line cook position. And you're actually gonna be more qualified than a typical line cook with that qualification. The kitchen with a mission aspect is something interesting because we found that, like, hey. Serving customers is great. It's a really good revenue stream, but being a pop-up is really tough to source. So sometimes we'd source too much food or too little, and we weren't getting the training that we the training hours we desired. So we said, hey. Let's partner with nonprofits who give food to people already. So let's just make hot meals for those in need and use grant and donor money to produce the meals.

So we are guaranteed to produce two hundred meals for four hours and the veterans would get the time there. And then when they graduate from that hour set, all self-paced because everybody in our program is a working parent. We understand that. Like, we get it. Once you graduate to that, you become a ten ninety-nine contractor in the truck when you sell to when you sell to customers, and that's when you get the real customer service interface that's really important for your future business model. And then after you get great at the food truck, I mean, from starting up the generator all the way to sourcing a menu, right, we like to say it's pretty much everything from marketing to mincing onions to, you know, everything, and that's what we provide.

And then we partner with, a nonprofit in Maryland called Project Opportunity, and which is free business school training. So our whole thing is, like, one, it's self-paced, so these people can complete it as they can go. They're in the program. Two, it's free, but they also get paid as a ten ninety-nine. And then three, you never leave our system in the sense that you are always an alum and you're always family. So if you wanna come back and think about product market fit for a menu you're working on, step into the truck. It's yours. It's your home. Right? And I think that's what makes us different from all the other nonprofits out there. In addition, there's no other program in the nation that does what we do. So that's that's another thing that makes us clearly different, but I think just our spirit is really important to get out there to everybody.

07:45- Gresham Harkkless

Yeah. I  could definitely hear that spirit and that passion that you all have, and I love how you were kinda talking about, you know, not going wide but going deep. And you could definitely hear that and, for lack of a better term, the holistic nature of the fives the five, I guess, peers or pieces of, you know, that process, but also too of understanding. It sounds like you've stepped into the shoes of the people, that would be going through the program, the veterans, and are able to kinda understand exactly what they would need, when they would need it, and provide a lot of resources for them to be able to do that and, of course, be able to succeed.

08:15 – Jordan Foley

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, when we say on ramps too, like, we have some veterans coming in with ten years of naval culinary specialist training. Putting them into a digital curriculum would be a joke for them. We can get them straight into the kitchen with a mission, straight on the truck as fast as possible. Maybe they're so accomplished that they're already a chef. We have a couple of classically trained people who are actually just interested in getting product market fit. So they, hey. I have a menu. Can we serve it out of your truck? And we do that, and we allow that for them.

08:45 – Jordan Foley

So we think, you know, not being rigid in the way we provide a curriculum and provide it is gonna actually open us up to more people who have different interests, whether it's starting a brick and mortar, a catering business, or a food truck. We're able to provide that guidance. And, we always say too, if if at the end of our program you decide that the food truck industry isn't for you, that's also good because you didn't spend seventy-five thousand, buying your own food truck to realize this isn't for me. So, you know, there's a lot of ways to produce success here.

But, you know, it's just giving this these people, these veterans, and military spouse to it's a there's a lot of barriers to entry, because of where they're coming from, but also the culinary industry is expensive and competitive. But we always say as long as CHAL's operating, we're eventually and we we guarantee this. We will eventually have an alum of our program who wins a James Beard award because these people can do amazing things when given an opportunity.

09:35 – Gresham Harkkless

I definitely appreciate that. And, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have. What's something that makes you both more effective and efficient?

09:47 – Jordan Foley

Yeah. That's, you know, me having two girls under the age of four, efficiency is kinda key. So, like, I guess my thing is I am I am an absolute pen-and-paper planner type of person. So, like, I have a little moleskin planner. I've had one since I've honestly got six grades probably. So, like, you know, I just even though I have Google Calendar, I need to write everything down, have little notes jot it. It keeps me on track and, like, something like that. Like, I sometimes have to plan down to the minutes of a day, to get through. And, like, obviously, like, I'm a full-time naval officer too. I run chow as a part-time, and chow is a full-time job in and of itself. So, like, the the minutes and planning and still getting a full night's sleep, as broken as it may be with a one-year-old, like, it's it's super important. So for me, don't don't underestimate the power of the paper planner.

10:36- Gresham Harkkless

Would you would you consider that to be what I call a a CEO nugget, which is kind of like a word of wisdom or piece of advice? I usually say it might be something you would give advice to a client or if you hopped it to a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

10:48 – Jordan Foley

Yeah. I mean, it could be a nugget. We use it as a hack more because every day we meet, we're like, let's remind ourselves. Let's go over it. We were on the front page of, the Annapolis newspaper where the title underneath our picture was Saving the world one idea at a Time. We post that everywhere because it's not like, hey. Great food truck in Annapolis. Really cool was the headline. No. It's like we are fighting, like, we are fighting mental health, you know, problems within the veteran community, you know, poverty, working poor issues are are are best enough. Remind yourself that you are a steward of donor money. So that's something we think is really important you are a steward of the donor money.

So when you are purchasing, always do your due diligence and understand that, like, this is somebody's hard-earned money they gave to you because they trust you. So for us, our model, I think, is so attractive to donors because the food trucks are a revenue stream. That means a hundred percent of donor money can go directly to programming. So if you want to cater an event in an underserved community.

You can give us four hundred dollars to produce a hundred-plus meals and deliver them directly, and you know all of that money went there. There was no administration or anything like that. Like, we are very much we silo money so we understand, like, as a donor, you are going directly to this. So I think that's a big nugget of what we learned is that donors do wanna ensure that their money's going to a good place, and you as the the the basically, the steward of their money needs to make sure it's going there.

12:10 – Gresham Harkkless

I'd like to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote-and-unquote CEOs on the show. So of you for both of you, I wanted to hear what being a CEO means to you.

12:20- Charlie Mcgovern

For me, it's, been a great outlet to actually make an impact, you know, with my skill set. You know? I mean, I do a lot of creative work, you know, with weddings and all that stuff. But, you know, I don't know. That stuff doesn't do it for me as much. You know, I followed my initial career because I want I wanted to help, you know, with stories and have an impact that way. And this is a great way for me to, you know, use my skills, and all of our promotional videos.

I'm shooting all of those, all of our content. You know, I help out with, you know, a lot of the, you know, the forward-facing things that you see, and it's great to be able to work on this stuff knowing that, you know, yeah, it's great to make the bride remember her wedding day. Like, that's fine. But, like, this is way better. You know? This really gets me going. It gets me out of bed. It gets me working hard, and I really like it. You know? So to me, it's the impact. It's a chance to it means a chance to really help out and do some good things.

13:14 – Jordan Foley

Yeah. And at the heart of it, like, we thought about this when we started. For every massive government program, you have to address a problem, we think you need an army of small nonprofits like us willing to implement things and to bridge gaps. So I think we're doing that, and we're doing it every day. And that honestly, the main important and most important thing to us is the social aspect of our work. You know, I think that's what gets us up, and that's what makes us wanna work twenty hours a day on this is the people we can help.

13:43 – Gresham Harkkless

Yeah. Absolutely appreciate that. And especially that word creativity that you both kind of alluded to and and and included because I think if you're able to kinda understand, see the impact that you can make and you think creatively about how to not just help out your organization, but how you can collectively make that impact is absolutely huge. And so, of course, who doesn't love doing what they do and having a really great cause behind it?

So  I appreciate you both kinda using your skills and your talents and your mission to be able to make the world a better place. So, Charlie, and Jordan, I truly appreciate you and your time. What I want to do is just pass you the bike one more time, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know and, of course, how best they can get ahold of you and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

14:22 – Charlie Mcgovern

In terms of how to reach us, you know, right here plus chow dot org. You can donate there. Follow us, at chow underscores Nonprofit on Instagram. Those are the two best ways to get at us. Yeah.

14:35 – Jordan Foley

And, you know, we always like to say too, we ask people to to log on to Let Chow or Oregon donate. Reach out to us if you know a veteran. We can help and as military spouses, we can help. We have portals on our website to let us know. But we say, you know, we won't ask you to pay it forward. Number four is our campaign because four dollars is what it costs us to make a restaurant-quality style meal for somebody in need. That's that's a very, you know, a good meal, very healthy and nutritious for them. And if you have four dollars, that you didn't spend today on a coffee and you can donate it through our website, please do because that's gonna buy somebody a meal.

If you can scale that up, it's just gonna buy more meals. But also, we understand that not everybody's in a position to give, and we know that. But we have another initiative called Challenge Twenty-two. That symbolizes the twenty-two veterans who die by suicide every day, and we ask you to honor that by telling twenty-two of your contacts about Chao and about our initiatives because outreach is very important. And we understand that not everybody can give monetarily.

But we ask people to share us with their social networks, to acknowledge that every day, twenty-two veterans will die by suicide. And we believe that that is tied to a lot of different issues including financial health and wellness and that's what we try to do and we try to seek to create not only independent veterans and military spouses, but business owners. So in a way, we're we're giving American heroes a chance at the American dream. So if you're with us, log on, check us out, share us, and you can donate.

15:58 – Gresham Harkkless

Absolutely. I truly appreciate that. We will have the links and information in the show notes as well. And I love, you know, obviously, all the work that you're doing. And, again, like I mentioned, the passions and gifts that you have, that you give to the organization, to the veterans, the military families, and finding a way when sometimes it feels like there's no way. So thank you so much for being stewards and reminding us of the ability to give in so many different ways that we sometimes forget that we have. Appreciate both of you again, and I hope you have a great rest of the day.

16:23 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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