IAM1951 – Founders Find Opportunities for Veterans

Previous Episode: https://iamceo.co/2021/06/07/iam1029-founders-find-opportunities-for-veterans/

Transcription:

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Jordan Foley Teaser 00:00

Yeah, 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.

Intro 00:15

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 are in search of.

This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:42

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we were purposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, the business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, business owners, and what I like to call CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month, we are focusing on finishing it out, fighting the good fight and closing out the job. I think just as important as it is to start something, it's even more important in how you conclude it or finish it out. So if you think of the different things that you can finish out, it could be everything from a project, it could be from a day, it could also be from a business in and of itself, and it could also of course be for the year. So when you think of finishing out, I want you to really think of these episodes because what we are gonna really focus on is the last question that we really ask, which is defining what it means to be a CEO.

All the creative, innovative, and I think truly insightful questions that we receive from this question is really what we want to highlight during the show. But of course, we want you to enjoy the entire episode and think about how you're gonna finish things out, and how you're gonna finish things out strongly. So sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

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.

Jordan Foley 02:14

Thank you. Awesome to be on the show.

Yeah, it's great to be here. Appreciate it Gresham.

Gresham Harkless :02:18

No problem. The pleasure is definitely all ours, 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 that they're both doing.

Jordan is an active duty in the Navy and served on submarines for the first 6 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 and Charlie founded a nonprofit called Chow. Chow gives military veterans the opportunity to own and operate food trucks.

Charlie is a high school friend of Jordan and a photographer and videographer. He is also the COO and co-founder and is from the great land of Pittsburgh.

Charlie and Jordan are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Charlie Mcgovern 03:10

Yeah , let's do it. Let's go.

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Gresham Harkless 03:11

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

Jordan Foley 03:20

Yeah, absolutely. So, being in the military, everybody knows this, you move a lot. I'm moving once every two years to the point where we're moving maybe every six months as a family. We weren't even hanging out pictures or unpacking boxes at some point. So let alone when 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. I always thought about starting a nonprofit but didn't know exactly how I would focus it.

Then in 2019, 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 thought that there are so many programs out there that are a mile wide and each deep for veterans, but don't hyper-focus on anything and they touch a lot of lives, but they don't touch them deeply. So Charlie and I sat at my mom's house at christmas dinner that year and we were just talking and I was like we both love to cook. There are so many military people who are interested or already trained in the culinary arts. Let's start something that hyper focuses in the culinary industry and takes you from digital training, which we've developed all the way to pretty much a business school class of 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 hyper focus and we picked the culinary industry and picked food trucks to be the perfect training ground for that.

Gresham Harkless 04:48

Yeah, absolutely. Appreciate that. I love that food truck MBA phrase. You might have to trademark that one if you did, if it is.

Charlie Mcgovern 04:55

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

Gresham Harkless 05:01

Absolutely. 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?

Jordan Foley 05:09

Yeah, absolutely. So, Charlie, you want to start with the 5-step procedure that we got?

Charlie Mcgovern 05:13

Yeah. All right. We want to have a lot of on ramps and off ramps. So the main thing we start with is a five step program.

Step one is additional training. It's at your own pace, and we want to make sure that even at the end of that, you're ready for something. So they've served certified.

Then from there we move you on to go right to the kitchen. Yeah. We have the single 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 your skills that you learned in training.

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.

At the end of it we have a capstone project where you have to source your food, you've come up with a menu and then you serve it to upwards of 100 or 200 people.

From there, we have business resources to help you start your own business. Once you're ready to go, we're not just going to be like good job. So we've made all kinds of grounds or connections with people just to help you get your business off the ground and running the right way.

Jordan Foley 06:17

Yeah, and something Charlie mentioned too is the on ramps and off ramps. That's really important. The self pace is also really important because we wanted to be a different model. There are plenty predatory for profit training programs that take GI bill and take tuition money from veterans without giving them actual things that really translate 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 going to be serving, right?

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 conduct digital training, which is free to veterans and military spouses, you can step into any line cook position, and you're actually going to be more qualified than a typical line cook with that qualification. The kitchen with a mission aspect is something interesting because we found that hey, serving to customers is great. It's a really good revenue stream. But being a pop up is really tough to source.

So sometimes we source too much food or too little and we weren't getting 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 200 meals for four hours and the veterans would get the time there. Then when they graduate from that hour set, all self paced because everybody in our program is a working parent, we understand that once you graduate to that, you become a 1099 contractor in the truck 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, 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 everything and that's what we provide. Then we partnered with a nonprofit in Maryland called project opportunity and that is free business school training. So our whole thing is 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 1099. Then three, you never leave our system in the sense that you are always an alum and you're always family.

So if you want to 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? I think that's what makes us different from all of the other nonprofits out there. In addition, there's no other program in the nation that does what we do. So that's another thing that makes us clearly different. But I think just our spirit is really important to get out there and everybody.

Gresham Harkless 08:37

Yeah, I could definitely hear that spirit and that passion that you all have. I love how you were talking about not going wide, but going deep. You could definitely hear that. And for lack of a better term, the holistic nature of the five peers or pieces of that process. But also 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 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.

Jordan Foley 09:03

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. When we say on ramps we have some veterans coming in with 10 years of naval culinary specialist training, putting them into a digital curriculum would be a joke for them. We can get them straight into 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 say, Hey, I have a menu, can we serve it out of your truck and we do that? We allow that for them.

So we think, not being rigid in the way we provide a curriculum and provide it is going to actually open us up to more people who have different interests, whether it's starting a brick and mortar catering business or a food truck. We're able to provide that guidance. And we always say too, 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 75, 000 buying your own food truck to realize this isn't for me. So, there's a lot of ways to produce success, it's just giving these people, these veterans and military spouses.

There are 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 child's operating 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.

Gresham Harkless 10:18

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

Jordan Foley 10:30

Yeah, that's me having two girls under the age of four efficiency is key. So, I guess for my thing is, I am an absolute pen and paper planner type person. I have a little moleskin planner. I've had one since I honestly what? 6th grade probably. So, even though I have Google calendar, I need to write everything down, have little notes jotted. It keeps me on track and something like that.

I sometimes have to plan down to the minutes of a day to get through and obviously, 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, the minutes and planning and still getting a full night's sleep as broken as it may be with a one year old. It's super important. So for me that don't underestimate the power of the paper planner.

Gresham Harkless 11:12

Would you consider that to be what I call a CEO nugget, which is 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 into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

Jordan Foley 11:23

Yeah. 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 Hey, great food truck in Annapolis. Really cool was the note. It's we're fighting mental health problems within the veteran community poverty, working poor issues are best not remind yourself that you are a steward of donor money.

So that's something we think is really important is you are a steward of the donor money. So when you are purchasing always do your due diligence and understand that this is somebody's hard-earned money. They gave 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 100% of donor money can go directly to programming. So if you want to cater an event in an underserved community, you can give us 400 to produce 100 plus meals and deliver it directly.

All of that money went there. There was no administrative, anything like that. Like we are very much, we silo money. So we understand as a donor, you are going directly to this. So that, I think that's a big nugget. What we learned is that donors do you want to ensure that their money is going to a good place? And you as the basically the steward of their money needs to make sure it's going there.

Gresham Harkless 12:41

I want 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 quote CEOs on the show. So both of you from both of you, I wanted to hear what does being a CEO mean to you?

Charlie Mcgovern 12:51

For me, it's been a great outlet to actually make an impact. With my skill set, I do a lot of creative work. With weddings and all that stuff, but, I don't know. That stuff doesn't do it for me as much. I followed my initial career because I wanted to help with stories and have an impact that way. This is a great way for me to use my skills. All of our promotional videos, I'm shooting all of those, all of our content.

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

Jordan Foley 13:38

At the heart of it 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's honestly the main important and most important thing to us is the social aspect of our work.

I think that's what gets us up. That's what makes us want to work 20 hours a day on this is the people we could help.

Gresham Harkless 14:05

Yeah, I absolutely appreciate that. Who doesn't love doing what they do and having a really great cause behind it. So I appreciate you both using your skills and your talents and your mission to be able to make the world a better place. So Charlie, Jordan, I truly appreciate you and your time.

What I want to do is just patch 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.

Charlie Mcgovern 14:28

In terms of how to reach us right here, letschow.org. You can donate there follow us on at chow_nonprofit on Instagram. Those are the two best ways to get at us.

Jordan Foley 14:39

Yeah, and we always ask people to log on to letschow.org and donate and reach out to us. If you know a veteran, we can help and a military spouse, we can help. We have portals on our website to let us know. But we say, we will 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 a very good meal, very healthy and nutritious for them. 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 going to buy somebody a meal.

If you can scale that up, it's just going to buy more meals, but also we understand that not everybody's in a position to give. We know that, but we have another initiative called Challenge 22. That symbolizes the 22 veterans who die by suicide every day. We ask you to honor that by telling 22 of your contacts about Chow 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 everyday 22 veterans will die by suicide.

We believe that is tied to a lot of different issues, including financial health and wellness. That's what we try to do. We try to seek to create not only independent veterans and military spouses, but business owners. So, in a way, 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 if you can donate.

Gresham Harkless 15:58

Absolutely. I truly appreciate that. We will have the links and information that shown that as well too. I love, obviously all the work that you're doing. 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.

Outro 16:22

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CB Nation and 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. Get your driven CEO gear at ceogear.co.

This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless, Jr. Thank you for listening.

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