Introduction to the Podcast and Hosts
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Everyone dreams about living an uncommon life, but how we define that dream is very different for each of us. And for most, it's a lifelong pursuit. Welcome to the Uncommon Life Project podcast. We're going to introduce you to people who are living that life or enjoying the journey to get there. We're going to also give you some tools, tricks, and tips for starting or accelerating your own efforts to live an uncommon life.
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A life worth celebrating and savoring. Please welcome your hosts, Brian Dewhurst and Philip Ramsey.
Introducing Gabe Glenn
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Hello and welcome. My name is Philip Ramsey. And I'm Brian Dewhurst. And you are listening to the Uncommon Life Project, where we are going to dive into one of the most interesting men in the world, and he's not the Dos Equis guy. He's Gabe Glenn. I'm glad he's here. Amanda, thank you so much for that beautiful intro. You always do such a good job for us.
Gabe's Entrepreneurial Journey Begins
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All right, let's do the bio for Gabe Glenn and let's rock this out. Gabe's kind of big time. I don't know about that. Gabe Glenn is the CEO of Make You Safe and a serial entrepreneur. Gabriel's startup journey began over a decade ago and in that time has experienced several successful exits, which just means basically he sold his company. His most recent being the selling of his software company SlashWeb Studios in 2015. Gabe was named 2014 Entrepreneur of the Year at the Iowa Small Business Awards.
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In 2016, he was awarded the Alumni of the Year by Des Moines Area Community College and was a finalist for the YPC Young Professional of the Year in 2013. He has served on many community and nonprofit boards including the Ankeny Young Professionals and was a charter member of the Greater Des Moines Rotary Club. Gabriel is the creator and host of the Advanced Manufacturing Podcast, AMP, on iTunes and has interviewed dozens of manufacturing leaders around the globe.
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including Jeff Immelt, formerly of GE Corporation. Gabriel and his wife of 11 years of Manda live in Ankeny, Iowa, shout out, with their two boys, Caleb and Tucker. Gabriel has a degree in business administration from Des Moines Area Community College. Awesome. Welcome to the show, Gabe Glenn. Hey,
Early Professional Connections
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thanks for having me on, guys. This is awesome. You know, that all sounds really good, but let me just be honest with you. How do we know each other, Gabe?
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Was it back in our target? It was back in our target days are Jay. Yep Gabe was what was asset? What was the executive team leader of asset protection asset protection there? It was and I was really nothing But did something I was an executive team lead for
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front lines or guest services guest services there was yes i i don't know if you guys know this but i also share the target brotherhood really oh wow it's my first job so we're uh what store uh i was in omaha okay 132nd center and i was the uh
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Like the stockroom guy, the stockroom captain. I don't remember what the title was.
From Burnout to Business Idea
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You gotta watch those guys. Yeah. Gabe would call me in his office like, dude, you gotta see this. And then that's when we were friends forever. But since then, we've both obviously got out of target. We're all out of target. We're all out of target. And that was a good starting ground. But Gabe, I just want to give you a little edification. You kind of have the golden touch.
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So I wanna just commend you for where you're at and how you've got there. So I wanna start going back to, you were at Target as a asset, what was it called? Executive team lead of asset protection. Asset protection, that's what I'm trying to figure out. Which by the way, I feel like Target's one of those that they try to make the job title sound like super- They do. Incredible, right? They do, yeah. And my first job when I worked at Applebee's, I was a dishwasher and I tried to get them to change the name to hydroceramic technician.
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And it didn't stick. But Target, that would have worked. That would have worked. They would have loved that. They embraced it. So you were at Target. At what point did you say, like, I got to get out of this? I just can't do this anymore?
Starting Asset Protection Specialists
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Yeah, it was actually an interesting moment. So my father and I were very close. We like to go hunting, fishing, do a lot of camping, that kind of stuff. So we were out fishing one day. And I was telling him about work and said, you know, I'm kind of getting burned out.
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You know, 70, 80 hour weeks, every holiday I'm away. I just, I'm not experiencing life like I thought I was going to experience. And he said, you know, I had an idea for a business when I was your age. And now keep in mind, I was I think 22, 23 at the time. And he said, uh,
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You know, I always wanted to start a company where I would go inside people's homes and inventory all their personal possessions, record model numbers, serial numbers, take pictures, scan receipts, have all that stuff. And then if they had to make a loss claim with their insurance company, we would jump in and be like, hey, we have all the information on their stuff. And I go, that is a really good idea and still applicable today. I said, you know what, I think I'm gonna quit my job and start a company. And he did the same thing, he chuckled and then,
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That's what I did. A few weeks later, I turned in my resignation and started a company called Asset Protection Specialists with just that mission in mind to record all the assets and then have it there for reclamation from the insurance companies. Were you married at that time? 22. Probably not. No. Amanda and I were engaged, I think. So we've been married 12 years now. Wow. Holy cow. Congrats. So thank you. It had to have been really
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really close to cause I'm 35. So it was probably right around that time. Yeah. What did she think about that? Getting out of asset protection, stable job, kind of went into asset protection though too. Yeah. And I kept the executive team lead of asset protection and I started a company asset protection specialist. So, uh, kind of pulled a little bit from, from my target days there. You know, at first neither of us really knew what we were getting into. And the interesting thing is, so I had decided to quit target.
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And the week that I decided I got a job offer to go move to Cedar Rapids, which is where I'm from and have a huge family in, and they made an offer to me to open a franchise of a trucking company over there.
Making a Commitment to Business
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And it was the gentleman that I knew very well, and he was gonna pay me three times what my salary was at Target, plus I was gonna get bonuses.
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And so I was really excited about this offer. I thought, you know, forget about this entrepreneurship stuff. So I took my wife out to dinner to her favorite restaurant in Ankeny and we're sitting there at dinner and I said, you know, I've got something exciting to share with you. And she said, well, what's that? And I go, tell her about this job offer. And she's just staring at me. And then she starts crying.
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And I'm like, are those tears of joy? And she's like, no. She goes, we just moved to Des Moines. I mean, we'd only been here probably a year and a half, maybe. And she goes, we're just starting to make our own life, make our own friends. She goes, I just started my new job at Strategic America.
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She goes, I really love it here. And I feel like this is our place. And I'm like, honey, who cares about your job? You can quit your job. We're going to have enough income. We can start a family. We didn't have kids at that time. We can start a family. You can be a stay-at-home mom. We'll be close to my family. Because we didn't have anybody here from a family standpoint. Let's be honest. You were pot committed. You thought this was the jam. Oh, dude. I thought she was going to jump out of the booth and give me a hug. And we were going to spray champagne around the restaurant. That was, in my mind, this whole thing is playing out in a way that I didn't expect it.
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I said, well, I have 24 hours to give an answer to this guy. And she goes, well, my answer is no, I don't want to do this. And I said, well, what if I, you know, just commute it to Cedar Rapids or lived out there during the week and then came back on the weekends and she goes, she goes, you know, we're newly married. I just don't know how that would impact our.
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are both together. And so anyways, we sat silent for the rest of the meal and the next morning I was downstairs making breakfast and she came downstairs and I said, so he got a chance to sleep on it. What do you think? He goes back to the well. I still hadn't called the guy. I'm like, well, what do you think? And she goes, I just really don't want to do this. She goes, I feel like there's more here for us. And so that put the kibosh on that job offer. And that's when I said, all right, so honey,
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I wanna start my own company. Here's what I wanna do. We've talked about this, but I guarantee it's gonna be harder than we think. It's gonna cost us a lot of money. We're still broke. We're fresh out of college, completely broke. I said it's gonna be really hard for us. But what I want you to do is I want you to support me 100% in this journey, if this is the path we're gonna take. And she said I will. And she's never wavered since. So if it wasn't for her, this entire journey,
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us sitting here, all of these things, probably never would have happened. No idea how much your spouse truly does support you in those things. And I always tell people, if my wife's with me, I'll take on the world. If my wife's against me, it doesn't matter if the world's on my side, my world's upside down. And so that's such a, it speaks to exactly your story. So you're in the asset protection. How are things going for the first couple weeks, months,
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As good as you thought, was it exactly what you thought, what you planned? Were you ever at that point where I want to go back to Target and just watch screens and people stealing things? Yeah, it was a dumpster fire at the beginning.
Learning from Early Mistakes
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I mean, it was rough. I made every mistake you could possibly make. First thing I did is I got a credit line and I went out and I spent a ton of money on office furniture, office supplies. I set up my home office all on a credit line. I went and started paying for advertising.
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So this is how naive I was, right? So this isn't that long ago, guys. And I turn around and I dropped $5,000 on yellow page advertising. Oh my. You know, I wanted the big spread, right? Yellow book. So that all seven people that...
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you know use the yellow pages would they have a strong pitch though i will say that they do man i got i got pulled in so they brought me a nice cup of coffee at starbucks and convinced me that this was the way to success and i think that you know entrepreneurship in general i think uh early on most folks believe you know it's that old
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You know, if you build it, they will come kind of thing. You know, you open the doors and there will be a line of people waiting outside your business. And the sad reality of it is it takes tremendous amounts of work and perseverance. And so those early months weren't easy. And pretty quickly we found ourselves in dire financial straits. And so here I am.
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Started my first company at that time. I didn't have a degree either and I had spent three years at UNI. That's where I met Amanda I tried three different majors didn't really like any of the word exactly so I've wrapped up a pretty good You know pretty good debt right there, so I decided hey if I'm gonna do this entrepreneur thing I should probably you know learn business, so I decided to enroll at DMACC in business school and
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So here I am running this startup company from you know, eight to five Then I would have dinner then I would go to night classes from six to nine Wow and financially we just weren't cutting it So my wife got a job at the golf course across the street as a beverage cart girl to make money on the weekends Even though she had a full-time job hustling and I got connected to a
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through a friend to a security company. So after I got out of night class, I would go home and get dressed in my uniform and I would go be a security guard overnight at Embassy Suites downtown. And I'd get off about six in the morning, I'd come home, sleep for a couple hours and do it all over again. Wow, dedication. So it was rough. I remember several nights at the Embassy Suites, I carried a pocket Bible with me.
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And I would go into the swimming pool area because it was shut down and nobody could get in there. I had to check it every hour anyways. And I'd sit next to the pool in a chair and I'd look at my reflection in the water and read verses. And just ask myself, God, is this really the plan? Is this really what you wanted for me? Because I'm not seeing it.
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You know, I we all I would say have stories like that and to me I've just been reflecting lately of When people don't have that story you almost rob yourself of the true. I guess
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What's in there? Yes, it's never hit that rock bottom. Some people have never hit rock bottom. They either take over a business or they do maybe something else that they franchise maybe, but they've never had that sit by a pool, read Bible verses and say like, is this really where you want me? And the character that produces now on the flip side is powerful. So when did you start seeing things start to flip?
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on the asset protection? It was probably about a year and a half in.
Strategic Partnerships with Insurance Agents
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So one of my instructors in school, I reached out to him and I said, I want to buy you lunch and share with you my business and what I'm doing. And I sat down with him for lunch and shared my business plan with him. And he really started to push me on how I was going to grow the company to a place where it wasn't this grind for me all the time. And one of the things he helped me identify was, he said, try to find yourself an unpaid sales force.
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And I go, okay, an unpaid sales force, how do you do that? He goes, you gotta find who stands to gain the most from what you're doing that will encourage people to use your service. And the first thing that clicked into my head was insurance agents, right? They tell their customers to do this, to inventory their property. Nobody does it, right? And the folks that I was targeting were high net worth people that had a lot of assets and didn't have a lot of time and weren't gonna spend the time themselves, but stood a lot to lose if something happened.
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So I went and I met with insurance agents and I said, you know, here's my company. Here's a brochure that talks about it. Tell your customers to do the inventory, but then say, since we know you're not going to do it, here's a company that will do it for you. And what I gave them in exchange was I said, at the end of the day, I will pay for coffee for you and your customer to sit down and go through their inventory. And what I had done is I spent months
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understanding insurance policies, all the major carriers. And what I discovered is something I didn't know about insurance policies, which is they have limits of liability for specific categories within a policy. So you have a half million dollars contents policy, but you know, your musical instruments might only be covered up to 1500 bucks, even though you've got a half million. Yeah. So I had just inventoried this guy's house and he's got this guitar collection. He's got a $30,000 1969 Fender Strat hanging on the wall, right?
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And he goes, oh, I've got over 600,000 in contents coverage. And I pulled out his policy, and I showed him where it said musical instruments, $1,500 max. And he about puked. And so what I did is I set these people down together, and they were able to go through the inventory. The insurance agent would write them a better policy. And it benefited both sides. Yeah, you make that insurance agent look like a rock star. And then you also benefit because you're now providing a value.
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How did you get out of that company? What was the exit there? Yeah, it was actually kind of by accident.
Pivot to Software Development
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So we had Tom, who was my instructor in school, helped me to create a turnkey business model out of this so we could essentially create these in other states. And so we had, for lack of a better term, franchised off in a couple of states.
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And at that time, so Twitter and Facebook and stuff were just starting to come onto the scene. I was dabbling with the little computer programming and things like that. And so I got online and I created sort of this application for scraping profile data. Now keep in mind, this is back in the beginning, privacy concerns weren't even a concern. It wasn't anything we even talked about. And so what I was using social media for was identifying like when somebody was moving to Des Moines,
00:15:31
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That's a good target for me, right? They're moving into a house. Everything's clean. They've got a lot of stuff that they're moving, that kind of stuff. So I was using this system to identify customers based on what people were saying and what they were sharing online. And the business record did an article on me. Mostly they were curious about asset protection specialists, but I got to talking about what I was doing with this system for finding customers.
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So that article hit the paper, and I started getting calls from businesses all around the metro here. I mean, big companies going, hey, we're hearing about the social media. How do we buy your software? Can you come work for us? And so that afternoon, I had talked to a big real estate company, and they said, how much would it cost to be able to use this? And I was really happy doing APS.
00:16:19
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And I just threw out a number. I said, 35 grand. And they said, okay, great, can you come in next Monday and get things set up? And I'm like, oh, okay. So I drove down the street to my attorney's office and I said, hey, I gotta start another company. And so what was really cool was in six weeks' time,
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With this new company we passed three years worth of sales from the from the APS business Wow, so I hired a few friends from high school and college brought them over and we started rolling there So it was really kind of this natural like I moved into this and then I went to one of my franchisees and said hey Do you want to take over the the whole company? I'll sell it to you and he said done Wow, and so that was kind of how I'm from APS into this
Success with Mobile Applications
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you go from there? Slashwebs, right? Yeah. So we were primarily focused on the social media side of things, right, that the Twitter and the Facebook and all that kind of stuff. And a lot of our customers were asking for websites and digital things that we weren't really able to produce. So I found a couple of guys in Ankeny that had a little lifestyle web business called Slashweb Studios. They had started a couple of years earlier in an architecture office where they were primarily working. So this is kind of a side hobby.
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And so I started feeding them business and pretty soon they were getting really, really busy and we were co-oping a ton of projects together. So one day we're out for a beer and I said, hey guys, what would this look like if we just mashed this together and ran with this thing? And at that time I had two other employees. There was three of us. It was the two of them and they had one other guy that was starting to do work for them.
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We did. We matched it together. We kept the SlashWeb Studios name because my company's name, the social media company, was Ed Stringo, which is Latin for to bring together. But when you find it online, you're like, I don't even know what that is. I was not a branding guy. So anyways, we matched together SlashWeb Studios and right around probably a year into that marriage,
00:18:14
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Smartphones really became a thing you know we kind of assume and feel like they've been a part of our lives for a long time But the iphone's only been around a decade. Yeah, it's crazy so So anyways we recognize that Mobile was where things were really going to be going and so one of the hardest things I had to do was go to my friends and the people that I recruited to Des Moines and
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and tell them, hey, we're gonna get rid of the social media side of things. By then, a lot of change from privacy standpoint, and a lot of it got commoditized and automated. What we were doing was manual, and so the cost got driven really down. It just wasn't profitable.
00:18:50
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So we made that move and we decided to hire on a couple of guys that were really focused on developing mobile applications and we decided to go after that market and it ended up being a great choice. I mean that was really the turn of the smartphone revolution and we ended up with more business than we could even handle. Even by the time we grew to 15 employees we were still farming stuff out to companies. So then your exit for that was you had to merge with a bigger company.
00:19:16
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Yeah, we recognized that really there was two options for us to grow. We were either going to acquire or be acquired. And we had a company that had approached us and said, hey, we're kind of interested in growth ourselves. They did similar things to what we were doing, custom web applications, mobile. They were a little bit bigger than us, about twice the size.
00:19:36
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And I said, well, let's talk about it. Let's entertain the offer. And actually within 24 hours, another company, another competitor of theirs reached out to us and said, hey, we're looking to grow. Do you guys have any interest in being acquired? So here we had two interested parties. And really what it provided us was not so much necessarily the ability to let them negotiate against each other. What it did is it gave us a clear path to let's choose somebody that we want to work with.
00:20:05
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Let's choose who would be a good partner. Lots of blessing. Because a lot of the clients that we had, we had personal relationships with. You spend a few years working with these people and helping them grow their companies and their businesses. They're like families. Yeah. I didn't want to just be like, all right, hey, sorry, we sold you off to these. Got the highest bidder. Yeah, over here. I got paid. Exactly. So we found a great partner in Shift Interactive here in Des Moines and decided to transition the company over to them. And that would have been January of 2015.
00:20:33
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Okay, now this is where things get good. I want to take a pause before getting to the next thing. Oh, we're going back. Because I think to our listeners, you're all in. When you make a decision, Gabe's all in, right? But what does it look like with your own personal capital at a high level?
Reinvesting for Growth
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What's it been like going through two businesses
00:20:54
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and like what what advice would you give our listeners like i want to start something don't do this or do this you know give it make it a little more tangible yeah i think some of the uh some of the challenges that i had was everything that i kept getting into the next thing
00:21:11
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Kept getting bigger, which is a natural, I guess, progression. So I didn't get to experience this, you know, great windfall of like, wow, I'm going to go buy a lake house and I'm going to do these other things. It was every time I had an opportunity to exit, it was like, I'll take that little bit of money that I was able to go from there. Take what I've learned, right? The knowledge is something that I think entrepreneurs underplay that what they gather from that.
00:21:34
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and then roll that into something else, a little bit bigger. And I had been doing some investing in the marketplace. What was funny is there was an Edward Jones guy in a lunch group that I knew. And he was really the only financial person that I knew. And so I went to him and I said, look, I know you've got customers with a ton of money. I've got 1,500 bucks. And it's a lot of money to me. It is all of my extra money that I have to spare right now.
00:22:02
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I said, but Facebook is going to be IPO-ing. And I said, I have watched Facebook from its infancy. I know this company inside and out. I said, this is a technology company. It is not a MySpace. It is not a social media company. I said, they are they are investing. They are buying. They're buying all kinds of interesting technology. Right.
00:22:23
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I said, I feel like they're kind of a Google type play. So I said, I want to put my $1,500 on Facebook. He's like, all right. He goes, all right. He goes, I'll do it for you. So we do the IPO happens. You know, I think I bought stock at like 45 bucks. Absolutely. Exactly. So he calls me back and he goes, Hey, we're down around $20. He goes, you've lost a lot on this already. He goes,
00:22:50
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you have a lot of confidence in this company though, do you have any extra cash that you want to put? He goes, excuse me, he said, I would consider maybe a dollar cost averaging and getting back in. So I did, I gave him another $1,500. That's what I had earned, you know, over the course of a few weeks there of dealing with that with Facebook. And so we put that back in at like $19.
00:23:12
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And then when I transitioned out of shift interactive and into this new company, I was able to sell that stock for around 150, 160 dollars a share. And that really helped us launch this new company that's super capital intensive. So some of it was just a little bit of luck, but then also just knowledge about the industry that I was passionate about. Yeah. All
Post-Exit Reflections
00:23:34
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right. So you're done with shift. You're chilling.
00:23:38
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You're just, Gabe doesn't chill. Yeah, he doesn't chill long. It was a very short period, right? Yeah. I hung around for about 11 months through the transition with Shift and recognized that my life is startups. I like creating things. It was a great company. I love the people there. My business partner, Brad, is still with them. I know Brad. Yeah, great guy. Great guy.
00:23:59
Speaker
And so I said, all right, guys, I need to pull out here. I need to go do something else with my life. And so- Gage is getting antsy. Gage is getting antsy. Well, the first thing was I needed to reconnect with my family, right? At this point, I've got two boys. Life is going full force. And you guys know me. I'm kind of a, well, you mentioned I'm all in, right? Yeah. And so the pendulum swings one way when I'm onto something. And so I find myself with my life getting very out of balance on things. So here we had just sold this company.
00:24:28
Speaker
We're trying to, you know, bring our customers into the fold. There's a lot going on, right? And I had let myself get completely absorbed in that. So the first thing I said was, it's November. I'm going to spend the next two months with my family. It's the holiday season. They need to get reacquainted to their dad, their husband. So that's what I did. I spent a couple of months. Well, of course, I was kind of looking at like what maybe the next thing might be. I had always wanted to learn broadcast. I'd always wanted to learn audio editing and recording and that kind of stuff.
00:24:57
Speaker
And so I decided, you know what I'm really passionate about? At Slash Web Studios, we did a lot of manufacturing software. So we would take ERP systems and make them mobile for their salespeople out in the world. And I'm like, I was in these...
00:25:11
Speaker
manufacturing facilities all around the Midwest. And I kept hearing over and over again, these incredible stories of a company that started in the 1880s making horseshoes. And here they are five generations later, still going, still in business, obviously not in the horseshoe market. Right. But that was what was fascinating to me is how do you reinvent yourself so many times over and over again? And now you're making touch screen automated grain sorting systems. Right. How did you find that path and that vision? And I said, you know what? I want to record these stories.
00:25:41
Speaker
I'm gonna put them online with a free to distribute free to use license open syndication anybody can take it they can chop it they do whatever they want with it right for me it was about telling those stories and I figured nobody's gonna listen to him anyways but we should record these stories for for history right uh-huh so I launched the advanced manufacturing podcast after my two-month sabbatical
00:26:04
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with just that mission record the stories put them on the internet for people to hear and i was wrong people really wanted to hear the stuff they really wanted to listen and pretty soon i had thousands of people listening to this thing and i started getting calls from all around the world people saying hey i heard your podcast here and we're doing something really cool with our company would you want to do an interview with us and.
Podcast Success and Opportunities
00:26:27
Speaker
And I was like, yeah, man, that sounds great. So originally, I was kind of like, I'll just kind of focus on Iowa. Well, now we're doing global podcasts, which is really cool. And I think all of it kind of came to a pinnacle. You mentioned in the intro my opportunity to sit down with Jeff Immelt from GE Corporation. So about a year ago at this time, actually, I was on the corporate jet with GE. They had reached out to me and said, hey, we're big fans of your podcast. We do some cool things at GE. Not sure how much you know about us.
00:26:54
Speaker
Like you were founded by Thomas Edison. How do you spell that? Exactly. So, you know, I knew their history. I knew what they were doing. And so at first I thought my friends are punking me, right? Like, yeah. So I fly to New York City. I hop on an airplane and they take me around the country for a few days. They show me their jet engine facility that they just built. They show me the robotics facility. I go to
00:27:17
Speaker
I go to Pennsylvania to their locomotive remanufacturing facility. And then to cap it all off, I show up at an oyster bar in Boston and get to sit down and have dinner with Jeff Immelt and talk about GE all because of this hobby podcast.
00:27:33
Speaker
I should tell you guys this funny story. So I show up at the hangar, right? And what they told me is, you know, we'll be doing industry tours for a few days, right? Which is what I do all the time with this podcast. So I show up in Dickie Jeans, Wolverine boots, flannel shirt, fire truck or brewery hat. I got my own safety glasses with me. And I walk into the hangar and there's all these people in suits. And they're like, who are you? And I go, Gabe Glenn with the Advanced Manufacturing Podcast. And I go, okay, where are you from?
00:28:03
Speaker
And I said, Des Moines, Iowa, and they go, oh, okay, that makes sense. So anyways, yeah, I was, I was totally a fish out of water, totally out of place. What was cool is they invited a few media members, I guess was technically what I was. So we had a wall street journal, uh, ink magazine, CNBC, um, and a industry week magazine. And then, and then me from the advanced manufacturing podcast and they treat us like kings. We had a private dinner at the Henry Ford museum in Detroit.
00:28:29
Speaker
They shut the museum down. We had a private dinner. How cool is that? It was just an awesome experience. Quick question, follow-up question. On the present CEO of GE, Jeff, what was the biggest question you asked him that you were a little nervous to ask him in that interview? Yeah, great question, Phillip. So I happened to be, we're sitting in kind of a line with the media members on the one side of the table and then the executives from GE on the other side of the table. And I just happened to be last in line and Jeff says,
00:28:55
Speaker
Each of you can ask me two questions and so the first question, you know, these are media members they've got a pander to their audience and I've got to ask the political questions and and Jeff is very much so a politician in the way that he answers things right very Polished and proper and a lot of canned answers so the first question is like, you know how does the Trump travel ban impact your business and that kind of stuff and
00:29:16
Speaker
So then they get to me and I said, Mr. Emil, you've done some amazing things in your life. I mean, you're the CEO of a company founded by Thomas Edison. You followed Jack Welch, one of the greatest CEOs in global history. You've had an amazing career, but is there anything on your list that you haven't done that you wanna do? And he stared at me, it felt like minutes, right? Probably just a couple of seconds. Take that CNBC.
00:29:44
Speaker
And he's looking at me, and he leans back in his chair, and you can just kind of see this weight come off of him. And he said, you know what, young man? He said, I have had an interesting career. I have had the opportunity to work with some amazing people and run one of the most incredible companies that has ever been created on our planet. And he said, but I've always wondered.
00:30:01
Speaker
could I do it? Could I be the person to start something like this that 100 years from now somebody else is sitting here running this company? And I was like, wow, that's awesome. That was a great story. And I goes, is that on the record? He goes, oh, God, no, you didn't record that, did you? And I was like, yeah, I did. So publicist is like, we'll just take that sound bite. Basically what Jeff just said was, I want to have that moment by the pool with my Bible
00:30:28
Speaker
Wondering if I could do it right like and we have that what an amazing story. Yeah, it was fun cool experience They treated me so well. It's just a lot of fun. So you're starting to get some traction on this Manufacturing train the podcast is going well and at what point did you say wait?
Inspiration for Make You Safe
00:30:43
Speaker
I think I can make this even bigger and better for not only myself, but other people and make it safer and
00:30:49
Speaker
Yeah, so really what happened is, and this kind of goes back to a practice of mine, so I try to spend a lot of time fine-tuning the way that I view the world and the way that I look at people, the way that I look at situations, and so one of the things that I had started doing a couple years ago was every morning I would pull out a spreadsheet and I would try to come up with three new ideas, three new ideas for something, and sometimes I would challenge myself even harder. It didn't matter how absurd they were or anything, but I would challenge myself in a hard way,
00:31:19
Speaker
One day I put silverware in front of me on the table and I said, how would I reinvent silverware? It's never been reinvented. It's never been redone. And you know, forever, right? And you just force yourself to try to think through different ideas, whether it's materials that you would use differently or different shapes and that kind of stuff. So what I found was that practice helped me look at things a little bit differently. And so while I'm out touring one afternoon, a facility,
00:31:44
Speaker
The employees are wearing these funny looking buttons on their shirt. And so I asked the guy go what's that all about? And he said well, unfortunately one of our employees lost their hearing So we're being audited by OSHA and those are called dosimeter buttons. They're gonna come back Download all the data off of them and determine if we violated OSHA code and if we're gonna be fined and sued and liable for the hearing loss and
00:32:08
Speaker
And I said, unpack that a little bit. Tell me what that means. I go, there are laws around how much sound somebody can be exposed to. What else are there laws around that they can be exposed? How do you guys monitor this kind of stuff? And fortunately, my father is a safety manager at a plant with more than 1,000 employees.
00:32:25
Speaker
And so I was able to lean on him a lot for this information. What I discovered is it's a completely archaic process of paying a third party thousands of dollars to come into a facility once a year, test all of these things, right? And then they go away and they assume the other 364 days it's gonna be the exact same. And they all know when they're coming. Exactly. And so the light bulb goes off and I go, you know what? We have the technology now where we can not only constantly monitor environmental conditions,
00:32:54
Speaker
But we can do it directly on the individual. And we can understand just exactly what each individual person is being exposed to. And that data is incredibly powerful in understanding how we can more predictably and prescriptively prevent accidents from happening in the facility. And so I tell my wife this story, and I said, hey, you work at a research company. I said, do some research for me. Tell me how big of a problem this is.
00:33:19
Speaker
I said, because I think we might be on to something, and I never, ever would have expected what she came back to me with. It was heartbreaking. More than a thousand people a day die in work accidents on this planet. In manufacturing? Or just variety of industries, right? Sure.
00:33:39
Speaker
500 people a minute get injured. There was over 160,000 people in the U.S. that didn't go home from work last year. Last year in Iowa, there was 56 workers that died. I think somebody at Sauer just lost their life. Yeah, it wasn't that long ago. So I mean, this is a real problem. So that was the heartbreaking part. And then also just understanding the financial impact, right? More than a billion dollars a week.
00:34:07
Speaker
gets paid out on worker compensation claims in the US alone. There's a ton of money that goes out the door. And quite frankly, there are a lot of leading indicators that tell us that these things are going to happen. We just were never gathering them. In a broken archaic system, no one's ever tried to challenge that. It just kind of, well, I guess that's what you do. That's the way that it is.
00:34:27
Speaker
And so that was when I contacted a friend of mine, one of the smartest guys I know, Mark Frederick. He was working at IBM and IoT and cloud computing. And I said, hey, man, I've got a problem I want to talk to you about. So we got together and I shared with him the research and the stories and what I knew about the manufacturing industry. And keep in mind, I'm in these facilities every day. That was my life. I had tons of access to the space to see what was going on.
00:34:52
Speaker
And I said, I really think we can change the way the world looks at workplace environments and the way that we look at the way the environment impacts worker health, safety and productivity. And so that was the genesis of Make You Safe.
00:35:07
Speaker
So you like naming things. Walk us through the name because I think it's really cool. Well, I can't take credit for this. It was another friend of ours that came up with the thing here. You know, we're struggling for, you know, what do we want to call this thing? And, you know, we're focused on environment and safety and all that kind of stuff. Well, um,
00:35:23
Speaker
the guy just happened to look up, you know, what are some words in Hawaiian that are around risk and safety or something like that. Because everyone likes Hawaii. It's better than Greek, right? I was going to say, I would have suggested Latin, but we don't know how that works out. So anyways, it turns out Maku, M-A-K-U, is Hawaiian for risk.
00:35:42
Speaker
And so we said, well, what if we put a line over the A and we pronounce it make you, so make you safe, even though the corporation is actually Makusei Corporation, because our whole goal and focus is, you know, we want to send more people home from work every day, so we need to reduce the risk. And so that's how make you safe. So this is really the biggest venture you've ever done. Hands down. And so.
Overcoming Challenges at Make You Safe
00:36:02
Speaker
Walk us through how your experience in the past has helped you even because you're in the crowdfunding or like the startup phase right now. Capital raise. Capital raise. And that's a little bit different than any other company that you've described to us up to this point.
00:36:18
Speaker
Yeah, so in the past, I'd never there's a lot of things that are first for me with this venture. So one, hardware, I had zero hardware experience. You know, we are more of a software and a data company. Really, for us, it's about the data, trending the data, identifying risk and offering remediation steps. Right. So that's that's really at our core. But in order to be able to do that in a proactive way, we needed to gather this data. There was nothing on the planet.
00:36:44
Speaker
That was designed to do what we wanted it to do so we were kind of what what's the old adage like necessity? Innovation right so that's what happened and we said well okay, we need to create this product and my naivety Actually was was a bit of a savior to us because I thought how hard can it be just hardware I've built a lot of software stuff. It can't be that different
00:37:05
Speaker
can't be too expensive, right? So that naivety really got us started down this path of, hey, I threw some money in. I had some money from my exit with slash web. And so Mark and I started down this journey. And what we discovered was one, hardware is incredibly hard. It is super capital intensive before you can actually get to market the amount of capital that's needed to create something that can be viable in a workplace environment is super expensive.
00:37:34
Speaker
So there it forced me to learn how to capital raise so that that was part of it never gone down the patenting process By capital raising we knew that we needed to form the corporation as a C corporation because we were gonna be bringing on a board of directors We're gonna have shareholders. Yeah, right. So now I had to learn How do you run a C corporation because everything else has been LLCs? So now I've got a board of directors to answer to I've got corporate formalities, you know all of these things, you know and it kind of goes back to the comment I made about how I think entrepreneurs undervalue
00:38:03
Speaker
the education side of each venture. Each thing was a building block to where I am now to answer your question, Phillip. There were elements of everything that I was doing and certainly connections along that journey that were going to prove to be really helpful here for Make You Safe in this journey. But we completely undervalue
00:38:24
Speaker
the amount of knowledge and education that we gain out of that, because I look at what I've invested into this startup. I mean, selling my town home, investing the capital that I had, pulling my stocks, anything I could to get capital. All hands on deck. Going underneath the seat cushions. Exactly, exactly. Taking all the cans back in the garage, doing that kind of stuff. But at the end of the day, regardless of where Make You Safe turns out,
00:38:52
Speaker
nobody can take away this education from me. And I can tell you, I could not have paid the amount of money that I've invested into this thing to get that same education and to meet those people along the way. We say all the time, you can't cheat that process either. That entrepreneurial education trial by fire, you just can't buy it. You just have to get into it.
00:39:12
Speaker
You know your story will unravel so yeah true. I'm totally nailing this part I'm sorry I'm asking all these questions But where are you on where you want make you safe to be just give the listeners like zero is like I just threw the first diamond of this thing and a hundred percent is like this thing's ready to go and
00:39:30
Speaker
Yeah, you're selling it. Where are you at on that percentage-wise, just so the listeners can kind of hear that from you? Yeah, so the first year and a half, I was the only full-time person in the company on a volunteer basis, right?
Redefining Business Strategy
00:39:44
Speaker
I remember those days. And my co-founder, Mark,
00:39:48
Speaker
had really embraced the project. Although he said, I'm not in a position to leave my career. He said, I'm all in, man. I'm going to help you with this. So he was working nights and weekends and I mean, putting in a ton of time on this. So we progressed pretty well. So we got our first beta test products out probably within the first six months. So we started the company like May of 2015.
00:40:12
Speaker
In the fall of 2015, we were testing our product in factories here in Iowa. And at that point, we had burned through the capital. We had worked with a team of engineers here in Iowa. And that's when I started to learn like, woo. It goes pretty quickly. So we had some folks in manufacturing that were
00:40:30
Speaker
Excuse me, keeping a close eye on what we were doing. And so I went to them and I said, hey, I need some capital for this. Would you be interested in putting in? I opened up a small angel round of $100,000. And within 72 hours, we had the round closed up, which was amazing for us. We used that $100,000 to help us iterate on our hardware. So we went through a few different versions of this hardware as we were learning things about what we were doing. And it was at this point that
00:40:58
Speaker
we started getting some press about what we were doing and EMC company, insurance company, they're a regional carrier. They were actually born out of the Iowa Manufacturers Association. I don't know if you guys knew that, which is now ABI. But back in the day, they were the Iowa Manufacturers Association. They started their own insurance company to insure manufacturers.
00:41:20
Speaker
And that's how EMC was born. So they reached out and said, hey, you're doing something really interesting. We think you're onto something. Can we get some capital into this thing and help you guys develop this technology? We said, sure. That sounds great. That door's open. Sounds really cool. So we did a deal with EMC. They came on as an equity partner in the company. And we started collaborating with their team. And really, this is where the entire thing kind of blew wide open. Because what we discovered after a few months of working with them is
00:41:50
Speaker
We had been focused on making the lives of guys like my father a lot easier, right? Providing them tools to manage risk and safety in their facility, manage the paperwork process, reporting process, all those things, super critical and important to this whole focus of Make You Safe. But what we didn't realize is we are building an insurance tool. And how we realized that was after collaborating with the folks at EMC and some of the other carriers that have been reaching out to us, we discovered that
00:42:19
Speaker
These companies have massive risk reduction departments. EMC has over 100 employees here in Des Moines in risk reduction. Those are ergonomists, industrial hygienists, safety trainers, they've got tools, they've got equipment, they have all these things that they've spent a ton of money on and they use it to help reduce the risk of the people they insure and they deliver those tools to them based on claims.
00:42:39
Speaker
So once somebody's had a lot of claims, they get a whole bunch of resources. But by then, there's losses. There's already accidents. Lives. Premiums are going up. Lives, right? And it's a bad relationship at that point. And so we said, well, with the data that we're gathering, we can recognize trends in the facility before they get to a place where they're causing these loss claims.
00:43:02
Speaker
And we can act as a conduit for you guys to deliver your risk reduction resources in a proactive way to your customers. That's amazing. Instead of always waiting for reactive. Proactive and preventative. That's amazing. Exactly. And for our listeners, Gabe, this is a wearable device. I don't want to associate it to any other device because it does more than I think most devices on the market. But this is a wearable device that guys in the manufacturing facility are wearing while they're on the job. Correct? That's correct, yeah.
00:43:30
Speaker
put a tremendous amount of energy and design effort into this. We worked with the design team out of San Jose, California, that specialize in wearable devices. So they helped design Fitbits, the Apple Watch, Java. They've done a lot of wearable things. So their design team came to Iowa and we went on a factory tour. And they interviewed employees and they tried to understand more about their job. And I knew enough between my father being in safety and my experience in manufacturing. I knew enough about
00:43:58
Speaker
how this thing needed to operate and where it needed to be placed on the body is one simple example. So this is an arm band that goes up around the shoulder area and we wanted it close to the head. That's where you sense sound with your ears. So we wanted to be able to track that close to your ears and your eyes and that kind of stuff.
00:44:17
Speaker
Because we knew a lot of factories you can't have hand and wrist warm stuff So we couldn't repurpose a wrist watch or we couldn't repurpose an Apple watch or something like that Plus we also knew cost is always a factor, right? And not that people don't want to spend money on safety, but they any time you spend money in business you should So why have a you know, a $700
Supporting Entrepreneurs
00:44:39
Speaker
Apple watch on somebody and
00:44:41
Speaker
that by the way, isn't tracking half of the things that we're tracking. And if something happens to it, that's $700, ours are sub 30 bucks. So think how many more people you can cover with that. Not to mention just the interruption of what you can do on an Apple watch and the distraction of that in a manufacturing facility times a thousand people. But yeah, I had another question there and I just lost it. It'll come back.
00:45:07
Speaker
You know, I think this is important because we have loved interviewing people like you and what we've been getting feedback of is that we don't do a good job of explaining how do we fit in the picture, right? And so you can hear Gabe's passion in this podcast and it's coming out and I love talking to you.
00:45:26
Speaker
What we get passionate about is seeing that passion come out in our clients and the people that we work with every day. Our life is this big podcast. And seeing people transform lives and help industries like you're doing.
00:45:41
Speaker
It's so empowering for Brian and I to be able to walk through, how do you actually do this? Like, how do you go from zero to 60? And a lot of times that's gonna have, it's gonna be clunky. And to have somebody like Brian and I to walk through that, what does that look like for your specific example? Where do you wanna go? Hold you accountable? That's financial advising. When it's not just, here, give me your money, I'm gonna put it over in a stock over here, it's actually bringing
00:46:05
Speaker
bringing ideas and thoughts out of people and then impacting others. And I love to hear your passion. I get excited about it just right now. We're super out of time, but I don't want to stop. So we're going to keep going. I want to hit one more thing. And I remember my question is, I think so many people have a good idea.
SaaS Model and Market Demand
00:46:22
Speaker
And, you know, I always go back to, you know, a guy makes tacos. I just think it's so easy to understand everybody likes tacos, but that's not a residual business, right? Like you've got to get up and turn the lights on every day. So when you look at Make You Safe and you look at, okay, I could be a hardware manufacturer and produce these armbands, but that's not really where the potential is. So when you look at your business, talk about how you're turning it into, you know, a residual type,
00:46:49
Speaker
model and what are the different ways you can kind of monetize this information to truly save people's life? Yeah, so what we discovered was the insurance company has a lot to gain and a lot to lose in workplace safety. And once we started pairing ourselves with the insurance companies and we said, look, here's the interesting thing. We don't want to be a hardware company. We're not out there to sell pieces of hardware.
00:47:13
Speaker
Like I said, sub $30 to produce this thing, I'll sell it to you guys at whatever it costs us, right? We're focused on a software as a service revenue model, right? So each of these connected devices comes with a $6 a month fee to have access to that data, to the data platforms and things like that.
00:47:31
Speaker
And then certainly there's a lot more, even more opportunity in the data. Once we've aggregated and built up, you get a thousand companies on here, imagine the amazing things that we'll be able to learn as we anonymize this data and start to look for patterns in that. So you're certainly right. We're more focused on the residual income side of things. We've been very fortunate that
00:47:55
Speaker
Insurance carriers have embraced that and we've got almost five million dollars in bookings right now for the product Which which is incredible for a startup that our product isn't out yet. It's not ready to release Mark it's telling you there's a need Exactly. So, you know so often the number one reason a startup fails I don't know if you guys knew this the number one reason a startup fails is
00:48:15
Speaker
is product market fit. Somebody creates something that they think the market needs and it just isn't there, right? Or the economics of the system don't work, right? Maybe they would use it, but you can't produce it at affordable enough cost for them to go, yeah, I'll take that. And so now, we're in a startup where both the end user has said, we demand this, we need this for our employees. And then you've got the people that stand to have the most financial upfront loss, the insurance companies going,
00:48:45
Speaker
We need this we did we demand this speed this up exactly so that's put us in a really good position and you know one of the challenges with startups especially in the hardware spaces it takes time you know we're not. We're not competing with the two kids in the garage like i always was on the software right things right because. You know when you're doing software is just about coding time how fast can you can you showed you know and get something out there with hardware there's a process.
00:49:09
Speaker
And there's rules, regulations, there's things that it takes to get this off of the ground. And that just takes time and it takes capital. So that's where I've spent most of my time as the CEO. My co-founder resigned from IBM last August, came on full-time as our CCO. We hired a CIO in October. We've hired a couple more guys. So I mentioned the instructor from DMACC that helped me start my first company, Tom West.
00:49:32
Speaker
He was Mickey safe's fifth employee. Oh nice. He's taken after 28 years of teaching. Tom's a great guy. Gosh. Taking a step away and gonna help us out. So one last question I have and I think you hit it and I want to just, I want to hit on it deeper because I think so many business owners miss this and I've been guilty of this too but is admitting that you don't know how to do something and asking for
Importance of Support and Faith
00:49:56
Speaker
help. We see so many business owners that are holding on so tight
00:50:00
Speaker
trying to control everything, that they just don't know how to ask for help. So talk to our listeners about what it's been like to like, I don't know how to do this, and that mindset.
00:50:10
Speaker
Our company wouldn't exist if it wasn't for a lot of the people around us that have rallied around us and gotten behind our mission and what we're doing. And I mentioned from the beginning, my naivety about this is really what made this thing happen because we got 10 months in and I look back on it, I'm like, oh my gosh, look at what we've accomplished. And then I looked ahead to what we still had to do. And I go, man, this is Mount Everest. This looks really hard.
00:50:34
Speaker
think we can do it. And I think being stupid in the beginning and not knowing what I was getting myself into should help. But one thing I will say is faith has played a big part of my life. It wasn't always that way. I grew up Catholic in high school, late high school and college. I became atheist and really turned away from my faith. If it wasn't for a mentor of mine when I was working at Target who has since gone on to be a pastor and now
00:51:02
Speaker
as like a regional director for first assemblies of God. If it wasn't for his prompting every day when I would come into work, I don't know where I would be at my faith journey, but I can tell you, I know where I'd be at in my entrepreneurial journey and it wouldn't be where I am right now. So many times in this journey, I've had to sit down and pray and say, Lord, I just need you to take control of this. I need a connection. I need a door to open and just please help me recognize that.
00:51:31
Speaker
And every time that phone rings, I get an email, somebody calls and says, hey, I have somebody you need to talk to. And it's just been story after story after story like that through this process. So I really truly feel that his hand is over this and that the people that are rallying around this really believe in our mission and what we're trying to do. And it's easy for them to get behind it.
00:51:55
Speaker
that's so cool very cool well i think that pretty much caps it off how can you how can you end a better podcast than that gabe i want to thank you so much for just your time today and what you're doing if you have any questions guys we would love to hear from our listeners we would love to walk through some of the challenges and obstacles because we all know they're out there and
00:52:18
Speaker
I just, yeah, there's a lot here and there's a lot more. So we just want to encourage you to continue doing what you're doing. Thank you for letting us be a part of your journey. Gabe, how can our listeners, if they wanted to contact you or follow up on what you're doing, how can they keep track of you? Yeah, I'm at Gabriel Glenn on Twitter and that's G-A-B-R-I-E-L-G-L-Y and kind of goofy spelling there.
00:52:43
Speaker
Or you can visit us at makusafe.com and I would like to say, I'd like to throw a little plug back your guys' way. So I've known you guys as you've kind of gone through this journey too. So, you know, you and I, we're kindred souls, right? We're kind of going through this together.
00:53:02
Speaker
One of the things that I've loved about working with you guys is I know when you look at your list of customers I'm probably at the bottom from a financial Wealth standpoint and and and you know the work I've been able to do with you guys but one of the things that the two of you said to me that has resonated and been one of the reasons why I want to continue to work with you guys and why I jumped in to begin with was when we first started talking about the financial side of things I think this is when I first met you Brian and you said
00:53:31
Speaker
Don't worry about stocks, bonds, things like that. Invest in yourself right now. Just invest in yourself. It will get you to a place where you want to be. And we will be here to help along the way. And we'll be here and ready when you get to a place where you want to use more stuff from us. And so we've been able to do some transactions along the way, right? Which has been fantastic.
00:53:53
Speaker
But you guys have supported me in so many ways. This podcast being a great example of that, getting a chance to share our story with your listeners is really cool. So thank you to both of you guys. Oh, thank you. That was neat. Yeah. Guys, you've been listening to the Uncommon Life Project. This is your host, Philip Ramsey. And I'm Brian Dewhurst. Thanks again, Gabe. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks, everybody.
00:54:12
Speaker
That's all for this episode of The Uncommon Life Project, brought to you by Uncommon Wealth Partners. Be sure to visit uncommonwealth.com to learn more about our services. Don't miss an episode as we introduce you to inspiring people who are actively pursuing an uncommon life.