In this episode Mike Gnoffo, a Marine Combat Veteran and entrepreneur discusses balancing military service and business, launching his custom apparel brand Exray, and the importance of actions over words. Mike shares his experiences from failing out of the University of Delaware to starting a business that supports military and first responders with custom U.S.-made gear. They delve into the value of adversity, finding fulfillment, and creating a structure for success. This episode showcases the blend of discipline and innovation required to navigate both military and entrepreneurial landscapes.
Episode Highlights:
09:55 The Importance of Structure and Freedom in Business
29:02 Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
33:42 Discovering Your True Self
34:48 Balancing Passion and Profit
37:25 The Importance of Pricing Strategy
39:49 Made in the USA: The Value of Local Production
49:16 Building a Community Through Apparel
54:50 Supporting the Military and First Responders
Mike Gnoffo is the founder and CEO of Exray, you can learn more here: exray.cc
Episode Transcript:
00:32
Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions, not words. If you want to know what somebody truly believes, don’t listen to their words, instead observe their actions. I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson, and my guest today truly embodies that phrase.
00:59
Mike Nopfo is a Marine combat veteran who served as a team chief, JFO and radio operator at Third Anglico as a Marine. He spent more than a decade balancing service with a career in small business, eventually launching X-Ray EXRAY to deliver custom-made military and first responder apparel products that are made in the United States. JC Glick connected us and first of all, I love that man more than words, incredible person. And if he…
01:28
recommends that I connect to anybody, then I just say, yes, let’s figure out how to make it happen. So Mike, thank you for being here today and thank you for all that you’re doing. Thank you so much for having me, Marcus. It’s an honor to be here. It’s an honor to talk to you. Should I have recorded the beginning? Because we already had some gold, but it gave us a good direction to get started. And I think it’s interesting because I was active duty. So when you’re active, it’s like you’re in, you’re in that mode. But for you, you were going back and forth.
01:58
through the reserves in addition to building business and entrepreneurship, but if you would, could you give us a little bit of the path that got you there, because we were discussing how a lot of times our parents or the people around us say, you have to get this education, you have to do this thing. If you don’t have this piece of paper by this amount of time, then all of a sudden you’re, they don’t say you’re a failure, but they feel like you’re not really kind of staying lockstep with where everyone else is in their progress.
02:28
I’ve made mistakes my whole life and I started off with one when it comes to education. I was into a good school at University of Delaware and I signed up for Air Force ROTC, my first semester freshman year. I saw Top Gun when I was 12 or 15 and I was going to be Tom Cruise no matter what. And so I messed up right away by going to Air Force instead of Navy and I did the ROTC for a year. And they do.
02:56
Great work there, just wasn’t the vibe that I wanted. And I got a little antsy and it was my freshman year of college and so I got impatient and I wanted more of a military experience. And I thought I could get that and I did in the Marine Corps. And so I walked into the enlisting office, the recruiting office in Newark, Delaware, and I signed up with about three weeks left to school, hadn’t taken finals yet. And I said, I can leave whenever and I left right away.
03:24
to go to bootcamp in the summer and skip my finals. And while I was at bootcamp, effectively failed out of school. But it did get bootcamp done and then got stuck in the reserve as a result and nothing against the reserve. I ended up having a wonderful career in it, but I had to learn how to navigate reserve duty and being in college dropout very quickly, which meant a couple of years of messing around and trying to find the right career field for me.
03:52
I came out to California chasing active duty orders, ended up luckily landing at an incredible reserve unit called Third Anglico that changed my military career for the better, but also the whole time I had to have a real civilian job. And my very first gig when I landed in California, the first, the only job I could get, I found on Craigslist and the job was at a company called BDS Tactical Gear and the owner was a Marine. And he needed someone to come pack
04:22
plate carriers and chest rigs and admin pouches and slings into boxes for like 10 bucks an hour. And I was ready to work for whatever anyone would give me so I could afford gas in my car and the ramen that I was eating at that time to live in San Diego. And just started to learn the business and got hired again for no other reason. I was completely unqualified than me being a Marine. I was going to say, I know Marines.
04:45
We’ll do that for each other. Yeah, I shouldn’t have worked there, but Mike, a foreign friend who still owns BDS and does a wonderful job with that brand has kept it afloat manufacturing in America for decades. Now was the one who gave me that first shot. So I was working for a company that the American production of my very first civilian job at a small factory in California. And then one weekend in the month, or frankly, a lot more than that was heading off to do schools, drills.
05:14
ATs and ultimately a deployment. And so I’ve cut my teeth in the industry and the apparel and small business world by getting hired off of this primary. So, uh, world works and funny with us. It does. And it’s a great testament. You and I were discussing this before. I think, you know, my story, I, you know, I was injured at 40. I was joined the light imagery at 38 because of divorce and. You know, my great uncle passing. So.
05:45
Oftentimes it’s adversity that it gives us the direction that we need. You made a comment sort of offhand, you were saying, you know, you kind of grew up in this life where there wasn’t a whole lot of adversity in your life. And I think that whether we realize it or not subconsciously, either we seek it out or we create it within us. If we feel like we are not fulfilled because we know on some level that whatever this thing is, it’s going to force me to level up. It’s going to force me to lean into this hardship.
06:14
And so like, like with me joining the light infantry, going to infantry school, you joined in the Marines jumping in, like you’re in over your head. It’s like, Hey, you’re committed guys. Like, you know, the first three weeks of hell week when you’re going through it, it’s like, man, I wonder if I made the wrong, wrong decision, but that’s, but again, that’s where that fear is. And we learned to chill. There’s a beauty in the diversity of going back. It can be really, it can be really focusing. I think, you know, as we’re talking beforehand, you know, I did grow up.
06:41
with very little challenge. I had everything that I needed and most of what I wanted growing up. And so I knew that I needed to go seek something harder. And I thought I was doing that by joining the Marine Corps and to a certain extent, that certainly covered a piece of it. And then I really dove in, asked backwards when I really made bigger mistakes in my civilian life. And then I got into this world where I had to balance the hardship of being in the Marine Corps and the challenges that that brings with the hardship of.
07:09
not having the appropriate piece of paper on the wall and having no real job skills or other assets for another than my willingness to work. And when you have nothing else but that, for me, ultimately, it made it very easy. I wasn’t worried about chasing job satisfaction. I wasn’t worried about happiness at work necessarily. I’m not saying it’s wrong to pursue those things, but I was just literally hungry. Like I needed to eat food and I was poor because I had burnt bridges on the way out.
07:39
And also hungry because I just wanted to have value that I brought somewhere and I wanted to be working to show up and be someone that brought value to my organization. I wanted to be working all the time. I wanted to be paying my bills and I had no other choice other than to dive headfirst into this opportunity that I was given that I probably shouldn’t have been. And I’m so grateful that I was. And in that process of being focused and working really hard, I found out that I actually really loved the work.
08:09
And that didn’t happen overnight, like, like creating, sewing up tactical gear and putting into a box to, you know, fulfill internet orders or put items on the shelf at the PX. Wasn’t what I would have told you I was passionate about when I was 12 and watching Top Gun for the first time, right? Like it wasn’t the vision that I had originally had, but I got to be introduced to people that had started a small business and ran it for themselves. And, you know, I got to see Mike.
08:37
struggle through those things and succeed, you know, predominantly, but also I just have hardships and build a layer of respect for that kind of life. I also got to watch him be able to make his own decisions about his company in a lot of ways. And I thought that was really compelling. And I had this one aspect of my life in the Marine Corps where I wasn’t necessarily a decision maker, certainly as an enlisted man, I wasn’t at this strategic level of thinking.
09:02
Although the Marine Corps pushes down decision-making to very low levels, it’s just, you are being told what to do and how to do it predominantly for most of your career. And it’s a very structured way to go about it. And then on the other side of my life in the civilian world, you know, I’m working with someone who’s making it up as they go. That’s both freeing and also a huge burden. And I love both of those things. And I was jettisoning in between each of these two worlds, or transitioning in between each of these two worlds.
09:31
frequently for a decade. And I figured out at the end of that decade which one of those worlds I really wanted to dive into. And it was both my own decision and my wife who was pregnant with our first kid helped make it easier. And I made the decision to focus on a small business world but not right away as a small business owner. It’s a whole different ballgame. And I think you brought up a lot of points there. One that in a discomfort of the best teachers and if we’re hungry and we have empty pockets.
10:00
That’s when we really learn what we believe, who we are, what we’re really made of, what we’re willing to do in the face of adversity. And also as human beings, you were saying as you grew up that you wanted for nothing and pretty much anything that you wanted was literally at your disposal. And for a lot of people, that’s dangerous because if we don’t work for it, we don’t respect it. If it were easy, we wouldn’t respect it. So that’s sort of the built-in mechanism of adversity. If we look at nature,
10:31
nothing grows stronger without a hard winner, anything from a chicken to an insect coming out of a cocoon, they literally have to be strong enough to break through that initial barrier into life. And that’s designed to make sure that they’re strong enough to have a chance to survive in this thing called the world where there’s no punishments, there’s no rewards, there are simply repercussions to your preparation or lack thereof. Yeah. So there’s this element of, for me,
11:00
I didn’t have to grind. And then when I did have to do it, that’s when I really started to grow as a person and as an individual. I really felt like I started to understand myself better. The point at which my life, I was at my lowest and had to really define myself through work. So again, so grateful to Mike for the opportunity to start that out. And then I can claim responsibility and claim that was my work that did it all the way through. But the other thing that I saw through that whole
11:30
was years of challenges that was transitioning between the Marine Corps Reserve duty and you know, working in small business in the civilian world was finding the humility to seek help when you need it and to ask for it. And so we talked about two people who’ve been a huge part of that for me. And I just in every corner of my journey from being an idiot college dropout to being a growing small business owner now and my whole Marine Corps service throughout.
11:59
the duration of all that is there are people who helped give me a path or pick me up when I was down, especially in moments when I was just humble enough to ask for it. So I had to reach out to Mike and apply for that job and be very candid with him about where I was in life and what I could bring to the table for his business. When I started now, many years later, when I started my own small business back in November of this past year,
12:27
One of the first people I called was JC. We would both know him and I said, I don’t know what I don’t know. And I asked JC to join our board of advisors, which is a really nice way to say, I asked JC to give me lots of advice for functionally nothing in return, at least for right now. You know, I hope to make that different in the future, but, and JC in the first call said, absolutely. You know, he was on board immediately.
12:57
He and I have never been in the same room physically. You know, like we met digitally at an amazing program called Tuck Next Step, which helps transitioning veterans and Olympic athletes and to figure out if they wanna get into the business world and go to business school. I would love to go to business school, but I can’t because they’re on the college screen. So I’m in the business school of just doing business and trying to figure out what you’re messing up. But Jason and I met there in 2021. We couldn’t even meet in the same place because of COVID.
13:26
So we’ve really never been in the same room and to have people that are willing to put forth their name and their credentials and their time and attention, you can grind as hard as you want. If you don’t have people in your corner that are supporting you, it’s a really tough uphill battle. It’s already tough as it is. And so being able to reach out and ask for help in the times in my life when I’ve needed it has been huge. It’s not a solo journey. And it’s interesting because…
13:55
It’s so low in the fact that only you can do the work. Yeah. But as you were saying, when we get knocked on our ass by adversity, it’s called humility because it keeps you from being humiliated. So when we’re humble and when we’re down to like you said, and there’s nothing that creates that humbleness, like I have no other options here. I don’t have enough food for this. Like what, what can I get? That hunger is what can drive us. And having somebody in your quarter in any capacity, just
14:24
to kind of believe in you. And I think you, I’m gonna say it from this orientation, you being in those two worlds where you were juxtaposed between everything being regimented and like mission command down to when you can actually go take a dump to the other direction where it’s like, man, I don’t care whenever you want to get up. Do you want to do PT? Great, if you don’t, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter. Oh, you’re gonna eat something? Fine.
14:51
How many times do you want to eat today? I don’t care. Do you have time? Are you getting this stuff done? So those extremes, I believe gave you a very wide parameter and then you were able to choose what you wanted. But the more important thing that I want to point out is today for young entrepreneurs and I mean young in the business, whether they’re 105 or they’re 20, they don’t understand that they have that option to that choice every single day. And
15:19
And it’s going to be that mastery, that skill set to know when to be crazy, random regimented, and you are grinding and you are working your face off for a long time without a whole lot of break. And then also understanding that one, that’s not sustainable because you will burn out or you’ll, you’ll lose your track and you won’t be able to stop and look at the map again and reshoot your asthma, so to speak, to find your path. And then there’s the other side where you give yourself that ability to say, you know what?
15:49
I’ve literally done everything that I can. And now I’m waiting for this email, this confirmation, this phone call, this distributor, whatever it is. And now while I’m in this place, I’m not gonna kill myself waiting. I’m going to give myself this piece to say I’m gonna breathe, I’m gonna get a refit, I’m gonna get some food, I’m gonna get some sleep, I’m gonna recover so that I can be ready again for the next part. So I think you were saying about going to school.
16:14
I think you’re already in adversity university. Yeah, it’s a very good, like I said, school of failure. Go ahead and just dive in, mess up and learn from the mistakes. Those don’t make them again. And you mentioned the juxtaposition between this wide open free world of creating a small business and defining how that works against the Marine Corps regimented model. And it really did benefit from both. And they do serve each other really well.
16:42
the Marine Corps into small business. When I think about all the guys out there and the people that are transitioning out and thinking about entrepreneurship, it’s a very fulfilling and exciting career path. And it’s also very scary. The thing that makes it less scary for me is born from a lot of the things I learned in the Marine Corps. And frankly, the skillset that I had, like calling in airstrikes or artillery strikes,
17:11
of the radio information I had to pull together and understand, you know, all those details have very little to no value in the life that I lead today. But what I loved about the Marine Corps and particularly the 3rd Anglican Corps was being surrounded by a lot of people that were better than me all the time. We had great leaders, especially the small, you know, unit level, brigade level, assault level for us. Those guys.
17:40
there were so many guys there that had their acts together, at least projected as much when I was around them. And it was easy to start to see, yeah, there’s a regimented structure here, but someone has to drive that. Someone has to tell other people when to show up, and has to build a plan around what the day is gonna look like and how we’re gonna execute and get better and learn how to do these things we’re supposed to do. And there’s always someone to strive after who’s doing it better than me.
18:09
There’s just such good, amazing young men that were very easy to follow and learn from. So now that I’m in this free world, I can get up and do whatever I want every single day for this business. There’s a freedom in that. But what’s scary about freedom is the lack of structure. We have to go figure out myself, my partner, other people that are part of this, need to go figure out what that structure is going to be.
18:37
We’re defining that every day. That’s the exciting part of small businesses, learning how to invent your own structure and process. And within the Marine Corps, I got to watch people on some level, but on many levels, execute a regimented process. And learning from their commitment to it, how consistent they were about it, just showing up and competing hard for every one of those stages that we were at.
19:06
That was a very, very important lesson and one that I strive for to create in my business, but it’s very early and I’m glad to have had that experience though with that regimented structure ahead of getting into this wide open world of figure it out. There’s so many points there too, the one that you mentioned about freedom. Everybody claims that they want freedom, but if they’re really honest, they’re not executing on half of the freedoms that they currently have.
19:36
And they think that more is the answer. And I think that when you’re in an area where everything’s wide open, you start to understand that anything in excess becomes its opposite. Yeah. And it’s like, so having that regimented component, and you say like the military, the same thing with the wide infantry, the military ended up itself, there’s a lot of chaos above it. But once you get down to like the team or the squad level, as you say, all those men, like you are only as good as your last PT test, your last qual.
20:05
Your last day, like every morning is day one. So you got to prove it. And whether you’re a guy on the team, whether you’ve been given a leadership position as a team leader, whatever it is, you have to run that thing every day. So there is that, that beauty within that. And it’s powerful. And the freedom, the freedom is what are you going to do today? Like, that’s why I woke up today. Like we had a podcast scheduled. So here I am, but like, I can’t be it. I have to every day have a plan for.
20:33
What are we doing that’s going to make this thing that we’ve created succeed? You can’t just freewheel it the whole way. You have to come at it with a plan. And that plan is born somewhat from my experience in the industry, which is very valuable. So unlike many guys who might be coming out and looking to get an entrepreneurship, they’re wondering what I should get into. I instead had a very long decade plus career in the apparel industry. So I.
21:01
knew what industry I was going to get into and came in with some prior knowledge. So that was helpful. But that’s just a good awareness of how the industry works and some places you can go to start. But it’s not a regimented structure for how you attack the problem in front of you. I know what the problems are, but how do we address those every single day? And so a big part of launching this business was identifying the biggest risks.
21:31
the biggest problems we’re going to face, and then building a plan to address those as quickly as possible and as reliably as possible. That came from the Marine Corps. That desire to put a structure around this as quickly as possible came from the Marine Corps. The rest of it was just, luckily being in the industry for over a decade, so yeah. Yeah, but in that decade, that was your internship, your paid internship, so to speak. We see young entrepreneurs now, and I mentioned the term.
21:59
They’re sort of sold to build the goods that entrepreneurship is this glamorous, you know, driving your sports car, living like a baller. You don’t have to do anything and you’ve got this passive income established. And that can happen, but it takes decades of work and failure and protocols and systems and the capacity to pivot and the ability to, to, to look at things really hard every single day to get there. People selling you on a passive income.
22:28
are typically your their passive income. I fault no industry and I’m a capitalist at heart so we have that. But it is challenging. We have not paid ourselves yet. So to be very stark about how this process works, we’ve been at it now for six months. I haven’t even said in this podcast yet what my business does. I think you introduced it, which is great. As you see, I’m learning some of the things about running a business like you should probably talk about what you do a little bit.
22:58
We’re bringing those things out as we go. I was going to say, and we absolutely have. We all have our weaknesses. Marketing is mine. But we started in November and I immediately brought a partner in who was deeply experienced in the space that I had known for my time in the industry. And we both said, hey, we’re going to give ourselves a year. We had enough put away and have supportive spouses who work. So we didn’t walk into this just completely broken and foolish.
23:28
We have a year and it’s going exactly as planned, which is wonderful. It’s growing quickly and that’s wonderful. But we have yet to pay ourselves a dime for this business. We’ve hired people and those people get paid first. That’s a core aspect of businesses. You pay your staff. They show up, they’re not equity partners. They show up and they get paid. That’s why they show up. There’s this thought of jet setting or driving BMWs around and going on.
23:57
cool trips all over the place. It’s mostly me sitting in front of this computer, plugging away at Excel spreadsheets, learning how to build websites on different platforms and working with vendors to produce the very high standards that we expect of our brand. And we picked a really hard path. And that was intentional because we think we found a niche that is underserved in this space. There it is. So obviously X-Ray is the brand.
24:25
So I’ve been working on the marketing, shouldn’t say the name of the brand more often. And we build custom apparel with no minimum water quantities for military units, law enforcement departments, fire departments, VSOs, even better known small businesses. I joke that we’re like, as long as you’re one degree of Kevin Bacon away from service, we’ll work with you. We’re not going to do the local softball team.
24:52
primarily our customers are military units down to the fire team level. They approach us through a form online and they provide us their logos. Typically, they’re in really bad shape or they don’t exist and they’re asking for wild stuff. Which is cool. You know, an 18 to 19 year old kid, kind of stuff they might ask for on a t-shirt design. Lots of skulls, lots of snakes. Lots of skulls and demons in 1980s. Hard rock, metal cover, album covers. You got the vibe down.
25:22
And some units are more dialed and come to us with better assets, but we upscale those or create assets for them for free. We build them a website for free. And individual members of that unit can come to the site, place their own orders whenever they want, and then their products are X-ray brand items, predominantly active wearers built in the US. So it’s made by hand in a factory in Agoura Hills that we’re partnered with and shipped directly to that unit member’s house.
25:51
So literally one off, one of a kind pieces of apparel, your order number is gonna be printed on the inside of your shirt. So truly one of a kind. It’s basically the hardest second way to build apparel on the planet. Every other brand out there on the active ver sides doing mass production, they’re probably doing it overseas and they’re stocking it on a shelf and getting it out to you. And we said, let’s just make this as hard as possible for ourselves. But at the same time, we wanted to solve a problem.
26:21
that our customers were dealing with, which is some poor staff sergeant walking around and collecting names and rosters and cash, maybe. And then they have to order up front, a big box of shirts shows up. Maybe they’re good quality, maybe they’re not. And then that box of shirts, he has to hand it out to people. Or it’s sitting in the back of their truck, under their desk in the S1 for the next year, collecting dust. And it’s all the smalls and the 3XLs.
26:48
We all know this story from this, you know, in the military community. And we wanted to solve that. And we said, we’re going to figure out, we’re going to let operational problems be our biggest problems right away. And it took us six months really to dial in exactly how we would deliver this perfectly. And I say perfectly, it’s kind of cavalier to say that. To the best of your capacity, right? Yeah. To make it functional and do what we need to for our customers.
27:17
In talking about how to create that regimen and that structure, the first thing you have to do is figure out what your biggest problem is going to be. Ours was going to be putting one shirt with a custom design in one person’s hands without charging upfront for any of the services to get that shirt onto a site and to try to make it competitively priced enough for a junior enlisted person to afford it while making it in the US. So, a little insane. But we’ve achieved that at this point.
27:47
And we let that be our big problem first. And now our big problem is making sure people know that we exist, that we’re doing it. The fact that we’ve grown as much as we have without telling people that we exist is amazing. It’s the power of the word of mouth in our space and in the military community and the service community. That’s a big reason we chose service as the call to vertical that we’re gonna be playing in. Yeah. And I love, that was your entrepreneurial path
28:17
Lots of times we don’t know exactly where, first of all, we know we want to go down some sort of path. But people that are young in the industry or in life, they don’t understand that being lost on the path is part of the path. This is exactly what everybody does. Everybody stumbles around, everybody looks and they say, I don’t know, this is what I want. And I’m going to ask you this question. But what I have found is there’s these areas where you either fall into it.
28:46
or these areas of like passion that you enjoyed and they sort of overlap like a Venn diagram. So again, you, you, your first experience was like, this is what you knew. You were pretty damn good at it because you didn’t have any other choice. Then all of a sudden you’re like, huh, I’m not quite as bad as I thought it was. Yes. So for people that are trying to go into this entrepreneurial journey of creating something from nothing, what sort of advice would you give them? Like how can they find what that thing is for them? It really comes down to what you value as an individual.
29:16
Like what makes you feel fulfilled? I’ve discovered through this process that I don’t necessarily, I don’t think that it’s t-shirts and making custom products, even if it’s making nice stuff. It could be the nicest shirt on the planet. I’m not passionate about shirts and apparel necessarily. I learned enough in this space that I realized I could create value and give people
29:46
better experiences, ease of access to things that they wanted to order or they wanted to get. I could make people’s lives easier. I could make them happy with the products that they get or the service they experience. And I really enjoyed, one, creating that value for somebody else. And then, two, for leading into the small business piece, I really enjoyed having…
30:14
freedom to set my own structure. So I valued those two things tremendously. I think I would struggle a lot in a corporate environment. And so I’m really happy being in a place where I’m ultimately accountable for all the things that we’re doing. The buck stops here. I wanted that experience. I knew that about myself from being in small business long enough to be close to it, but to never really have it myself.
30:42
until I did it on my own. And I knew that about myself from, you know, the times I felt most fulfilled in my Marine Corps experience, in my personal and professional lives, have always been when I was doing something that made somebody else happier or safer, or just if I brought value to something bigger than me. So I kind of get to have my cake and eat it too, to some extent, as long as this continues to grow and becomes truly viable long-term.
31:12
I get to be a decision maker and have accountability and own the end state of this thing that I’m working on and I get to bring value to people. And it just so happens that we do that through apparel. And so for anyone that is trying to think about starting their own business, you’ve got to figure out what would be fulfilling for you. Not so much like what makes you happy every day. I’m not happy every day. There are a lot of days where I’m extremely frustrated. And you know,
31:40
kick myself or wonder why I did something a certain way. It’s just, it’s not happiness. It’s fulfillment. I wake up and I trust that what I’m working on every day is important, feels important to me. So that’s a really hard, that’s terrible advice to give somebody that’s so hard to grasp it. I think it just comes from experience and time. Not everyone’s gonna have a 10 year runaway like I did to figure out that they like industry or not, or that they…
32:10
But everyone has had little snippets in their life that they got that little ping of, oh, this was good. I really like this. It could be a thing that they’re consuming or a thing that they’re doing for somebody else. Maybe it’s a product you like. Maybe it’s that you use a lot and you have faith in. Go sell something like that when you get it out and figure out what the industry behind that is. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t.
32:40
Think about those things in your life where you feel deeply fulfilled, where you feel like you have value and you have no doubt that you’re doing what you want to be doing. And if you want to be an entrepreneur, that’s going to be sustainable. There are other guys out there, I think, who are really money motivated. And that’s what makes it work for them. And that’s just not my piece. I’m not saying I don’t want this to be a viable end state for my family and for my long term prospects. It’s just not the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning. So you got to find that thing that…
33:09
gets you out of bed and you sit down and go, I wanna work on this right now. That’s by the first little tidbit, the most important piece when you, if you can sit down and go, I wanna work on this and you can’t stop thinking about working on it, that’s a good sign that you’re on the right track. Like I’m excited to get up and figure this shit out. That’s super powerful. And again, it’s not happiness, it’s motivation. It’s like, I am compelled to act.
33:38
on this thing every day. Yeah, that fulfillment is everything. People talk about finding your why, but you got to figure out who. Like, who the hell are you? What the hell do you believe in? What do you really, like, what are you willing to live and die for? And now how can I build my life around that in a way that, like you said, creates something for someone else? And listen, I’m not shitting on people that want to make money. I absolutely understand that. That’s what it is. And I’m capitalistic for sure. Having said that.
34:06
Many times if we get the car before the horse and we’re chasing something that promises a lot of money initially, we’re either being promised it by someone else who again is maybe trying to use us as a passive income stream or it’s sold as a bill of goods where it’s easy. And then when you get out there and it’s like hyper competitive, doggy dog, there’s not a whole lot to go around. If you’re in this Uber like competitive arena all the time.
34:35
even when you win, it’s not fulfilling enough. Yes, there’s always more, if that’s what you’re chasing after. That’s a super interesting point. You said one thing I wanna lean into as well, that there are guys that are solely money motivated, but there’s an opposite end of the spectrum that I think plagues a lot of veteran entrepreneurs, and that’s being afraid to make money on something. Yes.
35:03
If you find this thing that you’re passionate about, and that’s what you want to do outside of the military as you start to build a business, you can’t be afraid to let that be the thing that earns you money. And there are a lot of guys out there who feel like it’s, you don’t want it to be a grifter. And that’s absolutely true. You never want to take advantage of, especially for someone back into this community. Like it’s really important that you’re authentic and.
35:32
providing a true valuable product and service. But if you have a product or service that you believe in that meant a lot to you when you were in, and you wanna go pursue that afterwards, remember that it had value to you and that things cost money to make. And the way that things get produced in the world is, they have to generate value for everybody. And so don’t be afraid to let it generate value for you. Charge the right amount of money for it, charge more than you think you should upfront.
36:02
You can always come down. It’s much harder to go back up. And don’t be afraid to let it become your profession, if you really believe in the thing. And that could be a product or a service, whatever it is. But you have to start thinking that way as you leave the service, if you’re going to transition from military to entrepreneurship. And that’s hard for a lot of guys. And I understand why. Probably that’s more so a problem than being money motivated. Because the kind of person that serves typically, right? Like you’re…
36:29
you’re seeking that path out because you want to be part of something bigger than yourself right away. Like that’s, that’s at least a part of it, right? And then that’d be like the main thing for everybody, but it’s at least, you know, there’s, there are some characteristics that are consistent across the board. So that contingent of people who care so much about group over self may struggle more than someone who hasn’t been in service on the entrepreneurship side because you have to be so.
36:57
laser focused on your decision making and you become so much more important, not as a, not as an ego thing, but just you’re responsible to make this shit work. And it has to, it has to go well and you have to make those decisions. It has to be about you in the short term. That’s a hard leap for a lot of guys. So yeah, long, again, long winded answer to your thing. But that’s what these are. We, I want, it’s a talk. It’s a talk. I want to, I want to hear the talk.
37:28
the point that you made about this understanding of price points, you have to price yourself out of the idiot range as quickly as you can. And I say that with all due respect, but what I’m saying is there’s something about this. If you offer a product and you offer it at a price that is premium or semi-premium, people don’t understand that that forces you now to uphold that standard, to hold the line, even when it’s delivered.
37:56
You absolutely have to deliver. But if you feel subconsciously like, I’m already giving these people this thing for basically nothing. They don’t understand everything I’m doing for it. There’s a part of us that holds back and doesn’t try to excel. And we’re just doing the minimum, because in our mind, we’re only charging the minimum. So this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you’re not careful. And I’ve seen it in different companies, different industries. But if I’m charging a certain amount of money to come speak somewhere, and it makes them kind of go,
38:26
but they pay it now that makes sure that when I’m on stage, I am leading for those people to give them what they need. But if I’m just up there and I had this idea that I’m doing this free luncheon at a local business and I’m not really being valued, then subconsciously, no matter how good my standards are, I will give more when I know that I’m forcing myself to do that. That’s a great point. That’s a great point. The reality of the small business…
38:54
is that it’s hard to compete at price point, even if that’s what you think your gambit is, that you’re going to go compete and be the cheaper option. It’s really hard to do that the day you start. You don’t have any of the economies of scale that a larger entity might have. You don’t have the purchasing power to bring on inventory or get in front of people or buy marketing assets to get in front of people. It’s really challenging to compete at price point as a small business.
39:24
that long-term game, a price point competition, only goes in one direction. You know, you have to continue to price down and down and down. So it really hard to grow out of that. So for other guys that are starting to just come out hot and crazy with, with like a price you, you would pay for it. That is reasonable that you can live up to. You’ve gotten to your point. You’ve got to live up to it. Um, and, and coming out with that premium price point, which is, you
39:54
Why did we choose to make things in the US? Exactly. And we talked about this before. It isn’t even necessary that the US is the best place to produce things. It is actively not the best place to produce things. There are more sewers, better machines, better talent, better capacity in many places around the world. But in the US, you have a particular type of hungry individual who’s working at this, especially in this industry, this apparel industry.
40:23
I value the work ethic and kind of the grit of the people that are working alongside us in this kind of small apparel business space. And it says something about our product that we want to not necessarily go chase the easy path. Even if it’s on paper, it costs less to achieve the same. And in terms of product quality, the whole story behind it.
40:52
has less value. And so we know that we can go command a slightly higher price for a product built in the US, not even because it’s made better. We do believe it’s made with incredibly high quality, but because it’s made by people who really care about what they’re doing and that we have a semblance of control over it, that we wouldn’t have those produced somewhere overseas. And it just says more about us valuing this place.
41:21
I think we’re not looking for the easy way out and we love this country. Producing in the US for us is just our customers don’t require it. Some of them may not even care. But for us, we wanted to hang our hat on a process and a group of people that we could go see, literally could walk in the door and not need our passport to do it. And to have a relationship like that with people that are making the things that we’re selling, I think, you know,
41:50
I love this business because it’s not dissimilar to a carpenter or someone who’s working in a trade. There’s a thing that is produced at the end of this, a physical product. You can hold it in your hand and go, our team made this. And it is made for someone specifically and individually. And they’re going to love it for a long time. And so we get to celebrate that in a level that we just wouldn’t if we cut corners or produced overseas.
42:20
And again, nothing against any company that does. I think it’s the right decision for certain brands, for us and for our community, for military law enforcement, fire and service related community. It feels like it’s the only way to go. And so that’ll be something that we do forever. This will be the only place that we produce until the last factory in the US closes, which will never happen. But that will be the only thing.
42:46
that would get us to look around and even then maybe we just open our own factory again and I’ve learned how to sell. I’d rather do that. So that’s core to us and yeah, that’s what we were getting out of Made in the US. And that’s why I’m having all of my stuff like the same way, Auxinomber of the stuff made sourcing US. It would kill me for a veteran to buy our stuff and then say, oh, this is made in another country because…
43:13
It’s almost like when people buy American flags and then it’s like, you bought that from another country. Why? That the whole reason why you’re buying this, the purpose is completely antithesis to… I always picture a sewer on a sewing line in Indonesia or Vietnam and they’re sewing an American flag. And what a strange, you know, and, you know, hopefully it’s at a place that pays them right amount of money for where they’re living. But who knows, you know, yeah, it’s just a weird thing to even imagine in your head.
43:42
the idea of that being produced elsewhere with an awkward image. So for us, I think, again, anyone can buy a shirt from anybody, but it’s got to be able to tell a story about who we are as the brand that makes it and who the person who’s wearing it is as the consumer. And so as X-Ray grows and people get to know our logo, which is it’s a story in and of itself and get to know our name.
44:11
That’s something that will always be associated with. Tell me the story of the X-Ray logo. So it’s, um, and I’m going to get sued by Warner Brothers here. Um, I joke, but also when that cease and desist comes up in the future. Until then we’re going with it. It’s a very subdued bat logo. Um, and, um, I had to walk it all the way back to getting the brand started. So I, I, I launched this on November 1st.
44:40
The idea was like, when I decided I’m going to do this full bore, it was the number first of 23. And I had been in touch with somebody in the industry who, my current partner, Brennan Cassidy, and he had been the COO of a cycling and triathlon apparel company called Elial Cycling, a wonderful brand out of Vista, California. They did produce in the US and he ran the US factory.
45:05
And, you know, just knows more about this business than just anybody I can imagine. And he happens to live 15 minutes away from me. So I parted ways with my previous employer unceremoniously on October 31st and decided to launch this the next day. And before I even told my wife that this was going to happen, I called Brennan. And I said, Hey, man, I’m going to do this small business thing now. What are you doing?
45:34
And he had exited the cycling and triathlon apparel brand month prior. He was working in corporate America and was just deeply unhappy and wanted to get back into small business. And he said, in kinder terms, business said, fuck it, man, I’m in. And he quit his job in corporate America two weeks later, and we filed our LLC the next day together. But on the very first day that I called him, that evening on November 1st.
46:04
He had on a shared Google Drive document, a cashflow plan, a launching a business checklist. He had all things you just dialed operationally, right? He had all the things that we would need to do to really get this thing kicked off the right way to start. And we didn’t know what we were gonna call it yet. He had no idea. He just got off a phone call with me. So he called it Business Project X. And we had lots of other ideas for what we were gonna call this thing and trademarks.
46:30
are tough. You’ve got to look at that stuff when you’re starting a business to make sure it’s just a product of trademark law convenience and website purchasing price. And then the bat came from, if you look up Project X-Ray and military history, there was a, before the nuclear bomb, are you familiar with Project X-Ray? I am. You know this history? I am, but I want everybody else to hear this story because it’s amazing. So while they were developing the nuclear bomb, before they were sure it was going to
47:00
The plan was, and this was signed off by Eisenhower full on, this was being tested. They were going to stuff a bunch of metal cylinders with fruit bats, hundreds of thousands of fruit bats with a little bit of napalm tied to their leg. They were going to release these cylinders over Japan and then timed, open up the cylinder, the bats would go roost all over.
47:27
and eventually explode and cause a firestorm. And it sounds like crazy work, but they tested it. They burned down Carlsbad Army Airfield. And this was like not fully greenlit, but it was signed off approved project that had been tested and it burned some shit down. So it worked. And not only is that a crazy story about Project X-Ray and you get a bat logo out of it, but also.
47:55
It’s a perfect microcosm of how we’re approaching this industry in space. We’re not coming at it with a nuclear bomb and some big entrance and a huge spend on marketing. We’re not going to be like Fiori or Nike or Under Armour. We’re not going to have that kind of cash asset big show out of the gate. It’s going to take lots of little opportunities. So we will build a custom e-commerce store and do custom artwork for a fire team.
48:25
the military with no upfront cost or anything. And so it’s lots of little fires that we’re looking to start. And that’s how we’re going to grow our brand. It’s kind of a completely backwards approach to the way most people would suggest you grow an apparel brand. But we’re approaching the long tail a bit and saying, let’s do all the really hard things no one else wants to touch, and everyone else is afraid to touch. Let’s do it in as high quality as possible and do that here in the States. And so the bat bomb, you know,
48:54
thousands of little fires was just the perfect little microcosm of our process. So we made a bat as dissimilar to the Batman logo as humanly possible. And we await our letter from Warner Brothers. So, maybe we’ll cut the ass out and actually send it, but who knows? Yeah. And that’s the thing is like this, it’s this asymmetrical warfare. It’s like, if these are the normal avenues of approach, I can do that. But again, it’s not necessarily.
49:25
If I’m not able to do the exact same things that they’re doing with the same sort of firepower capacity, if you will, and I’m the same way you are, it’s like I would rather slowly build something, have people buy something that they desperately want or that they’re very proud to wear, that they’re signaling to other people what this means to them. Again, with the fire team component or with military or first responders, lots of these shirts are things, as you say, you earn them.
49:52
It’s not things that are just given to people. You have to be, you have to earn this. You’ve done a lot of work to continue to do work. And then even as you wear that thing, it is that reminder to you on the days when it’s tough, you’re like, I’m wearing this shirt. This is what got me here. I’m not going to give up now. Even before I could get good quality insurance, I’ve got half four in my closet. I won’t put it among because they feel like cardboard. Yeah. Mine too. I can’t throw them out, man. I cannot get rid of them. I agree.
50:21
And that’s pretty unique. Like, you know, when people work for companies and they get corporate apparel, when they go to the best company, you know, no one’s pining after, you know, their Acme incorporated polo in their closet. You know, it goes in the giveaway or the garbage and, or becomes their painting housework shirt, right? You know, the unit shirts for me, because I had a great experience in the military, were different.
50:48
And I look back on those things and I value the time. And does a shirt represent all those things? No, of course not. But at least it’s a hint. It’s a quiet little reminder of the time that I spent there. When we were together and I was active in wearing them, it was great to just look great and aligned and to be like, this is us. And to have that pride of membership and having earned it. We put design to be earned all over our site.
51:16
Right now it’s the only way to buy from us. If you go to xray.cc, our site, you can’t buy anything. There’s nothing for sale there. There is, there needs to be at some point in the future, we’re gonna continue this thing, but right now we’re really content to have this be really exclusive and to have this idea of earned apparel run through everything that we do. And it’s a really cool experience to say the only way you can get what we sell is to be part of a military unit, law enforcement department, fire department.
51:45
or to support one of those things as a spouse or family member or friend, whoever the unit chooses to give access to. We don’t even give access to the product. It’s up to the unit leader, whoever opened the store with us. They disseminate that link. And if they tell five people or 100, we have absolutely no control over that. So we build the store, we populate the products in the store that have their custom design down to the individual name if they want. And then we give them a link and say, hey, let people know it’s here if they want it. And so we are deeply
52:14
on our unit partners, if you will, to spread the word and kind of gatekeep. And they’re the ones that get to decide who gets access to that stuff, not even us. And that’s actually a really cool feature of this. It’s been fun to see which units lean in. You can’t predict it. There are some… So it’s maybe a metric of the health of the unit camaraderie and the people’s interest in it. Right now it’s like there are some…
52:43
units that do really cool stuff, who stores half-formed as well as a bulk fuel unit down the road. I can say that jokingly as that was my first NLS in the wrinkle before I transferred to something I enjoyed more. But you don’t need to be high speed here. You just need to give a shit about contributing to something bigger than yourself. And if your unit’s culture supports that, the stuff goes like wildfire.
53:11
people really value wearing it and showing it off, and they’ll value it forever, forever. That’s been a cool part of this process is helping units put a stamp on the sense of camaraderie in the unit, the sense of unit cohesion, and look, at the end of the day, it’s a t-shirt, and we recognize that we don’t wanna get too, like, too high and mighty about it. It’s a piece of the pearl, but it is amazing what little things can do to build that and support that.
53:40
Yeah, and I love that you pointed out that you don’t have to be like a high speed top tier operator. You can be, again, anyone, any MOS. And again, as a matter of fact, the MOS’s that may not be as quote unquote high speed, they may need this even more because that will build even more unit cohesion. That will build that identity. That will build that additional element of this uniform and this camaraderie and this singular minded focus to this mission over man.
54:08
And just like you said, like I’m the same way with my t-shirts. I would never wear them again, because again, they feel like sandpaper, but I will never get rid of them because the man that I was, the people I was with. And that moment that’s that representation of that. And you will, there are very few other things that you can have in your life that you can physically pick up and touch and say, wow, I remember that guy. Yeah. It’s funny. I, uh, can we talk about high speed or not? I think we don’t really care.
54:37
what kind of unit is working with us at all. We are interested in working with people that buy into this value of service over self. I don’t care what you do in the military or the police service or whatever it is that you are serving. If you are committed to doing something that brings value to a group, that brings value to a team, and that drives you every day, that’s the customer we wanna work with.
55:06
So we’ve built x-ray to center around that and be focused entirely on people like that. And again, the bat bomb, little fires everywhere, really works well to just make it just for teams right now, just for units. So I think we focused on that contingent because they are people that will value what we do more than the youth sports team or corporate America. What we delivered to those people is the
55:35
the community that we came from. So we understand what it means to get that thing and how much they’re going to value it. We also understand the expectation for how it needs to perform, how long it needs to last. You know, we’ll have a wash off. The logo can’t wash off in 10 washes. It has to fit right. It has to look good under uniform and in PT gear. It has to be the right color. It has to be, you know, it has to do a lot more than just a t-shirt would normally have to do. And so we, you know, we really are excited by
56:03
the expectations we have to meet. And it’s just cool to be working with this community again. I have missed tremendously some of the Marine Corps lifestyle. I got the two kids and the mortgage and we got the Toyota SUV in the driveway. We’re living the civilian suburban life. And I just love the community that works. A lot of cynicism around the military.
56:32
Now, I think especially in the veteran community and then the content that gets out on social media, it’s just so much negativity and the cynicism around it. And it is fucking hard. Like there’s so much to it that is unfair and people get screwed over for sure. But people are everywhere, man. Like there’s, you know, you go to corporate America, you get laid off tomorrow for no reason, you know. And with the military, there’s just not enough focus on the…
57:01
good that it does and service. And not just like when it’s military, like first responders and police officers and even the VSOs that are out serving back to the community. Like we don’t wanna be a company or a brand. I don’t wanna be a leader of a brand that looks back and goes, look how shitty that hall is or what hell it was. Like it would be inauthentic of me because I had an amazing experience and it was, it wasn’t all good, but in the end it was, right?
57:30
Everything that’s come from it has been a thing that was a building block was foundational for my life Right. It doesn’t need to be The outer experience. I don’t need to build a house I don’t need service to be the flag hanging on the outside and the paint over the walls But it it is the foundation of all the things that i’ve been able to do since Um the stuff under the ground that actually buttresses how the house is structured. Yeah, right? So I for me I can’t act like
58:00
this was bad or people shouldn’t do it. Like if I would, people ask, would you let your kids in? If they were up for it and they wanted that for themselves, it would be absolutely yes. And I recommend it to anybody who thinks that they want it. I don’t think it’s for everybody, but for the people that do go chase it. And if you let it be, it can be really powerful and a powerful source of good in your life. And so we are gravitating around people like you and JC.
58:30
and our partner Reagan at Mission Essential Gear prints all of our cotton shirts. And people that look at it and go, this is good. This is inherently good. And we’re gonna take the bad with it, but we wanna empower people to feel good about the service that they’re committing to. And we want people to have pride in the group that they’re in. And that’s just really, really critical for us. I love that. And another point that you’re kind of getting to, which people may not see this is,
59:00
If you have that staff sergeant or that LT or that XO that’s doing this, like you said, once they’ve kind of got their foot in the door and they’ve established this, now they make it easier for the next person that steps in or when the unit deploys and when they come back and now they want something different, it’s already established. So now you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single time. They just say, hey, here’s this, here’s the store, here’s the access or here’s the guys, connect to them. They will work with you from the beginning. They’ll hold your hand, they’ll talk to you like you’re four and they will help you design what you want.
59:30
And then you’ll be done and then you can go back to doing like, again, I joke about this a lot. I said this podcast a couple of times, but we’re making t-shirts here. Like it’s not that big of a deal at the end of the day, right? Like it, but it becomes this thing that becomes a distraction for, you know, for staff sergeants, for, for sergeants, for junior lieutenants and captains. It’s a headache. See this, but you’re solving a problem. It’s a distraction that can last long cost money up front. It’d be this thing that
59:58
There’s nothing to do with what they should be doing. So if we can simplify this process for people, provide access to better quality products easier for literally no upfront cost to get this thing started, why wouldn’t people do that? So we’re leaning deeply into that structure and we hope that it serves the community really, really well. And we’re seeing that happen. We opened up our 100th unit store just yesterday, which is awesome to see.
01:00:28
We’ve partnered with National Ranger Association to run their store. We helped them do merch for the first time online for Best Ranger this year. And we’ve got J.C.’s Charity Commit Foundation launching a store shortly. We just signed on with Redefining Border Culture, which is a really cool kind of onsite activity-based charity based out of the East Coast and Delaware area. And so we’re going to continue to lean into the charities. They’re doing great work.
01:00:57
If we can reduce the staff sergeants work, if we can help those organizations that are out there, like there are charities and VSOs that are facing back in the community, if we can help them fund raise, we do all of those things and do it in a way that reduces any upfront burden on the partners we work with. So it’s been, that’s, it’s super rewarding despite the fact that it’s just t-shirts. So that kind of circles back to you asking about, you know, finding what you value or what you’re, what you’re passionate about. And I think
01:01:27
I’m not passionate about t-shirts. I’m passionate about this community that I came from that taught me a lot about how to structure my life and that provided the challenges I was looking for and the mentors I needed. And so I get to come do that every day and t-shirts are just the vehicle. So it’s nothing else better to say about it. I’ve been really lucky in that aspect that I found this. Yeah, they’re the physical representation of that commitment and I love that you’re doing that.
01:01:56
So we can go to xray.cc, E-X-R-A-Y.cc to learn more about everything you’re talking about, right? E-X-R-A-Y.cc. We can’t afford xray.com guys. Yeah. Look, one of these days we’ll be able to get it. You’ll get there. We’re bootstrapping this baby. So it’s going to be xray.cc for the time being. I love it. Yeah. Well, listen, Mike, thank you for everything. Thank you for what you’re doing and for taking the time. And
01:02:24
And I’m excited to see you continue to grow and do what you’re doing. And I wouldn’t have you on the show unless I believed in what you were doing. So thank you for giving back to the veterans, the community. Like you said, it’s we care about people and that’s what you’re doing. This, the vehicle is the t-shirts, but the mission and the people is what you’re doing. So that means a lot. I guess I really appreciate it. It’s been an honor to be on. I’m so glad JC put us in touch. Me too. JC Glick, we keep referring to him because we know him by just JC, but JC Glick will buy his books. Uh, incredible leader.
01:02:54
Ranger commander, epic guy. Yep. Get more people like JNC in your life, and you’ll be just fine. Yeah, absolutely. All right, man. Thank you so much. Thanks so much, Marcus. I really appreciate it. I appreciate you. Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
