We could hardly keep up. It was a good challenge to have but a challenge nonetheless. As many entrepreneurs will tell you, when you are bursting with success you can often encounter a pack of wolves.
Suddenly, you find yourself hiring anyone you can because you need help so badly. You might give in to the habit of throwing money or resources at a problem rather than finding a long-term solution because it seems more advantageous in the moment. Staff start to complain they’re overworked. Because you can’t imagine finding the time to deal with recruiting and training someone new, you throw a raise at an employee who might be happier elsewhere. Your expenses and administrative headaches are growing just as quickly as your profits.
One piece of advice I want to pass on is to hire slowly and fire quickly. You’ll find much less drama—and trauma—if you make an effort to do this.
I can honestly say today that while I thrive on the building phase, with the growing-things phase, I’ve sometimes found it best to move a little more slowly. It’s important to consult others before charging ahead—for example, discussing with colleagues whether to take on a new project or not.
After having replicated the business model about four times, I realized I’d maxed out how many times I could do this successfully. Now I was meeting with more and more people in the conservative movement. They were very interesting people with unique messages but little to no platform. They included learned people who were writing books and articles and who were speakers or news giants. They were not necessarily businessmen, marketers, or web designers but, rather, content providers. They needed the infrastructure I had created to build revenue so they could continue getting their content out to the public. Basically, they needed a back-office team that could generate revenue, and I had everything in place to provide it for them.
One of those people was Victoria Jackson, a Saturday Night Live cast member who became a Tea Party spokesperson. She’s a dynamo entertainer and a smart and persuasive conservative voice. But without the background structure of television producers and promoters, her message might not reach the world at large. I said, “Hey, Vicky, how about we start a website together? And I will do the same thing for your website that I’m doing for mine.”
We started an Internet TV show and The Victoria Jackson Show website. I had a small studio where we produced episodes. One of the guests on her show was a guy named Doug Giles. As I watched Doug talk to Victoria Jackson, I realized the guy was awesome.
After explaining what I was doing, he agreed to partner with me to launch a site, Clash Daily. Since it was our first project outside of our company, I offered to split revenue fifty fifty. We shook hands on the deal and built a successful and profitable business from the ground up. Doug and I are still partners–and friends–today.
It became apparent that I needed a brand that tied all of my websites and partner websites together. PatriotDepot.com and PatriotUpdate.com were thriving, and now I was realizing I could coordinate a network of other politically minded personalities. I wanted to leverage the power we could have if we were all on the same team, harnessed to the same vision. It would be an alliance of kings and queens, not just individual personalities trying to make it alone.
Thus Liberty Alliance emerged. I purchased the domain LibertyAlliance.com for $2,000 and used economies of scale to build on what I was already doing to increase the margins so that we were all making more money and reaching more people with every passing week. Our network continued to grow.
We started inviting partners such as Joe Wurzelbacher (a.k.a. Joe the Plumber) who became a conservative-folk hero after a viral video. He is now our VP of partner relations and a great addition to our team. We partnered with actor Kirk Cameron, who starred in Growing Pains and now has a thriving marriage and family-enrichment platform, and with Colonel Allen West, a conservative politician and pundit from Florida often featured on Fox News and other political programs. We’ve partnered with Fox News and Newsmax TV personalities and countless writers and speakers across the country—even some freedom lovers in other countries!
These are great partnerships for all of us because these brilliant people provide their engaging content and commentary for the public, and we provide monetization and the back-office infrastructure of ad placement, vendor relationships, accounting, even product fulfillment where applicable.
The partnership mentality I instituted from the beginning means all parties bring something equally valuable to the table. In the business world, it might more closely resemble a client-vendor relationship, but I see it as a partnership because it is a win-win for both parties, and we rely on each other to have an impact. We provide our services at no upfront cost to the content providers, and in return, our efforts are paid for through the revenue we create for them. Everyone wins. It’s my favorite way to conduct business!
Liberty Alliance mushroomed in 2012, and as of 2016, we’ve been listed on the Inc. 5000 List of America’s Fastest-Growing Companies for five years in a row, a privilege not every business can claim. We have generated over $50 million in revenue since our inception in 2007. We are very proud of the success we have experienced for ourselves and for our partners.
During the first few years, I was the designer and the marketer, and I even handled product shipments at one point, a regular one-man band. I began hiring people to do web development and accounting, but I still did the marketing and product creation for a long time. By 2012 I was acting as the CEO and had a full staff to manage operations, including an executive assistant to handle my evermore complicated schedule and travel arrangements.
It was a dream come true for me. I felt invincible. We all did. We bought a printing company to print our own bumper stickers and T-shirts and renamed it Liberty Printing. One idea always led to another, and that’s how I got into the firearms business and started Liberty Guns.
I had one employee who had a real spark about him. He was very enthusiastic, a go-getter, eager to do well, eager to be whatever we needed. We hired Scott to handle e-marketing for PatriotDepot.com, and about three months in, we realized this guy knew everything about guns. He was practically a two-legged encyclopedia of firearms knowledge.
We decided that since he was already handling product sales well and knew guns, and our market loved guns, we should get into that business and start a firearm-sales division. So I got my federal firearms license and expanded into selling licensed firearms and ammo and accessories.
It would have been easy for us to tell ourselves that firearms were not what we did or that Scott hadn’t been hired to sell firearms. Instead, we changed Scott’s role entirely. He became the VP and general manager of a successful division because he knew something we didn’t know and put his heart and soul into that passion, on the clock and off the clock.
Tragically, Scott was killed in an automobile accident on his way home from work in August 2015, something none of us will ever fully recover from. I’d never lost an employee like that before. It hit all of us very hard. Scott Johnston was one of the best I had ever had working for me. In the hours preceding his accident, as he was closing up the store, I saw him vacuuming the front area. That is real leadership and humility in action. I will never forget that. Rest in peace, brother.
The year 2015 was very difficult for me. Early that year, our gun store was burglarized through the neighboring unit that was undergoing construction, and $20,000 worth of firearms was stolen in a few minutes. That was definitely a big, bad, ugly wolf. Thankfully, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) investigators ruled there wasn’t much we could have done differently to avoid the incident, but it was a sucker punch to the gut. Then Scott was killed a few months later. The wolves were closing in.
On the night of Scott’s accident, I was in discussions with a competitor who was considering a buyout of Liberty Alliance for several million dollars, but the deal didn’t go through at the last minute, and I was disappointed.
I had found myself at the top of an empire that, while successful, encountered cash-flow and operational challenges often, and my administrative attention was required constantly—remember I am a builder, not a maintainer.
I was already developing my next new entrepreneurial interests, including Vallorani Estates, and I was forced to continue giving time and administrative attention to Liberty Alliance in order to keep it flying upward. Everything needed my attention now more than ever. Juggling a dozen spinning plates at all times while successfully balancing on a see-saw became not only a hope but a requirement to keep all the wolves at bay.
My brother Jared now acts as Liberty Alliance’s CEO, and my son Adam (still in high school) works in the advertising department as an intern. Having the ability to give my family members a career path is extremely satisfying, and I can work on developing the Vallorani Estates brand.
By the end of 2015 I had been self-employed for eight years, and I had faced many wolves. I had begun to realize I couldn’t wait for the mandolin moments to come to me—I had to pursue them, find them, and take the time to enjoy them. It became evident that my next and biggest goal was to help others find and enjoy those moments and find a way to face their own wolves.
What I Know to Be True
It’s always easier to stay within the comfort zone of what you’ve done before, but that’s not how you grow. Those who see openings where others see a brick wall are the ones who make history. And don’t get so wrapped up in the task at hand that you stop looking at the world around you for opportunities, because they pop up when and where you least expect them.
Everything you do or learn or try may not succeed in and of itself. In fact, you’re going to fail occasionally if you’re really trying, but failure can lead you to something new you’d not have otherwise considered or maybe even been aware of. Keep moving, keep learning, and keep seeking out like-minded people and exchanging ideas with them.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Facing Your Wolves
Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.
Sir Winston S. Churchill
In April 2014 Doug Giles and I, along with my boys, went to southern Florida on what I thought would be a routine hunting trip. Doug is an avid hunter, having bagged big game all over the planet. We’d already been on several exciting rifle hunts together, bringing down water buffalo, black buck antelope, Père David’s deer, and wild boar.
Little did I know, however, that this time I would come face-to-face with a wild boar and the only thing that would keep his razor-sharp teeth from entering my body was a six-inch knife.
Sometimes, too, they’d eat a newborn calf if the mama cow couldn’t keep them horned away. Or a baby fawn that the doe had left hidden in the tall grass. Once, in a real dry time, Papa and I saw an old sow standing belly deep in a drying up pothole of water, catching and eating perch that were trapped in there and couldn’t get away.
Most of these meat eaters were old hogs, however. Starvation, during some bad drought or extra cold winter, had forced them to eat anything they could get hold of. Papa said they generally started out by feeding on the carcass of some deer or cow that had died, then going from there to catching and killing live meat. He told a tale about how one old range hog had caught him when he was a baby and his folks got there just barely in time to save him.
It was that sort of thing, I guess, that always made Mama so afraid of wild hogs. The least little old biting shoat could make her take cover. She didn’t like it a bit when I started out to catch and mark all the pigs that our sows had raised that year. She knew we had it to do, else we couldn’t tell our hogs from those of the neighbors. But she didn’t like the idea of my doing it alone.
“But I’m not working hop alone, Mama,” I pointed out. “I’ve got Old Yeller, and Burn Sanderson says he’s a real good hog dog.”
“That doesn’t mean a thing,” Mama said. “All hog dogs are good ones. A good one is the only kind that can work hogs and live. But the best dog in the world won’t keep you from getting cut all to pieces if you ever make a slip.”
Well, Mama was right. I’d worked with Papa enough to know that any time you messed with a wild hog, you were asking for trouble. Let him alone, and he’ll generally snort and run from you on sight, the same as a deer. But once you corner him, he’s the most dangerous animal that ever lived in Texas. Catch a squealing pig out of the bunch, and you’ve got a battle on your hands. All of them will turn on you at one time and here they’ll come, roaring and popping their teeth, cutting high and fast with gleaming white tushes that they keep whetted to the sharpness of knife points. And there’s no bluff to them, either. They mean business. They’ll kill you if they can get to you; and if you’re not fast footed and don’t keep a close watch, they’ll get to you.4
It all started the night before as Doug and I drank vodka and smoked cigars around the glowing campfire. The guides were telling us stories of their dangerous and exotic hunts. The boys and I were riveted to our seats, eyes wide, hearts pounding, when Doug and his daughter Regis told me that I had not truly hunted until I had faced an angry boar with the end of a spear. They challenged me to an epic battle of man versus monster the next day.
I will admit I was a little afraid at first. I had heard many stories of people who were maimed or even killed by wild-boar attacks. Feral boars are a serious concern. Considered pests, they overrun the wild areas and wreak havoc on neighborhoods, threatening hikers and small children. In 2014 a squirrel hunter in Louisiana encountered a boar that ripped his legs apart and caused significant loss of blood.
When threatened, boars will either run away or come at you like a freight train. One never knows until it’s too late. Death on four feet, these mythical beasts often attack their victims on the inside of the leg, with their tusks, severing the femoral artery, and the victims bleed out with one quick slash. We’ve likely all seen and/or read Old Yeller!
By the end of the evening, they had talked me into it. I thought of Luigi being a “pretty tough guy” and tried to gather my courage. That night I tossed and turned in my bed. I went through several mental exercises of how I would spear this hog and pin him to the ground. I had no choice but to beat him.
The next morning, I woke early to the sound of hunting dogs howling with anticipation. These dogs love to chase hogs. They literally live for it. You can learn a lot from these dogs, many of which sustain injuries doing what they love.
Doug and I lit up our cigars, climbed in the swamp buggies, and went out into the palmetto jungle in search of wild hogs with the guides and dogs. My heart was pounding. I kept wiping my sweaty palms on my jeans. The cigar and the fresh morning air as we drove a while began to calm my nerves.
Things stayed relatively quiet until the chase dog caught wind of a wild boar. He flung himself off the truck and disappeared into the thick brush. It wasn’t long before I heard the barking replaced by the squeals of a very angry hog.
The chase dog runs after the hog and wears him down. At this point the guides release the catch dog, which bites down on the hog’s head and holds him until the hunter can get in close enough for the kill. Before we jumped off the swamp buggy and headed to face the dog-captured hog, I reached for the spear. It wasn’t there. I asked Doug to help me find it. That’s when he said, “Forget the spear. Use this knife.”
What? Are you kidding? I had mentally rehearsed going on this hunt with a long heavy spear I wielded from a safe distance, not getting up close and personal with a dangerous hog and a mere six-inch knife!
There was no time to argue. I followed the guides through the brush. It was so thick you could only see about two feet in front of you. Doug was behind me with a rifle in the event things got nasty. The sound of squeals, growls, and thrashing was getting louder and louder.
As I rounded a palmetto bush, I saw a feral hog that was as big as a black bear. The catch dog was growing fatigued and the hog w
as starting to flip him around like a rag doll. My adrenaline and testosterone kicked into high gear. It was either me or the hog, and I wasn’t going to die today. What good were Luigi’s legendary stories of near-death escapes if I fell to a wild pig?
So, without any more hesitation, I took the blade and sank it deep into the angry beast, just behind the shoulder. I stabbed him a couple more times to be sure because he kept thrashing in anger, trying to get at me. The hot blood ran down my hands as the massive hog breathed his last. I had done it! I shook from the adrenaline rush for several minutes afterward.
After the hunt, the full impact of what had happened began to sink in. I had faced one of life’s biggest, baddest “wolves” and beaten it. Not only had man won over wild beast, but we were able to donate the meat from that hog to feed the children of the Seminole Indian Reservation. I don’t believe in wasting anything I’ve hunted. My family or other people’s families have all been fed from what I’ve hunted.
This hog hunt quickly became a metaphor for the rest of my life. I know now that I can overcome fear with courage. I can face the wolves, sometimes climbing a tree to avoid them, playing the mandolin until they are calmed so I can continue on my way. It helps me to know I can fight the wild beasts that surround me in business and in life and still enjoy the music of life.
Three Kinds of Wolves You Might Face
The world is hell-bent on separating you from your money and your time. People are very happy to take both from you. They’re like wolves in that respect. You must be sharply aware of these wolves and do what you can to avoid them. Helping people in need is not what I refer to here, as I advocate and regularly give to a number of causes and charities.
No, I refer to those who will nickel-and-dime your business until you realize your pockets are empty. They’ll expense the three-mile trip to the store to pick up a cable for their office. They’ll arrive ten minutes late and leave five minutes early. They’ll charge a personal purchase to a company card.
The Wolves and the Mandolin: Celebrating Life's Privileges In A Harsh World Page 9