HI 122 - Team Rubicon - Veterans Providing Disaster Relief Worldwide with CEO Jake Wood

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Hello and welcome to episode 122 of the Heroic Investing Show. A podcast for first responders, members of the military, veterans and anyone looking to improve their financial future and gain some freedom with their time. We teach America's heroes how to build passive income, build their startup business and safely grow wealth through real estate and other alternative investments. We help current and prior first responders put protections and systems in place to enable them to build a life where they can focus on their passion, the service or product that they are uniquely gifted to share with the world. That might be rental properties, it might be widgets, it might be the best doggone burger and hot dogs on the beach. My name is Gary Pinkerton and I co host this show that hopefully you find both helpful and inspiring with good friend and mentor of mine, Jason Hartman. Hey. In Heroic Investing 122, we have an amazing show for you. I'm here with Team Rubicon CEO and co founder Jake Wood. Jake started off after school, after college as a Marine sniper. He and he served in Afghanistan and Iraq both in that role. As a sniper. Jake now runs an incredibly inspiring nonprofit providing disaster relief nearly 24,7 across the globe and it is almost completely manned with veterans and first responders. I don't think I could possibly have found a better fit for this audience. Certainly not one that would be any more inspiring. So I mentioned Jake is co founder of Team Rubicon. He co founded it alongside William McNutty following the Haiti earthquake. When the two of them showed up in 2010 after that 7.8 Richter scale attack or devastation that occurred just across, you know, in Port aux France, just across the border from the Dominican Republic. As is often true for events of that size and that come without much warning, traditional aid organizations were really, really slow to take response. And when they did show up, if you remember this back in the news, the buildings in that place were so unstable that it took a really long time for them to have the confidence to get in there and make some substantial disaster relief. And so there were some people on the ground, Jake and many others I'm sure that were looking to Take action much faster. They were prohibited, or at least they were dissuaded for a long time. But as Jake tells the story, he decided to act and got a small group of eight people together. They were all veterans, first responders, medical professionals, and they deployed to Haiti, or I should say, they started taking action in Port au Prince as one of the earliest responding groups, even small, and the name Team Rubicon born out of their actions. So going back to the history and where this name came from, Jake explains that when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon at the head of his legions and marched on Rome, it marked a point of no return for Caesar's army. The phrase crossing the Rubicon has since survived in reference to any group committing itself to a risky course of action. And so he felt that that fit perfectly with the way in which they entered Haiti. And specifically, if you look at the geography there, there's a river called Artabanite, and it's a natural border that separates Dominican Republic and Haiti. And this small team of eight volunteers call themselves Team Rubicon because they had to cross that water to get into Port au Prince and start taking action when others were still hesitant to do so. It's just an amazing story of people who wanted to do good and found a way to get there. They focused on providing immediate aid to those that had been overlooked by the larger organizations because they were in areas that probably were not stable to get into yet they made a huge difference. And so, a little bit more about Jake before we jump into the interview. He's a nationally recognized social entrepreneur and keynote speaker. He has some pretty amazing awards. He was named a CNN Hero. He's Got Goldman Sachs 100 most intriguing entrepreneurs list under his belt, the chronicle of philanthropy, 40 under 40. So, you know, some pretty amazing stuff. He started off life at University of Wisconsin extremely frustrated with, you know, his inability to serve, watching others do it. After 9, 11, we get into that a little bit in our discussion, and he decided to take action. He served some incredible action in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Came back after his tour in the military, wanted to continue to serve. And he talks about in our interview how that's the makeup of everyone who's coming to volunteer or is actually on his permanent team there. And, you know, they've grown an operation that not only responds in the Western Hemisphere and not, certainly not only in America, but they now have started to build cells in different countries called Team Rubicon Global. So I think you're going to be incredibly inspired. I hope some of you pick up the phone and go work with Jake because I think you would just be absolutely amazed. I can't wait for you to hear this. I think it's going to help change your lives and it's certainly going to give you a warm feeling about Americans and about what veterans and first responders do while they're active or afterwards as we search to continue to serve following our retirement. So without further ado, please join me. Have a great time with this interview. I'm talking with CEO of Team Rubicon, Jake Wood.

Jake comes to us from Team Rubicon. You know, we're certainly it's an honor to have Jake in a few minutes of his time, I'm sure with Team Rubicon. And it's an organization that I mentioned to Jake before we were talking that I did not know much about. And once we got him on the program, I learned about an incredible, incredible organization. Can't wait to hear about your time of service and then now your new time with the company. Jake, thanks for joining us.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

So can you start off a little bit about your background before you founded Team Rubicon and how you got there? Some of it's on your website. We'd love to hear it from the head.

Quick bit about myself. I grew up in the Midwest, pretty typical childhood, had always really wanted to join the military and started to explore those options while I was in high school. I was looking at the service academies a little bit, talking to some recruiters. I ended up having the opportunity to play football in college. So I took a scholarship to go play football for the University of Wisconsin and Barry Alvarez. That was the year 2000 that I made that decision my freshman year in 2001, 9, 11 happened and I immediately, I wouldn't say regretted my decision, but I instantly started thinking twice about it. I spent the next four years watching our country go to war and a bunch of men and women my age march off to Iraq and Afghanistan. And so I played my last game on January 1, 2005 and within a few weeks I was in talking to a Marine recruiter and a few months later signed a contract and shipped off to boot camp a few months after that. So I enlisted into the Marine Corps. Upon my graduation, joined the infantry, I was stationed in Twentynine palms with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines. A bunch of war dogs out there, you know. My time in service was pretty typical. I served from 05 to 09. I was part of the surge in 2007 with 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines in the Anbar Province. It was a tough time in the war. It was a tough province to be in. It was a tough fight. And then came back, tried out for and was accepted into a scout sniper platoon. And after that selection, I went to scout sniper school. That was a kick in the pants every day for 10 weeks or 14 weeks, whatever it was. And after that was put into a sniper team and sent to Afghanistan. So I served seven months in a city called Sengin outside of the Helman or in the Helmand Valley. And again, another really tough Tour. It was 2008, it was really before the surge happened in Afghanistan, so we were pretty under resourced and. But, you know, it was served with some great men and made the tough decision to get out of the Marine Corps in 2009. And that's kind of how I got to where I am today.

That's amazing. Okay, so that gets you to. Through, you know, your time. How many years did you serve?

I only served four years.

You know, I had a lot of orthopedic issues. My body had broken down a lot while I was playing football. You know, a bunch of surgeries. And the Marine Corps infantry certainly did not make any of those better. So I was looking at the end of my four years, do I reenlist and go to MARSOC or do I get out? And it was a tough choice, but I don't think my body could have handled another four years.

Okay, so you're finished there and what next for you?

I didn't know it was going to be next, actually. I was always pretty business minded, and my thought was, I want to get into something entrepreneurial. The allure of Silicon Valley was kind of high on my list, but I also knew I couldn't fly up to San Francisco, walk up to Twitter headquarters and say, like, hey, I'm a Marine sniper. You should hire me. It just didn't make a whole lot of sense. So I figured I'd go get my mba. And as soon as I got out, I was prepping for the tests and took the GMAT and started to apply to grad school. And I thought that's what I was going to do. And then the Haiti earthquake happened a few months or weeks later. And that was really the genesis of Team Rubicon.

Nice. Okay, so pick it up there then. So on your website, you talk quite a bit about Haiti and how the initial volunteers, I guess, not only helped you get the idea going, the genesis, as you mentioned, but also some of them became part of your team, I think. Right.

Team Rubicon didn't start as, like a business Plan, you know, it was a reaction to the earthquake in Port au Prince. I woke up, I saw what was happening. I immediately thought back to my time in service. Called a few organizations to volunteer. They wouldn't let me. And so I, being a thick skulled Marine, said, well, screw it, I'm going to go anyway. So I worked with a couple of buddies to start organizing a team. We got down there four days later. There was eight of us. Over the course of a couple weeks, it grew to about 60 guys and gals and did great work. Came to the realization that our training in the military made us pretty adept at running these small teams in a situation like that. So we came back and only then did we incorporate it as a nonprofit and actually set out to build something. We came back about a month later and we started to put the pieces in place to build what now has become Team Rubicon. In the eight years since then, it's grown to about 80,000 volunteers across the country. And there's really no sign of slowing down.

Yeah, it's awesome. And you have a global presence as well and a pretty impressive board of directors audience. Go check out the board of directors. It's nice. I think they probably provide some really sage advice. So, Jake, you know, you had a group of people with you. It was a successful event. There's a couple things on your website that intrigued me. One is that you have this diagram of traditional aid, and then, you know, what Team Rubicon provides, which is bridging a gap, you know, with services. Explain a little bit. How is Team Rubicon different?

Well, I mean, how we're primarily different is the human capital that we're bringing to the fight. So we are recruiting and training and deploying military veterans primarily. We have about, you know, 75% of our ranks are former military. The other 25%, many of them are, you know, emergency services backgrounds. So police, fire, ems, stuff like that. We try to take the. This principled military approach to these disasters. How do you bring order to chaos? How do you make decisions effectively in an environment of limited information and do so in such a way to maximize mission accomplishment? You know, that's what you're taught to do in the military, whether you're a squad leader or a battalion commander. And so we've done that. We've built a system, we've built a set of processes that enable us to move quickly into these situations domestically and then internationally. When you talk about what's it take to bridge the gap internationally, you have a lot of organizations that do great Work that have great presence on the ground 365 days a year in some of these really challenging environments. But when those environments receive a shock to the system like a massive earthquake or a typhoon, I think that one you need people that can come in there and operate in that type of denied environment and do so effectively until some level of consistency and stability is restored. We're sending teams, medical teams, into those environments to solve really challenging problems. I'll give you an example. There's another Ebola outbreak that is happening in the drc, the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's in a city which makes it a very scary situation. And the World Health Organization has come to us and inquired whether or not we'd be willing to come in and set up an ambulance service and staff medical evacuation helicopters. Now, Team Rubicon's never set up an ambulance service in its existence. We have no idea how to do that. But we know people that can come in. Maybe they get a former logistics officer that used to run log trains in Baghdad. Pair that person up with somebody from the Navy that's got a infectious disease background, and suddenly we can start coming up with some solutions. Because it's really about thinking outside of the box and solving problems. That's the example of the things we try to do when these really challenging situations arise.

That's amazing. That's a great example. So are you 100%? I know it's a 501C3, which just means that the company is not designed to make a profit. Is it fully funded by donations or are you able to somehow employ government aid to the benefit of the disaster people who are citizens of the disaster?

Yes, we're fully funded on philanthropy today. A lot of that is corporate and foundation money. A lot of it's individual money. We take less than 1/10 of 1% of our money from the government. We expect to begin expanding government support in the coming years, particularly if we begin expanding a lot of what we do internationally, because we can then go after USAID money, State Department money, UN funding, as necessary. But the services that we're providing domestically are not reimbursable by fema. We don't take money from states or local governments or from the homeowners that we assist. We're looking at different ways that we can generate some more sustainable income and revenue from non core services. But I would anticipate that we'll remain largely charitably funded for the foreseeable future.

That's awesome. Let's turn it towards the audience here and what the listeners Other than just being inspired by this organization, how it may directly affect somebody who's getting ready to transition. You have an entire program about helping veterans actually go through their transition. Am I accurate there?

We have a program, a fellowship program that is, it's a niche program and it's got really two avenues, two paths. It's called the Clay Hunt Fellows Program. It's named after my sniper partner from the Marine Corps who ended up committing suicide about seven years ago. The program's really designed on one half for one cohort. It's designed around the idea of self discovery and self exploration, really helping transitioning veterans understand who they are and who they want to become. And that's been a successful program. We've been running it for about five years. On the other half, we've recently launched an additional sub program within that fellows program that is focused on long term recovery. So we're using Long term Recovery in Houston, Texas following the hurricanes to train cohorts of veterans in construction management skills. So they'll be employed by the organization going through this programming, this training, but also leading our long term recovery efforts in Texas.

Okay, excellent. So really then. So there's a couple niche programs that will help people transition and kind of find their fit. But heck, there's a lot of people that are like me that maybe are retiring, they have an income. What they're really searching for is mission something to inspire them. And as your website does a great job of commenting, it gives people, it gives veterans an opportunity to continue service, you know, from their retired or they're moving on position wherever they are in life. Do you have people who are doing this part time or is it, I mean obviously you have volunteers doing that. Do you have members of your team that are able to do this one month a year? Kind of almost like a, you know, a reservist.

Yeah, so we have some great programs for that. One of the, the majority of what we do is volunteer led, volunteer executed. We do have some programs internally that create what we call casual employment opportunities. So we have primarily two cadres. We have an incident management team cadre. These are people who have, they're our best, our most advanced field leaders, operational leaders, so they understand incident command system and basically how Team Rubicon runs operations. We will employ them on a contract basis for one week to five weeks at a time to go in almost like a special forces mission, and advise and assist volunteer leaders on the ground. In some cases, like with Hurricane Harvey, we'll actually send them in to actually manage and run the Response operation and we pay them a day rate to do so. The second cadre is our instructor cadre. So this is great for people who want to work maybe two days at a time. You know, we'd fly them to a city where we are hosting one of our training programs, they'd spend two days serving as an instructor and they would get paid to do so. Both cadres require a lot of vetting, a lot of training, a lot of proficiency management, but they are by far our best. We pay them for the work that they do. It's a great program for retired military, particularly that person who is maybe getting out after 20 years, still pretty young, not willing to commit to a full time job, but wants to do something that's exciting and maybe make a few bucks to supplement his or her income. It's the perfect program for that.

Yeah, it sounds like it. And it just keeps you connected, you know, with fitness, with other people who are like minded, be able to use your skills. That is incredible. I had no idea, personally had no idea that something like that was out there. And an ability to serve. I have a very good friend who is a firefighter in Los Angeles county and has actually still, I think, a reservist in the Air Force, served a full career and he is on FEMA's National Disaster Relief program and so he deploys with them. But I have not seen the connection, the really tight bond connection that Team Rubicon offers. That's amazing for veterans. But I'm assuming you also have volunteers that are first responders, firefighters, police officers, or is it exclusively veteran?

No, about 20 to 25% of our volunteers are non veteran. A lot of fire and police, like you mentioned, you know, and firefighters are great because they have such flexible shifts, you know, so we have, we have a lot of firefighters who work maybe in, call it a slower district. They don't maybe respond to as many exciting things as they would perhaps like. And so they supplement that by deploying with Team Rubicon. And it's great because they obviously have a ton of training, so a lot of skills and value that they can add. And then they have that flexibility, which is really what's critical for us to execute.

Yeah. Jake, do you have bodies deployed now at this point? 24, 7, or are there gaps?

I would say this year we've been operational probably every single day of 2018 so far, and most likely in multiple locations most days. I mean, right now we have disaster responses going on in Baltimore county with the flooding there, a tornado in Connecticut of all places. We just wrapped up a response to the Big island in Hawaii. We have wildfire response going on in Arizona. We typically have four or five operations going at a time.

Okay, so I noticed that you've got basically two websites. You've got Team Rubicon Global and then Team Rubicon usa. Are they different organizations or just a different focus of a website?

They're technically separate organizations. So we spun out Team Rubicon Global about three years ago with a very specific mission. And that mission was to launch and incubate Team Rubicon, new Team Rubicons in coalition countries. So Team Rubicon Global has been successful in launching in the United Kingdom, in Canada and Australia, in leveraging those veterans from those countries to do the model that we're doing here.

So it's not a focus of the effort, it's the origin of the team. So Team Rubicon UK is British veterans and service provider. Excuse me, volunteers. Got it.

Yeah, exactly.

Got it, Got it. Okay, so I'm looking, you know, unfortunately the audience doesn't get to see our cameras, but I'm looking out and it looks like you're in kind of home base for Team Rubicon there. Where are you located?

Yeah, I'm here at our HQ in Los Angeles. We've got. Most of our support functions are based out of here. We have also a big national ops center in Dallas and now a long term recovery office in Houston.

That's awesome. I'm going to connect up my buddy Tony, who's in the FEMA organization with you. He's there in Los Angeles too. As I mentioned, how do people get in contact with you who are interested in either doing the short term or permanent team member volunteer? What's the best way? Just through the website?

Yeah, definitely through the website. We have about 200, 250 people a week signing up. You can log in, fill out all your information. You'll instantly be put into a training and onboarding funnel. So you'll be assigned to a region which is purely based on where you live, some initial training to complete, and then you can really just start plugging in and getting involved in your local area with whatever activities we have going on.

That's awesome. So Jake, what have we not talked about that's important for an audience of veterans and first responders?

This audience is primarily people that are leaving great careers in great institutions where every day you woke up, you had a mission, you put on a uniform of one type or another that you had pride in and worked with, people who were like minded and people that leave that Whether you've been doing it for four years like I did, or 24 years like a lot of people, it's hard to find what's next. And what's next might be a great job at a Fortune 500 company, but chances are you're not going to find that same sense of purpose and self worth and that same band of brothers and sisters. Where are you going to find it? You should really be thoughtful in that transition about how you fill that void. Team Rubicon is one option. We'd love to have anybody that's listening. There are other great options out there. We're not the only one. But I always encourage people to be really thoughtful about that part of their transition.

Awesome advice. You know, a year and a half ago, I finally made that transition. I will admit that I was inside continental US for my last five years, but, you know, after 30 years of wearing a uniform, probably even after four years, especially when you're in combat, it seems crazy to say, but there is this part of you that's lonely, right? And you're back with your family finally, and there's this part that's got it kind of an emptiness. And so that's why I'm doing this podcast. It's why I continue to volunteer with organizations. A great organization called Tunnel to Towers, the Stephen Siller foundation, you know, putting back for 911 as well, and doing great things for catastrophically wounded veterans. So trying, you know, to fill that void like you just mentioned. And man, you know, so. Audience, before we started, Jake mentioned that he only does three or four of these a year. And to be able to have his time to do this podcast, I hope all of you, you know, gained a tremendous amount out of it. Please do not hesitate. Run over to teamrubiconusa.org and find out a bit more. Jake, I'll give you one last, you know, one last opportunity to have the last word, if you would.

Well, I would just close by saying, you know, we're really trying to build something special here.

We.

I look at the fact that there are 3 million men and women that have served since 911 that we've invested, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars into, and these men and women are getting out of the service. They're going back to our communities across the country, and nobody's asking them to continue their service. And I think that's a shame because these are people with service in their hearts in really a unique set of skill. So we're trying to reinvent how we plug those men and women into their communities to serve in times of crisis. And I hope everybody listening will consider joining.

Yeah, so we've talked about a half a dozen different programs that you have, and some of them more intensive to help people find themselves. And I think the one thing that you kind of mentioned about the sad story about your sniper mate, a lot of people are struggling with very similar things with ptsd, and they just need community to be around to be able to talk through that with and feel like they're still making a difference. And you guys offer that, and my hat's off to you for that. I mean, I don't know. I'm sure your organization is hard to run every day, but you know, you're a patriot for doing it, so. And Jake, thanks so much for helping us and sticking with us and I look forward to connecting you up with some friends who I think could earn a lot from this. So thank you, my friend.

Of course. Thank you for having me.

Take care.

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