Empowering Veterans for Success: Warrior-Scholar Project

Ben:After years of work, Ryan Pavel had finally landed his dream job with the Warrior-Scholar project. He was a military veteran turned lawyer who dreamed of working with other veterans. The Warrior-Scholar project had just received a huge grant that would allow them to bring him on as executive director. But right before he was supposed to begin, his boss suddenly left the organization. Ryan:So I came on board and I had this really small team of people who believed in the thing, like a few people, and we had enough money in the bank to be able to pay the bills, but the organization's sustainability really depended on that grant. I didn't realize how much depended on it until I actually got a look at the full on financials. I also didn't realize that we were only in phase one of this big grant application.Ben:Okay, let me just make sure I have this right. You come on board on spec, you don't know how on spec it is. You desperately need this grant way more than you realize you desperately need this grant. And it's a little further away than you sort of were led to believe.Ryan:Yeah, yeah, shit. Right?Ben:Yeah.Welcome to The Unshakeables, from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. I'm Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business. On The Unshakeables, we're sharing the daring stories of small business owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories of how they got through it. And today I want to introduce you to someone special who will be joining us on this episode. Mark Elliott is Managing Director and Global Head of Military and Veterans Affairs for JPMorgan Chase, where I work. And we're excited to have him join us today.Hi Mark. Welcome to the show.Mark:Ben, thank you for having me and thank you for hosting this. I think this is important for not just the veteran community, but the entire small business community.Ben:We're fortunate enough to be colleagues, but JPMorgan Chase is a really big place. So why don't you tell everyone what it is you do for the firm.Mark:I do lead our military and veteran affairs here at JPMorgan Chase, and I pinch myself every day just to know that I get to do this. It's a way to give back to a community that I spent 28 years serving alongside.Ben:So Mark, hopefully you know what our show is all about, and I think you've heard a couple of episodes. But I wanted to have you join us today because you are a veteran and just like Ryan, you work with veterans all the time as they transition from military life into civilian life.Mark:Well, Ben, thank you for shedding a light on this community. I think they are a treasure that we should be proud of and make sure we're helping them be successful.Ben:On today's episode, the Warrior-Scholar Project from Washington, D.C.So first of all, I just want to say in front of everyone, I want to say thank you for your service.Ryan:Thank you so much for your support. It's actually really interesting, even that question about how veterans respond to that question of thank you for your service. That's really topical in the veteran community. There's a school of people that really reject that as like something that people don't like being thanked for their service. There's a whole lot of conversation about it, and it took me years before I heard somebody else say that.Ben:Well, I'm sorry if I offended you.Ryan:You didn't at all. No. But put to that point, right? That my response to that is actually what I found that is the most comfortable that you say thank you for your service, and then I always respond, thank you for your support.Ben:Ryan, as you'll hear throughout this episode, has a complicated relationship with the military. But one thing is crystal clear, his support for veterans is unwavering. To understand how Ryan got to the Warrior-Scholar project, we have to go back to the beginning.Ryan:I grew up in a upper middle class suburb, very privileged upbringing, only child. Very, very fortunate in that regard. And since I grew up outside Chicago, the school everybody wanted to go to was University of Illinois, and I got rejected. And rightly so, I was not a particularly compelling candidate. I was not achieving my potential. My extracurriculars were track and cross country and getting last in a lot of those races.Ben:After that rejection, he didn't know where to turn. Then he spoke with a recruiter from the Marine Corps.Ryan:Some things clicked for me. The path that I thought that I was going to do, the path that seemed easy is not the path that I'm actually going to follow of just going to school and taking a major and studying something for the sake of studying something. It seemed like a really good way to be able to wipe the slate clean, at least at the junior ranks, the military, it's a true meritocracy. All that matters is can you do this number of pull-ups, doesn't matter where you came from or anything else like that. I liked that a lot. Service of country and a lot of pride. Something that I could take a lot of pride and ownership over.Ben:So Ryan joined up. He went to basic training and took a series of aptitude tests to see what career he would be best suited for. His testing indicated he would excel in languages, so he set out learning Arabic.Ryan:All day every day, you're learning from native speakers.Ben:It's a tough language too. It's not a Roman alphabet, the whole thing.Ryan:Right. And you're not just a college student either, right? Like the Marine Corps still owns you, right? And so you are doing all the formations and all the training for the Marine Corps, but then your job is really to be able to actually learn that language.Ben:And how'd that go?Ryan:Well, ups and downs, right? It was not a particularly easy language for me to learn. And so I needed some additional tutoring, and I ended up doing okay. But the thing about it is that all that matters is one test at the end. That's it. But you have to hit a certain line and you can either be a linguist or you can't. And I failed. Basically, everybody around me passed it, and so it's sort of this series of failures. It's like, okay, well, I'm 17 years old. I get rejected, you know why. Like, okay, well now I'm going to be an Arabic linguist. I tell everybody I'm going to be an Arabic for a year and a half between boot camp and all these things, but I'm moving towards this thing and I take this test. Well, wait, now I failed this thing too.Ben:Ryan was given an option. He could either find another specialty, or he could double down, work harder and retake the test in eight weeks. Ryan decided to focus and go for it.Ryan:I learned probably more Arabic in those eight weeks than in the rest of the 63 weeks combined. And so I took it again and I passed. And so then I was able to leave that duty station, went to North Carolina, and I went back and forth to Iraq from there a couple of times between 2009, 2010.Ben:During his time in the military, Ryan worked as an Arabic translator.Ryan:You are working in a secure environment and you are translating whatever comes across your desk. We lived in a bunker, just kind of buried into a dune on the side of a base. I worked the night shift, so it was 12 hours on, 12 hours off for seven months, for seven days a week. So you get kind of weird, right?Ben:Yeah. I mean, imagine.Ryan:Like the folks that you're with, like you get real close in real weird ways. We were attached to an infantry unit and a human intelligence unit.Ben:He wasn't only in the bunker though. On his second tour, he went out into the field.Ryan:A lot of my memories from Iraq are those ones when we were out in the field and actually translating and being people from the communities. I grew up a lot like just being able to be around different cultures effectively kicked me into high gear, in a way that I was not feeling when I was 17.Ben:At that point, Ryan had been in for five years, but he had never stopped wanting to go to school.Ryan:Two thirds of enlisted service members are first gen college students. And so I was in the minority that I was not a first gen college student, which means that I had this familial support to be able to say, hey, like college is a thing that you should be doing. But there still are these challenges in terms of what that transition can look like for me.Ben:So I'm sure many of you have heard of the GI Bill, which was first introduced after World War Two, and provided veterans with a host of benefits. One of the best known being tuition coverage for a service member looking to attend college or a vocational school. What we have now is a little different, and it was passed in 2008. This bill, the one Ryan would have access to, covered the cost of tuition for any university in the veteran's home state. One critique about the implementation of that bill is that there's low awareness among service members about the options that are available to them as they transition out of the military. Many veterans end up going to the college or university that advertises the most to them, rather than the institution that might be the best fit for their academic goals and needs as a student. In 2010, Ryan was in the same boat. Unsure of where to turn, he did what millions of people do every day when they're looking for answers.Ryan:I went to Google and I typed in Arabic College and Veteran, and I applied to the schools that popped up. So not like the most sophisticated. University of Michigan popped up at top of that list. So many Arab Americans live in that area that they have a phenomenal Arabic program at University of Michigan. So I applied and was promptly rejected.Ryan:... University of Michigan. So I applied and was promptly rejected. Ben:It was The University of Illinois all over again, but unlike 17-year-old Ryan who pivoted, former Marine Ryan didn't back down.Ryan:I called the admissions office and said, "Hey, I was very interested in your institution. Could you give me any sort of input on what led to that rejection?" They connected me to somebody who had actually reviewed my application, and she was very blunt about it. She's like, "You've got some good things going for you, but you haven't shown you can be a good student," which is fair, right? Michigan requires people to be good students.Ben:Good to study, yeah.Ryan:Yeah.Ben:Ryan knew he could study. He'd shown himself that during his Arabic courses, so he enrolled at the community college near his base in North Carolina.Ryan:While I was still active duty in my last couple months, just whatever the classes were that were available, which is a really common path for a lot of veterans, using community college. It's one of the most underappreciated assets we have in this country. That's this whole separate podcast.Ben:I completely agree. Completely undervalued, underfunded, underappreciated, all across the board.Ryan:Absolutely, and I was able to transfer into University of Michigan. I was there for two years. Took as many courses as I possibly could to get my degree as quickly as I could, which is not the way that I advise veterans to go about getting an undergraduate degree.Ben:What's your degree in?Ryan:International relations.Ben:So Mark, this is usually the part in our story where we take a moment and talk about what we've just heard. When I first met Ryan, we were introduced, and I said, "It's nice to meet you. Thank you for your service," and he said, "Thank you for your support," and then we got into a discussion.And he said that there are a number of veterans who are very uncomfortable with the phrase, "Thank you for your service," and I just wanted to understand that a bit more. Because I've always felt, as a patriot, very proud to say thank you because I genuinely am grateful for people who make the sacrifice to serve our country. Where does that come from?Mark:Different veterans are going to feel different about that type of a thank-you. How that's manifested, I think, is really what Ryan was probably trying to say. How is that manifested in the actions of your organization, the actions of your community, the actions of you, maybe, as an individual? I think is where maybe the friction into that comes. I always say, "Thank you for your service is important to me, but let's see: How does your organization actually do that on a day-to-day basis?"Ben:So that's really helpful because I'm educating myself. Now, Ryan went to school, but many service members don't take that path. Talk to me about other transitions out of the military.Mark:Some people say, "I'm going to stay four or five years, and I'm going to get out." I was one of those. And then some say, "I'm going to stay 30 years," and they get out at five, and so you just never know. Assignments happen every two to three years, and so you know there's a transition opportunity every two to three years. It just may not be a transition out of the military.Ben:So when you talk to veterans who are transitioning from active duty into the private sector in some form, how do you tell them to think about figuring out that transition?Mark:It's all about prepping yourself, and to me, that's what this is all about. This is what helping service members transition is all about, is making sure they're prepared. If we can build relationship with service members while they're still serving, to help them tap into skills that they didn't know they had, help them develop skills that they didn't know were dormant. You're not sure about: How do I value at? You're not sure what you bring to the table, and we're going to point you to some resources that can help you think through that.Do you want to go to school? If you want to go to school now, let us help you. Warrior Scholar Project is one of those organizations that can help you, as a transition service member, into college. How do you become successful? How do you build the right relationships network? You may be working because you actually have a family now, that you took out of the military with you. Let us help you think through: How do you do all of those things?Ben:Back to Ryan. He got his degree in two years, which is not something he would advise people to do, by the way, but at the time, he just didn't know better. It was just one of a few challenges he never anticipated about returning to civilian life as a college student.Ryan:One of the big challenges is particularly when you're junior enlisted, the question of why is not acceptable. If you were to take it to the extreme example of a boot camp. Boot camp, if a drill instructor says, "Do 50 pushups," and you say, "Why?" it's not going to go over well.In the college environment, if you don't ask why, then you're missing a huge part of it. If you don't understand a concept, really understanding why, going to office hours, doing those things. So there's a big challenge there, in terms of the difference of community and in terms of what the culture expects of you in one environment versus another. You can short-circuit that if you really directly ask the question of, "What's your response the first time that somebody asks you if you've killed anybody?" That's a very stark question, but you should think about your answer to that question before somebody asks it.Ben:It's a crazy thing to ask somebody.Ryan:It is, but it happens. How do you have these sorts of discussions? How do you join student groups? How do you go to these meetings? How do you embrace everything that this college campus and this college community has to offer? But I needed some fellow veterans to walk me through that.Ben:Ryan's identity as a veteran stayed with him as a student and then as he transitioned into the workforce.Ryan:So I wanted to continue to serve, so I actually taught with Teach for America for a couple years in Detroit. I taught high school. Hardest job I've ever had, by some margin. I was not cut out for that work. I committed to doing two years, and there was no chance that I was going to quit, but it was not the best application of my skill set. So I went to law school, and around that time that I was going from finishing up my teaching requirement to go to law school, I heard about Warrior Scholar Project.Ben:We've heard this name, the Warrior Scholar Project, a few times now, but let's talk about what it is. The Warrior Scholar Project is a national nonprofit 501(c)(3) that equips enlisted veterans to succeed in higher education classrooms and beyond. It was founded in 2012 by Christopher Howell. Howell wanted to go to school when he got out of the military, but he wasn't sure he'd be able to. To help him, Howell's brother designed a crash course curriculum in student life that prepared Howell to apply for university programs.Christopher went on to study at Yale, and that crash course went on to become the Warrior Scholar Projects curriculum. He started this program to help service members with two friends, also students, and that's the program Ryan came across while he was at The University of Michigan.This is something I want to underscore about this episode. Unlike the other folks we've spoken to here on The Unshakeables, Ryan was not the singular founder of the Warrior Scholar Project, but he did found the first chapter outside of its original incarnation at Yale.Ryan:The first branch that they allowed us to really be able to franchise what they were doing at Yale. That was a very easy decision for me to be able to do that because they were doing something at Yale in this Warrior Scholar Project classroom that was unlike any other transition program, any other classroom environment that I had been a part of. It was this intoxicating thing.Ben:The Warrior Scholar curriculum creates a highly-structured environment where enlisted service members feel confident to prepare them for academic life.Ryan:It is primarily a series of academic boot camps where you are taking enlisted service members who want to be able to pursue their undergraduate studies, and we put them in a safe but ungraded, unaccredited environment that is really demanding. We mean when we call it a boot camp. It's about 75 hours of work per week, and they are on these college campuses experiencing what it's like to succeed at Columbia, at University of Chicago, at Yale, at University of Michigan, at schools like this. And they come off the other end of that ready to go wherever.Ben:They do this while they're already in school, or in prep to go to school?Ryan:It's a mix. They cannot yet have a Bachelor's degree. For most of them, they're saying, "Either I want to make a change. I'm currently pursuing my studies, and I want to make a change." Or they're people that are just saying, "Hey, I'm about to get out of the military. I want to pursue my undergraduate studies. How do I do this?"So it's very much about confidence. It's about saying, "No, you actually do have what it takes." At Yale, there was this legendary professor, Charles Hill. They were reading Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and at the time, there were 12 veterans that were in the classroom. Tatted-up vets, and they're going toe-to-toe with this professor on de Tocqueville's equality of conditions argument, and they're engaging. They've all clearly done their-Ryan:... on Tocqueville's equality of conditions argument, and they're engaging. They've all clearly done the reading. It's just like, what? Again, what universe? What is this? I asked afterwards, is this just like what classes were at Yale? And the professor was like, "No, this is not your average class." There's something going on here, and it was really about veterans respond really well when you throw on the gauntlet and you challenge them. Ben: Ryan loved working with WSP. He finished his own studies at the University of Michigan and went on to law school at the University of Virginia. I want to take a moment here. This is someone who didn't get into college the first time he applied and now he's going to one of the best law schools in the country. Anything is possibleRyan:For five years, that was my part-time involvement, was going back every summer and doing this program.Ben:While Ryan was part-time, the program wanted him full-timeRyan:Right before law school, this was going into my second program, the second time I had run it, they offered me the position to come on board and to become the executive director. The founder was leaving and they wanted to be able to grow it, and even though I felt so strongly about this thing, I said no, and I wondered for years if that was the greatest professional mistake of my life, was saying no to this thing that I really believed in.Ben:That little feeling that tickled his brain to enlist in the Marines was also tickling him again. He wanted to work with the Warrior-Scholar Project, but he knew he wasn't quite ready.Ryan:I couldn't really identify when I turned down that job to become the Warrior-Scholar Project executive director back in 2014, I couldn't have really told you, here are the seven things that I need to be able to learn before I would feel qualified for it.Ben:He worked with WSP in the summers, graduated law school, and went on to start at a large firm.Ryan:I intended to be there for a few years, build the connections, work a lot, make some money, and then figure out what's next.Ben:For him, what was next was a federal clerkship, then going back to public service. He still kept in touch with the Warrior Scholar founders and would meet up with them socially. One day, they were all out to lunch.Ryan:And I talked about that moment of when they offered me that position, that executive directorship in 2014, and I said, "I always think, if only there was a way I could work for WSP full-time now," and he just said, "Well, what if there was."Ben:The Warrior-Scholar Project had just received a large grant that would allow them to expand the team. They wanted Ryan to come on board as COO working under the executive director for the company. Ryan was over the moon. He accepted the position in August and he was winding down his last case with his law firm as he was getting up to speed on WSP in September.Ryan:We had a case that was in trial in the Northern District of Illinois, so going back and forth to the courthouse from there. As I'm starting to field everything that happens on the inflow of my ramp up to WSP, the executive director who I was supposed to be working under left, right then.Ben:As often happens in business, there are moving parts that not everyone may be privy to. The executive director that Ryan was supposed to be working with, learning from and jumping into the organization with, he was gone. He was on his own.Ryan:So I came on board and I had this really small team of people who believed in the thing, a few people, but the organization's sustainability really depended on that grant. I didn't realize how much depended on it until I actually got a look at the full on financials. I also didn't realize that we were only in phase one of this big grant application.Ben:The grant that WSP had gotten, the very grant that allowed them to bring Ryan on board full-time, wasn't actually theirs. And it's not just that the money hadn't come through. They had only just submitted the application, and to make things worse, the application, it wasn't great.Ryan:I've never written a grant application in my life. I've never run operations for a nonprofit.Ben:But you can read.Ryan:I can read, and here's the thing. The thing that I had going for me in spades is that I knew the core deliverable. I knew the thing that we did on a visceral level.Ben:Ryan, brand new, relatively unsupported, new hire at WSP, had to make the call. He had to find a way to fix the grant, to save both his future with WSP, but also the future of the organization itself.Ryan:One of the first calls that I had was just to the program officer, and just basically said to them, "Hey, I'm the new guy. Here's the challenges that I'm up against. I've never run a non-profit. I believe in the thing. I know what we do. I know that this thing can work and I know that this grant application isn't really going to get us there. I read through the Bridge Band due diligence. This is not where it needs to be." And they said, "Yeah, you're right."Ben:There will never be an alternate universe where Ryan doesn't make that call. We'll never know what would've happened if he didn't speak up and say, "Hey guys, this isn't going to cut it. We've got to do it again." But that's what it means to be unshakable. It's to be able to see a problem, tackle it head on, and be brave enough to step in, whatever is waiting for you.Ryan:Being very real and being able to be vulnerable in that moment, I know that it was a game changer. I'm not going to rewrite this application by myself. I need the buy-in from everybody that's on the team and so I need everybody to be able to contribute to the thing, and I need to have regular communication with this large grantor and to be able to say, "Hey, here's the deadlines. Here's what we're going to be able to get you," and that ultimately allowed us to be able to get that grant.Ben:Ryan was promoted to CEO in 2019.Ryan:I was both very concerned and very honored by that. There is a deeply embedded notion of feeling like an imposter, like, "I don't have the chops to be the CEO of this organization." I'm not a fundraiser, right? Then you have six or seven months later, you have the pandemic that hits, and so I start to get myself a little bit more in the zone of running an organization and then that happens. Same sort of thing of digging deep and relying on the team that's around you. We were able to pivot during that and we made it through, and converted all of our programs to being virtual and made it work. I love talking about the metrics for where we are today, but so much of that is because we have people that have been here for years, that we have that institutional knowledge, because it takes so much longer to rebuild that institutional knowledge if people are just coming in and out of the organization.Ben:Today, the Warrior-Scholar Project has served 2,500 people through their academic boot camps. 99% of participants go on to recommend the program to others.Ryan:The percent of students that complete their degrees within six years for all veterans is about 47%. For our students, it's about 90% that will persist and will actually complete their degrees.Ben:A big difference,Ryan:And importantly, even for the 10%. So long as that's an informed choice, if one of our students says, "Hey, I went to this boot camp and I actually don't want to do undergrad. Instead, I want to pursue a trade or an apprenticeship, or it's just not for me right now," that's also a success. If you are making informed choices and you're not just going to school because you have these benefits, then that's also a success. This year, we'll serve just shy of 400 people through those academic boot camps and about 600 people through other services, through career services, through graduate school services, community college services. We have partnerships with community colleges, so we'll serve about a thousand people this year alone, and we have pretty aggressive plans to be able to grow and scale in the next years. We have a five-year strategic plan. We have 20 partner schools operating this summer.I still feel like an imposter. I was listening to this podcast on the way. I'm not an entrepreneur, so there's always been this sense of do I belong in this space? I feel strongly about what we do. We've had a lot of success in what we do, and that's one of the things that really helps me to be able to say, "Yeah, I'm the right guy for it."Ben:So talk to me a little bit, Mark, then about... Let's break it down into two pieces if we could, and for our listeners who many of them may want to hire veterans just like we do, or they may be veterans themselves who are looking to start a business, what are the unique challenges of veterans and the transition from military service to civilian life in the private sector? And then the second part of my question is, what are the unique attributes that are really special and powerful that veterans bring to the private sector, that private sector employers can really avail themselves of?Mark:Yeah, so I'm transitioning. I'm leaving this thing called the military. A big organization, but it was actually my family. It's...Mark:... big organization, but it was actually my family. It's probably the only thing I've known, it's the thing that I've grown up with, it has a culture, and now I have to walk away from that. In the military, you had this thing called a mission. You knew what that meant. You knew what it took to deliver against that mission. You understood what the larger organization was trying to accomplish. And when you leave out of the military, you're not sure what the mission is, you're not sure what the major contribution that organization is trying to make, so sometimes that's a barrier for your success. One of the other biggest barriers been is, we tend to suffer in silence because we've been taught to solve problems. We've been taught to deliver without having to constantly run back for instructions. I want to deliver, so I'll suffer in silence. I'll study it, but I just don't know how to ask for help. So that's one of our biggest barriers.The culture's different. We believe we're imposters, and we're afraid to ask for help because it's a sign of weakness and we are taught not to be weak. So now, what do I bring to the table? I bring to the table I'm adaptive. I do know how to problem solve. I know how to take large organizations and do amazing things with them. I know how to operate in cultures and countries that never imagined you'd ever find yourself in. I do that on a regular basis, and I do that without a lot of guidance. So what company wouldn't want somebody like that in their organization? It's just, it's inherent in the culture in the military that you get it. How do companies tap into that, recognize it's there, and then leverage it, and then teach them all the other things you need them to know?Ben:Many of our listeners are either entrepreneurs/business owners or aspiring business owners.Mark:Mm-hmm.Ben:Talk to the veterans who are listening today who are thinking about starting their own business and why veterans make such great entrepreneurs.Mark:As you think about a veteran, whether it's a young enlisted kid who's coming up who becomes a squad leader, who's given a number of individuals that they're responsible for, that's a little small company that you're running. You keep layering that to the platoon sergeant, the platoon leader, and that scope gets a little bit broader. They're literally running small businesses. They have equipment that they have to maintain. They have a product that they have to deliver. We're already small business owners; we just don't think of it that way. So the thing I'd say to a veteran, you've already learned some of the basic skills and principles of running a business. We just need to give you the more technical ways that the business world looks at that and maybe apply some of the financial literacy that you need to be more successful, but you have that in your DNA.Ben:As a way of closing this out, Mark, can you talk about what JPMorgan Chase as a firm is doing to support veterans both in our own workforce and as entrepreneurs? Because I want to seed as many ideas out there as I can so that a broader portion of the population gets behind this idea and comes up with their own ways of solving this challenge.Mark:Yeah. I would say, first, know that you're not out there by yourself and know that JPMorgan Chase is just one avenue. We actually lead an organization called the Veterans Job Mission, which is like-minded companies. Something that started back in 2011 with 11 companies, today is over 315 companies who are doing the same things that we're doing: trying to ensure veterans can be successful post their military career, whether it's in employment or whether it's in small business. And we do that not just for veterans, because we've used the phrase veterans, we're talking about military spouses as well, who I always say is the secret sauce to the military.So organizations like that are ways that you can tap into it, but it's also organizations like the Institute for Veterans and Military Families, IVMF, or Bunker Labs, or some of the nonprofits that we work with that I would argue are great places to start when you're saying, "I want to start a business." Okay, let them help guide you in the early stages of that. Am I really ready to start a business? Do I have the right knowledge? Have I started to build a network? And then understand that you don't have to know all the answers today, and that's, to me, what JPMorgan Chase and other companies are doing, is to help point you to those answers so that you don't have to discover all of those things on your own.Ben:Well, it's a rich resource for a whole country in terms of our veteran, let's call it our veteran families because it's veterans and their spouses and families, and I hope we take more advantage of it and help them lift themselves up as they transition into civilian life.Mark:Well, Ben, thank you for shedding a light on this community. I think they are a treasure that we should be proud of and make sure we're helping them be successful.Ben:Ryan, what advice do you have for aspiring business owners? And I accept that you don't view yourself as an entrepreneur. That's okay. You are running something, you're running something from small to large.Ryan:Yeah.Ben:Some of our listeners didn't start their businesses, they bought them, so it's kind of the same. And I'd like to know from you, if you could impart a little bit of wisdom that you've learned along the way that you wish you'd known back when, what would that be?Ryan:Sure. It is, everything is about relationships. Everything is about relationships. To give you one quantifiable thing, two years ago we got a $5 million MacKenzie Scott grant or a $5 million organization, so that is a huge amount of money.Ben:It's transformative.Ryan:It's transformative. I don't know which relationship triggered us getting on her radar, but it absolutely came down to a relationship. I think about the reason that I'm at WSP to begin with in 2018, just connecting with one of the co-founders and saying, "Hey, let's meet up. There's no job that I would rather have than this one." And every single thing that we do comes down to the value of relationships and that not just being something which is transactional. It's not like you and I meeting and saying, "What am I going to get out of this? And what am I potentially going to give to you?" It's much more about the longer term view of saying, "Hey, there's something to just being able to build that relationship and then to be able to trust each other and to build your network in a really authentic and meaningful way." You don't know where that goes, but holy cow, does that pay dividends if you really lean into it?Ben:Amazing advice for everyone. Ryan, what an inspiring story. Thank you for sharing it, and thank you for being on the show.Ryan:Thanks so much for having me.Ben:Thanks so much for listening to The Unshakeables. If you liked this episode, please rate and review it. It'll help our show find more listeners. I'm Ben Walter, and this is The Unshakeables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia.