Jake Wood:
Sure. Team Rubicon is a nonprofit organization that’s been operating since 2010 and its mission is to mobilize military veterans and communities to respond to disasters and humanitarian crises. We do that globally in places like Ukraine and Central and South America today. We have over 150,000 volunteers and most of them are military veterans who are training and organizing year round to ensure that their communities are more resilient in the face of these disasters. We help those communities before, during and after those inevitable moments happened.
I got out of the Marine Corps in late 2009. I’m not quite sure what I had planned, but a few weeks after getting out, the Haiti earthquake happened in 2010. That was a moment, one of the largest humanitarian catastrophes of the last hundred years, 150,000 people died instantly about another a hundred thousand people would die in the coming weeks from their injuries and from lack of water. I was inspired in that moment to use my skills and experiences as a military veteran to help. I helped organize a team of veterans and doctors to get on the ground. We got down there four days later and you know, almost 13 years later now, we’ve done that same thing over a thousand times in communities all around the world,

Chrissy Blasinsky:
You make it sound so easy. but it’s not. What I’ve seen, the big difference with Team Rubicon is different. And to me seems way more complex. It’s more infrastructure, it’s more making sure the lights get back on, making sure roads get cleared and making sure that people can get from point A to point B.

Jake Wood:
I think one of the things that most people don’t appreciate is that the post-disaster scenario is so complex. There are so many needs that get disrupted and no single organization, no single government entity can address any or all of those needs. The Red Cross is certainly the largest disaster response player in the space, they’ve been around for over a hundred years and they do tremendous work, but they do a sliver of the work that needs to get done. They focus on sheltering and feeding those people who have lost their homes in many cases, but they’re not the ones who go in and repair the home as an example. And so really we see our work as mutually reinforcing, we take care of a lot of those different functions that some of the organizations don’t.

Jeff Lenard:
What you learn in the service is discipline, you learn how to fix things. You learn how to do all these things that you may not normally have another chance to do. The connection between solving problems, big problems in involving logistics and the military and veterans makes a lot of sense. How did that come together? Was it that trip to Haiti that gave you the impetus that this is the best way to do it?

Jake Wood:
When I saw what was happening in Haiti unfold, I looked at it through the lens of my experience over the previous four years. I served in the infantry and in a scout sniper unit in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. So I had seen challenging circumstances. Certainly I’d seen danger. I was accustomed to operating in environments with limited resources and limited information. Watching what was really almost a post-apocalyptic scenario unfolding in Haiti, I knew this is what I do, going to situations like that. We quickly realized one of the things that lacks on the ground in a really bad post-disaster situation is the ability for people to cut through and navigate that chaos.
That requires effective decision making, effective utilization of resources, effective operational planning, and that’s what the U.S. military does really, really well at a tactical level. And so that became blaringly obvious. And then I think over time, what we realized was that in a disaster zone, every skill that’s necessary is a skill that is directly trained in the military for that job. So whether it’s how to operate heavy machinery in an austere environment, whether it’s water, sanitation, communications infrastructure, any of those things we have men and women. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year training to the highest standards to execute those same functions in the worst circumstances imaginable. When they come home and they take off that uniform for the last time, the U.S. taxpayer isn’t getting a return on that investment anymore. And so we see this as an opportunity to stretch that resource further by challenging those men and women to continue their service. And frankly, it’s a challenge I think most of them are looking for.

Chrissy Blasinsky:
I can’t think of a better group of people to go into situations like that than veterans, right? Because in the face of chaos, panic is not what you want, especially in a leader. These are the people who you want to go into these scenarios and into these places to help people, because there is that calm presence. There is unfortunately the experience of having been in worst case scenarios where they can help.

Jake Wood:
You’re absolutely right. There’s a saying in the military that panic is contagious and I’ve seen it, it spreads like contagion. The other thing though that’s interesting is so is attitude or behavior. Leadership is contagious, calm is contagious. And one of the things that we’ve seen is that yes, military veterans have been in dicey situations before. Not all of them handle it great, but for those who have found that they can operate effectively in chaotic situations, it’s a skill that you don’t lose. And what’s interesting is in these communities, the U.S. has a pretty amazing emergency management infrastructure. It is a profession that’s staffed with highly educated people. We have a great emergency management system through the national instant management system and the corresponding ICS infrastructure.
But if you’re an emergency manager in small town Kentucky, let’s use Kentucky in the flooding that happened there in Eastern Kentucky this year, horrific flooding. If you’re an emergency manager in one of those small towns, you may have been the emergency manager for 10 years, and you may have been developing plans and contingency plans, but you’ve probably actually never experienced a disaster. We can come in with our teams. in particular our incident management teams who are responding to 15, 20, 25 disasters a year, and help them understand here’s the application of your expertise in practice. Here’s how you apply what you know to what we’re seeing on the ground. There’s no disaster scenario that we haven’t seen at this point, short of a nuclear meltdown, which our teams in Ukraine are preparing for by the way.

Jeff Lenard:
You’ve talked about the concept of love, which helps engender trust and makes a lot of these things, these high energy things possible.

Jake Wood:
Usually people struggle to hear a Marine combat veteran talk about love. I think one of the things that I learned in the military is that the most important factor in unlocking the courage of your teams is creating a sense of safety for those teams and the fastest way to create a sense of safety for people is for them to feel cared for. I talk about that and use the word love because I think it’s the most powerful form of that. And what happens is when people feel cared for, they feel that sense of safety. They know that you have their back, they know that you will do anything for them, whether that’s for them professionally or whether for them personally.
And what happens then is they have the space to become courageous, right? I often use this example, which really leaves people scratching their heads. There were various moments in my combat tours overseas where I saw real courage unlocked, where I saw Marines running across fields under machine gunfire. And I’ve led Marines across fields under machine gunfire. When I sit back and I think about why they were able to find that courage, I think back through that sequence that I just spoke about, they miraculously in that moment felt safe. Now that doesn’t make sense because of course they were in mortal danger, there were literal machine gun rounds coming at them. But that sense of safety is relative, right? They weren’t physically safe, but they were emotionally and mentally safe and that emotional and mental safety came from their knowledge that there was so much love within that platoon that if they went down, there’d be a line of Marines waiting to run back out into that same machine gun riddled field to get them.
And so that provided them with the opportunity to find courage. I think leaders in business can do that same thing. If you create a culture of fear where people are nervous that any misstep is going to cost them their job, you’re not just costing someone their job, you’re costing them the ability to pay for gas, the ability to put food on the table for their kids. There is nothing more fearful in the world and not being able to provide for your family. And when people are operating in that culture of fear, they are unwilling to take any risk. They’re unwilling to demonstrate any courage because what do you need courage for? You don’t need courage for the not-risky stuff. That’s just the day to day. But the opportunity to do the right thing by a customer, which maybe goes against the protocol or breaks the rule somehow. you gotta give people that liberty to operate in that way, but they can’t do it under fear.

Jeff Lenard:
A former board member used to say, I’ll never lose a customer over 10 cents.

Jake Wood:
Right. Right.

Jeff Lenard:
So 150,000 volunteers. One of the things people talk about when they’re in volunteer organizations is the hardest thing is to get volunteers. The second hardest thing is to keep them. How do you do that with building up that volunteer base and keeping them engaged where at a moment’s notice they are doing something that is going to be a challenge?

Jake Wood:
I think it all begins and ends with culture, and it culture’s really hard to measure. There was this anecdotal way that we discovered in measuring it, this hypothetical question we would ask ourselves, which was if Team Rubicon disappeared overnight, would it leave an irreplaceable void in the lives of the people who were involved in it? Beyond if they were a full-time employee and it was a financial void, like if it disappeared overnight, would it leave that void where they’re like I’ll never have an organization like that again. Because for people who were in the military, like for me as a Marine, the Marine Corps was such a special time in my life.
Eeventually we were able to measure whether we were having that impact because we started to see people tattoo Team Rubicon on their bodies. There are very few companies or brands or organizations that have been elevated into a person’s conscience consciousness where they tattoo it on their body. But think about some of them, right? The military calls them boot camp scars, because the first thing that a graduate of Marine Corps boot camp does is go to a tattoo parlor and a Corps tattoo on their body because now it’s now a part of their identity. It’s what they identify as. Look at Harley Davidson. It’s a motorcycle, it’s a big hunk of metal, but it’s a lifestyle, it’s a way of expressing who they are and they’ll get that Harley Davidson tattoo on their bicep.
There are very few companies, brands, organizations that have elevated themselves to that with the people they serve. So the first time I saw a Team Rubicon tattoo, I thought it was the strangest thing in the entire world. And I saw my second one and you know, the guy already had like 50 other tattoos. So I was like, wow, it’s like a 2% tattoo increase. Then you see 10, 15, 20, 50, there’s hundreds of Team Rubicon tattoos out there. And it was at that point that I really understood that we built something that mattered so much to these volunteers that if it disappeared, they would never replace it. And so focusing on that volunteer experience, focusing on that culture, focusing on how you make them feel in all of those moments is so precious. Now, counterintuitively, one of the best ways to protect that volunteer culture is to fire volunteers.
The moment you see a volunteer demonstrating some sort of toxic behavior that jeopardizes those things for their other volunteers, you have to let that person go and firing a volunteer is one of the hardest things in the world for a volunteer organization to do because you convince yourself they’re trying to do the right thing, they’re here volunteering. They must be a good person at heart. Well listen, some people are assholes and there’s nothing that’s more toxic in the world than an asshole inside of an organization. They can quickly errode an experience for everyone. And so it was a tough lesson. We didn’t learn it fast, but eventually we learned it and it was one of the most important lessons we learned.

Chrissy Blasinsky:
Some companies should probably learn that faster.

Jake Wood:
Certainly

Chrissy Blasinsky:
I think you know you made it when people start tattooing your logo on their body. What I’m hearing from you is that Team Rubicon provides the folks who are volunteering a purpose, right? They go into what they’re doing with the purpose and drive to get to the goal that they want to achieve. And I think that’s pretty amazing.

Jake Wood:
We talk about three things. We talk about purpose. We talk about community and we talk about identity. When we talk about that volunteer experience, so purpose, that’s universal. Every human being needs purpose in their life. And it’s really sad when you see a human being who hasn’t found their purpose yet. So we can be a part of that. We talk about community, how do we bring together a tribe of people with shared values, if not shared experience? And then finally that identity. The way I often articulated is if you’re a military veteran and you spent any amount of time in the military deploying overseas, you had a uniform, you took pride in that uniform. You’d look in the mirror, you’d see metals on your chest.
You would take pride in those medals. You knew who you were, you identified in my case as a Marine. And when you lose that you lose that sense of identity. Maybe you go work a nine to five job, but your identity is not tied to that job. You don’t look in the mirror with that suit and tie on and be like, man, I love that suit and tie. I take so much pride in that suit and tie. But we put that uniform back on those volunteers and it immediately it gives them that sense of identity again. I think that’s powerful for people to have.

Jeff Lenard:
The work that you do at Team Rubicon really makes a difference. First off don’t change your logo. There’s gonna be a lot of people who have to get their tattoos readjusted.

Jake Wood:
We’ve run that April Fool’s joke.

Jeff Lenard:
Team Rubicon is just part of your story. I think there’s so many interesting lessons that people who go to your NACS Show presentation on October 3rd will hear. Jake wood, thanks for joining us today. And we will see you in Las Vegas and uh, look forward to hearing more from you. So thanks for joining us today.

Convenience Matters Outro:
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