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Growing Lean
Transitioning From Navy Enthusiast to Nonprofit Leader: Mike Schindler's Journey in the Nonprofit and Entertainment Sectors
Do you ever wonder how veterans are making waves in both the nonprofit and entertainment sectors? Our latest episode features Mike Schindler, the CEO of Operation Military Family and co-executive producer of Itzvooka, who paints an incredible picture of his unique career path. A third-generation Navy enthusiast, Mike's journey is anything but ordinary. From striving to be Perry Mason at 16, to leading a nonprofit, producing a documentary, and dealing with Hollywood strikes, Mike's experiences are as diverse as they are captivating. He dives into the intricacies of his role, the competitive nature of the nonprofit world, the importance of having a clear vision, and the need for diverse income streams.
But that's not all. Mike and I also venture into the realm of technology and its role in businesses today. Ever wondered how technology can propel your international expansion? Or how new tools like chat GPT can speed up work? Mike has fascinating insights to offer. We also discuss the undying relevance of face-to-face meetings in the digital era. Lastly, we delve deep into what success means to Mike - not just in terms of his business, but also for the individuals he assists. His approach to measuring success, both qualitatively and quantitatively, offers a fresh perspective. So tune in, this episode promises to be a rollercoaster ride of insights and reflections.
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Welcome back to the growing Lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Deej. I'm very happy to be here with Mike Schindler, the founder and CEO of Operation Military Family and co-executive producer of Itzvooka. Welcome, mike.
Speaker 2:Oh well, Deej, it's an honor to be here. Thanks for having me, yeah excited to explore and unpack everything that we're going to talk about.
Speaker 1:Amazing. I'm also very excited To get us started. Mike, can you tell us a bit about your background and history and how you ended up in the business you're in today?
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. Well, I mean, I'm third generation Navy so I always kind of had this thought that I would join the military at some point. But when I was 16, I thought I really want to be Perry Mason. So for your audience that isn't familiar with Perry Mason, he was this high, you know, high-profile attorney on TV that was kind of the sleuth and investigative reporter. But also he'd come back and win his court cases and actually I went to see a movie in 1986, so that kind of dates me a little bit. But I was 16 and walked into this movie and when I walked out it confirmed what I wanted to do. I walked into the recruiter that day and looked right at him and said I'm Tom Cruise, I'm going to fly your cold jets and I'm going to date Kelly McGillis. And at that point I signed with the Navy and ended up being able to do some cool stuff with the Navy never flew cool jets.
Speaker 2:And then just kind of fast track, when I got out I got into startups. So really kind of understood the startup space, made a ton of money in startups, lost a ton of money in startups and then I think it was 2006, my best friend deployed to Afghanistan and that's when I wrote my first book and that was kind of the catalyst that kicked off our nonprofit, our philanthropic effort, operation Military Family, which really works on mission purpose identity for military and veteran families when they get out of service, and that if you're in the nonprofit space there's a lot of highs and a lot of lows and I'm sure we can talk through that. And then about five years ago I met Chris Nolan out of Hollywood and we started working on documentaries and the result of that, during the pandemic, was us doing this groundbreaking film that interviews 17 of some of the world's top military leaders, thought leaders, neuroscience experts and really had to move people from stuck to unstuck using military methodologies. So it's been a journey, been crazy.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Well, firstly, thank you for your service and, yeah, I'm excited to unpack some challenges that you've faced getting to where you are. So what have the biggest challenges been, firstly for your nonprofit and then in your documentary series? What have the biggest challenges been and how have you faced them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think on both, I'll take them separately. The nonprofit there's people that want to start nonprofits all the time, so it's kind of a crowded space and I think, geez. In the US alone there's over 45,000 nonprofits that serve our military and veteran families and some are doing the same thing, so it's competing forces in many and as a result of that, there's always funding issues. I don't want to say always, but a number of nonprofits deal with funding issues. Now we've just celebrated over a decade, which the average nonprofit lasts about five years or less, but 80% of them fold within five years. We just celebrated the decade moving on to the 11th year, and if you're in the nonprofit space, you've got to be really clear. Number one what is my mission and what are my funding mechanisms? And in the early stages we were small and then we started to grow and it really is because we didn't just rely on donations, foundations and grants. We also created a fee for service model and I think anybody that explores the nonprofit space really needs to have three lines of revenue, at least three lines of revenue.
Speaker 2:In the documentary space, when the pandemic hit, distribution changed right. All of Hollywood changed, as a matter of fact and how you distribute old distributors. Now you really have to have relationships with streamers and you've got to get streamers involved and you still have to come up with money. So in some ways it's similar to nonprofits. You got to get somebody to buy into the idea it's willing to back you and still come with your own funds as well. And we just went through the Hollywood strike, right which the writer strike and the actor strike, and how is AI playing into all of that? And so that's a very dynamic space.
Speaker 2:And how we really navigate all of this, deej, is we're really clear on what our mission is. We have clarity around this Now. How we get there might change, but we're really clear on the direction we want to go. And I think in today's environment, people have to be really clear on who you're serving and what your vision is. And when the vision is big, the circumstances don't matter as much. I mean, they still matter, but not as much, right, because you're going to go through walls to get there and people just have to have that clarity 100%, and is it safe to assume that it's?
Speaker 1:VUCA is your main source of income in terms of a business owner?
Speaker 2:It's one of them. Yeah, that whole film, that documentary, which came out in 2022, evolved into an executive leadership training program which has gone international, and it is one of my sources of income. Again, like I suggested, in the nonprofit world, I have multiple sources of income. So, whether it's through books or whether it's through speaking or training, I also get paid by our nonprofit to come in and navigate some of both our federal grants but also the training piece that we do through that, really working with our military and veteran families. So I'm a joke I'm over 50 and yet I still feel like I'm in the gig economy right, but I think people need to be smart about that.
Speaker 2:The shelf life of skills today, for anybody that's graduating out of college and even for people in the workplace, your shelf life on your current skill set is less than five years. So when you look at all the data, you've really got to be committed to being a growth mindset individual. You can't say, hey, this is the way I've always done things and I'm always gonna do it this way because you'll be left behind. So, being in both worlds in a very entertainment driven but service driven industry and with a nonprofit being entirely service driven. We're always evaluating ourselves on a quarterly basis. What do we need to do, what's working and how do we have kind of a future back mindset, how do we see into the future and look at what we're doing now and how do we need to evolve ourselves?
Speaker 1:100%, and would you be able to walk me through your overall business strategy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's really so. On the for profit side, which is our film, executive leadership training, company side, it's pretty simple. What we end up doing with companies is we go into most companies and I'm just gonna give you the framework. Okay, is we just go into a company and we say, hey, listen, and I'll take a scenario. Let's companies now are requiring their employees to come back to work right, so they return to work.
Speaker 2:What's a return to work strategy? We actually call it a return to culture strategy because people wanna be. If you look at employees today, they wanna have flexibility, right, they wanna have something that is purpose driven. They wanna have purpose driven work right, that's a big deal. And they want to have personal and professional development.
Speaker 2:So when you look at those three factors and we go into companies, we evaluate that number one, but we say, hey, listen, you need to pick a project or initiative that is real, that we can track, okay, that we can get involved in.
Speaker 2:Number two, it's got to have an ROI, meaning it's we either have to look at this project from a cost building perspective, like a revenue generating perspective, or a cost saving perspective. That could mean we have to improve morale, because that'll improve efficiencies but also drive revenue. And third is it's got to be so complex that you think it's going to take six to nine months, and so then what we'll do is we'll say whatever you invest into, this is initiative. We're going to 10x that within that timeframe and if we don't 10x it, we'll continue to work on it until we do. Does that make sense? So our strategy really is, and what happens because of the results we've had is we get a lot of referrals. Today we still do some stuff on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn, but a lot of it is referral based. So we're very selective as far as who we work with.
Speaker 1:So Okay, amazing. It's good to hear a referral based business. It means you're doing a lot of things right and I love that. Yeah, and how have you adapted over the last like couple of years to changes in the industry? Obviously, we've gone through so many changes in the last three years in terms of technology in terms of mindset after the pandemic. So how have you adapted during this time of change?
Speaker 2:Well, fortunately, I mean, I got immersed into change, right? So for your audience that doesn't know what VUCA means, vuca came out of the 80s when the Soviet Union was falling. It's a military term, military loves. We love our acronyms. It stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. Right, which is the world today? Right, I mean, it hasn't. You know, it's not much different.
Speaker 2:But the flip side to that is vision, understanding, clarity and adaptability, and those are things that we can actually control. So we get our team really focused on what are the things that we can control? And how do we plan for the things that we can control? Right, because we we can plan for things that are uncontrollables. We know they're going to happen. We just don't know when they're going to happen. Right, but we can't necessarily change it. But what we can change is the things that we can control. So how do we prepare, plan and execute on those? That's our PPE.
Speaker 2:So we all joked during, you know, the pandemic. We said, yeah, we have our own PPE, which is prepare, plan and execute. Right, so we do a lot of things virtually nowadays. That's how our company went from really local focus to international focused, because technology was great, we adapted to it and we adopted it. Nothing replaces face to face, though, dij, I'd say that I still encourage our teams to get together, shake hands, be in community, because being human is an art and there's so much creativity that comes from you and I. Having a cup of coffee sitting across the table, then it does via Zoom. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, we, we adapt, and we also know that in the next 10 years there's going to be 100 years of technological growth. That's, I mean, that's what research shows, right. So we know we can't be like, well, this is the way we're going to do it. What we know is we have to be really clear on where we're going and we have to be, it's like, fixed on the mission, flexible on the method. Does it make sense? So that's how we adapt. We're just very adaptable.
Speaker 1:Amazing. And, on that point, what steps have you taken to utilize new tools and tactics that have become available over the last couple of years?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So chat GPT my business partner, chris he uses that a ton. He tests that. He understands how to prompt that. We don't replace the creative side of what we do with chat GPT, but we prompt it to either maybe do some research and then we verify that research because we know there's been some challenges there. We might do it for, like a framework of an idea that we're playing with. That gives us some more ideas, right. So we use technology to kind of prompt our creativity. Okay, we don't use it to replace our creativity. We use social media to do more outreach, right To expand our audience. It's different now in that I've got to have it in my schedule like, oh, I've got to post to social media today, right Now. There are tools that will do that for us, but I still remain very active in that because I want it to be very personal, because I think people are looking for authenticity. So that's how I remain tied to my audience, if that makes sense. I don't disperse all those things yet to technology.
Speaker 1:That helped does that make sense? Yeah, no, 100%. These tools these days, especially with AI coming into the mainstream, it's crazy what we can do in the time, in like a fraction of the time it would take us to do these things before. And I think that's the biggest thing is utilizing the technology as a tool to do your work faster not necessarily better, but faster.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really an efficiency thing. It's no different than we had the horse and buggy right and then they developed the car and people were freaking out. The difference is people had 40 years to accept the car. We usually have like months to accept new technology, new ways of doing things. That's why people are so kind of freaked out and overwhelmed in some cases, because they don't have time to kind of grow into it.
Speaker 2:It's like no, this is thrust on us, and that's why it's so important that we really work on our mindset what we call benign observation, which is understanding that we're at the right place. We're in the place, that we need to be at the right time for us to understand how to grow, and it really forces us as humans to let go of a fixed mindset. This is the way we've always done it. I'm not gonna change into no, no, life is happening for me not to me, but for me. So now I need to understand what I'm to learn from this. Make sense. I mean, unfortunately, our education system doesn't really promote that, which is why people are having challenges. So we got some work to do there too.
Speaker 1:But yeah, 100%. I agree completely and reminds me of an analogy I like to use, is that having like these AI tools today in business is like having an iron tool in the Stone Age being just dropped in front of you. You still need to figure out exactly how to use it, but once you do, it'll make you 100 times faster than everyone else around you.
Speaker 2:Oh, totally.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a good comparison.
Speaker 2:I think you're right, yeah, because it's dropping. Those AI tools are dropping really fast, right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and not all of them are gonna last, but some of them that actually bring impact to your business are definitely going to. Back to your business are you? What metrics or KPIs do you use to measure the success of, firstly, your business and those you help?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we have both qualitative and quantitative goals. Certainly, in our nonprofit we measure areas like. On a qualitative basis, we measure areas like are there improvements mentally, physically, spiritually, relationally, financially? We look at those right, right, you know. When we look at quantitative, you know it's how many throughputs do we have? You know how many people are enrolling into our programs on a monthly, quarterly basis? How many people are completing what we're doing? Right? So when they get involved, are they to completion? How many people are rolling out of that program and getting into best fit, best qualified, best cultural fit employment? How long do they stay in that, you know, employment.
Speaker 2:So these are things that we measure, which is very easy to you know. On the quantitative, it's very easy to measure those. On the qualitative, it's really subjective but it really is based on what the individual shares. Right, do they see improvements in those areas? You know, in the film business you're always looking at reach and eyeballs. You know how many people are watching what we create, how many people are enrolling in that program as well. So we look at that too.
Speaker 1:Amazing, and what metrics would you like to improve If you could choose one? What's the most important one you are looking to improve in the next couple years?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's pretty easy. I mean, this was based off a radio interview I did a decade ago and the lady asked how much money I wanted to make. And, honestly, dj, I had not thought about it and I just kind of blurted it out and it was live radio. And she said, well, how much money do you want to make? And I said $100 million. And I hadn't even thought of that before, to be honest with you, and she's like $100 million. I can't believe you want to make $100 million off the backs of veterans. And I was really curious why she would say it that way. And so I was about to say well, you know, walk me through that. And she said $100 million again. And it just cemented in my brain.
Speaker 2:I said, yeah, $100 million for every life we impact. So for me it's about impact. So if there's one thing that we can improve, is really our outreach and our messaging to more of the world Right, because for us it's about equipping and empowering those individuals who come into our programs. Whether they're veterans or whether they're executive leaders or CEOs doesn't matter. We're equipping them with the right tools and mindset so that when they are faced or hit in the face what we call hitting the face in the military with external things, that they know how to navigate not only themselves but their teams through it, so that they come out the backside better, improved, both personally and professionally 100%.
Speaker 1:I love that and I love the justification for a dollar for every life saved. That must have to shut it up on the interview.
Speaker 2:I mean it's totally changed the conversation, but it changed my life too. I was like, oh my gosh, where did that come from, right? So you know, sometimes you get that divine spiritual moment in your life, regardless of you know who you say is your divine, and you're like, wow, that was life changing.
Speaker 1:Amazing, I love that so much. And in the next one to or, let's say, in three years time. What would you like to have been accomplished if we sat down again in three years time? What would you like to have evolved to and changed from now?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean that's you know personally and professionally, I certainly have those mapped out. Honestly, one of our visions is to have a $10 million endowment for a nonprofit right so that it outlives me, and that's really a primary focus for our team in the next three years is really to establish that endowment and also to be much closer to our $100 million mark in our for profit. You know, in the next three years that for profit should be generating eight figures and that's really our focus. There is, how do we do that? We do that through entertainment, because we know that people love to be entertained, but it's entertainment that that hopefully creates them to be a seeker, so that they want to dive deeper. And then you know, they jump into the program and and the the programs are life changing, to be honest with you.
Speaker 1:So great, that's awesome. I love that. I love the goals and aspirations and I'm sure you will. I'm sure you will get there for sure.
Speaker 2:We are.
Speaker 1:we are running out of time though, unfortunately, but I wanted to ask before we go, what piece of advice would you give to other business owners or any entrepreneurs looking to into your industry?
Speaker 2:The most important so when we get into industry is we're all kind of like Luke Skywalker's right. We're kind of clueless, we know that we want to save the universe, we just don't know how. And the key to his success, to that character success, was mentorship. And if there's one thing I would say is get a mentor. Get a mentor. Find somebody who has gone before you and take him out to coffee. Offer to buy him a $5 cup of coffee, sit down with him or do a zoom call and say listen, I want to mentor, I want to learn what you learned, I want to know what you know. I want to know what. I need to pay attention to get a mentor 100% amazing and well.
Speaker 1:thanks again, mike, for for being on the show. What is the best way for people to reach out to Mike Schindler if they want to follow your story or if you have any offers for them to take advantage of?
Speaker 2:Yeah, they could go to it's VUCA maxcom. That's a. You know you can reach out to us there. Linkedin I'm on LinkedIn quite a bit. You know you can find me there. Those are probably the two best ways. Or they can call me to be honest with you. I mean, I'll give you my mobile number. It's 206-795-5890. People are like, oh my gosh, you can't believe you give your number. It's so interesting to me. The people that don't use it though. I will be readily accessible. I'm happy to have a conversation with somebody just to help them jumpstart.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, thank you so much, mike. I'm sure our audience appreciates that as much as I do. I'm looking forward to seeing what the future holds. I'm going to follow your story very much on LinkedIn.
Speaker 2:Wonderful, hey, thanks for having me Deige, for sure, awesome.