The Green Beret Way

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Trusted Leadership Innovator & Advisor; Award-Winning & Bestselling Author; Former Green Beret Officer and Diplomat; PolyFounder; Award-Winning Bourbon; Pathwright for the Green Beret Way, EPIC Leadership, & Ethosynthesis®; Dog Lover; Knife Designer.

"Elite teams evolve constantly. If you're doing things ""the way we've always done them,"" you're already falling behind...
06/16/2026

"Elite teams evolve constantly. If you're doing things ""the way we've always done them,"" you're already falling behind. When was the last time your team conducted a thorough review of what worked and what didn't? "

06/16/2026

Scaling founders, your team can be talented and still be hard to scale.
That sounds like a contradiction until you've lived it.
You hired well, and the people are smart, committed, and good at the work. And you're still the one the standard runs through, still the one the decisions wait for, still the one who gets pulled in when a handoff breaks.
Here's why talent doesn't fix it. Talent is how well a person does their own work; management capacity is whether the team can set a standard, make a call, and hand work off without you. Those are two different things, and growth exposes the gap between them.
I've watched this in a lot of growing companies. A talented team with no management capacity still sends the hard calls up, not because the people are weak, but because nobody ever defined who owns the call or what good looks like when you're not there to say so. When that line is blurry, the amygdala settles it: people default to the safe option. So they ask you.
That's the part that surprises founders. You think hiring better people will get you out of the middle. It doesn't work that way: better people raise the ceiling on the work, but on their own they don't build the layer that carries standards, decisions, and handoffs.
What's the thing your talented team still routes back to you? It could be the final quality check, the pricing exception, the unhappy client, or the call nobody wants to make without cover.
Name it, and we'll figure out whether it's a talent gap or a capacity gap.
I built a short scorecard that shows which part of that layer is thinnest. It's in the comments.

06/15/2026

Scaling founders, the hard part isn't feeling like the bottleneck. It's not knowing which part of the work is actually the bottleneck.
You can feel work coming back to you: approvals pile up, calls wait for your sign-off, and handoffs come back half-finished.
From your seat, it all reads as one problem. You're in the middle of everything, and when everything feels like the bottleneck, it's hard to fix anything.
But it's usually not one problem. It's a gap in one of four parts of your management capacity: the standard people work to, the decisions that are actually theirs to make, the handoffs between them, and whether your managers follow through without you.
Those four feel identical from your chair, but they're not, and each needs a different fix.
So the first useful step isn't working harder on all of it. It's naming which one is carrying the most weight right now.
Which one is it for you? It could be the standard only you can hold, the decision your team waits on, the handoff that keeps bouncing, or the manager who avoids the hard call.
Name the one you're seeing, and we'll figure out whether it's a standards gap or a decision-rights gap.
I also built a short scorecard that points you to the area pulling the most back onto your plate. Details in the comments.

Embrace the fire within and unleash your potential. Let the Gift of the Furies fuel your drive towards greatness.🔥"
06/12/2026

Embrace the fire within and unleash your potential. Let the Gift of the Furies fuel your drive towards greatness.🔥"

06/11/2026

Operators running multiple teams or locations: your local leader can be good and still be buried. That's the part people miss.
The person on the ground may know the work cold, they may care deeply about the company, and they may have earned every bit of your trust. But if they're still carrying production, customer problems, hiring, training, the standard, and every daily surprise, the leadership layer is a lot thinner than the org chart says.
From a distance, the chart says there's a leader there. In practice, you still get pulled into the same problems, because that leader is too buried to handle them.
And the drag is quiet: the standard drifts, small issues compound, communication slows, and the person closest to the work stops making the call because they're already carrying more than they can hold.
This is one of the patterns I'm trying to understand through short research interviews.
So if you're running teams, locations, or acquired companies from a distance, tell me: what's the problem that keeps landing back on your calendar? It could be standards, hiring, feedback, handoffs, your own time, local decisions, or the leader who's great at the work and drowning in the leadership part of it.
Name the version you're seeing.

"It's not about being busy, it's about being effective. Stop using ""busy"" as a badge of honor and start focusing on wh...
06/10/2026

"It's not about being busy, it's about being effective. Stop using ""busy"" as a badge of honor and start focusing on what truly matters. Take control of your time and energy, and channel it towards becoming a badass."

06/09/2026

Scaling founders: if every “people” problem still climbs back to your desk, you're probably missing a management layer.
By a layer, I don't mean a title. I mean the work the title is supposed to carry.
A real management layer turns expectations into daily behavior, gives direct feedback before the same problem burns another week, and makes the standard visible enough that a new hire can learn it without guessing. It means you're no longer the only person who can tell whether the work is actually good.
This is tricky because it looks like a people problem: one employee who won't step up, one manager who won't give feedback, one location that keeps needing rescue, one team that keeps missing the mark.
But when the pattern repeats, the cause is almost never effort; it's structural. The company grew past the stage where "just hire self-starters" could carry the whole thing, and nobody built the layer that replaces it.
There's also a reason the feedback never happens. A hard conversation lights up the same threat response in the brain as physical danger, so the manager avoids it and the problem rolls uphill to you, and when you multiply that across a team, you've built a company that can't correct itself.
So tell me: what's the management-layer gap you're staring at right now? It might be unclear standards, weak feedback loops, new managers who duck the hard conversations, local leaders buried in the work, or reports who need more structure than your first crew ever did.
Name the version you're seeing.

06/08/2026

Scaling founders and operators: the business changes the day it outgrows its self-starters.
Early on, the company runs because the first people figure things out. They hold the standard without being told what it is, and they make the call because they were close enough to you to absorb the context.
Then you grow, and the ground shifts. New people come in, roles split, and your managers suddenly have to lead people who don't already think like owners. The leader in your second location has the title, but they're still doing the work and carrying too much to actually lead it.
That's when you get pulled back into fires your team should be putting out without you.
But here’s something you probably didn’t know: when a manager dodges the hard feedback conversation, that's not always laziness. The brain reads a difficult conversation as a threat, and that threat response routes the problem up to you instead of handling it where it lives.
I'm doing a small number of 15-minute research interviews with founders and operators dealing with this right now. It isn't a sales call. I want to understand what happened, what you tried, what it cost you, and what real help would have to look like.
So name it: what's the version you're living with right now? It might be a new manager who needs clearer expectations, a team that can't hold the standard without you, a second location that keeps pulling you back, or a decision that still routes to your desk every time.
Name it in the comments.

Are you ready to become a champion? It's not about being perfect or having all the talent in the world. It's about consi...
06/05/2026

Are you ready to become a champion? It's not about being perfect or having all the talent in the world. It's about consistently showing up and putting in the work day after day, even when it's hard. That's the difference between champions and amateurs. Don't give up when the going gets tough. Keep pushing yourself and stay consistent, and you'll be amazed at what you can achieve.

06/04/2026

What's one takeaway from your work that shapes how you operate?

I was a 20 year old sergeant deep in Robin Sage — the final exercise of the U.S. Army Special Forces Q-Course (Green Berets) — when the Guerilla Chief (actually my evaluator) looked at me and said he wanted me to build a set of bleachers three rows high that would hold 30 people so his troops could better observe our training. He told me I had 3 days to do it.

I looked at him like he had a third eye in the middle of his forehead. "You want what? I'm sorry, did you say you wanted bleachers?" I was stunned.

Bleachers are aluminum. They've got metal frames, cross-bracing, hardware, bolts. They're built in factories and installed by crews with power tools. Nobody puts a set of bleachers in the middle of a forest. The moment he said the word, my brain pulled up every bleacher I'd ever seen — every high school football stadium, every Little League field — and measured the gap between that picture and where I was standing. No electricity, no power tools, no hardware store. I didn't have the money or the means to order bleachers — and I surely couldn't have gotten them made and delivered into the middle of a North Carolina forest in 3 days. It was impossible.

But when I looked at him again he had a little smirk. The kind that told me he already knew the answer — he was just waiting for me to find it. This was a test, and somewhere in that smirk was the confirmation that it could be done.

So I started over and reimagined the problem from the ground up. Forget aluminum. Forget the football stadium. What is a bleacher, at its most basic? Levels. Something to sit on. Somewhere to put your feet. What tools and materials did I actually have? A finger saw, some paracord, a survival knife, and a lot of trees.

Now I could work. I found suitable trees, stripped their branches, and designed a structure I'd never built before. I knew it needed to be free standing and support a lot of weight and be three levels high with footrests so it would need a lot of crossbracing.

But then the next problem — the entire team didn't have enough 550 cord, rope, or other lashing material to safely lash three levels of logs together. Again, it was impossible.

But I remembered that smirk. So I asked around to see if anyone else had ideas and someone mentioned the parachutes that we had jumped into the area with. We'd cached them immediately after our infil — but they'd still be there. And each parachute has over 700 feet of paracord — meaning I now had access to almost 10,000 feet of cordage. But parachutes are very expensive.

So I told the G chief I was going to take a patrol back to our cache site to dig up the parachutes and cut them up for lashing material. But right after we set out, a miraculous stash of lashing material appeared from thin air.

I built three levels that held 30 people. It wasn't comfortable. Nobody was mistaking it for stadium seating. But the G chi

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