Welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs, the podcast where we speak with business owners and entrepreneurs from around the world and from all walks of life, in the hope that something you hear will leave your business a little richer. We’re your co-hosts, Vicki and Laura from Two Four One Branding, supporting entrepreneurs as they launch their new business or product. We love doing it, and we're good at it. And it's important to us that every new business launches well with a sound strategy and brand, giving them the greatest chance of success. We don't want to see any entrepreneur quit. If you love this show, please help us out and subscribe on whichever platform you're listening to or watching on now, and you will be notified of the next great episode. Today we're talking to Zachary Leyden, whose entrepreneurial journey took him from military service to starting a thriving horse recreation business — and it's making a difference in people's lives. He's designed a programme called “Leadership Through Horsemanship,” for corporations, military organisations, veterans and at-risk youth. Today, we're going to hear all about the parallels of horsemanship and leadership. Welcome, Zach. Welcome.
Hi, thank you for having me.
Thank you for joining us, I'm really excited to have this conversation. I'll probably reveal a few things about my childhood experiences growing up with horses and how much I love that and so I'm really looking forward to how you have turned that into a business. Certainly, we know that having a horse and growing up around horses, they are very expensive animals but they're also quite magical so I'm really looking forward to this conversation. But first, before we get too deep into all of that, let's go back in time and tell us about your childhood. Were you a bit of an entrepreneurial kid? How'd you grow up? And how's that developed you into who you are now?
I think I was pretty entrepreneurial-minded from the start. I had a paper route when I was younger. I'd go to The Niles, which is a trade market in the town I was in and would get odd jobs from different places within that farmers market and I ended up working for three different places at the same time strategically I guess. I was really young at the time. And then when I was in high school, I met a girl that had horses and I liked the girl so obviously, I liked the horses and I ended up liking the horses more than the girl over time. It didn't start off with entrepreneurship. I joined the military, cowboy on the weekends, did my stretch in the military in the Special Operations Unit. Got out, got back from Afghanistan, went into the real world, and went to school. Horses won that venture too, they brought me back, made me feel whole again, so I jumped in with both feet and created a business around horses.
I want to talk more about the link between going from military experience into horses, and how you just said they brought you back. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Because that's a really important topic.
So when you get out of the military — I think they're working on it as the transitional process is getting better now — but when I got out, I came back to the real world with a GI Bill. And your thought is: use that GI Bill, go to school, and you're now part of the real world. What's hard to transition in with, is that you had a job, a purpose, a team, and it was, you had a strong sense of being at the time when you're in the military. Everybody is moving towards the same goal. You feel like you're a part of something bigger than yourself and then when you get out, you have none of that, and the support system goes away. Now you're able to sit on all of the things that didn't go well and that hit real hard for me. So I had enough time to think of the people I lost overseas, I had enough time to think about the things that I was doing, and it hit me hard. Somebody who was a Vietnam vet, who tipped horses, who'd trained mustangs — he saw that I was in a bad place and he asked if I could help him, knowing that I had a background with horses. If I could talk to him now I would ask, but I think that he knew that I had a problem, and he knew the horses could help heal it. So I went and spent time with him, and I ended up spending more time with him than anything else. All my free time was with him and the horses and I decided, okay, if there's a way to make money with horses, I might as well try now. I've got nothing to lose. I've got no team that relies on me, I have no leadership position, might as well just try. And I did it, I made something of it.
What a beautiful story that is born from your own personal experience of healing, and now you're sharing that gift with others who are in a similar situation. So tell us about the money-making side of it. What is this leadership programme that you've developed? How does it help people?
So when you were talking about “Leadership Through Horsemanship,” that's just one small project that's a part of our facility here. Since I got out of the military, I've now developed four horse facilities. This is Ocean View Stables in San Francisco, it's a few minutes away from the San Francisco Zoo, right on the coast. At this facility, we let veterans ride for free, you can do trail rides down to the beach, and there's lesson programmes here. There's a boarding facility — we're putting pods in the back so you can stay overnight — we're kind of building a tiny guest ranch in San Francisco. So that's the big picture of what we have here. One of the aspects that we have is “Leadership Through Horsemanship,” and so this programme is selling on a B2B level so we are having businesses, reaching out to HR, having them come in for team-building exercises or corporate retreats. We're teaching them how sensitive horses are and how they speak through body language, and how very little pressure and release of pressure goes a long way, and how a 1200 pound animal can react to your subtlest moves. Some of the things that I do is I put them in the round pen with the horses after showing them what can be done, and show them how they can get a lot more out of this horse through very subtle cues — if they can connect with them appropriately. By the end of this little process the horse is walking, following them around like a puppy dog — with proper pressure and release of pressure. The idea of this exercise is you can get a lot done with very little, you need to think about what your body's doing and how you're saying what you're saying. The big thing is, it's not what you say but how you say it.[a]
You're bringing me back such great memories of my childhood, being able to grow up with horses surrounding me. My grandparents had horses, and I had my own horse for a while that I rode, before he passed away when I was in my mid-teens and I don’t think people do fully understand how much of what you're saying is true, and that horses are so magical, and so incredible, and so intuitive and sensitive to humans, the connection is just one of those beautiful things you have to experience. I love that you've connected it with leadership because I think that's something people wouldn't necessarily think of. What an incredible idea for a retreat for a team to just really connect and to have that experience. How can people do that? You have four different stables you said, that people can— are they all the same? Tell us more about the business, and how people can get involved.
We have one facility now, but I've stood up four. We have Ocean View Stables, you go to oceanviewstables.com. We're located just a few minutes from the San Francisco Zoo. You can book a ride online, a lesson online or if you want to do our leadership course, you could do that online as well.
The other facilities, what happened was, when I was starting the first one, I was looking at how I can connect what I did in the military with my passion for horses. So I was thinking, “What are the skill sets I learnt while in the military?” What came out of it was I have a strong sense of navigation. So land navigation was something I learned and I was good at. Well land navigation, I know how to hunt and I know how to work with horses. So I put those together, and I did pack trips for hunters — I packed people in for hunting trips and that was the start. Then I turned that from pack trips for hunting into luxury pack trips, then from luxury pack trips we went to kids’ camps. This is when my wife came in. She was, at the time, my girlfriend, she's an amazing horse person in her own right. She's a performance girl, and I brought her into my world and she said, “Okay, wait a minute, we're gonna change some things.” And she took me from being this rugged cowboy style to more of a refined businessman. We moved into getting wilderness kids’ camps going on the land that I was already working for, or leasing for the pack trips. That was a change in our trajectory, we were a bit more successful, you can charge a little bit more and get a lot more people involved. From there she was actually the reason that I moved on to the next spot — she wanted to be closer to her family who lived in Sacramento. So I went to Sacramento and I researched and did a market analysis on every dilapidated property within a 50-mile radius of her family's house. I put together a business plan for every single one of them on how they could be more profitable as a horse facility. Then I started going to them, pitching them the idea and saying, “Listen, you can have this business plan, it's 100% yours, you can take it, this is how you can make more money but the thing is, I don't know if you're going to be able to execute it — I know I can. So if you hire me and my team to come in, and my horses to come in, I can make this a more profitable business. You'll get a percentage of what I do, and I believe that even with this percentage you're going to be better off than what you're doing now.” I only had to pitch it to two different places before the second one took us in and we signed a contract and later on, I ended up taking that entire facility. It was a 350-acre facility owned by Sacramento County. After a couple of years being a subcontract, I ended up getting the entire RFP — the whole contract — getting her closer to her family.
That is true entrepreneurial spirit, Zach. So whether you were an entrepreneur as a kid, you certainly are now. That is a remarkable way to, and very grounded in business. You've allowed your passion to blend with true business skills. I think our audience could learn from this. Can we talk a little bit about your launch period? There's been a lot of transition in what you've talked about there, what's your main takeaway from when you were launching each of these things? You had an idea, you knew you wanted to try it on in the market, what would you say your biggest lesson or takeaway was from that period?
Well each time that I've done this, we can talk about from military to first business, or from first business to first successful business — that's getting the ranch in Sacramento. Or the transition from Sacramento to the winery horse ranch, or the winery horse ranch to San Francisco. Each one of these has a completely different thought process and structure to them. The first one, it was super cowboy. The way that I went about that obviously isn't the way I went about it every other time. I don't know which one you'd like me to describe.
Well, now that you've been through those and you have the experience of all of them. If you had to do it again, which way would you go? What would you do for a launch?
Obviously, I'm doing it the way I'm doing it now because the way I'm doing it now is great and it's working. I've structured systems to make it so that I can do this over and over again. However, the whole entrepreneurship thing is about the journey, if I couldn't do it the way I did it from the beginning, I don't know if it'd be as fun as it was. It's like secondary fun, awful while I was doing it but looking back on it was like, “Man, that was so cool that I went through that.”
What I'll do is I'll tell you a little bit about the hardship of getting going in one of the hardest industries to make money. Starting off, I came out of the military, I was going to school or college, then I decided I was gonna do this journey in the horsemanship world. So I had a couple horses, I was strategic on what I was doing to feed them, I had a bit of knowledge on the horse world, but I didn't have a lot. So my first step was gathering intelligence. So I went to facilities that were running well, that I wanted to learn from, and I knocked on the door and said, “Hey, listen, I'm a hard worker, you won't find one harder than me and I'm willing to work for free. So that's a better price than the next guy I'm sure.” I would come in, and I would work hard and then after basically proving myself as an asset for a couple of months I’d go, “I'm gonna stop working now unless you're willing to teach me. Here's the trade off: I'm no longer free, I cost something. The cost is you need to take me along with you and show me how you're doing what you do. Then I'll keep working.” These were 16-hour days, half of them working, following the owner and him showing me what's going on, and then the other half working the awful jobs, the hard jobs in the industry that I wanted to learn. Obviously I needed to learn these jobs as well. Fixing plumbing, fixing fencing, working the horses, all of the aspects — again, for free. One of the trade-offs I had for free was I was also living on these ranches so you know, it wasn't exactly free. After about a year of learning everything that I needed to learn with them, I was travelling following Buck Brannaman around, he’s one of my favourite horse trainers so I would go to all of his clinics that I could get into, fly out and check him out along with other clinicians, and then work with this guy for free. After about a year, I think I had enough information to know how I can get good deals on hay, get all the right contracts that I needed, how he was getting contracts for his kids' camps, and how he's getting contracts for his other operations. I also found out strategic ways to have horses and have land for free and so these were things that I gathered from him, which were great and I used a lot of them and threw away a lot of ideas that he had that I didn't like. I took that and started getting my first small contracts. The big contract I got is something that I could never replicate ever again, because it was just chaos, and the moral of this story though, is sometimes you gotta fake it till you make it. The next step was, we were doing kids’ camps, well we wanted to do kids’ camps, so I was cold calling every kids’ wilderness programme that's out there that has things like, kayaking and hiking, and some of them had horse programmes. I called them and said, “Hey, I have this great piece of land, it’s out here in this area and I have this beautiful programme put together.” And I called and called and called, and one of them came back and said, “Okay, great. I want to put twelve kids on your wilderness pack trip for five days each, we'll put two counsellors on it with you, so that's fourteen. We want to do it in the summer.” That was huge for me, I was like, “Yes, okay, we win!” Except, I had four horses.
It’s a massive work.
So I'm on the phone, and I'm like, “Absolutely, I can do that, we just need a half down deposit,” of course, that's normal. And they said “Yes.” I was like, “Okay, so now we have the money to get the horses.” So I called my wife, girlfriend at the time, and was like, “Hey, so we need to go find twelve horses, and we need to train them up and we have a month before our first ride.” So she's yelling at me, she's like, “You shouldn't have done this, this is crazy” but we did it. We got all the horses, we got them all trained up and we got there. Now the other awful thing that happened the first time was, I hired a guide that was supposed to get us through this ‘cause I didn't know the terrain well enough, I'm good at land navigation but I wanted somebody who was skilled on this terrain. And he said, “Great, I'm going to be there.” The day the children showed up to this spot, he was nowhere to be found.
Oh, no.
So that was chaos in itself, again what do you do? Do you just close down? I was like, “Okay, here's a map, here's a protractor, and here's a compass, I'm going to also teach you kids how to do land navigation. This is all a part of it, surprise!” And it turned out so well, the camp called me and they said, “This was the best camp that any of these kids have ever been on. It was amazing.” They had no idea how many fake-it-’till-you-make-it moments that I had to go through to create this perfect experience for them. And it went well. Doing it now, compared to doing it when I first started, obviously I have all the systems in place. I'm doing it all by the book of my curriculum that I've built. But I didn't have any of that back then, I was just shooting from the hip. And if I didn't say “Yes, we got it, let's put it together” — if I called off that first one, they would have asked for a refund for all of them I’m sure, because it would have been unstructured and unorganised. If I didn't fake it ‘till I make it, I never would have made it to this point where I'm now. I just bought a multi-million dollar horse facility in San Francisco. [b]
I love it. I love that story. I think that's entrepreneurship for you. In a nutshell, you just gotta go for it sometimes, and you gotta say yes, figure it out, and learn the lessons and get better along the way. It's those who hesitate, and freak out, and give up that aren't going to make it. Then you just keep building on that success and those learnings for the next thing, but I can imagine that was probably pretty stressful at the time.
But it worked out.
Yeah, and it's still working out for you. That's incredible. What would you say is your greatest achievement to date? What's the thing you're most proud of?
I’ve built a beautiful, successful life for my family. My little daughter, she's 18 months, she's already riding horses. I've given her an opportunity to be able to experience this beautiful world of the equestrian arts from a young age, and she's already super excited for it.
I've given a lot of horses a second chance, and I've given a lot of veterans a second life. The reason military veterans ride for free here is, at one point, I was at the VA, and there was a veteran who was arguing with the VA about a ride home, I ended up giving him a ride and he lived close to the ranch; we had to stop by there, and he asked if he could stay, and so I was like, "You can stay for a minute." He ended up staying all day, and I gave him a ride at the end of the day and he asked if he could come back the next day. So he came back, this was in Sacramento, and he came — he actually came back every day for a couple of months. After, two months, he was like, "Hey, I just just want to let you know, I was at the point of suicide, I was gonna go home, that day I was contemplating ending it." And it broke my heart but it also made me feel like, "Wow, the change that the horses made for me just happened to somebody else." And I went to my wife, and I said, "This is it. Veterans ride for free. I don't care, we'll figure out how to make the money on the other aspects.” But military veterans, when they come here, there's no red tape because I personally never would have gone to a psychologist or have gotten psychiatric help when I first got out of the military, because I felt like weak people did that. Looking back years and years later, I absolutely needed it and the horses were the first piece to help me with that. Same thing with this guy, he was as strong as they come, you would never have expected this guy to be the kind of person who needed the help, and he was done. So the horses saved him. Countless other people over the years have told me the same thing. We've given them a place to come and nobody asks anything of them. If you're a veteran, you show me proof of your service, you can just come and be a part of this, as much or as little as you want. And people have changed their whole identity to cowboy, and then later told me that this was the thing that saved them, coming back. I think between helping horses, giving my family a great place and a better life, and then helping the veterans, I'm blessed about everything that I get to do, my whole purpose here is fulfilled already.
You're moving me to tears. This is deep, it really is. The work you do is so impacting. I just want to thank you for all the work you do and for the impact you're having on the world. And so no doubt that also translates into corporations, because there's also a market that you serve. Sometimes people don't know what's going on with employees, or even senior managers in a corporation. I think having an experience like this just may make everybody a little kinder at work, a little more patient, a little more understanding. We opened the episode talking about how you help people understand that being gentle with the horse and giving small cues is really the way to get the best performance. Did you want to talk into that a little more about how the gentle aspect is what gets results?
Some of the exercises we do, here's one — so if you come in with a team, let's say you have a small team of six people, and then I put them in the arena and I put a horse in the arena. Then I tell them, I pick their leader, whoever it is, and bring them in and the other ones are on the other side of the arena. We let them know, “You are not to speak to your team, you can only use non-verbals, and you need to get your team to help you get that horse to zigzag through the cones, come to the other side and take two steps back and then one step to the left, and then go back to the other side and only go through the middle cone on the way back.” Give them a complicated process of what you need to get this horse to do just with pressure. Now before this, they've already learnt several things about horse safety and how to get a horse to move, but now they're in the arena and they're not allowed to speak, and this guy is going to have to communicate with his team. What a more aggressive leader would do is try to just take control of the whole situation, but then the horse is going to be - like if you put too much pressure on a horse, the horse is going to run off. If you come up to a horse soft, then the horse is going to move softly. So it's a lot easier to tell the team, and he's only able to tell the team, can't mimic the zigzag; he has to tell the team one step at a time, and he has to use the horse to guide it where he wants to go and put people in place. I don't know if I could paint a really good picture of this because it's a very hands-on experience. But through this process, when you're heavy-handed, when you're highly aggressive with your manners and mannerisms, you're not getting the horse through this process very easily — those people who are aggressive seem to have a lot of struggle. But if you're soft, and you're clear, and you move smoothly, you can get that horse to make soft, clear movements, and it seems to get a lot more with a lot less. I don't even know if I'm explaining this very well. It's a lot easier to explain when I have a horse in front of me. Next podcast I'll do it in the arena. But ultimately, what I'm getting at is, with the horses, little gets you a lot, and they almost look for the answers when you're very subtle. If you're too heavy-handed, then they're just going off the pressure but if you're very, very soft, and they're looking in, and they're like, "Oh, what does he want me to do?" And now they're coming to you looking for that answer rather than just reacting.
How do most leaders who are aggressive, or maybe have a harder time — how do they react in that type of situation?
Sometimes it's a humbling thing. Other times, I think that especially in the world that I live in, in San Francisco there's a lot of corporations that are larger so it gives them a humbling experience where they get to step back and re-adjust. Most of them do it quickly. Very very seldomly do people not want to make that change. If you're a high-level leader in a large corporation, where you've already proven that you know how to — you're coachable, you know how to adapt, you know how to make changes, but sometimes you just need to have a good reflection and so coming here just gives them a different perspective and lets them think, “Oh, wait a minute, okay, there might be a better way or a different way.” Or maybe it has them step back and be like, “Oh, that used to work for me.” For the most part, it's a very positive experience.
I imagine their employees enjoy it too.
Yeah, playing with horses.
That's pretty great.
And they all get a chance to do the leadership role too.
Oh, okay, that's cool. That's an important part of it, amazing. Was there any point in this journey of yours with the horses that you were like, “This is crazy, I'm out of my mind, I need to quit.” Have you ever had that moment?
I've fallen on my face several times and, through just sheer tenacity, pushed through. I've had large contracts that seemed to be going really well and through not going through the right channels - when you're building a contract that's big and that it's going to be a life-changing contract, you should definitely have several different lawyers look at it and make sure that you plug all the holes. Sometimes people will reassure you when you find a hole and — this happened to me — I found a hole in a contract, I said , "Hey, this isn't gonna be right”. “Our lawyers just put that in there." In reality, I should have fixed it. We lost the contract because of that and I fell on our face and it took me just a few weeks to get a new contract re-established, moved everything over and redo it again. I think most people would have been pretty much done after a faceplant like that. Business is hard. The second biggest thing is when you get really good, everyone knows you're good. So then people try to hire you. That's also a very hard thing to say no to. You have to have a lot of discipline to say no to a really good, structured plan. If a bigger corporation than you, a bigger company says, "Hey, I'll hire you to run my thing, and you'll get this amount of money, and you don't have to worry about anything, you'll get all these benefits." And I'm like, "I have a little kid, a little daughter and a family, this would be really good." It's really hard to say no to that. But you know, you're not an entrepreneur if you say yes.[c]
What keeps you going? What keeps you going and saying no to that? What drives that?
For me, I have a chip on my shoulder: I really want to be something. I think that I am going to make something great out of myself and I think that I don't want to fail. Even accepting a really nice job, to me, just seems like a failure. Before my daughter, it was my own chip on my shoulder, I was just like, “Nah, I'm going to be great, and everything I do, I'm going to kill it. I'm going to be the best.” I had that chip on my shoulder, then I had a daughter and now it's like, “Well, now I gotta prove to her that it's all possible.” If I can make something great out of horses, then she could do whatever she wants in this world. I'm fighting an uphill battle constantly. Horses are impossible, you don't make a fortune on horses unless you have a bigger fortune to lose. [d]
That's a good way to put it, very true. What about failure? How do you process failure? Being someone with your military background, there’s got to be some mindset there that you can help share with the audience.
Through my schooling in the military, everything that I did, no matter what the school was, I could do anything for another hour, I could do anything for another day, I could do anything for a month. Depending on the scale of it, if I'm doing something that is absolutely torturous and it's going to be done in an hour, it's like, "It's just an hour." Then I go back and I'm done. I could do this for an hour, I can do anything for an hour. If somebody else can do this, then I can absolutely do this for an hour. Or if it's something that's going to take a week, then it's just a week. What can't I do for a week? I can do anything for a week, it's easy. Or a month. So I just break everything down into smaller and smaller pieces. If the big picture is, this is three months of hell. Okay, I'm not thinking about those three months of hell. What is the piece that I'm going through right now? This one's easy. I can break this one down, I can be done with this one. When's the next relief? I could do this for this amount of time, so I break everything down into the smallest pieces I possibly can, and then it seems a lot easier. If I look at the bigger picture, it's pretty chaotic, but every little piece is pretty simple.
I think for our listening audience, it's important to note that you're still really young, Zach. You’re still in your 30s, and you've had such rich life experiences, and you come with so much wisdom from those experiences. For those of you who aren't watching on YouTube, and you're listening to Zach, you might not have picked up on that youthfulness. I just thought it was worth noting.
I'm 32 years old, I joined the military when I was 17, and have been in this entrepreneurship pursuit since I was 22. So only 10 years, 10 years tackling this.
That’s actually a lot of time really focusing on one great goal. So project us into the next 10 years? What does success look like for you 10 years from now?
We've got some big plans, so the facility that we have here in San Francisco, we're turning it into a tiny guest ranch in San Francisco. Well, disclaimer, we're in Daly City but we're a rock throw away from San Francisco, our neighbouring property is San Francisco. Anyway, we are building a tiny guest ranch in San Francisco. We have a food truck that we're opening up in the front, if all things go well, putting an indoor arena on the property. We've just cleared out 30 truck-dumpster loads of debris from the property, redid the barn. We're putting pods in the back so people can stay overnight, and the back has an unobstructed view of the ocean. It's beautiful, and there’s trail rides down to the beach. So we have a five-year goal to turn this into a just five-star beautiful facility. Along with that, we're going to build a coaching process on how to build a business in the equestrian world, so this will be an online course that you can check out from our website oceanviewstables.com. For that one, we're about a year out before it launches.
Hey, that is cool. So let's just go even bigger. What is that big, hairy, audacious goal and what's that big mission or that big number that you want to say on your deathbed, “I achieved this, this is my life mission.” Like what is that for you? I'm just curious how much bigger.
My personal aspirations — talking self-storage facilities, real estate, the horse facilities, all things considered, I think that if I hit retirement age with 100 million I'd be okay.
I like it.
I might be undercutting myself there.
I hope so.
Probably, I would say 500 million then because this property in just a matter of a couple of years, I think that I'll be profitable at about 10 million. Let's say $500 million by 65 and I’ll be happy.
Imagine the impact.
Zach, when you talk about you want to be big for you and then for your daughter, is that what that is for you? Or is it something different? You want to be something, you said?
Well, I want her to know that whatever you want to do in this world is possible with the right direction, the right goals, the right aspirations. I think that putting a big number out there is just setting that goal high, but the money means less than the impact because you asked, "What's the personal goal?" Well, if I made that big of an impact, that number doesn't — what am I going to do with that kind of money? Nothing. But that means that I've made that big of an impact in this world, right? If I'm controlling that amount of assets in business then I'm probably doing something great here, right? Like with this business, one of the next things we're doing is, we're partnering with a non-profit to build an actual horse therapy programme for military veterans. That will be another big impact. I don't know if you want to include, what is the worth of each one of these projects as a whole. If I have a big net worth, then I'm probably impacting the world positively on a big scale. My daughter can see that and know that whatever it is she wants to do with the same tenacity, she could.
I see the world knowing the name Zach Leyden. I see the world knowing who you are, and what you do, and the impact that you make in this niche in the world — changing people's lives and saving people's lives. I see that very clearly in your future and I'm not looking into a crystal ball. I'm just listening to you and seeing who you are. It's there.
I want to say that the money mindset you have is so important for people to hear, especially startup entrepreneurs. Because often we're scared of the money, or we don't want to talk about the money, or we're afraid that we're too braggadocious about it, or that it's greedy or evil — there's so many issues with money that people bring along, sometimes from generations before them. To understand the link between the money and the impact takes away all of that, because you're absolutely right. With that will come a tremendous amount of impact and that's really why we're entrepreneurs, because there's something that's important to us. It's something we have a passion about, or something that drives us to keep going every day, and the money is just a part of that process. It just allows you to be able to do even more, even bigger things — inspire the next generation, your daughter and probably loads of others along the way. So thank you for saying that, I think it's really important to note and for more people to talk about, and feel comfortable talking about.
It's not really the money, it's the projects. If I won the lottery, and I had $100 million right now, I would be doing the same projects that I'm doing right now. I would still be trying to build these horse businesses. The project is fun, the climb to the top is fun. Once you've succeeded, it's not as fun as the ride up. I keep re-inventing and re-building because I enjoy the building part of it.
Totally relate to that, can't we, Vicki? We love the building too, we absolutely get that. So we just want to finish with one last question. We, of course, are Resilient Entrepreneurs, so we always have to ask something about resilience. So I'd love to ask you: how do you believe that we can, as entrepreneurs and human beings, become resilient? What does it take?
It takes time for something to be a general pattern, but consistency builds resilience. That grit is something that you can actually achieve and build over time. If you don't have it, if you're in a rut, and then it starts with just basic things like wake up at five in the morning, and put together a system to make it really annoying not to wake up. Then wake up, go to the gym and work out, and set basic small things that anybody can do. When you get good and consistent with those, then consistency becomes a part of your daily routine in your life, which then makes it easier for you to accomplish bigger and bigger and bigger things. When I fell on my face the first time, when I was coming out of the military and realising that I didn't have a support team anymore there was a good period of me just being the worst version of myself, and coming out of that wasn't easy. It took one little thing at a time that gradually turned into bigger and bigger and bigger, things. Like I said, I started by just making sure that I woke up early. I did that for 30 days and I didn't think about anything bigger. I just thought of that: wake up early and go to the ranch, wake up early and go to the ranch. It was three months of me just having small goals before I made a big goal. I was like, "Okay, now I'm going to find somebody who's doing this business thing that I want to do." This was a clear thing that I wanted to make myself uncomfortable for 30 days, that was one that I put in there. So I called, and I would start with little things like just saying random things to people that made me feel uncomfortable, probably like five or ten days of just doing something really uncomfortable. Before I got the guts to start calling these ranches and saying, "Hey, I'm gonna come work for you for free." I did that for a week or two before finally someone gave me an opportunity to show up, and then I showed up. And then I was like, "Hey, now I got the opportunity, now I’ve got to be bigger and better than everybody else in this." So it turned from one little tiny thing into my whole life revolving around me doing a little bit more, being a little more uncomfortable. I now run into uncomfortability with excitement. Now that's ten years in the making, going from not wanting to be uncomfortable at all, to running into it with excitement.
The steps in between are really important to note that it does take time, and resilience is like a muscle: you can build it. That's exactly what I'm hearing you say, is you've built that resilient muscle by doing the hard things, keeping the consistency, adding some discipline, pushing yourself out of the comfort zone. I believe there's no "out of the comfort zone," it's just stretching that comfort zone like an elastic band, It just keeps going, it never snaps back, it just keeps stretching. And then once that starts to feel comfortable, you can just take on the next thing, take on the next thing, and then the next thing that seems crazy of you look back five years, your self then would not believe you're doing what you're doing today. Because there's just no way you would have conceived it. But it's just by that little bit everyday, everyday consistently building.
Zach, I love everything you've shared. I think this conversation will have an impact along with everything else that you're doing. So thank you so much for joining us. This has just been wonderful, it's brought back lovely memories for me. I miss my horse Bobby so much. He was lovely and a huge part of my growing up years, and Vicki didn't even know about it till today that I used to ride horses, that I owned my own horse. I'd do it all again if I could, but thank you so much for everything you shared.
Come to San Francisco and ride a horse down to the beach.
You have no idea how much I want to do that. Actually I might have to go visit Vicki in Australia, so I'll just pop over there on my way.
Oh no, no, no, no, no. We're gonna meet in San Francisco, you're not doing this on your own, lady.
We’ll do an event here and you guys can go through the Leadership Through Horsemanship, and we will do another podcast talking about your experience.
Thank you very, very much. We really appreciate your time and everything that you shared today Zach, take care.
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