Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: the whole time. You know. Welcome, Marty. Marty: How's it going, Or doctor, sorry, doctor? Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: going really good man. No, just a ⁓ just a man today. I got the scrubs on but there's no patients in the room. So just a man today. And ⁓ as as are you, just a man. At least less I I have to take it for granted or take your word for it. Marty: I shave standing up. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Very nice. Well, today, ⁓ in the all in, all in ph today the all in, all in X pod, I want to welcome a very special guest, a friend of mine, ⁓ Marty Strong, who you many of you have seen Marty on our pamphlets and brochures at the Atlantic Implant Institute for the business course. He does a great talk. It's not just a motivational speech, it's a business seminar, business clinic that he puts on there. ⁓ because ⁓ Marty's done a lot in his life. Marty is You are one of the original the original SEALs almost. I call it original, 'cause it goes back to before the days of the movie Navy SEALs, before teams and SEALs were even a ⁓ thing in the living rooms of mainstream America. ⁓ but we're not just gonna talk about war stories and steel stuff. I think we're gonna talk to somebody who has been in the business world, in the healthcare business world, as a CEO, as a leader of people, and maybe you can take some of your old world ⁓ lessons. your SEAL lessons, your military lessons, and your CEO lessons and help us ⁓ learn some lessons and convert those into dentistry. So with that, Marty, yeah, you think we can do that? You think we can accomplish that this hour? Marty: That's good. I'm ready. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: You're ready. Let me give you a little bit more of a formal biography with for those who don't know. So you're a Navy SEAL combat veteran, a novelist. You've written ten novels, leadership mindset expert, author of three Amazon best selling business books on leadership, scaling, strategy, and innovation. ⁓ you're a speaker. ⁓ you've spoken and interviewed on topics that include how to master psychological resilience, how to harness positive energy to create success. How to win the battle of your mind every day. Your life and professional experience enhance moving presentations, making lessons, impart real and personal ⁓ lessons. ⁓ you were 20 years in the Elite Navy SEALs, eight years as a portfolio manager with UBS, the United Bank of Switzerland, before becoming a corporate VP, COO, and CEO the last 15 years. You have a degree in business administration and a graduate degree in management. You are now the CEO of the Veteran Foundation Warriors Haven USA. And your latest book just released, Intentional Performance Inside the Navy SEAL Mindset, is actually set for release here, if I'd read ahead my notes for December. ⁓ and this is going to be extraordinary. This is not just about a Navy SEAL, but about the principles that created extraordinary people. So With that formal introduction, now Marty, welcome to the show. Marty: Thank you very much. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: So what creates ⁓ what separates ordinary performers from elite performers? Marty: Yeah. So, you you remember the old nurture nature argument in the military, you know, it's usually around leaders, right? Are leaders born that way? It's a DNA thing or they nurture and trained and developed into leaders. And it was a fight that would go on almost as vehemently as the nine millimeter versus 45 caliber pistol round argument, right? It was just, everybody argued it. But it was more important than the matching bullets because Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Right. Right. Marty: Being in the military is all about leading through things, planning as a leader, developing as a leader. Everybody eventually moves up and becomes a leader. And in a worst case scenario, if something happens to the leaders, as the junior guys start to step up, they have to lead, even if it's just one guy leading one guy, right? So you find out that, and these I have, in having both realms of experience, that... It's all about human nature. It's really not about the task. It's not whether you're supposed to charge ill, take a machine gun nest, or whether you're supposed to go and get a certain kind of an EBITDA this quarter or hit certain numbers in your new startup practice or company ⁓ every month. The challenge is there. You either rise to the occasion yourself or you rise to the occasion and pull other people together as a team to rise to the occasion. And from that point forward, it's just a story of human nature. It's a battle of human nature. It's a battle of your will, if you're the leader or the owner, and how that will stacks up against all the outside challenges, which includes your team, because they may be a team by label, but they may not really be a team. And all the internal noise that's going on in your head, the voices in your head, the things that are trying to distract you. slow you down or just sway. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Right. So do you find that ⁓ sounds like what you're saying is no matter the type of group, the origin of the group, you know, whether it's military, civilian life, whatever sector of business you're in, it's the same challenges. Is that what you're saying? Marty: Yes. mean, it all comes down to human to human issue. If it's ⁓ a crash plane on a mountain and ⁓ there's 10 survivors, there's three wounded people, injured people of the survivors. Within some point in time, somebody's going to stand up and say, we got to figure out how to get out of here. And they start to lead and people start to plan and then they start to organize and they develop into a team. And then they pick up the injured people and they start moving on a navigational plan. Right. And they go through whatever the problems they run into. There's a river, there's another mountain, there's something trying to eat them, whatever. It's a human condition. It's a human scenario. And the reason I keep saying that is people look at things, whether, you know, if you're teaching them in your academy about business leadership and your mentorship is very confident and very focused on being upbeat and waking up every morning and just shrugging off whatever failures happened the day before. Other people are thinking, yeah, yeah, but you're already arrived. You're there. That's easy for you to say, right? Or in my case, ⁓ you were a Navy SEAL. Navy SEALs can do that, but I can't do that. That's not the case. It's a human thing. It's an every human thing. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Right. I'll translate for the dentists out there in the group. So the crane plat crane plane crash scenario of there's three injured and there's ten on the plane. So you have ten peop ten employees and you show up to work and there's one late, not accounted for, you don't know where they're at, one called in sick, and one's there, but they're not really there. And you got seven people that are c that can legitimately move on. And how do you pick up the pieces and how do you move on? How do you navigate the schedule? So I just wanted to translate for all the all the mainstream people out there. But it's the same Marty: Absolutely. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: No matter the ⁓ no matter the scenario, it's still the same thing. It's it's getting jobs accomplished with the team that you're given, the team that you've drafted or hired, or the team that you've allowed to stay, despite, you know, obvious shortcomings, or you've inherited, right? Yeah. Yeah. ⁓ and it's it's always the same dilemma. So you're a lot of dentists out there are leading a team of ten or less people, maybe twenty or less people. ⁓ and so Marty: Or even inherited. Or even inherited. Because that happens a lot. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: you know, how do you get is that any different than those that are in the larger, you know, structured groups of of fifty or a hundred and like your D SOs, or is it the same task? Marty: No, think of it as a tribe. I know this number, Raytheon has 85,000 employees scattered all over the planet. Lockheed, Northern Grumman, they all have the same kinds of numbers, right? There's nobody at the top of those companies waking up every morning and giving a speech to 85,000 people. They're not personally motivating them. They're not present to be emulated by any of the followers in that population of 85,000. What you have is 85,000 people. structured in little tiny bundles of 10 to 25 people. Every division department, every little niche group, that's the tribe. So you write back down to, how do you affect a huge organization? Well, you affect it kind of one tribe at a time and really affect it kind of from the bottom up. That's how you build morale. That's how you build culture. If you need to build culture or change culture, if you need to change culture, it'll never happen coming down because it doesn't exist. It's a fantasy. that that pyramid or chart is actually like a megaphone pointing down. doesn't work. The communications are muffled. They're not taken seriously. And the human beings at the bottom have their own objectives. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah. So, you know, when the supreme being, you know, in charge of the whole country gives a speech, you're saying that not everybody's getting the message. They're getting it in smaller groups. Yeah. So and maybe there's something to be said, maybe the military has learned something from their small groups, you know, the fire team of four in the Marine Corps, the platoon, you know, the the squad, if you will, then the platoon. It does it become impossible to manage for one person to manage a group of people over a certain number, say eighteen or thirty eight people? Is there is there a magic number where Marty: Yeah. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Middle managers get capped. Marty: So the, technically they call that a span of control discussion. So the span of control is how many people can you legitimately guide? It depends on what you are. Now, if you're in charge of an artistic team that's building some kind of art-saver advertising, the way you interact with those people is completely different than if you're on a factory floor and you've got 10 people that are producing something from raw material at one end to a finished product at the other end. And those kinds of leaders are different because they have different tasks and those kinds of followers have to interact with that leader in different ways. But normal span of control discussions look at where does the communication break down? there's a theory that if you have a group that is more than five people, they immediately start breaking into subgroups. So if you put a team together, a community together, you put management team together, If you've got 14, you really have three groups within 14 and they're all working at different, for different reasons at different purposes. So you think you're leading them, but you're not. So essentially, you know, the whole thing about having flat organizations is to try to communicate to one or two people at the most five people that are responsible, a big chunk of the organization. And then they have replicate the same kind of chain of communications and management and leadership interaction below them. It's not easy and it's not comfortable. And it doesn't look like a standard or chart that you just pull up from some graphic program. And that's why people don't do it. It's very human-based, but it's not the way organizational science has said you're supposed to do it. So in an every organization. Whether you like it or not, there'll be influencers that aren't being paid to be influencers. They don't have the titles. They don't have the perks, but they're the ones that are putting things together, connecting people. And it's been proven. It's been all kinds of research. read one article a couple of years ago that they found this one woman was responsible for like 75 % of the effective communications going around in this company. And she was getting paid $75,000 a year. And they basically said, based on her impact of doing something that just Human communications and not being tasked with that, she should be paid $3.50 a year because she was having that much impact. And they call it the ant farm effect. If you try to channel how people communicate and lead, it won't work. They'll find a way. They'll end up finding a way. It's kind of like the six degrees of separation thing a little bit, but the ant farm will find a way. And if you have an ant farm, it means you didn't structure the thing correctly in the first place. for what are the purposes of the organization. So when you get up to about, you you're in charge of five people, you start getting more than that, split them into, you know, two four-man groups with a leader in each group. Now you've got two people reporting to you, try to do that as much as possible so that you're influencing the influencers and then they're only talking to a smaller team. Easier to motivate, easier to direct, easier to communicate. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah, ⁓ I re you're speaking my language on this because I mean I've been a squad leader in the Marine Corps and I've been in you know, this is kind of a squad here, my building I'm standing at, Fuller Plant Choice, where, you know, it's about twenty people, right? About, you know, pretty close the same as a squad. And you have these little fire teams in the Marine Corps and each one has a squad leader, right? And the squad leaders have to have their meeting within their team and then they the squad leaders all meet and then they meet with the you know, the platoon sergeant and the platoon commander and all that stuff. And it's just these layers of management. And we have the same thing. I was just actually I had a call from a neural surgeon earlier this morning, today, as a matter of fact, and he was talking about scaling his practice. And he's been sitting at seven people for fifteen years and doing just fine. And we were talking about the scaling process. And I said, you know, I remember the days when I had a practice with seven, six, seven people. It was easy. It was so easy to deal with. I knew everything about everybody all every day. And ⁓ but going to from seven to ten was not, you know, just a little jump. That was a big jump. Because now it's like now we had two groups like you just said, you just threw it out there, four or five people. Now we had two groups, but then jumping to fifteen almost became impossible when one person, me, tried to control the whole team. Now I had to have department leaders, just like just like ⁓ squad leaders. It sounds like that is what you're referring to in the in the business sense. Marty: Yes. ⁓ And, know, organizational design should just form follows function. So if you're starting from scratch, you want to begin with the end in mind, you want to create the structure based on what they're going to do. If they're going to go out and they're going to chop trees down and make log cabins, you got to look at that activity and say, what's the effective way to organize human activity and behavior? And, you know, is it a supervisor? Is everybody works? There's not enough people. Do you have everybody, especially? One guy has, he's the guy who hits one side of the tree, other guy hits the other side of the tree, the other guy makes the safety area and go, it's clear for the tree to fall. You know, you got to think all that out ahead of time as much as you can. And unfortunately, I think what happens with all of us, we try to copy the last place we work for or what we think the org chart is supposed to look like in general, rather than specializing the structure based on what we're about to do with that structure. So it. Think of it this way. If I said, I want to win NFL football games. And I turned to you and I said, let's organize, let's structure this thing. And you came back, you go, here we go. And it's set up as a hockey team. I go, oh, well, we're not, no, no, we're not trying to, we're not trying to score goals. And we're not going to continuously slide around, you know, for a long period of time. We're going to, we're trying to score football touchdowns and we're going to have breaks all the time. You see what I mean? It's a disconnect, even though it's sports. Business is business, but it's not. It has to be, it has to be, um, design thought through and the architecture has to be, um, put together considering human nature. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. Marty: And human nature also, what incensed them to care, what incensed them to work hard, what incensed them to work late, what incensed them to do a really high quality job. These are all different areas. And everybody wants to hire that perfect person with all that, you know, all those mindsets and do it for, you know, a low, low cost. But as as they hire them, because they'll say, yeah, I can do all that. And Rizme says, yeah, I do all these, the four things I'm really good at. You're perfect. They get in, can do two out of four or one out of four or three out of four. And then you're left, you're left doing triage every day on the missing components of your team. Cause nobody cares about quality, but they're all really good at showing up on time. Nobody shows up on time with a really good quality, but can't get any production cause they don't show up. Yeah. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Do you have a camera in my office? 'Cause I think you're watching my light every day. Yeah. Yeah. Marty: Well, and you just proved my point. If it's human nature, then this is something I'm describing. It's everywhere, right? Universal, it's a universal experience for people in organizations. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah. It is. I always say I we have the best staff in the world. I love them. They're loyal. They work hard, but every s it's the same issues come in every day. It's just a different person's turn to have that issue. You know, it's someone else's baby was sick today and someone else's car wouldn't start today and someone else had traffic today. You know, whatever. There's always something, you know, and they just these per these problems are pervasive. You know, the person that you're describing about o about hiring that perfect employee, that sounds like the owner. It really does. Because you're talking about somebody that has like a high degree of the highest degree of loyalty. Marty: Yeah. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Initiative, enthusiasm, just the sense of ownership. That's what it sounds like to me. You're looking to hire the owner. Marty: You're absolutely right. I, when I was managing money, the GBS, they're all high net worth guys. They all had lots of companies and lots of business acumen. I remember one time this guy wanted, he had a car dealership. It was like three different, three different brands in one dealership. He wanted to expand. He wanted to go buy Honda dealership. And they never talked to me about their money. They told me about everything else. It was just, you go in there, I'll be ready to talk about their investments, but they never wanted. Once they trust you with the money, now they just trust you, period. So they want to talk about things they, you know, want to get off their chest. And so he starts talking to me about this and I go, what are you afraid of? I'm afraid of whoever's running the other one's not going to be me. And I said, well, in what way? He said, well, I show up at four o'clock in the morning. I look at all the security cameras. I do a walk down to the entire place for cleanliness before the sun comes up. You know, I look at the positioning of the cars. I look at the sales reports and all that's before the sun comes up. And then I do spot checks. Yeah. Okay. So you, you feel comfortable though, if you had a guy like you running the other place. Yes. So you're right. You're hiring yourself because that's in your mind, that's the perfect employee. But that isn't always the case because if you're, again, I go back to the creative thing. If you have a bunch of, ⁓ responsibilities and whatever the organization's doing to create high quality, that's creative, that's innovative, that's different. That means different. So you're not hiring people like you, you're hiring people that have certain skills and attitudes in general about open-mindedness and about seeking, you know, truth based on what the market's looking for. And that's fickle. You know, the trans are telling you you're right or you're wrong. And if you're stuck in the mud boss and you hire everybody in that scenario and they think just like you, and what you like is, you know, images from the 1980s or 2010, that's great, you're the boss, we'll do that for you, but we're not going to win in the marketplace because the marketplace isn't 2010 anymore, right? So sometimes it's a good thing, attributes, characteristics and things, but when it comes to the talent skill sets, you can kind of, or the knowledge, you can kind of clone yourself and then you are the smartest person in room, but it's not serving you well. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Right. I found it as I'm as I'm stepping away this year a little bit and and and putting some other people in place, the hardest thing for me to do is to watch them do something differently than I would do it and just kind of step back and be okay with it and watching it unfold and say, Well, you know, maybe this will work too. You know, instead of getting it instead of jumping in micromanaging and No, no, no, no, I would have done it completely different. It's been the hardest task of mine this past year. Marty: That's very tough. There's an example in our education system of the rigidity of it in most cases. It has to do with division. So there are a lot of different ways to do long division. There's only one way that's usually taught. the example is a child is taught by their parents to do long division very quickly, very accurately using a different system. The child does that and they have to show their work when they do take the test and they get an F, even though they got every answer right. Every end state answer was correct because they didn't follow the approved procedure to get to the right answer. Now you do that long enough. And this is, this was in my book, be visionary color research. You basically are hobbling all their creative mind, the assets, your needs you're born with the creativity, the innovation, the desire to. To seek. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yes. Yes. Marty: seek something that's awesome and incredible and you get stamped down into some mold. And whether you think so or somebody else says, this is a school, you can't beat it because you're incarcerated for, you know, from kindergarten all the way to if you end up getting through, you know, college, especially you go into a professional degree program, a graduate degree program or like, you know, a doctor. What you end up with is you can't remember how to do that. You can't remember how to be flexible and nimble and adaptable and open-minded and all that. All you remember is follow the rules, comply, and ⁓ go along and get along kind of thing. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Well we could ⁓ have a discussion about our education system in this country and I was made to stamp out people who wanna work in factories and not be free thinkers. But you know, I I get it. Marty: Well, let me give you an example completely out of the business realm, but it is organizational design. So this is about flexibility, thinking outside of the box, whatever you want to call it, but matching the end state requirements to the organizational structure, which then kind of goes back to the training, coaching, mentoring of that organizational structure and even further back to the job is the actual job positional designs. the recruiting methodology, how do you get those people in there? It all kind of goes back, but it starts with what the task is, right? So we had in the SEALs, had missions that we had to do and organically, we were a 16 man group and we were issued two snipers, two guys that knew how to shoot long guns, long distances. But the other thing they were trained to do was to sneak in and take pictures. They were our best. reconnaissance guys. They were, wore suits that made them look like a bush, you know, they could do all this stuff. But you only allowed two of them per 16 main group. The problem is every mission that we had, you wanted to put four of them out to cover all four corners of whatever you were looking at. But if you only have two, and the way they were taught is they worked as a pair. So, you know, one is none and two is one. So you had one, one sniper team when you needed four sniper teams. And I'm looking at this and, and I'm thinking, how does it, and I've been in the teams at this point by 11 years. So how do I do this? Well, one is I figured out a way to sneak in a third guy as a sniper. now I have three snipers. The second thing I do is I say, if I gave you the best shots out of the rest of the 16, not counting two officers, and I had you train them to be the number two guy, which is. A guy that sits with binoculars and calls out distances. He's not a shooter. He's, he's, he's security. And he's also that eyes on the target. Could you do that? Teach him the cameras, teach them all the methods, teach them how to write, write the information down, whatever, and how to tell you what the range is. Yeah. How long would it take? you have a curriculum. Well, yeah, it's in the sniper school. I want you three to run the rest of these guys through some, some, you know, I guess. screaming, tell me who your candidates are, and then I want you to take them up to an army base and I you to spend a week to 10 days. I want you to replicate what you guys are taught for that second position in a two-man team. And if one of them does make it, then we'll pick the next guy, whatever. So what I ended up with is I ended up with six snipers or three teams. And eventually I expanded that by one more team. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Mm-hmm. Marty: And I still had 16 guys. So on paper, had my, technically I had my official two snipers, but I had taken the organizational structure and changed it. And without, without lowering quality, without changing any of the real requirements and gave myself all kinds of flexibility. And for example, I ended up sending those guys, those six guys, I sent them to the army during actual combat operations. And those guys helped rescue 65 people from a prison camp. I'm being the guys that were protecting the army guys coming in and do the rescue. I couldn't have done that if I just had the two. So what does that say? What it says is you can go into an organization, even your organization now, you say, I know it's set up, but ⁓ they kind of steal something I said a long time ago when I was at Blackwater. What if you just took everybody, all the skill sets. and put them in a big cardboard box and went and dumped them out in the parking lot and then started over and did it from a functional. What do we need to get done? The guy with the MBA is not getting it done as a leader or whatever. Okay, let's pick this guy because he's a great leader. Whatever you touch, it's terms of the goal. You are now the guy in charge. You're now a vice president. The MBA guy, you're still in the parking lot waiting for a job. But it sounds silly, but it actually is a really good way to take what you have and figure out a way. to not shake it up just to shake it up, but to realign people because organizations, successful or unsuccessful, they scale and they descale. They flex and they contract, which means whatever the team looks like today is the way the team needs to look like in a while. And, you know, and you can talk all day long about, you know, the stress related to that and the disconnects between old order charts and new order charts that maybe aren't even written yet. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah, well I mean a lot of similarities in small business, you know, and and here we're, you know, talking to a lot of entrepreneurs out there and a lot of people in dentistry, surgery and whatever. ⁓ and, you know, my team out here just over sixteen. ⁓ your your team was sixteen, and it's very similar out on this front because, you know, we're all constantly hiring and hiring and firing and people are quitting and coming and going and ⁓ we got different departments, but I think what I hear is like Always be cross training, always be looking to fill somebody in the next seat, always be looking to support each other. You know, for example, like, you know, when we have somebody call in sick or they don't show up anything to do on vacation, well, we're not it's not we don't look at it like you know, we're a man down or a woman down as much as okay, well this is an opportunity for Susie over here to come in and fill in in surgery and learn the skill because you know, we've can all we might need her one day. So, you know, you took two people, you turned it into eight. We have to do the same thing in small business all the time. Constantly cross train. And if we're not doing anything, if we're ever s we're never just sitting on our thumbs, if we have a day off or our surgery cancels, well that's time to sit down and train. And you go sit in their seat and learn what they do for a couple hours, they're gonna come sit in your seat for a couple hours and learn what they do. So, you know, you make the most out of the resources that you have. Because you're you're you're not always gonna Marty: Yeah. And you can do something, you can do something that's called a black swan drill. You don't have to go to that extreme and black swan drill. get a bunch of people in room and you just kind of keep it light and say, look, what we're going to do is we're going to sit here and we're going to put stuff up on a whiteboard. Whatever you think could happen to cause problems here. Inside, outside, anything and anything. For example, all of a sudden, no patients call. We have no patients. No patients in the input side. You write all this stuff. Once people get rolling on this, there's some really cool stuff that comes out. You know, we don't have a, we don't have a hurricane plan or we don't have this. We don't have that. Only one person knows the passwords to get into this, you know, and you end up with all this stuff on the board. And then you say, okay. So you start circling them. Good if you videotape it too, cause you have a way of recording it. What are we going to do about this? What could we do about this proactively? And what you do is you end up starting both policies, succession planning. ⁓ Cross trading is a pre-emptive act instead of as like you're saying, like after somebody's going, this is a good opportunity for you to learn this job. Do it ahead of time. ⁓ The cross empathy, bringing somebody from sales in to sit there and watch how the accountant's try to put together a budget or have to answer the P &O questions or vice versa to see how tough it is over in sales where they can't get anybody to answer or call it. It's suddenly gels people in a natural way. You're not, you know, you're not forcing them. It's still walking somebody else's shoes, technically. But that little black saundry. I didn't come up with that. Um, somebody told me about it and I told my, my group to do it and they got in room. And there was no, at the time I was a CEO of pretty large company and there was no succession plan for me. And they decided that if I got hit by a bus, there was going to be a problem because nobody else was doing strategy. Nobody else was doing that. That whole part. be missing. And so I had to create a succession plan and I had to figure out who's going to be my successor successor. So I had to start grooming somebody, you know, one or two people that could step up if they had to. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: It all makes sense in the military, you know, that if somebody doesn't show up to work today or somebody goes down, someone else has to step up and take their place. It's very scary in the business world when there's nobody there available for you. ⁓ I've went through I've been going through, you know, you and I talk offline quite a bit about the changes I'm making around here. I just went through a week where I put myself, my team through the test. After creating a bunch of SOPs and things like that, things we have to do, I decided I was just I literally just went ⁓ I went like night out. I went blackout. on me for a week. I just stepped I didn't go anywhere. I was local and I just made the the whole operation run for a week just to to determine how effective we were in our operations and our standard operating procedures and if who the people were that could make step up to make decisions, you know, I wanted to watch and see what happened. So, you know, I'll be coming back this week after and getting the full reports and seeing where the problems were. ⁓ to know, you know, what do I have to do next to make sure that this business is is sustainable and operational if I'm not here making the decisions every day. It's a very scary thought, you know, to see what we're gonna find out. Have you ever put your s your team through the test just said, I'm not here, I'm gone. You know, you all do it. Do the mission. Let's see what happens. Let's see who the leaders are. Let's see where the mistakes are made. Marty: Yeah, actually that story about the succession plan and all that, you put all that in place. And then I thought, well, it's not just me getting hit by a bus. I hadn't at the time, but what if I go on a vacation where I'm off the net? What happens to that? So then I had to nuance the succession plan to a three-person executive team. chairman of my board. So I talked to the chairman of my board. said, absolutely. So I had to write it up as a policy. I, and I did, I went to Australia and I was in Australia for two and a half months, not two and half months, two and a half weeks visiting my daughter in Sydney. And I never picked up my, I didn't look at anything. You talk about, well, you've, you've already, you you just go through, you wake up every day going, oh, like there's flames coming out of the windows in your mind. You know, we've lost half of our clients and ⁓ somebody got fired for no good reason. You know, there was a fist fight in the lobby, you know, and, but then one of like the Rich Dad Poor Dad books, when you look at those books in the quadrant that he created, you're not a business owner if you have to be there. You're, you're an employee. So to be a business owner means you can walk away and the business keeps operating. Then you have a business. You don't have a, you don't have a team following the following somebody. You have an actual business. ⁓ and I, ⁓ I came back and like everything had kept on keeping on. was, it was humming along. I kept looking, kept looking, looking for like scorch marks from the flames and, and it worked. It worked. Now I didn't work. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah. Good. Marty: It wasn't just policy that is a piece of paper to George. He looked and see what happens. We had some time and we talked about it. but you know, and only one time did they have to go to the chairman to resolve a conflict between the three that couldn't agree on some decision. And, and he was savvy enough that he had them still come up with a decision that made sense. He didn't actually impose anything on them. So yeah, you, I've been through stuff like that. Mostly when I go away for a trip, even now, if I go away for a trip, I got a bunch of startups, got the foundation. If I just took off right now for a month, I'd be wondering what the hell, right? And I may, we're kind of aiming at a February, March timeframe for him to do something like that. I was just talking to my wife yesterday and okay, the infrastructure is almost there. I need at least enough scaffolding that if I walk away. things are still going to continue. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: That's very important for a lot of a lot of dentists don't get that, or a lot of entrepreneurs don't get that. You know, it's the ⁓ they think they built a business, but they've really built themselves a a trap or a prison, something that they can't leave and they have to be there all the time, even when they're on vacation. And I was that guy. I mean I'll I'll admit it, I was that guy for a long, long time. Not not I didn't really know I was trying to get out of it. I was enjoying what I was doing. But, you know, when it comes time to get that you do want to step aside, you do you finally realize how much you are trapped. ⁓ okay, I want to get on to ⁓ something else because your biography that I pulled offline talked about how to win the battle in your mind. ⁓ I think I know a little bit about where this is going. You know, because we all wake up every day, stress, doubt, you know, can't do you we got problems, personal problems, marital problems, lawsuits, whatever. You got financial pressures, things like that, you know, and I think we're all facing burnout. I mean How do you what do you mean by win is that what you're getting at? What what do you mean by winning this battle inside your mind? Marty: So, you know, I have a lot of talking programs that relate to that. And I actually have a couple chapters in the new book because I didn't want the new book, Intentional Performance, to be just about this raw, everything's perfect, just rock and roll and, you know, like it's some kind of Marvel Comics book movie. And one of the things that is hard to explain to people is that. And, you know, elite performance, if you're trying to look at, because the key part of this intentional is it's like Nike, just do it, get up, move, make something happen, right? But the other part of it is the performance part. What's the metric you're using? What's the standard? What are you aiming for? Is it a worthy target or is it a cheap target or is it easy target? Right. So when you look at the extreme performance, people, elite athletes, know, Olympians, extreme ⁓ sports participants. you know, surfers that go out and get the biggest wave and try to go through it. And you look at elite military, you look at elite businesses, back to the human nature thing again, everything written about these guys. There's lots of books about flow state where they've studied these guys that are really on the edge. You know, they're free climbers going up, know, all cap and, you know, with no top roping, you know, that they're all paranoid. They wake up paranoid. I wake up paranoid. I wake up paranoid because subconsciously during the night, all those little voices, all those little competitive ⁓ insights, you you suck, no you don't, you're great, no you really suck, know, and here's what's gonna happen here, and that thing wasn't, you didn't prepare for this and it's not gonna happen the way you think. And all those different things, you wake up and you have a sense of paranoia. Now you can call it fear. I think it's more paranoia because you're afraid or you're feeling emotional about something that hasn't happened yet. Right? You're projecting it's going to happen. And what I say in the book is that's a good thing. I mean, you're in the game. That means you care. means, know, if you don't care, then you might as well just, you might as well just stop right now. So you need your care and the paranoia is actually a strength, just like adrenaline when you're scared. It's a way of your body getting prepared for battle, fight or flight. So I explained that you take the paranoia and you think about it. And even if you have to, write down the elements of what you were concerned about. And then you use that as a task list. You rationally look at it and say, okay, is this real? Is it not real? Is it possible? Is it potential? Is it probable? You know, and what can I do? What can I do proactively to prevent that, that potential scenario of never unfolding? Right. Or if it is unfolding, what can I do to stem it, ⁓ to cap it off? Or if it's a positive thing, how can I supersize it, energize it and pour fuel on it? Don't ignore that. Don't ignore the voices in your head when they're telling you to be concerned or worried about everything. It's just ⁓ a human behavior. Where the voices in your head and all that get you down is when you wake up in the morning and you say, you take counsel of those fears, you take counsel of that paranoia. and say, it's real. It's not paranoia, it's real. It's like, I just got this right from CNN. It's real, it's really gonna happen, it's all gonna happen. You wake up a number of days with that kind of point of view, you're gonna start shrinking back. You're gonna start trying to reduce risk exposure. You're gonna try to figure out ways to take some chips off the table. You may not reach out into the market. You may not hire somebody that you really need to hire because now you worry. You're just going to shrivel and become this little husk that's incapable of doing anything. You care, but you care about protecting yourself because you think everything's negative and everything that's negative is going to happen. yeah, you can listen to the voices in your head, know, in SEAL training it's different. Basically the voice is just saying, stop, quit. You know, you don't need to do this. It's volunteer. It's not the same as running a business. And I always just tell people, the voices in that context. They're take charge of voice. Just say, tell everybody to shut up and just keep putting one foot in front of the other. But in that context, it's about physical and mental exhaustion and trying to get through that. isn't like that. Businesses can be exhausting, but business isn't about you're physically on the edge of total collapse, which is what special operations and rings and all that. They're trained to that point. they feel what it's like on the edge. and are confident they can go there. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah. So like when we're in boot camp and you're in SEAL training and things like that and it's just physical and just fatigue, it's just, you know, suck it up, ignore the voice, just keep on going one foot in front of the other, just keep on moving, make it to the next chow, make it to breakfast, make it to dinner, make it to lunch, whatever, you know, just one hour at a time, one minute at a time, but ignore it. But in business, you actually have to listen, write down what are the risks of failure and how do I circumvent that, you know, because failure is real in business. Marty: Yeah, it becomes an intellectual, an intellectual exercise instead of some kind of a, you know, gut test, which is what all those other examples are all about. You know, checking your ability to handle adversity. That's physical for the most part, right? I mean, there's a little bit of emotional, but it's mostly physical. Business isn't usually about you being beat up every day at work physically. You know, you're not, you're not running 30 miles or carrying sandbags. It's a different, it's It's the fear of failure. It's the fear of frustration. One of the guys that I just talked to about my book, Chris Peranto, who was in Benghazi, the CIA, that movie, 13 hours. He's the character Tonto in the movie. He says most people are afraid to make decisions because they don't want to risk their egos. don't want to, they're so prideful that they don't want to risk their egos. And that's something they will protect. Even as everything is collapsing around them, but not realizing that if they, if they just embrace whatever's wrong, whatever's challenging them and figure it out, work the problem, enlist other resources, get allies, get other smarter people that, you know, don't do it all in your own, in your own mind or at your own table. Get other people in here. What do you think? What's wrong? What am I doing wrong? Where should I go? Is this even true or is it, you know, is it a possible reality? ⁓ If you do that, you do that as an exercise on a regular basis, you stop thinking of it as you fail it. Stop thinking of it as all about you and your, you know, it's, it's more about how do I keep winning? And I do that through other people and through brain, brain power. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Right. Now is this ⁓ is this something that we could that a person has to be born with? Or is it something that they can learn? You know, how does you know, s take, you know, your person in business, your entrepreneur who maybe wasn't super com what wasn't military and wasn't super competitive in a sports arena, you know, maybe they were pretty shy and maybe introverted, you know, early in life and they're just coming out and, you know, now they find themselves with a team of five or ten or twenty people. You know, how do you I ⁓ are they screwed or can they learn something like this? Is there places they can go? Marty: Yeah. Well, there's two components in my opinion. One, it can be learned. It's not just ⁓ nature. You're not just born as a risk taker or born as a person comfortable with a a team environment and collaborating. There are a lot of people, just the way they were raised when they hit the professional world, they don't like working with other people professionally, or they don't like being in project teams or. They, they like having their own ⁓ score sheet, which gets all muddied up if there were three other people, right? They really have a high opinion of their own abilities. But if you put them with other people at home, this is going to drag my average down essentially. The other thing is the risk thing. And you can teach both of them and the way they do it in the military. And I've tried to do it in ⁓ the corporate world. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: ⁓ Marty: is what's called scenario-based training. You basically put everybody in a room and back kind of like the black swan thing, everybody in a room and say, we have the ability, let's say in your case, have the ability, what's the maximum number of surgeries you would do normally a week? Not the maximum, like the, what do call it? The best, most you've ever done, but what's like, what your normal kind of sweets buy. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Like to do I like to do like five or six, you know, patients, you know, big one the big ones. Marty: Okay. Every day. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: One a day, maybe one sometimes two. Marty: Okay, so you bring everybody in your room and says, hey, for whatever reason, put up on the board 10. We got to do 10 this week. figured out how are we going to do that? How is this team, is this group, how is this organization going to handle the flow through of 10 patients? Right? Or can even make it more audacious. Say it's 12 or 13. Stretch it a little bit. And then everybody's going to stare at you because you're the boss and you're supposed to be giving them the answer to that. And you say, I'll be back in half an hour. I want you to have some kind of a plan out. And you walk out. Now here's the funny thing. You don't say who's in charge of coming up with the answer. You just walk out. Right. And then you come back at 30 minutes and sometimes you'll find them still frozen, you know, and they haven't done anything. Sometimes you found somebody's taken charge immediately because they're, they just want to get it over with. And, and so there's driving and everybody's just flown with that, but they don't, they don't come up with anything. There's all kinds of different results of that when you come back. And then he said, you know, I'm serious. I know it sounded like it was an exercise, but this is, this is reality. I've got 12 people coming in this week and I need, I need the plan. So you've already had 30 minutes. I'm going to give you 45 minutes, but I need a plan. Now I wanted in writing, what are we going to do here? How's it going to work out? And then you walk out. And that, so what the other thing it does is they all have to play you. They have to play big picture thinker. They have to, they have to think like a leader. They have to think like an organizer. They have to think like. an entrepreneur, or they have to wonder, well, you what can we do? Well, one thing you can do is you can shut down administrative tasks and instead take people that do administrative tasks and shock them to the flow through team. The workflow through team, because this is the priority, can be made up of people that normally would sit over here and be a receptionist or whatever. And it's funny, they realized that this could happen and they realized that they could learn and contribute in other ways. Just do the exercise. You can do through supply chain. You can do, um, two people quit. All right. Susie and Susie and Joe quit. You've got 30 minutes to figure out how we're going to cover their job. Cause there's no way I'm gonna get anybody in. And one of them is an IT person and the other one's, you know, sales and everybody else. Cause Joe, always ask Joe for everything in IT. I don't really want IT. You give them 30 minutes. Well, at some point they're going to figure out they can outsource. They can bring somebody in. They can vet three companies. or freelance tax they can, you know, but they won't ever think that way unless you put them in that spot. What are they really doing here? They're dealing with the risk that you as a entrepreneur deal with all the time from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed. And they're dealing with it in a practical intellectual way. And the more they do these exercises, the less risk seems like risk the way they've been experiencing it in life. It's just a challenge. It's just a management exercise to get whatever you have to get done. And it demystifies it, it defends it. That's a great way to train and eventually nurture people in the area of risk. It doesn't have to be leaders for anybody. Cause you don't want the leader to be, know, Zorro and he doesn't care about risk and everybody else is scared to death. he still needs everybody else to do what they have to do. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: This sounds like one of the things that I wrote down from your your book on ⁓ intentional performance, right? about adversity. ⁓ adversity becoming your biggest competitive advantage, ⁓ you know, embracing adversity, you know, as preparation rather than punishment. I believe these are your words come out of your book. I don't know if it's a chapter I'm recalling, but ⁓ you know, let's let's talk about more about your book. ⁓ leadership. ⁓ you state that it begins with personal accountability. Marty: Yeah. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Okay, 'cause I we I know I've always got to hold my my team accountable for what they need to do, but is the does everything start and end with the leader and their own accountability? Can you can you explain that? Marty: Yeah, it's really tough. It's really tough to do anything. Professionally or personally of any value. If you live your life pretending that somebody else's fault or you live your life, trying to find somebody else or something else to blame for whatever's happening. You have to embrace failure. Failure is part of every day. It's part of everything, every endeavor. And it sounds cliche, but it is just, again, that's the way the universe is. It's the way human nature is. You're going to fail 30 times before you have a big success. And hopefully in time you forget the failures because success kind of overshadows that or overshines it. So if you as a leader and you can even be a technical expert in a team, you have to have personal accountability because what if you say, you know, how much money do we have in the bank? I want to do this thing. And they go, oh, and they don't know or they know and they're afraid to tell you because they haven't told you for two weeks because it's down so much. And so they just make up a number. Right. And then you go out and you do your thing to come back and find out that, you know, now there's no money. Or, you know, it could be a hundred different examples where a technical person could not tell the truth. And therefore they're not accountable because they're afraid of the of or they've been trained this way to they've been. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Right. Marty: condition in other organizations. If you say the truth, people are trying to find a scapegoat so that you're going to end up in burnt, right? And that's reality too. You got to understand that. So that's what you do. And as a leader, you're just another function. You're just like the IT person or the sales person or the accountant. You've got a function. Your function is to plan, point the way, build the team, nourish the team, and try to accomplish whatever the plan is trying to accomplish. with all those people making it happen for you. And let's say you... You know how this works. You know, do what I do what I say, not what I do. Right. So if you, I think one of the chapters in that book is called you are what you do, not what you say. So if you stand up there as a leader and you got, you know, a $12,000 Rolex watch and you drove in in a Lamborghini and you know, you work, you know, two times a week and you always come in around 10 30 every day. And you tell everybody else, you give a real speeches about being punctual, work ethic, the grind, you know, we're cutting costs because we're not making it up money. Look at the difference between those two images, right? You don't see that you're accountable for the way you're being, the way you portraying yourself through your actions and your behaviors. That's a way of not being accountable. a lot of people that do well in business forget that. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah. Yeah. Marty: You know, I think you got to be more like, ⁓ what's, what's his face in a roadhouse, you know, driving, take your Lamborghini, put it inside of a storage container, come out with a beater car and go to work. You know, cause it's messaging, it's all messaging, it's all behaviors. It's all being, it's all being absorbed and, and you want people to emulate you as a leader because you're accountable. And part of that is that you're fair minded and you know, the adversity thing is adversity of thought. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah. Marty: You're willing to listen to almost anybody about anything that's willing to give you some constructive criticism or constructive input. And in that environment, if you truly do that, you will get more than enough input from everybody, regardless of their rank, title, you know, and in time, the more consistent you are as a leader in that accountable mode, the more everybody else will actually kind of forget all the conditioning they had from all the bad places they were. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah. Yeah, it reminds me of a couple of lieutenants I had, Lieutenant. But these were Marine Corps lieutenants, so they were lower ranking than you. You know, but I remember we had a we had an exo that, ⁓ you know, if we failed, you know, if we if we didn't, you know, whatever, we disappointed the, you know, battalion or the commanding officer, whatever, that week and our liberty was restricted, he restricted himself too, 'cause he said, I've got to make myself better. I've got to make my marines better, you know, and We literally sort of saw him roll up his sleeves with us and ⁓ get and do whatever we had to do to get out of the dog doghouse. And you know, we respected that guy. You know, and then we had the next lieutenant came in and if we failed, he would yell at us and scorn us on how to work harder and your liberty's unrestriction, no one's going anywhere this weekend. And then we'd watch him go get a shower and be gone for the weekend. And we're all like, you know, this asshole you know, like you know, we didn't re work very hard for that guy either. Marty: Yeah. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: You know, but if the first guy, even if he had a Lamborghini, he we didn't know it 'cause he left it at the main gate. He he drove his dodge into work, you know. So there's a lot a lot to be said for that, you know, personal accountability. My ⁓ culture and you know, my presentations and vis I have a couple hour or two on on culture, and it's probably more about ⁓ I say culture. To me that means accountability and systems. And then we get into culture and the mood of the practice. ⁓ but it kind of starts with Marty: True. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: ⁓ you as a leader and you know that people are gonna emulate you. They're gonna copy you, you know, and and what you stand for. I think I'm very much in agreement with that. So and t to Marty: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I was lucky. was listed guy for 10 years, listed SEAL. So when I became an officer at the halfway point of my 20, I had seen a lot of good and bad examples. And the one you mentioned, which is if we fail as a team, I took the hit. It was my team. I'm responsible. I'm responsible for everything that happens in the team. That's the accountability element. And I saw guys that did that and then they would turn around and say, okay, no, let's fix this guy's, let's figure this out. So they rolled their sleeves and we figured it out. That's the second part. They're willing to be, they had the work ethic and the, I guess the maturity to figure out how to fix this thing. And at the same time, had the integrity and accountability to stay on there. Now, the other thing was if somebody did a great job, if something happened really great, they would immediately just push that guy to the front. Admiral, General. He's the guy that did this. He's the guy that came up with the idea. He's the guy that made this happen. So I already had it in my head, my game officer. And I don't think most people have that luck, but you cause they'd have to have somebody like that in the business world that they lived or whatever organization they were before they show up at their next job. So they can emulate that when they become a leader. It's usually they're emulating bad behaviors, not good behavior. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah. Yeah, you always have to put your team first and you know, translating this business, you know, when we make great teeth, you know, and the patients, you know, they say to the doctor, they say to me, you know, you did such a great job. You know, and I look and there's like the lab tech standing behind them, you know, that actually made the teeth. I'm like, No, you're not you're not talking to me, you're talking to her. Get up here. Come here. This is you know, this is Bridget, this is Taylor Scar, you know, whatever. So you gotta give them all the credit when where the credit is due. ⁓ it's ⁓ You know, you you see it in good I guess it you don't have to be military-minded just to see that. I mean, I'm sure that that happens all over in sports as well, you know, in civilian sectors. ⁓ another point out out of your your book, intentional performance, ⁓ that success requires direction and performance standards. Direction and performance standards. What do you mean by that? Marty: Basically, you can't 360 degrees and expect that you can accomplish anything. You have to figure out where you're going. I mentioned earlier, the quality of your target, that's the standard. So if I say, I want to be a mountain climber, and I'm willing to get up every morning and do all the physical training and all that to be a mountain climber. And the mountain that I'm going to climb is Mount Trashmore in Virginia Beach. And for those that, those that don't live in Virginia Beach, Mount Trashmore is actually a huge amount of trash that's been sodded over. And it's about 114 feet high. And, and, you know, I went out and I bought the clamp ons and I bought all the high speed Sherpa gear. I've got, you know, world-class Everest tent and I've spent $40,000 in equipment and I've trained for, you know, Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah. Marty: 13 months, and then I go up and I climb 115 feet and I go, this. Well, you know, the standard is defined by the targeted outcome, the end state, what you're trying to achieve. So you can do the first part, like I just described, but it's not really worth the effort. You aim too low, you know, it's what they call it, gun decking. You're trying to, and in the military, most people don't know what gun decking is, but gun decking was when they used to take wood and. shape it like a cannon barrel, it black and stick it on ships so that if another ship came up, it looked like they had a whole bunch of cannons. And so they would leave you alone. It's fake, right? It's false. And so gun decking is a term that means you're faking it basically. You're not trying very hard. So if you think success is doing all that and climbing 114 feet, if you're quadriplegic, that might define success. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah. Marty: and legitimately so. If you are not, that's probably not a legitimate target for mountain climbing. And you can pick almost anything. Let's say I want to make my numbers for the next quarter of my business. And what I want to do is I want to improve over last year's same month, same quarter numbers. So I got X last year, I X plus 2%, X plus 5%. And I say this knowing that I picked up more business and everything and I'm going to get X plus 14%. I already know. But I set that as my target, which is, you know, a hundred percent achievable. So again, what's the quality of the target? What's the quality of what you've defined as success? That's what I mean. If you really want to be a successful person, by the true measure of the term success, it has to be a worthy objective, worthy goal. It does not be monetary to be, there's many, many, many things. I want to speak Spanish fluently. Okay. If I say fluently, that's the quality standard. If I say I want to speak Spanish, any word will do. Yeah. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Right. All right, I want to get into ⁓ your your seal life. I got a question for you. I gotta admit the reality. seals have are fearless. Seals are never afraid of anything. Marty: No, that paranoid thing I was saying. Yeah, you don't overthink things. You over-prepare and over-train for the things that you're concerned about. So fear is more emotional. Seals are concerned about everything going right. So we work really hard to make sure that that concern is unfounded by the time they actually execute. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: So you have been afraid once, maybe at least once. So was there one or two Marines in the room? Marty: ⁓ yeah. No, there was Air Force guys flying a Blackhawk and they were, actually was age 53, there were bullets, tracers and stuff. And I just realized my pooh-pooh was very weak sitting there. I couldn't fight back. was just, I said, I told somebody I felt like I was a Christmas ornament being dangled over somebody on the ground with a big gun. There was nothing I could do about it, you know. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: ⁓ you were a spy rigging? Were you hanging? From the helicopter? Marty: No, mean, no, we were in a helicopter, but you just, meant the helicopters in the air, we're all jammed in like this with our guns. The pilots are just trying to flight it out of the gunfire and any idiot down there, if you hit the right thing, we're, going down. You know, you can't fight back. It's just, yeah, that was probably the most afraid I ever was of the SEAL. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah. Yeah. I think that that's legitimate. I'm gonna allow it. Okay. You know, I always say that fear is a useless emotion because it just make it causes you to paralyze, like you just can't do anything. And if you don't move, you're you know, they're gonna zero in on you, they're gonna find your position, you're a goner, right? And I think the same thing in business. ⁓ it's just fear is a useless emotion, but in that case, I'm gonna I think that you get a buy. Because you can nothing you can do. There's nowhere you can go, right? You know. Marty: Okay. ⁓ Yeah. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: What's ⁓ what is ⁓ harder, combat or business? Marty: I'd say business is harder because business just continues forever. ⁓ Combat happens and then doesn't and happens and doesn't. There's a lot of boring periods in between. Some of the actual missions are boring. know, not every mission is a gunfight. ⁓ And even the ones where there's some shooting going on, they're not necessarily, you know, desperate actions or anything like that. and for a SEAL or like for a Marine, When you're in that situation, you've got people, all the things we've been talking about today. They're mission focused, they're dedicated, they're ready to step in if somebody gets hurt, they're ready to step in if the leader gets hurt. They know their stuff, they know their gear, they know their tasks. And there's two or three people that are cross-trained. So if the radio guy gets hit, another guy steps up, grabs the radio. If the medic gets hit, somebody else steps up and does the job. You don't have that in business. If something goes down in business, I'm like, oh my God. We need a cyber guy. I'll look around, everyone. They'll be looking around too. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah. So I heard you say that in combat you have a lot of owners on the field. Everyone takes ownership. Everyone has a you know, a motivation to stay alive, so you know they're all gonna step up and work. Hopefully. You know, ⁓ you know, there may be those some. But ⁓ in business it's more like, you know, you're you're surrounded by cats, you know, sometimes and you gotta Marty: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. True, but to be fair, God country and consequences being life or limb are a little bit more serious than the people that go to work to get a paycheck so they can live their lives and pay their bills. I I wouldn't expect anybody in the business side to be driven at the same level of commitment. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yes. I agree. Yeah. I would ⁓ I do you ever miss the simplicity of military life? Marty: ⁓ Yeah, I miss the simplicity of the supply chain. I tell people that, you know, like one of the things that's different is everybody's, it's like a pez dispenser, right? The American people are paying for some guy. So Bob the radio man or Bob the medic breaks his ankle. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Or is it or is it simple? Did I ask that the wrong way? Marty: A day later, fill the medic or fill the room. And you got, you're good to go. You didn't have to, you didn't have to post a job. You didn't have to do interviews. didn't have to, it just, it shows up, you know, the food shows up, the bullets show up, the people show up. It's the plane shows up, you know, everything shows up. And in business, it's like Bob the cyber guy just quit. Oh man. mean, all you can think in your head is it was so hard to find Bob the cyber guy. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah. Yeah. I know. We hi it took five, you know, weeks to months to hire him and then took five months to train him and now he's what are we gonna do now? You know? Again, I think you have a camera in my office. This is every day around here. ⁓ so you're not you you could have retired ⁓ twice, three times over right now. You know, why why isn't retirement enough? You're starting a new career, a new job. What it what it when do you know you've made it? When's what where's success for you? Marty: Yeah. Well, think, well, ⁓ I defined it earlier. I set certain goals. So it may seem like a limited goal for somebody who's written a lot of books, but I set the objective of writing intentional performance. And it took me longer because I transitioned and moved to Florida during the middle of it. Then I usually take in to write a book. And then when I'm done, I sit down and say, okay, what's my next thing I want to do? So now I'm going to write the sixth seal. novel in a series. And so it's a challenge. So now I'm like, okay, you know, am I going to have the time? Is going to be the story? Does it have any care? So then all those doubts come in, right? The paranoia that maybe I should just call it quits. But I like doing it because it simulates my brain and makes me, I like being creative. And the more you're creative in general, the more you're creative all over the place in your life, in business. The other thing is the other enterprises that I'm involved in, Non-profit or profit or pretty much startups. You know, there are startups, one or two are starting to go into early stage. So that's exciting for me. Same thing, the creative juices. I like it. It's the risks are there. You know, it's hairier in that phase of things. You know, you're not up and on step and moving, but I've been there so many times starting companies, buying companies, building companies, selling companies. And I know that where I get the most excitement and get the most. kind of charge out of it is in the beginning, is in the forming and the creating part. Even though it's not going to be pretty and it's going to be messy and you know, the great plans that we put together will end up being like 14 degrees off to the left from where they should have gone. But now I'm comfortable with it. I that's the way it's going to be. I interviewed a guy the other day and he said he had 20 startup failures. 11 successes, which made him a multimillionaire, but he's had 20 failures. And he was proud of it because he, he comes up with an idea. He fleshes it out. He tries it. He also knows when to cut his losses. When it's just not working. The idea just isn't, isn't getting traction. So yeah, I mean, it's back to the fear thing. Don't be afraid of it. Figure it out. If you care about it. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah, and you know, from having ⁓ twenty startups, twenty losses and eleven successes, you know, obviously that ⁓ millionaire ⁓ he didn't wait to have it all figured out before he launched. I mean, he tried. He tried. He didn't have it all like he wasn't always waiting and waiting and waiting to launch and never launching, right? So there's something to be said for that. I wanted to ask you about Warrior Haven. You know, tell me about Warrior Haven. Why Warrior Haven? Marty: So, Watorshaven USA is a, or WatorshavenUSA.com. It's a veterans foundation. There is a gentleman named Peter Gary. He actually used to be in the car industry there in Genie Beach years ago. I've known him since 1994 and he was a force recon Marine. Got out, to culinary school for a couple of years. Had his first job, decided he didn't like the kitchen environment for real. And he started. selling cars because it was the only job that you could jump into. We turned out to really good at it. And he eventually ended up running big car dealerships and multiple car dealerships and different places around the country ended up down here in Boca Raton, Florida. And, uh, they created an advertising company, a second advertising company and sold both of them. So this guy has been a serial entrepreneur and been on lots of boards like me, well, veterans boards and other kinds of kids boards, boys and girls clubs, we're both on those things. And. He wanted to create his own, perfect as possible, veterans organization. And he had all the kind of do's and don'ts in his mind. And so in early 2024, he decided to create Warriors Haven USA. He bought a farm. I'm in Florida. The farm is about an hour, no hour, one mile from where I'm sitting right now. It's five acres. It's got horses. It's got all kinds of stuff on it. We've got 1200 square foot wooden metal shop that we built, both him and I. And as I was ending my career in the healthcare sector at the beginning of 2025, I was kind of looking around for what I wanted to do next. And he said, why don't you get your butt down here, me stand this foundation up. So I'm the CEO of that because I can plan and do all that kind of stuff. And yeah, but it helps veterans with, there's therapeutic. programs, really working in vocational education certification programs in woodworking and food color stuff. We have a business academy. So we help, we help mentor veterans that are either trying to start a business or restart a business and looking for something else, more capital. They're having difficulty scaling or hiring. That was one of the mentoring we did with one guy. I how do you know who to hire? I don't know who to trust. important that there's only one other guy in the canoe with you. He's got to row. ⁓ going to row, right? ⁓ So if you're small, every decision has got a bigger impact. ⁓ So we started the business academy part of it. We're building a canine academy right now. So we're going to do service dog support, ⁓ canine handler training for veterans so they can become canine handlers. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah, right. Marty: And then we have canine therapy along with the equine therapy with the horses. So all that stuff is all happening in that five acres. was donated by Peter and his wife to, ⁓ to the foundation. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Awesome. That's awesome. And it's called ⁓ war you can find it at Warriorhaven dot com. Is that correct? Marty: WarriorsHavingUSA.com Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Warriorshaven USA dot com. And lastly, I want to give you a chance to talk about your podcast. What's your podcast called? Marty: intentional performance. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Well, that's very fitting. It must have launched about the same time you're writing this book. Marty: Yeah. Well, you know what it was called. I wasn't as cool as I thought I was. It was called Instincts. And I came up with the book title last, last August, think, and developing a podcast company and then developing my own podcast within the company. duh. You know, and, ⁓ so it was a Friday. I decided to go with the book title because it all kind of jives with what I do in the the podcast, which I talked to all kinds of interesting people that are successful, but not necessarily went through a linear path to that success. And it includes astronauts and New York times, bestsellers and guys that were in the very senior levels of Ben, uh, the, um, uh, Ben Lyon hunt and the CIA. I've got business executives. So it's, it's not military oriented. Um, but it's been a lot of fun. And I get these guests in there and a lot of times I don't know anything about the field that they've been in. And so I find myself looking afterwards while I'm just sitting here the whole time going, like I'm watching a documentary instead of being an interactive host. I'm wow, that's really cool. What happened? There's a spacewalk and the guy's helmet started filling up with water globulas and he was going to drown. Really? I mean, that's a true story. Yeah. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Ha ha. Wow. That's pretty cool. Awesome. Well, I can't wait to check it out. and ⁓ can't wait to get the book and you get a copy of the book where? Marty: be on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, a bunch of other stuff coming out in December. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: In December. Okay. Look for the book. Look for the podcast, folks. ⁓ donate to the Warriors Foundation. And ⁓ Marty, it's been ⁓ exceptional. I always enjoy catching up with you. Thanks for being a guest on the pod. Marty: Thanks for having me, Adam. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: Yeah, you're very welcome. I'll see you soon, hopefully before Houston in December. No, Octo October. Marty: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, my book's coming out in December. We're going out in October. Adam M. Hogan DDS FAGD ABOI/D: I'll see you in Houston in October for our business academy. All right. Thanks a lot. Have a great night, Marty. Marty: All right. You too.