Balancing Career and Family

Mitch Lawrence shares his journey from being a game warden to transitioning into a completely different career path. He initially pursued his dream job as a wildlife officer but realized that the demanding schedule was taking a toll on his family life. After quitting his job, he took on various roles, including working as an auto mechanic then a leader at the YMCA.  Eventually, he found a position in channel sales at ePlan, where he could utilize his skills in building relationships and rapport. Mitch advises listeners to be open-minded about their abilities and not limit themselves to a specific industry or skill set.

Connect with Mitch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchell-lawrence-a7239380/

SPONSOR LINKS:

• This Episode was brought to you by David Turner at Turner Process Solutions. https://www.turnerprocess.com | 
  • Visit Turner Process Solutions at The Assembly Show South in Nashville on May 1st & 2nd at Booth 1360! Use code TPSVIP for free registration.
  • Connect with David: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-turner-enterprises/
• CAPTRON North America, the cutting edge manufacturer of capacitive touch sensor solutions. Follow them on LinkedIn ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/captron-na )  or Check out their website ( https://www.captron.com/ ) 
  • Make sure to visit CAPTRON at Automate 2024 in Chicago, IL at booth 2886. 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:14

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Failing For you. It's me, your host, jordan Yates, and today I am joined by Mitch Lawrence. I'm excited to have Mitch on because we just spent the last few minutes talking about his background, which is very unique, like we were saying, compared to a lot of guests I've had on here, and today we're going to talk about how he took this career path, kind of got what he thought was his dream job and then realized you know what this actually doesn't work for me and then made a huge pivot to something completely different. So we're going to get into it. I'm really excited, but for now, mitch, say hello to everybody.

Speaker 2: 0:55

Hey, thanks for having me on Jordan, and I'm excited to be here and share this story with everybody.

Speaker 1: 1:00

But real quick. Before we get started, let's hear a quick message from our sponsors.

Speaker 3: 1:08

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Speaker 4: 1:49

captron install once, replace never meet david turner at turn Process Solutions. Join us at the Assembly Show South in Nashville on May 1st and 2nd. Find us at booth 1360. Use code TPSVIP for free registration. Discover our expert services process and material handling, industrial automation and controls, functional safety analysis, systems integration, project management and plant energy cost savings. Turner Process Solutions your partner in innovation. Visit us at assemblymagcom for event details.

Speaker 1: 2:30

Yeah, no, it's definitely a good one. So, Mitch, I hate to make you repeat yourself, but everything you said earlier was so interesting. I'm curious. Walk us through what you thought your dream job was and how you started in it.

Speaker 2: 2:46

Sure. So it really kind of started when I was a child. So I came from a family that was very public service oriented, had multiple family members. Quite a few family members I would say maybe six to eight of them honestly were in some sort of public service, whether that was fire or law enforcement or telecommunicator or nursing something right. So as a very young man I looked up to my grandfather quite a bit and he was a game warden in the state of North Carolina. Some folks refer to them as game wardens here in North Carolina they're actually called wildlife officers. But he was a wildlife officer and spent his entire career doing that, and then my great grandfather also did that very same thing.

Speaker 2: 3:30

So for me it was a pretty easy decision when I was young to say that's what I want to do, right? But I wasn't exactly sure how I was going to get there. I came from a pretty low income family, so college was pretty much out unless I figured out how to do that on my own. So I decided I was going to join the Navy. So between my junior and senior year of high school I joined the Navy. I spent a year in the delayed entry program and then 11 days after I graduated, while everyone else was at the beach enjoying beach week, I was in boot camp. So I went through the Navy boot camp and spent six years in the United States Navy. Most of that time was on board a ship in Norfolk where I did a various amount of things, from shooting the five-inch gun, which was my primary job, to going to rescue swimmer school to shooting 25 millimeter 50 calibers all the fun things that you think a military guy would want to do. But the military was not my end goal. My end goal was to become a wildlife foster for the state of North Carolina. So in June of 2011, that was my ETS date, or my separation date from the Navy I was planning to go start a full-time college career utilizing the GI Bill, and it's kind of setting my path toward accomplishing that goal.

Speaker 2: 4:56

In May of 2011, right before my ETS date, while I was on terminal leave from the Navy, I found out that my wife was pregnant. So that kind of changed the trajectory of the next few years of our lives, because we really had to focus in on, you know, what was important. What could we afford? You know me going to school full-time probably wasn't in the cards. So I had actually already enrolled and I took a full session of summer classes. I was taking 18 credit hours per semester, trying to get, you know completed and unfortunately, just due to the family circumstances, I withdrew from the college that I was attending and I took a full-time job with the city of Greenville Police Department. That was actually probably one of the smartest decisions that I could have made.

Speaker 2: 5:47

You know, at the time I really felt like withdrawing from college was a huge failure of mine. It was, you know, something that I was kind of striving to do and took the job. Well, that, in turn, ended up helping me, you know, later on in my career choice. But I took the job at the city of Greenville and started working as an animal control officer there, which was a non-sworn position, but I was learning a lot of valuable, you know, technical knowledge about being a police officer, knowledge about being a police officer. And then, in 2013, I started the academy as a wildlife officer. I was actually hired by the state of North Carolina out of about 2000 applicants, I think they said we had somewhere, you know, between 1800 and 2000,. There was 20 of us that were chosen.

Speaker 2: 6:34

Wow I was just fortunate and blessed to have been one of those 20. I think that was due to the military and the law enforcement background that I had started and then the fact that I was a little more mature in age than some of our other applicants. So they were looking for folks that had a little bit of life experience, right to be able to handle problems and people and different things little bit of life experience, right To be able to handle, you know, problems and people and different things. So once I I started the Academy in 2013, I mean, I was set that was the dream job. Right, that's what I had always wanted to do.

Speaker 2: 7:09

I I very quickly fell in love with the work that we did as a wildlife foster. It was, you know, patrolling, hunting, fishing, boating and trapping primarily. But any law in the state of North Carolina that we could enforce, we were allowed to do so. So there was times I was helping the sheriff's office and you know the troopers and local police departments and ALE or whatever it was. So it was quite an interesting journey for me and you know, I really loved the job. So I did that for almost a decade, right, right out of decade, and during that time we also you know, my wife and I stayed married. We still had our one daughter and she was growing up and I started to see about halfway into my my 10 year tenure, that she was growing a lot faster than what I was realizing and I started to see that I was missing a lot of the things that a dad should be there or want to be there for Things like ball games and practices and, you know, dance recitals and all the things that a little girl does. I was working evenings and weekends I would say 70 to 80% of the time as a wildlife foster. Our job was to work when other people were not working, that's, when they participate in the activities that I regulated so to catch them fishing or boating or hunting or doing something unlawful. It was usually during those times when people were out of work, which meant I was working. So I started to see that the schedule was a hindrance on my ability to be a dad and to be a family man. It also took a little bit of a turn.

Speaker 2: 8:55

So in 2021, I decided to lateral to a different position. It was the same job, it was just a different location and when I moved, it was actually back to my home county, which I thought this is going to be great right, I get to spend time in an area that I'm familiar with and pretty quickly realized that that move was going to send me on a different trajectory, and the reason that I say that is where I was working. I had great management staff. The management and I got along really well. They were very supportive, they had my best interest at heart and I really truly believe that.

Speaker 2: 9:36

So when I moved and started working for a different management group, I did not feel that support and I did not feel like that management team had the officers that worked for them. I don't think that they had our best interest at heart. I don't think that they really wanted what was good for us. They wanted what was good for themselves, and while that sounds super negative, it also kind of helped me realize that I was doing that same thing to my daughter and to my wife. I was choosing a career path that ultimately was me being selfish. Right, it was my dream job and it wasn't really conducive to what I needed at home.

Speaker 1: 10:17

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 10:18

So and in November of 2021, about six months after I laterally transferred from the previous county I just quit. I had no plan, I had no job, I just up and quit and thankfully my wife was supportive. She understood the reasoning behind the management staff and the schedule and just all the things that I had going on. So, you know, I had a little bit of money in savings. So I took about a month off. I decided to just kind of figure out where my life was going, because I didn't know. But I did know that I did not want to go right back into law enforcement. I still have a badge and I still carry an ID and I still I stayed sworn just to keep all those certifications active with a little podunk PD here in North Carolina Do you have to keep swearing in every year, or is it just like a for life thing?

Speaker 2: 11:10

So it's a once you swear in one time. However, you have to do in-service training and keep up with your certifications year over year. So it's an annual recertification process. But as long as you keep your training up to date, it's not any issue. And I had a lot of certifications coming in to or quitting.

Speaker 2: 11:31

When I decided to quit I had been through, you know, instructor school and firearm school and boat accident reconstruction stuff. So I had had a lot of things that I wanted to kind of keep active if I could, just in case, right, you always want to have a fallback plan because, as we know, life can throw curve balls. So I kept all of that stuff active and I stayed sworn with a with a small little four square mile town here in North Carolina and but I knew that that's not what I wanted to do full time. I was trying to get away from that schedule. I was trying to get away from some of the heartache and hardship that comes with being in law enforcement.

Speaker 2: 12:08

So you know, I took that first month and just kind of figured it out and still had really no direction of where I was going to go. I was helping a buddy of mine renovate his house and he was not paying me. I was just helping him because he's one of my closest friends and you know I really enjoyed just being able to do the things that he and I had always talked about. So then, Wait.

Speaker 1: 12:30

Mitch before we get into the next steps we need to reflect on the huge load that you just put on us.

Speaker 1: 12:36

Ok, we need to get introspective. The next step is really cool, guys, because you know, I heard it. He did tell me about it not to brag, but you guys are going to have to wait because I want to get more into. When you were in your game warden position, this is what you thought as a child was your dream job. Tell us about actually being a game warden. What was that like? And beside the family stuff, because we'll get into that did you love doing it? Did you actually have fun? Was it what you thought it was going to be? Did?

Speaker 2: 13:04

you love doing it Like did you actually have fun? Was it what you thought it was going to be? No-transcript super comical.

Speaker 1: 13:34

Like a paid stalker.

Speaker 2: 13:35

Yeah, yeah, I got paid to obsessively shadow other people, right. And then you know we would set up the deer decoy at night and get people to. You know night deer hunt and shoot, that we had just all kinds of things you know, going on car chases and running into people's homes when they thought that there was an intruder in there, like any number of things, right. So as far as monotony, that job has zero. There is no monotonous part of being a game warden, working with other agencies, working with other community members and civic departments, and some days I would just hook the boat up behind the truck, take it to the lake and I would just patrol fishing for eight hours and most people would think, well, riding on a boat for eight hours does not really work, right? And I thought that same thing a lot of times now when it was 100 degrees outside and I'm wearing a Kevlar vest and pants while you're in a bathing suit.

Speaker 2: 14:31

That's different. Then it feels more like work, but it's still not. None of it was ever overly difficult, other than dealing with death and certain things that sometimes we did have to deal with, but it was a super cool job. I do miss the work, but I don't miss the time of the day that the work has to happen. So you know that part getting up at 2 or 3 am to go sit in the woods for three hours in the dark waiting on somebody to come in that was. You know that was a little tough.

Speaker 1: 15:08

Yeah, and your wife sounds like she's super supportive and awesome and we love her, that we're. We stand your wife, as the kids say. But what? At what point did she ever or did she ever say like hey, babe, like I kind of miss you, Like you're gone a lot, Like you're gone at weird hours, Like you're not home when I'm asleep and like I don't know? I feel like me personally, if my boyfriend was gone at those hours in the night, I would feel kind of like oh gosh, like I can't sleep well until he's back in bed, or something like that. Was there ever that in your relationship?

Speaker 2: 15:35

Yeah, absolutely so. She, she is super supportive, so shout out to her for sure. She spent about four years with me in the Navy prior to law enforcement. So me being gone was just a part of what she had grown accustomed to. She really kind of took care of everything here and I didn't have a whole lot to worry about. I mean, she really was the homemaker. And yeah, throughout the whole law enforcement career there were those nights where, you know, I was scheduled to come home at 10. Well then I arrested somebody at 930, which pushed my schedule till one o'clock in the morning or two in the morning, sometimes even till sunrise or after. And there were certainly those times where she was like I couldn't sleep because I was worried about you and I didn't know where you were.

Speaker 1: 16:26

And you know there were some times where she would text and say hey, I don't know where you are, but I'm coming to find you and I'm like I love her.

Speaker 2: 16:29

Yeah, how are you going to find me when you don't know where I am Right? But this was before you know.

Speaker 2: 16:33

Having like life 360 or Apple family or any of that stuff. So it was kind of she always had had me, you know, in her heart. She was trying to figure out ways to protect me, even though it should be the other way around. She's just that person the whole time. For almost 10 years she never complained. She just said, hey, we miss you, we wish you were here, but it was never a hey, you should quit and come home. She was always supportive of my career choice, which was really nice.

Speaker 1: 17:05

But your daughter, on the other hand, as she started getting older, did she ever notice or point out like, hey dad, you're not around, maybe other dads are around more? Was that ever a thing, or was it just you kind of realized it?

Speaker 2: 17:18

I think I really realized it. My daughter is a lot like my wife and she supports me in anything that I want to do Right. So she has the biggest heart, the biggest heart of any person I know, and she never wants to hurt anyone's feelings. So for her to say, hey, dad, I want you to be there because other dads are there, she would never say that.

Speaker 2: 17:37

She would just say, hey, I missed you. You know, I wish you could have been there, but I did so good. And then she would just like kind of change the subject to tell me about what it was that she had done, so super supportive kid. So it was really that realization on my part to see how management was treating me, to realize that that's what I was doing to my family, and it took a long time for that to happen. You know, looking back, I think you said in another podcast that I listened to hindsight's 2020. And it certainly is like looking back. If I could have done that sooner, I wish I would have, but you know, at least that happened and I'm not, you know, 15 years in now, wishing that I had left then.

Speaker 1: 18:21

So, yeah, and at least it sounds like. I feel like some people escape into work because they can't stand being around their family, but it sounds like you had an awesome family supporting you and when you were ready to come back, be around them at more normal hours, they were like, hey, we're here, like we still support you, no matter what. So you're very lucky and did a great job cultivating your life outside of it to keep that steady. For when it was time to come back. And I think a lot of us pour ourselves into work and, especially in my generation, don't even start families they're like, hey, work is life, all of our identity is placed in work. We don't even go and try to get a significant other or have children because we're so obsessed with work. And then one day you look up and we could be in a situation like that where it's like, hey, my boss isn't treating me right, this is kind of shitty. And then you have nothing to fall back on. I'm so glad that you had a family in place. I love that for you.

Speaker 1: 19:14

So now we're transitioning to, I guess, 2021. You were working with your friend. You guys were getting some man time in in doing some manual labor. It's kind of what I did during my last career transition to. I built myself a headboard like got really into carpentry. You really need that to figure life out, so tell us about when that period was and what you did next.

Speaker 2: 19:38

Yeah, and let me speak to one thing before we jump into that. You just kind of spurred this interest for me to bring up. You said that a lot of times we kind of put our identity with our work, and that's so true. If I could go back and say, you know, I would have told my younger self, don't fall into that trap of becoming your work, because ultimately what happens is we start to view ourselves as this. You know, whatever that title is For me it was is the game warden. Right, the game warden is a very respected position throughout the nation.

Speaker 2: 20:13

But I kind of fell into that trap of, well, if I'm the game warden, that's who I have to portray all the time, and what? What I ended up doing was becoming kind of closed off to the rest of of my friend group, to the rest of my wife's friends and even some family members, because I was only associating with other wildlife officers, I was only associating with people that fell within that community and that was somewhat detrimental to some relationships that I had and just, you know, people in general, and I don't want to ever get caught in that again. Like, my position is my position, but Mitchell is Mitchell, so I have to remember that I am who I am, regardless of what job I have. So, to your point, when I was doing the physical labor which I grew up doing physical labor, so that was, you know, it was kind of freeing and escaping for me. It was, you know, returning to the things that I knew how to do from an early child.

Speaker 2: 21:09

It really helped me realize that again, like, I am just a person, I'm not a game warden, I'm not, you know some. I'm not better than anyone. I am just me and I have to remember that and have to be humble. So that manual labor started in late 2021 and then kind of transitioned into a position with another friend of mine who offered me a job as an auto mechanic. And you know, growing up working with my hands, I was like, oh, this will be great, he's going to pay me cash until I can find a job. Like it's going to be really helpful for me and it was extremely helpful. I'm very grateful for him and his, his help through all that transition. But I very quickly realized that I do not want to auto mechanic for 30 years, right Coming home on the body.

Speaker 2: 21:53

Yeah With with busted knuckles and, you know, catching a transmission on my chest and different things. It was like I. I don't want to do this every day, but super great learning experience for me. You know I knew a little bit about mechanicing before working on old cars. Growing up and working. You know my dad didn't ever want to pay to get work done, so we always did it at the house and I was the youngest and the smallest so I could fit in all the small positions, um, but it it was a.

Speaker 2: 22:20

It was a super big help to me and it also helped drive me into the next job which I was looking to find something more stable that had a regular paycheck, that went into my bank account, that had some benefits. So I found a job actually through Facebook Marketplace. One day, or somebody's Facebook wall, it actually popped up on my feed and it just said, hey, we're hiring for an aquatics director at one of the YMCA's locally. I was like, hey, you know, I was a rescue swimmer in the Navy. I worked on a boat for the last 10 years. I teach the water safety portion of the wildlife school, so that's a great easy fit. I was a competitive swimmer in high school Like this is. This is a could be a game changer, right. But the Y, even though it's a wonderful organization and has wonderful benefits and wonderful people, the pay is just not very good. It's a nonprofit organization. You just kind of take what you can get, right.

Speaker 1: 23:13

So I actually worked at the Y as well. When I was in high school I did the kid zone.

Speaker 2: 23:18

Yeah, nice, that's awesome. So I worked out a deal with them initially about what kind of compensation I could come in the door for, and unfortunately they couldn't meet it initially. So I took about another week and a half and finally got a call back and the director said hey, mitch, I think I've got a job for you. We actually just had a senior program director that wanted to leave. That would put you in charge of about five facilities and I was like oh wow, I wasn't expecting to come in the door and have all these people work for me, but here for the last 10 years I've been working for myself and taking care of myself as a game warden, and now I have to take care of other people. I was like but I think I'm ready, career wise, maturity wise, I think I'm ready for that. So I said, okay, the compensation was a little bit better. So I stepped into that.

Speaker 2: 24:08

And then about six months later we had another senior program director leave and they approached me and said hey, do you want to take all the facilities? You're doing a really good job with the five. We would love for you to take on a few more. So I ended up having nine facilities total to take on a few more. So I ended up having nine facilities total, I think eight or nine direct reports I'd have to count them up to figure out that for sure but then about 130 indirect reports. So I went from managing myself doing some woodwork and some auto mechanicing to now have 150 people looking up to me to make decisions and I was like, oh, this is quite an increase in what I had expected but it was really good.

Speaker 2: 24:48

It was a great transition for me. I very quickly learned, you know, all the things that I saw in management. Growing up, from early Navy career to early law enforcement, to the ending of my law enforcement career, I saw all these different managing folks and I was like that's what I want to do and that's what I don't want to do. So I tried to encompass that. I tried to become a leader that was very employee centric. I wanted them to feel that they had my support. As long as they were doing what they were supposed to do, I would have their back and I really tried to embody that. And the Y was actually really a great place to work.

Speaker 2: 25:30

So then during the year and a half I was with the YMCA, I met the channel sales director for eplan and he and I had a conversation one day and it was really kind of a relationship. That started because our daughters go to school together and we ended up going to a field trip together and it just gave us some unadulterated time to talk and I didn't really know him at all. So we had a good conversation and basically at the end of the conversation there was a question asked about. You know, hey, have you ever thought about doing something like what I do? And I was like well, honestly, I have no idea what you do. I have no idea what the company is that you work for. I have no idea what your industry is. You know any of that. It's like I've only ever done public service and now I'm working at a nonprofit which is very similar to public service. So that's all I know.

Speaker 2: 26:23

And he said well, there's a lot of qualities from a law enforcement perspective that I think would fit into a channel sales perspective. And he started naming those things things like building, rapport, relationship building, you know, having hard conversations sometimes and I started to see kind of this alignment with law enforcement and a sales kind of methodology, if you will. So we had a few more conversations after that and we started to get a little deeper into you know, what would the position entail and what kind of things would I actually do? And one of the biggest, which I didn't mention this before, but in 2016, I became an instructor for the law enforcement agencies of North Carolina. So I started teaching at a community college level and the channel sales program at E-Plan was pretty new Channel sales director had started that program from scratch and we really needed to enable our selling partners, and to do that we had to have some training right.

Speaker 2: 27:27

Well my background was in scenario-based training. So he said, hey, what if we can utilize some of your scenario-based training and you can foster relationships and build rapport? And, as a channel sales manager at E-Plan, that's what I got to do. So last July, in 2023, I was fortunate and blessed to come to the E-Plan family and kind of hit the ground running and, thankfully, with great management support there, they've enabled me to bring out the best qualities and features of of my past and experience to really help drive our initiatives forward.

Speaker 2: 28:08

So what I do now is is really parallels exactly what I did in law enforcement, except now that the conversations I'm having with people they're not wearing handcuffs, right, so that's the biggest change is, the most of the conversations are are more voluntary, right? So it's hey, can we have a conversation about the product that you're selling or that I would like you to sell? Not, hey, sit, we're going to have a conversation about the product. So that's the biggest change. You're like Mitch, threatened to arrest me again, please. So, yeah, overall, the customer-centric for me, it's distributor-centric approach of making sure that my distributors feel enabled, they feel successful, they feel supported. It's essentially the exact same thing I was doing at the Y, except with my employees, and really was the exact same thing I was doing as a game warden, only that was to the public, right, they had to feel supported, they had to feel enabled to call me and tell me that there was a violation. Now it's just hey, call me and tell me when you need my help. Call me and tell me when you need some training or when your sales team needs some enablement, because that's what I do and I just I have fallen in love with sales.

Speaker 2: 29:28

I can't say that from a direct sales perspective or an inside sales perspective, because I haven't done those two things, so this is very channel specific, but from channel sales it is really about that relationship between the reseller and the company. So for me, as a manufacturing company with software, building those relationships with the distributor in this industry has been awesome, and you know, meeting people like yourself and listening to some of the voices of this industry that have so much knowledge and there's so much to learn and there's so much to gain in the world of automation, and I see that we as a culture, we're going there. Companies no longer want a person to do a job that a machine can do, because the machine doesn't cost as much money long-term as what an employee does, right. Maybe the upfront cost is a little more, but everything's going.

Speaker 2: 30:23

Automation they need it faster, they need it quicker, they need it better, they need quality control and all these things in place. So I'm happy to be kind of on the leading edge of that automation industry with a company like ePlan. But, man, what a turn my life took, right? I never would have thought if you'd asked me two years ago hey, where will you see yourself in 2024? I probably wouldn't have been able to tell you, but it definitely wouldn't have been here.

Speaker 1: 30:51

No, it's so crazy how that works and that's why people always say what's your five-year plan, what's your 10-year plan? And I'll tell, like listen, I have aspirations, I have goals of like where I think I want to be, but I don't like to plan every detail out Because if I am so stuck on a plan, you close yourself off to other opportunities that you wouldn't have expected, and that's why I like kind of what you did. You just opened yourself up and you're like okay, yeah, like, let me try something new and you were very rewarded for it and I love that. So we're getting pretty people who are kind of nervous about making a big career change, taking a step back from what they're currently doing. Can you give them any advice of just kind of like hey, like, maybe it'll be okay, or maybe any words of wisdom to warn them think about this before you do it, like just anything that you feel?

Speaker 2: 31:55

Sure. So one of the things is definitely think about you know a job before you quit your previous job. Don't set yourself up for no job, like I had for about four months. But, in all honesty, one of the biggest things that I could say as a takeaway is don't get hyper-focused on the skill sets that you think you have. Other people see things in you that you may not even see in yourself.

Speaker 2: 32:20

And you know, thankfully, when I was talking to the channel sales director for ePlan, he saw those things in me and he coined them as attributes. I don't think he actually coined that term, but you know, that's what he called them and it's really. It's not about the job that you're doing. It's about how you, how you do the job Right. So, yeah, putting people in handcuffs and stopping boats, that's, that's easy, but that's all that aren't teachable.

Speaker 2: 32:49

Are those attributes right? It's the character that you have, the integrity, the person that you are. How hardworking are you tenacious, all the things right. And it's those questions that we hate in interviews when they say, hey, tell me three strengths about yourself. Well, you're not going to be like, hey, I'm good at tying my shoe. That's a strength, right, but it's a teachable strength, but being tenacious, that's something that is just you, or being, you know, hardworking, because that's how you grew up and you had no choice, otherwise you wouldn't eat. You know, those things are really kind of those attributes that we have to focus on and I would say don't, don't set yourself in an industry path and think that that's the only path for you. That's what I did.

Speaker 2: 33:37

And I thought, hey, all I know is law enforcement, All I know is firearms Like I don't know how to go do anything else. And really that was exactly the wrong thing to think. People enabled me and said, hey, you can do more than this, and I see that you can do X, y and Z. Now let's go do X, y and Z and it's like, oh wow, I actually am good at that. I didn't know. So just be open-minded to the things that you're innately good at, and not what's teachable. Don't just set yourself up for failure by thinking you're only good at what you've been taught, because you're really good at a lot of things that you just do, but you don't know that you do them. So yeah, that's my word of advice.

Speaker 1: 34:21

I love it. I think that's really good and it's definitely something that you have to like. Really, you know, take time, get to know yourself and think about your qualities outside of your hard skills, and you know, just spend time with yourself, and I think I think that's great advice. So, mitch, thank you so much for coming on today. This was such a pleasure. It went by so fast. I was very interested in your story. I had a great time, so thank you so much.

Speaker 2: 34:45

Yeah, absolutely, thank you.

Speaker 1: 34:47

It was a great invitation.

Speaker 1: 34:49

I'll put Mitch's description, his description, his information, in the description below. So, like his LinkedIn, if you want to connect with him, chat with him, whatever if he responds or not responds. That's on Mitch, so I'll give you guys his LinkedIn and uh, but yeah, thank you so much for listening to another episode. Thank you If you made it to the end. I appreciate you all so much for listening. Um, but yeah, as always, I'm your host, Jordan Yates, and in the meantime I'll be failing for you. See you next week.