by Brandon Webb
Once back at base they learned that, by some miracle, we had not lost a single one of our men in the attack.
John and Ron stayed in-country until March, but that was their last trip as private contractors. That night they took a yellow legal pad and sketched out the concept for a vehicle that would become the focus of John’s entrepreneurial energies from that point on.
• • •
“It’s crazy over there,” John told Jackie once he was back stateside. “Our guys are getting blown up left and right. What we need is a fully armored vehicle, built from the ground up to blend into the traffic of the country where we’re operating.”
Jackie heard the passion in his voice and saw the gleam in his eye. Uh-oh, she thought. Here we go again. But over the years she’d learned that John’s business ideas, even though none had yet come to fruition, were often ingenious and at times brilliant. As John described the custom-built vehicle he envisioned, Jackie could see he was onto something important.
Not everyone had the same level of faith in the concept. After all, John and Ron were security guys, hired guns—not engineers. “Knuckle-draggers don’t make vehicles,” as Ron puts it. Well, that was about to change.
John wanted the vehicle to look indigenous and be as fully armored as possible without looking that way. Indigenous. Armored. He called up his dad with the seventh and final name for his corporation: Indigen Armor.
During the rest of 2004, while I was busy developing and teaching the NSW sniper course with Eric Davis, John and his partners (Ron and another ex–Spec Ops security guy) were creating Indigen Armor. They put together a detailed proposal, with CAD drawings of the vehicle they had in mind, then shopped their idea to companies with the connections and financial clout it would take to put it into production.
Every company they approached said the same thing: “Great idea—but we get pitched great ideas all the time. We’re not interested until you actually build the thing and show it to us.” Developing the idea for their vehicle was not going to cut it. They were going to have to hire someone to build them a working model of the damn thing.
John had already done the research and knew the ideal manufacturing partner. They approached a racing car company in southern California with a strong track record and a good-size manufacturing facility. The firm agreed to build their demo vehicle and be their manufacturing partner. All John and Ron had to do was come up with about a hundred thousand dollars. They each put in twenty grand themselves, money saved from their contracting work, and then did what every capital-deficient entrepreneur does: started talking to friends and family.
By July their financing was in place and they were ready to go. It took a little over two months to build their demo model, and John and Ron were on-site all day, every day. It was nerve-racking, having all that friends-and-family money on the line, and the ’round-the-clock intensity of the production process was brutal, even for guys who were used to working in a war zone. “Hellacious” is how Ron describes it.
That September they invited all the contacts they could come up with to a debut showing at the racing car company’s facility in Huntington Beach. The showing was a runaway success. Soon they had a $10 million contract, starting with an order for four vehicles. John and his partners were able to pay back every investor—with interest—in far less than the promised one year.
Jackie’s long-standing belief in John was vindicated at last: His dream company had become a reality. Indigen Armor was off and running.
• • •
Except that nothing ever goes according to plan. Ever. It’s the first rule of combat, and the first rule of business.
One day John got a phone call from their client with some extremely upsetting news: The race-car company, their manufacturing partner, was going behind John’s back. They wanted to squeeze Indigen Armor out of the picture altogether and deal directly with the client. After all, they were the ones building the thing, right?
In Special Operations you’re trained to respond to any threat from any direction, no matter how unexpected, with immediate and decisive force. John and his partners didn’t waste any time. They terminated their contract, sued the car company, and won a $2.1 million arbitration award. Which was good news financially—but now they were without a manufacturing partner, and where did that leave them? John was undaunted. Spec Ops training again: The ability to respond to any situation with creative solutions is just as important as knowing how to shoot your weapon. Often more so.
The day the wire transfer from the award landed in their corporate account, John said to Jackie, “Well, the Band-Aid’s been ripped off.” She asked him what he meant. He grinned and said, “It looks like we’re gonna build these cars ourselves.”
Jackie was floored. Was he saying they were going to create their own production line? John had never intended to become an automaker. He had no experience in designing, outfitting, or running a manufacturing plant. Was he out of his ever-loving mind?
But that was exactly what they did.
John had an uncanny ability to make things happen, sometimes seemingly out of thin air. I’ll give you two of my favorite examples.
One day, when John was on a flight from D.C. to California, a child on his plane had a seizure. The boy had never had a seizure before and his mother had no idea what was happening. John, a trained EMT, immediately went into action, laid the boy out on his side and made sure his airway was clear, got a cool washcloth on his neck, and completely handled the situation—including keeping the boy’s mother calm—until the boy was okay again.
Once everything had settled down, a man across the aisle leaned over and started talking with John. Clearly he was quite impressed with how the young man had handled himself. He handed over his business card and said, “If you ever need anything, don’t hesitate to call me.” Looking at the card, John realized the man was majority owner of a southern California bank. He laughed. “Funny you should say that,” he replied. “There actually is something I need at the moment.” What he needed was about half a million dollars to capitalize some major expansion in his plant.
The following week John was sitting in the man’s bank, and a week after that he had secured a loan for half a million dollars. Michael said that in all his decades of practicing law, he’d never seen a business loan transacted from start to finish in so short a time, let alone one of that substantial an amount. John and the man from the plane ended up having a long and fruitful business relationship, with many millions more in financing along the way.
And the other example:
At one point John was touring potential clients through their production facility, showing their first-generation vehicle, which was a large sedan. He knew they needed to move into producing a next-generation run of smaller, Japanese-style vehicles, but they didn’t have the funding for it yet. In the middle of the place he had set up a black box, and as they toured the plant, everyone kept eyeing the thing and asking, “What’s in the black box?”
“We can’t really show you that,” John replied. “It’s our next-generation concept, and it’s amazing—but I’m afraid I can’t tell you what it is just yet.”
In fact, there was absolutely nothing in the box. It was empty. But that didn’t matter. John completely sold them on the concept. Before long they had their financing, and their gen-two line was a complete success.
Today John’s vehicles are used throughout the world. Indigen Armor can’t release sales figures, but John’s company has built a lot of vehicles—and saved a lot of lives. Over the years they received a constant stream of e-mails and notes like this one:
I just wanted to write to thank you guys at Indigen Armor. I was on a mission today in the streets of the city where I’m stationed and our convoy was ambushed. The only reason I’m alive today is that I was driving one of your vehicles when it happened.
By 2008, John and his partners reali
zed they had outrun their capacity to generate the kind of capital it would take to tool up to the full scope of operation John had in mind. It was time to sell. They shopped around and found a New York private-equity firm with a strong background in military and aerospace. They sold a majority interest in the business for a sizable sum, with John retained as president and CEO, in 2009—by which time I was already hip-deep in my own entrepreneurial deployment and being shot at from all sides.
• • •
When I left the service in mid-2006, Indigen Armor was already in full production and doing well, and I was inspired by John’s example. But I didn’t want to build vehicles; I wanted to train the guys who drove them.
John had wanted to build something. Me, I’d always been into real estate, even had my real estate license. My idea was to create a training facility somewhere in southern California that would serve both military and law enforcement personnel. I called it Wind Zero, named after a precision shooting term.
I had been thinking about this idea for years. I’d been out to Blackwater and other dedicated training facilities on the East Coast, and I knew from experience that there was nothing comparable on the West Coast. In fact, southern California was desperate for a solid, reliable training facility. At the sniper course we constantly had problems finding usable venues for our training. I would call units from other branches of the military and even local law enforcement units and ask, “Where are you guys going when you train?” Invariably the answer was, “We don’t really know. We’re doing our best to find whatever we can.” The problem was systemic, and we were constantly having to ship guys out to other locations to train, which was both expensive and time-consuming.
There was a human cost, too: Sending people out of state for weeks and even months at a time was tough on their families. I’d experienced this myself. The strain those long stretches of absence had put on my own marriage was one of the driving reasons I’d made the decision to leave the teams. If we could provide a place where these young men and women could train during the day and be back home with their families at night, we’d be doing them a huge service.
I started developing the idea along with a fellow former SEAL, a Team Five guy named Randy Kelley, who had gotten out a year before me and started his own business training people in advanced security and surveillance techniques and technologies—something like Q in the James Bond movies (only with a North Carolina accent). Randy gave me free use of his office space and helped me write a business plan.
And it was one hell of a plan. In addition to shooting ranges, tracks for driving instruction, and indoor classroom space, Wind Zero would feature lodging and dining facilities for up to two hundred people. We would be able to embed actual buildings and cities that we could dress up so we could run large-scale urban-environment exercises, such as riot situations and other high-threat scenarios. We could facade the area out as an Afghan village this week, an urban downtown next week. The plan also included two helo pads and an airstrip.
In many cases we figured people would show up with their own trainers, such as law enforcement groups. We knew there would also be customers who would want us to provide the training. No problem. In fact, even as we were continuing to work on the facility itself, we put a training staff in place and started taking on contracts even without having our own facility in place yet.
Then we had the idea of adding more racetrack. There are a lot of car clubs in southern California, and some of them were telling us there was a huge market for motor sports. Porsche and BMW clubs approached us and said, “Hey, if you build it, we’ll use it.” So we bolted on a separate business to the original concept: a track where we could hold privately sponsored race car events. There would even be facilities where you could store your car in between events. An expert from the UK helped us design a full Grand Prix–style double track.
Now all I had to do was find and buy the land, get the full financing, and build it. The thing would cost something like $100 million all told.
Like John Zinn when he was first out of the service, in my first year out I took work as a private-contract security agent to pay the bills, which meant being over in Iraq for months at a time. In between those stints overseas I started combing southern California, looking for land. By the end of 2006 I had found the property I wanted, a thousand acres of raw land in Imperial County, not far from Niland, my old stomping grounds.
I was able to put down some option money from my savings and private-contract earnings, but that wouldn’t hold the land for long. This was a $2 million–plus piece of real estate; the down payment alone would be north of three hundred thousand dollars. It was time to raise some serious investment.
At the same time, I set about the arduous process of securing entitlements.
In land-development terms, “entitlements” refer to the gamut of legal permissions and approvals you need in order to physically build the project. This can include zoning variances (or, in some cases, actual rezoning); land-use permits; approvals for roads, utilities, landscaping, and construction; and more. The process is slow, complicated, and frustrating. For a project the size and scope of what we were planning, we figured it would probably take at least a year or two.
• • •
I had barely begun the process of developing Wind Zero when I found I had a serious competitor, the one private paramilitary training organization that everyone had heard of and had an opinion about: Blackwater.
When I was still on active duty I had bumped into some guys from Blackwater in Las Vegas at the annual SHOT (Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade) Show, a major military/hunting industry trade event, and asked them why they hadn’t done a West Coast facility yet. “The hell with California,” they said. “It’s too much of a pain in the ass.” They must have since rethought this position, because by the time I put a contract on my Imperial County land, Blackwater had just come on the scene and was aiming to do the same thing.
I was there when they first rolled into town in their stretch Hummers, meatheads piling out with their Under Armour shirts that were two sizes too small and showed off every muscle fiber. It was obnoxious. They brought out a guy from the East Coast with a pronounced Boston accent and put him in charge of their project. First thing he told me when we met was how much he hated California.
I was determined to take the opposite approach.
As soon as I had our land picked out, I began building as much local support as possible. I took a year and a half getting to know the people there, spent time talking with the guys in law enforcement, the fire departments, and the rest of the public safety community, building relationships with them, telling my story and explaining the project. Once I had established a foundation of solid support, then I started going to the town’s and county’s political leadership and moving the entitlement process forward. I put twenty letters of endorsement from local community leaders in front of them, from the police chief to the community college president, and they said, “Holy shit, we had no idea we needed this kind of facility . . . but you know, it makes sense.”
“Winning hearts and minds” isn’t just a military strategy for working in foreign territory; it’s common sense and common decency—and it works.
Two years after they started, the Blackwater effort crumbled under an onslaught of local opposition. There were anti-Blackwater bumper stickers everywhere. I knew it was over when I stepped outside one day and saw a lady walking her dog and wearing a T-shirt that said, “Stop Blackwater!”
Meanwhile our effort kept going. The entitlement process was even more complex, more difficult, more frustrating, and more drawn-out than our most conservative estimates. But we got through it. In December 2010, after four years of hard work, with millions of dollars on the line, we made it over the finish line and received official approval from Imperial County to build our facility.
It had taken four long years. We’d raised nearly $4 m
illion and done it the hard way, piece by piece from more than forty different investors, with no angel investor forking over the lion’s share. So many people had told me we would never get the entitlements. But we did. Where Blackwater had failed, we had succeeded.
• • •
The victory tasted sweet indeed—but it lasted just thirty days. Because nothing ever goes according to plan. Ever.
First rule of combat, first rule of business.
While I had strong support and no real opposition from the local community, there were forces working against me from other directions the whole time.
First there was Jack, a former SEAL I’d known from my deployment in Afghanistan. Jack had called me right at the start, before I even had my property, and tried to get me to back off. According to him, he was already planning to do something very similar himself. I suggested we both keep doing what we were doing and work together in a cooperative relationship. The demand was practically unlimited, I told him, and there was more than enough room for two training facilities in the marketplace. But Jack was one of those people who insists on trying to be the smartest guy in the room. (Me, I’d rather be the dumbest guy in the room. I have no problem working with people who are smarter than me—the more talented, the better.) He kept doing what he could to intimidate and discourage me and, when that didn’t work, to sabotage me.
Then there was Casey, one of our investors, who had gradually taken on a more and more direct role in the project. Casey had more business experience than I did, and I looked up to him and tended at times to defer to him. My mistake. I gave him too much power in the company, and before long he was trying to edge me out altogether.
While I was battling these political and internal complications, the entitlement process had dragged on for what seemed like forever while the money we’d raised gradually dwindled to nothing. Eventually I had stopped taking a salary and started taking on consulting work here and there to keep the lights on.
