Zachary Green is living the American dream. As a boy, he had three “sparks” as he calls them. First, to be a Marine. He had to wait until he was 18 to do that because his parents didn’t want him to join. Second, he wanted to be a firefighter. He did that. Third, to be an entrepreneur. He has done that one to the max, building a company that saves firefighters’ lives, and now inspiring others with speaking and his book. The military dream started early. Zachary was G.I. Joe every Halloween. While his friends were out riding their bikes, he was in the woods practicing his own maneuvers. When he was finally old enough to join, Zachary directed fire control first for artillery, then mortars in the European theatre. He then applied for Officer Candidate School but when it came time for graduation, he decided he did not want to serve any longer and resigned. It was the Clinton years, lots of attrition and no deployments, so he was frustrated his combat skills were unused. Two years after leaving, 911 happened and Zachary has regretted that his talents couldn’t be used to help his brother and sister warriors. He felt he absolutely had to give back and around 2002 he joined a volunteer firefighting group while still in sales and marketing for Eli Lilly. So that covers spark numbers one and two, but how did he get that far? Zachary credits the Marine Corps. As he says, you don’t join the Marines, you become a Marine. It’s a brotherhood, a family that one is a member of forever and it happens because everyone has to go through the crucible. The crucible, as defined by Zachary, is where you have faced challenge after challenge but come to a challenge for which you are not prepared and you must fight your way through. That is what you must face and defeat, but after that you are undefeatable. This is the crux of his book, but we are skipping ahead. Spark number three: Zachary has become a firefighter and gets lost during a fire. He eventually found his group, but the experience made him determined to invent a material that would make firefighters visible to each other and help firefighters keep their orientation under the worst conditions. He invented it and started selling to the fighters in his station. The word got out and he began selling to other locations out the back of his car (Phil Knight of Nike fame did the same thing). The first six months, Zachary had $5,000 in sales, not enough to quit his day job. After time, his fire chief sat down with Zachary and told him he was sitting on a gold mine and should make his business full time. After a heart-to-heart with his wife, Zachary went to the biggest firefighting trade show of the year. In three days, he sold over $100,000 worth of product. But how do you fill the orders? That’s where the can-do Marine came out; adapt, improvise. So the family mortgaged the house, maxed out the credit cards and began shipping. However, bravado doesn’t guarantee success, and the company was three days from running out of money and closing the doors at one point. This was Zachary’s crucible. And his transformation was to recognize he was a founder and an idea person, not the day-to-day operations person. They hired a CEO from the outside and sales last year were $30Million. And continuing with spark number three, Zachary has shared his experience and provided inspiration to many more with his speaking engagements and now his book, “Warrior Entrepreneur”.
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