friends, with your brothers. Not to mention that I wouldn’t have to reinvent T-shirt designs every month, so I could focus on giving back to the community I love. Which meant I needed to take a good hard look at the opportunity.
With the end of 2014 fast approaching, Evan, Jarred, and I were done looking. We were ready to commit. By Christmas, we had a name: Black Rifle Coffee Company. Evan came up with it when he was at the range one morning, and out in the parking lot he had his fully modded, fully blacked-out rifle laid out on the tailgate of his truck next to the traveling coffee setup he used for road brews. Black Rifle + Coffee + Company. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that us Army folk can’t be creative AF. A week later, on the first business day of the new year, Black Rifle Coffee Company was formed.
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Black Rifle Coffee took off. By the middle of 2015, the company’s growth curve looked like it had Peyronie’s disease: It went hard up and to the right. Even more, I was loving all the stuff we were doing in terms of content creation, product design, and employing and helping veterans. It was incredibly fulfilling the way the company collaboratively came together and embodied all the beliefs to which we’d dedicated our lives: teamwork, effort, opportunity, commitment, sacrifice, and shooting people in the face (this time with high-caliber caffeine).
And on a personal level, I’d found a kindred spirit in Evan. He was like the grown-up private-sector version of Danny Fulton. His work ethic, business savvy, and commitment to the veteran community were unrivaled. His sense of pride in his work and his country, and his loyalty to friends and fellow veterans, made him someone to admire, and made us, dare I say, BFFs.
And yet, despite all the work that needed to be done to grow this and the other businesses, despite all the marketing and branding decisions that needed to be made and that I had slowly developed a knack for, I was still doing contracting work at a ridiculously high tempo. I’d be home for barely more than the minimum required downtime between cycles, and then I’d be out the door and on a plane. I wasn’t disconnected from the team, don’t misunderstand. When I wasn’t at work, I was in my room, on my laptop, answering emails, writing business models, doing Skype calls, you name it. Whatever BRCC or Article 15 or Leadslingers work needed to get done, on my off hours I was doing it.
I probably didn’t need to keep deploying, since the business was doing well enough that I could have drawn a salary somewhere in between the peanuts I made in the Army and what, before Article 15, felt like stupid money from ███████. That was more than enough to live on. But I didn’t want to stop deploying. I told myself that it was because I loved what I was doing with the ██████ that I kept accepting rotation slots. The work was still exciting and meaningful. I was working with good people doing important stuff. But I would be lying if I didn’t say that all those messages we were getting from fans kind of scared the shit out of me. They were expressing my worst fears. I had transitioned out of the military once before, and re-entry had been really rough. I was worried that quitting contracting would lead to the same outcome. Although I felt that I had created a fairly good support system back home and had found real purpose and camaraderie with Jarred and Evan and the growing team at Article 15 and Black Rifle, I was still worried about giving up the real rifle. I was afraid of missing that kind of team. Missing out on that kind of mission. Missing all the jokes, all the shared experiences that I thought you can only get with others who are in harm’s way, going through the same exact thing you’re going through. You have to realize: At twenty-eight years old, I had dedicated nearly a decade of my life to service, and I truly did love it. And while I recognized at the time that the way I was hanging on to all of this was getting ridiculous, letting it go wasn’t so simple, especially when you were getting dozens of messages every week basically confirming that life after service could be this