246 | Veterans and Healing Through Service with Aaron Quinonez
Our guest this week on the pod is Aaron Quinonez. Sgt. Aaron Quinonez is the Founder of Reliable Commercial Cleaners (RCC), a commercial cleaning business that partners with it's clients to meet their goals. He's also the author of Healing Through Service: The Warriors Guidebook to Overcoming Trauma and works to help struggling veterans worldwide.
Resources mentioned in this episode include:
Episode with Aaron Quinonez on Veterans & Healing Through Service
NOTE: While it’s not perfect, we offer this transcription by Otter.ai for those who are hearing impaired or who don’t find listening to a podcast enjoyable or possible.
SPEAKERS
Aaron Quinonez, Paul Zelizer
Paul Zelizer 00:01
Hi, this is Paul Zelizer, and welcome to another episode of the Awarepreneurs podcast. This podcast is all about the intersection of three things, conscious business, social impact, and awareness practice. Each episode, I do a deep dive interview with a thought leader in this intersection, someone who has market tested experience, and is already transforming many lives. Before I introduce today's guest, in our topic, I have one request. If you could go over to Apple podcasts or whatever app you're listening to the show on, do a rating and review, it helps tremendously. Today, I'm thrilled to introduce you to Aaron Quinonez. And our topic is Veterans and Healing Through Service. Sergeant Q, as Aaron is oftentimes known, is the founder of Reliable Commercial Cleaners, a commercial cleaning business that partners with its clients to meet their clients goals. He's also the author of Healing Through Service: The Warriors Guidebook to Overcoming Trauma, and works to help struggling veterans worldwide. Aaron, welcome to the show!
Aaron Quinonez 01:08
Hey, thanks for having me, Paul, I really appreciate it. Thanks for allowing me to be on your platform and to be able to share some of this information with the guys out there who are searching for it.
Paul Zelizer 01:17
We know from research that veterans often have such a hard time and the data of how often veterans are dealing with some of these mental health issues that we're going to be talking about this. It's just off the charts, Aaron. So when I heard about what you're doing, I can't wait to share what you're doing with our community.
Aaron Quinonez 01:38
Yeah, hey, thanks a lot, Paul, I appreciate that.
Paul Zelizer 01:40
Before we get into what you're doing is incredible body of work. Let's help our listeners get to know you. One of the ways we like to do that Aaron, is to ask you about a wellness or resiliency practice that you personally use to help resource yourself for this really important work.
Aaron Quinonez 01:58
Yeah, so that's, that's a great question. And this is something that I've been doing for a long time. And then a few years ago, I joined the John Maxwell team. And John Maxwell says, You're never going to change your life, if you don't change something you do every single day that having a morning routine, is really important to being successful. And I was like, Hey, I'm already doing that. That's really cool. And so for me, every morning, I do a daily devotional. So I do a Bible study every morning takes me anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes, I read through a few scriptures, I take some notes on it have a real good system that I use to do that every day. And I just track my process. So or track my progress. So like today, I'll do it's day 10, right. So I put D 010, at the top of the page. And then tomorrow, it'll be day 11 day 011. And if I miss a day, then I go back to Day 01. So I don't track my accumulative days, I try and track my consistency, how many days I do it consistent. And I think my record is something like 435 days consecutive. So that takes a lot of effort and dedication and devotion to do that practice every single day. But it's it's really been something that helps me stay on track with my business life and my personal life. And I explain it to people like this. So, you know, I'm a Christian, and so that I speak from a Christian background. So if you're out there, and you're listening this and you're a Christian, you might understand this a little bit better. But I look at my daily devotional, my morning time with God as like showing up to the morning board meeting with your CEO, right. So if you're working for a company, and you don't show up to the morning meeting, how are you going to know what the plan is for the day? How are you going to know what you should be doing and what areas you should be working in? You're not. And so for me, the Bible quite often helps me to know what's going to be coming in, in my day. And I've got a really cool story. I'll tell you a little bit later on about exactly how that transpired. Just in my week, this week, with a homeless guy that I met. And if I hadn't been doing my daily devotional, I wouldn't have been prepared to help this guy in the way that he needed help. So a daily routine, whatever that works for you guys, I highly suggest you do it. For me. It's a Bible study. And I track my progress every single day.
Paul Zelizer 04:25
Wow, awesome. Thanks for sharing that with us. So they're called Sergeant cue. Right? That's how the Internet one of the ways people could find you on the internet. Right. Give us a little bit of the backstory of like, we're here to talk about veterans and healing through service. Obviously, you served tell us about your time in there and particularly as you were coming out things got a little bumpy there to give us or give our listeners a little bit of that backstory.
Aaron Quinonez 04:52
Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in the mountains in Northern California, kind of on a hippie commune and I did not it's it's not the pair advice like you see on TV like it was, it was a rough upbringing. And so I wanted to get as far away from that life as possible. So I joined the Marine Corps. And I went in as a community communication specialist, because I knew that with that job, I had a lot of latitude. I could go just about every unit that's out there, they rate a communications guy. And so I liked that idea of flexibility. When I was going through my MOS school, one of my instructors, his name was Sergeant love, I know very unfortunate name for a Marine. He, he was there as an instructor doing his b billet. And he took a liking to me and said, Hey, que Are you afraid of heights? And I was like, No, sorry. I'm not afraid of heights at all. He's like, alright, well, I'm gonna introduce you some guys and see if we can't get you into Anglica. And I had no idea what Anglica was. I do now it's the air naval gunfire liaison company. It's a special forces group inside the Marine Corps that calls on all the air artillery mortars. They do combined arms, they run nine line briefs, so we control all the air on the battlespace, Rolemaster parachutists. And when I was in, I got to do a lot of really cool stuff. I became the Naval Weapons security manager, and I also became the unit's close combat instructor, Master parachutist, and all kinds of all kinds of fun stuff spent millions of taxpayer dollars, blowing up stuff with artillery and close air support. And so that was my time in the military, I really loved it. I spent eight years with Anglica the whole time. And then in 2003, my last year I spent in Iraq, when the war first kicked off, I was running as an fo for the six engineers out of Portland. And so that's, that's my military time. And when I came out, there wasn't a really good transition process. When we were getting out during that time, it was really rushed. And I can remember, I went from the battlefield, literally, from the sounds of Iraq, to my doorstep in 48 hours. And then I was pretty much just out, there's really no out processing or anything like that. And I started struggle with mental health, almost immediately, dealing with anxiety and nightmares, and not really understanding what that was, and trying to get help with the VA at the time was was not helpful. They just tried to over medicate me, which made the symptoms I was dealing with even worse, you know, the side effects were worse than the symptoms sometimes. And so I struggled and ended up homeless, unemployed and suicidal. And it was a really, really tough transition for me. And so now I really try and capture guys that are getting close to getting out or, or are, you know, within their first year of being out, because it was such a hard transition for me. So those are the guys I really tried to target to get them connected to services, get them connected to other veterans, to help them create a support network for themselves. Because when they get out, you know, there's just not there's there's not a good safety net for guys. And so I really try and help guys in that aspect. Yeah. And before we hit record, I was telling you are in about a situation that came to my attention recently of somebody who's on the verge of getting out of a long career in the military. And there's some pretty significant mental health challenges. And I used to do, I did a 15 year career before I got into social entrepreneurship. In community mental health, and particularly as one of the few male frontline clinicians have worked with a lot of folks who wound up in the community mental health system, with PTSD and other diagnoses coming out in the military. So when your PR person pitched this episode, I was like, Oh, hell yeah. We got a lot to talk about. So I just want to say thank you for your work. I'm so sorry, the transition for you and so many vets is as difficult as you experienced. And listeners, if you haven't yet checked out the statistics about mental health challenges for vets coming out of the service. It's it's astronomical, just the levels of suicidality and mental health challenges that that's faced. So I just want to make sure our listeners know many of you are thinking about issues about communities that are deeply affected by these dynamics today, and Erina. I'm just so glad you're here to talk about this work. Yeah, thank you. I have a quick tip for you guys that are out there. And I'll give it to you guys on the front end of the podcast is if you're getting out or you know somebody who's getting out, you need to get in community with other guys, hopefully other veterans. Because, think about it, we when we were in the military, we didn't do that alone. We didn't go on operations alone. We didn't fight the war alone. And so we shouldn't be trying to fight this battlefield of our mind on our own either. You know, traditional therapy will tell you like, Oh, you just go talk to a counselor and then then you know, you'll be good or here's this here's this app, go ahead and interact with this app and you'll be good or here's this resource, you'll be good But that hasn't been working right, we can see that that that process, that old way of thinking hasn't been working. Now it still has value, but we need to upgrade that. And how we upgrade it is by doing the things we did in the military. When we were in the military, we were part of a unit, we were part of a squad, we had that squad dynamic. And the Department of the Army did a 40 year long study on this. And they determined the number one reason that the US military is successful on the battlefield is because of the strength of the squad, because we fight in squads every member values the squad over themselves, and they fight harder and longer to stay alive because they don't want to let the squad down. So I just reintroduced this component back into being a part of living a successful life is having two or three guys or gals that you're really close with that you can share the struggles with that can help you when you're struggling, and you can help them. It's that squad mentality that's going to make you successful, long term. And it's what I've based my business on my entire nonprofit is based on this concept. And that's the concept. And the theme through the entire book that I wrote, is this small unit dynamic how to be able to work together in a small team of people that you know, and trust. And so if if that's all you get out of this podcast, that that will be enough, right there is to find a small group of guys or gals that you can know and trust and just do live with that you can just be real and authentic with. And that's going to help you tremendously out there.
Paul Zelizer 11:20
Thanks for that tip, Baron. So we're going to do listeners Come with us on a little journey here, because we're gonna get to this work that Aaron is doing with that's in the book and all that. But before we do that, you know, me, listeners, if you've been around for a while, if you're new here, hey, so glad you're here. It's been around for a while, you know that part of what we do here is both deep care about the impact. But we also really help people get their feet as high level entrepreneurs so that we can live a good quality of life and really help people in sustainable ways. If we can't take care of ourselves financially, we're biting our fingernails about how we're going to put food in the refrigerator this week, we have a really hard time meeting our impact goals in a sustainable way. So coming out in the military, and after you sort of like things, got a little bit of like feet on the ground, Aaron, you created your own company, right? Tell us a little bit about your journey as an entrepreneur. And then we're gonna get into this new social impact project that you're bringing your entrepreneurial acumen to, but give us a little bit of sense you have this company that's doing quite well tell us a little bit about that.
Aaron Quinonez 12:30
Yeah, so it's reliable commercial cleaning. So I've got about 110 employees now in the Pacific Northwest. And so we clean commercial buildings, museums, we do a lot of health care and medical buildings. But that was 13 years ago, when I started this company. And I started it out of necessity, honestly, because I was not managing mental health, well, I couldn't hold a job, I would do really good for a while. And it wasn't my performance. That was the problem. It was my attendance was a problem. And the fact that other people didn't want to work with me, because I just wasn't a really easy person to work with, because I wasn't managing mental health. And so I found myself unemployed and looking at being homeless. For the third time, there was barely, barely able to make rent in this little basement apartment that didn't have any insulation on one wall. So I had to hang blankets on it. It just just awful. You know, it's one step away from being being homeless again. And I started a small janitorial company with just me and one other guy scrubbing some toilets in the middle of the night, because it's all I could do to try and feed myself and my family. And so I knew guys in the commercial cleaning industry, I had worked in there before, but none of these guys would hire me because I just wasn't very reliable. And so it's funny because I named my company reliable commercial cleaning, as a way to remind myself like that's what I needed to be was reliable. And so I started just me and one of the guys scrubbing toilets in the middle of the night. And one of my big breaks came when I was working for multi Care Health System. So I was working at the Tacoma General Hospital, and I was stripping and waxing their emergency room floors. And so the emergency room is chaos, especially in a major metropolitan city like Tacoma. And so it's super busy. You're talking stabbings, overdoses, gunshot wounds, it's chaos in there. And most people don't know how to manage chaos. Well, being a murderer.
Paul Zelizer 14:26
You knew a little bit about that, didn't you? Like I can manage
Aaron Quinonez 14:29
the chaos. And here's the thing at the end of the day, cleaning the floor is is not is not as important. As so in. Somebody's gets back in, right. And so I had to look at my my life. And my job is I'm there to support these nurses to give them a clean environment to work in. But I also have to be able to move and get out of their way and give them an opportunity to do their job. My job was just to help them be successful. And so that's how I looked at it. I wasn't there to clean the floor. I wasn't there to empty the trash. I was there strictly to help them be more successful at their job. And it was that mindset that allowed me to control some of that chaos and be able to work in and around the nurses and coordinate with them and ask them like, hey, where do you guys want me tonight, you know, I have my own plan, but I got a, that's got to go out the window, if they want me to change it, and I have to be willing to change it on the fly. If I'm prepping a room to strip out and they need that bed, well, guess what I'm getting my stuff, and I'm getting out of there. And I'm just gonna stand there and wait until another space opens up. And so a lot of companies, they, they have to, you know, it's their labor broker. So you know, those hours, that people aren't being productive, they lose revenue, but I wasn't concerned about that I was concerned about helping these nurses be successful. And it was because of that, the work that I did there, that they offered me a contract to do their full service, janitorial for their outlying buildings there at the hospital. And it was a huge contract. I mean, I went from like zero to 100, where, you know, during the day, I'm interviewing people at Starbucks to hire them to work in the night, you know, I had to hire something like 40 people in the first 30 days. So it was it was a lot of work really fast. But again, it was just that managing chaos that helped me be able to do that. And it was the mindset that my job was to help my customer be successful. I develop that early on. And a lot of that goes back to my time in the Marines in Angular Co. We're the air naval gunfire liaison company. So a big part of what we do is we liaison between the Marine Corps and different militaries that are out there, or the Marine Corps and different branches of our own government or not government, but our own military. So I work with the Army, the Air Force, the Navy, you know, I control their aircraft on station, they can take an angle of cool guy and put us with any unit and we become a force multiplier, because we bring all of that air and artillery capabilities to bear. And so an angler co our job was just to help that unit be more successful on the battlefield. And so I just took that mindset and transitioned it into my business. And it's, it's helped me be really successful out here in the civilian life.
Paul Zelizer 17:17
What are the things that you shared about me about how you run RCC? It's not like if you go to the website, and I'll put a link to the website, listeners, you can go check it out. It's not framed as a social enterprise. But one of the things you shared with me that really got my attention is how your relationship with your employees and some of the things you're offering your employees who again, are doing commercial cleaning, you're basically saying, Let me teach you how to thrive in business in all these very granular ways that I literally have never heard before. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that?
Aaron Quinonez 17:56
Yeah, absolutely. And so I do some mentoring for other business owners too. And so I see this happen a lot, where a lot of the information stays at the top and the executive level, and it filters out through this very small bottleneck to the staff. And so people don't know what they're supposed to be doing. They don't know the expectation, they don't understand how business is supposed to run, all they do is what they're told. And if you do that, then you're never going to be able to empower people to make decisions out there and grow in their leadership capabilities. For some reason, you know, people at the top feel like the only way to stay at the top is to hoard the information. And we do things exactly the opposite. we disseminate that information to everybody. So I teach my people how to be small business owners, because when they're out there, and they're managing their account, they're really managing a small business out there. And that's how I want them to look at it. I want them to take personal responsibility of their accounts of the equipment and the personnel that I'm giving them and, you know, charge over teaching and to be a small unit leader. So we do a lot of leadership teaching here. So I'm part of the John Maxwell team. And I have access to all of that curriculum. And so I realized that if I wanted my company to grow than I needed to grow as a leader, because nobody is going to outgrow me in my company, and if they do, they're going to become my competition. So as I grew and started learning these leadership principles of going to these conferences and gaining this knowledge, I started freely sharing it with all of my staff, all of my supervisors, all of my executive team, and even the people who were junior leaders who are just coming up just coming out of becoming a janitor into like a foreman position, or a floater position, things like that, where they had a little bit extra responsibility. They all come in every quarter, we talk about a different leadership principle, and we go over that. And so they can start using it. And I tell them, like, look, I'm giving you all of this information. You don't have to come to these meetings, but it's really important that you do because the knowledge that I'm giving you, you can take anywhere. Like you don't have to stay here in this company. If you just to move on or start your own business, everything that I'm giving you is going to be very valuable. And you get to take that with you, and it's free. And so they were really, they were really perplexed by that. Like, wait, you're, you're telling us you want us to grow? And if we leave the company, that's okay. And I said, Yeah, absolutely. Like, if you guys, if you guys outgrow your position here, and you want to go do something else, like I'm going to help you get there. And that shocked people. And what it did is it helped people become more loyal to the company, because they realized that, hey, Aaron cares about me as a person, not just the numbers that I'm putting on the board. And so it just changed people's attitude about coming to these meetings, and doing these extra trainings and these exercises, because now they realize that I'm investing in them as a person. And if that helps the company, great, but really, my goal is to invest in them. And I can tell you, you know, each one of each one of these people that I work with each one of them have come to me different times saying, hey, that stuff you taught me, I tried that with my daughter, and it really worked and our relationship is better. Or, you know, my boyfriend, and I tried those techniques with my boyfriend, and we don't argue as much anymore. And I'm like, see, look, you're using it. That's great. That's awesome. And so I really try to invest in people. And I hear a hear sometimes from, you know, business leaders, and they say, Well, what if I, what if I spent all this time and money training this into purse, training this person up? And then they leave the company? I said, Well, yeah, that's, that's definitely that could happen. I said, but what if you don't train them? And they stay? And then I'm just quiet? And let them think about that for?
Paul Zelizer 21:37
What a great question. Oh, my gosh, that's awesome. My guess is they're not I have a hunch what how you might answer this bum announce it anyway. We're in the midst of something that people are talking about in the business world called the Great resignation. Where people are all around the world, it's particularly high in all around the world, people are leaving their jobs. And at unprecedented levels. Like we haven't seen anything like this in our lifetime, and rarely in the entire history of the world, that we're we're not going into an act of war, and people leave because they're going active duty, the numbers of people leaving their workplaces is unprecedented. I'm going to guess, Aaron, that you're seeing less of that. Is that fair to say?
Aaron Quinonez 22:22
Yeah, absolutely. I kind of feel like I'm in this bubble, right. And I'm not, I'm not experiencing that on the level of everybody else. Like we always have turnover, right? When you have a company of over 100 people, you're gonna have turnover. But if I have people that are with me longer than about 18 months, I really don't see much turnover past that point. I just don't, because the culture that we've created here, is, is pretty amazing. And so when you talk about creating culture, it does not happen overnight. It's a slow progression of building trust with your employees, that creates that culture. So there's a lot of companies that try and do this flash in the pan like, Oh, we're gonna create this culture, change our culture, it doesn't happen overnight, it takes a lot of time and energy on the leadership's part to build that trust with the employees. So there's a couple things that you can do to do that. One is to invest in your people with no expectation of return on your investment. So that means investing in them as as employees, you know, teaching them things, giving them leadership skills, helping them when they're struggling in their personal life, like those are things that you give to people that are not going to have a direct return on investment for your business in the short term. But in the long term, it absolutely will. So it's the long game. So there's there's that but that takes that takes a little bit of time, job satisfaction is really important. You know, and you'll you probably you guys out there have heard this before that people don't quit jobs, they quit managers. And it's true. If you have a toxic manager, you have to get rid of them. And so I had this experience, just this year where I had been working with this gal and she had been with our company for about six years. And I'd spent more time and energy investing in her and her leadership than anybody else in the company. You know, I would do one on ones with her, I would teach her these principles, she would go out and do them report back. And she would do she would do well for a bit and then she would drop off and then she would do well for a bit and then she would drop off and go back to her old ways. I even paid for her to go work with another JMT which is Command Master Sergeant Erica Kelly. You know, she just retired from the Air Force. And she was at the Pentagon. And so I paid for her to work with Erica, who's another JMT member. But it just it just got to the point where she was she was doing more damage to the morale then than she was benefiting it. And so I had to let her go and it was tough because she'd been with us for a long time. I'd spent a lot of time and money and energy into her but she was one of those Those people that would keep all that information in power at the top, and she didn't want to let everybody else know what was going on. And so in the military, we've experienced this right guess my secret, you know that you got a lieutenant or Captain guess my secret, you want something done, but he doesn't tell you till the last minute. And that's kind of what she was doing. And so once I let her go, I saw all these other supervisors and leaders in my company, just blossom, it's kind of like when you cut down a big tree, you know, all the other trees grow up really fast, because now they're getting air and light and water, they were being starved out because of this big shadow. And so sometimes you have to do that in your company, you have to look at those people who they may be doing good at their job, but they're not managing people well. And those kinds of people will destroy your business, because they damaged the culture, they damage the morale of the company. And so that's one thing that we do really well here is that we, we've created that culture, and we manage it well. And so that's something that if you're experiencing turnover, or if you don't want to experience a lot of turnover, and people quitting, you know, really invest in your people invest in your culture. And the other thing is that you have to build trust with your employees. And that takes time, right, and it takes a lot of sacrifice on your part. Because if you say you're going to do something, and you actually have to follow through with it, you actually have to be there and do those things for people. So it's things like that, that, that really help help keep your staff motivated at getting the job done. Because it's it's more about the especially this generation of worker that's coming up, you know, the, the late model Gen X, or the early model, Gen X is and and the millennials, they, they want more out of a job than just come and clock in and clock out. They want to feel like they're part of something that's bigger than themselves. And so as a company, you've got to look at what is that? What is it that we're doing in the community that's bigger than ourselves, like we clean? We clean hospitals and clinics, right? Like that's what we do. But what how does that really affect the world. And so as a company, you've got to look at what can I pour into, take part of our profit and our time and pour it into something that's bigger than ourselves. That gives people a sense of pride of, hey, I work here as a janitor. But my company supports this thing, which makes a huge difference in the world. And so for us, we're My company is a huge supporter of que missions, which is my nonprofit, which we go down to Mexico every year, and we build homes for the homeless, and I take veterans down there to I put them through my healing through service course. And it helps them overcome trauma. And at the same time, we're building homes for the homeless in Mexico, and the majority of my employees are Hispanic. So that's part of our culture. So they know that when they're out there working, that the money that that they're making for the company, I'm not just gonna go buy a yacht with it, right? I'm actually reinvesting that into the community. I'm reinvesting that back into the veterans that are in their local community, I'm building homes for the homeless in Mexico, I'm doing these things out there, with the capital that we make from the company. So those are two things that you can really do to create good culture is find something to invest in, that's bigger than your company. And then really support your, your team members that are out there on the frontlines working every single day.
Paul Zelizer 28:33
Beautiful and and listeners, I don't care what kind of venture or enterprise you have, what your particular impact are, I do care. But in this context, whatever your impact area is, I hope you take to heart what Aaron just gave us, He gave us a huge gift as a community, and I hope you choose to take that in. So let's do this in a moment, I want to come back and get into the specifics of the work you're doing with veterans, and what that looks like what the offerings are. And it's just incredibly important work in a space where so much failure and people slipping through the cracks. Before we do that, I just want to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. Do you have a business that's about making the world a better place, and you want it to grow, both in terms of the impact that you're having, helping more people and your income so you can have a good quality sustainable life? If so, I'd like to talk to you about some research for a second. When scientists look at what actually contributes to humans meeting their goals, whether it's a wellness goal you have or a business goal you have, the single biggest predictor of whether we hit our goals or not, is what they call social support. In other words, are you part of an ecosystem of other people who are on a similar journey? This is how a 12 step programs work right? Other people who are on a similar journey that can share both strategies and tips for dealing with certain moments of the journey you're in right now. As well as the emotional support starting a business, especially in impact business, there's a lot of ups and downs and people who've been on that ride and understand and can help you stay with it and see the long haul. If that sounds interesting to you aware printers has are aware printers can be an incredibly generous and knowledgeable group of hundreds of social entrepreneurs from around the world who support each other in growing our impact in our income. If you'd like to find out more, you can go to a where printers.com forward slash community. And thank you to everybody in the world printers community who sponsors this podcast. So Aaron, and the second part of the show, not now that we've kind of like helped our listeners see, oh, this guy knows something about business. And this guy knows something about veterans and people coming out of the service and really hitting you know, the wall. Let's talk about this incredible body of work called healing through service, like what led you to want to write the book and create the course like, what were you thinking there?
Aaron Quinonez 31:16
Yeah, that's, that's a great, great question. So I, when I started my company, I was still struggling really bad with mental health. So there were times where, because the stress, there's a tremendous amount of stress. When it comes to running a business, like people who've never run a business before, you have no idea what you're getting into, like, I thought I knew, but I had no idea. So there's because everything is your responsibility. And there's nobody to go to to be like, Hey, should we, you know, buy this widget to do this thing. It's like you're you have to make that decision. And you have to own it, right? Because you make those decisions, good, bad or indifferent. They're, they're your decisions. So there's a tremendous amount of stress. And you make decisions that affect people's lives, like they depend on you to make good decisions, so they can feed your family at night. And so that's a tremendous amount of responsibility. So I was struggling with mental health, I couldn't get help with the VA. It just was not helping me. I had just started going to church, probably about three months before I started my business. So I had never been to church before I was just trying to learn these biblical principles, understand who God was, and my place in that story. And so I was with a small group of guys from the church, and we would do a Bible study every week. And so I'd go there, and they would teach me about the Bible and how to read it and what these different principles meant. And so as I was building my business, I was I was learning about the Bible. So a lot of the principles that I use in my company, are come straight from scripture, on how I operate things. And so I was probably nine months after I started my company, I got invited to go to Mexico and build a home for a homeless family. And I was like, I don't really want to do that. It doesn't seem like a lot of fun for me. But I did, I went pretty begrudgingly. And you'll notice that's a theme in my life. I do these things, because I feel like God calls me to him. But most times, I'm very apprehensive about it, right? I'm very much like the Jonas story. Like I don't want to go to Nineveh and tell them about God. So but I do these things. And so I went to Mexico, and it was the first time in my life. That was not my life. But the first time since I've been back from combat that I actually had any real emotion other than anger and depression. It was incredible. And I was like, Wow, this, I don't know what this is. But I need more of this right here. And so I went back to my church, and I said, hey, when do we do this? Again, they said, Oh, we only do it once a year. I was like, well, that's not good enough for me. So I need to do more of this. So they they connect me with all these different organizations. And I would go about four times a year. And I would go to Haiti and Honduras and Cambodia. And I would build churches and schools and orphanages, I would dig wells, all of these different things because it was really helping my mental health. And I didn't understand why. So I started reading the Bible and reading these medical journals, and I created just a plan for myself just do my journaling. I was journaling and realizing these things, and realizing like, hey, the Bible has been telling us the same thing. And guess what these medical journals over here are telling us that research, these research studies are telling us that when we give social support, it helps our mental health like this is quantifiable data, you can look at this in these in these studies. And so it's really cool. I noticed, you know, when the sponsor came on the, you know, giving social support. That's such a huge impact on our mental health. And you guys don't have to believe me, you can research this research, just doing the old Google machine there and say, does social support help your mental health and there are hundreds of studies that are going to come up that are going to show you that? Yes, it absolutely does. It absolutely helps boost your mental health. And so that's what I was learning that there was I was finding healing through serving other people. But, and so I kept doing it and doing it and doing it. And I did that for about seven years, I had about 30 trips under my belt. And my goal was to retire at 40, which would have been three years ago. And so that was my entire goal. I'd worked really hard, I grown the company. I had some real estate holdings. And I decided that that's that was the goal. Well, six years ago, God called me to lead other veterans onto the mission field. And I was like, I don't want to do that. That's a lot of work. I've already done a startup, like it's tough. But I ended up doing it. I did it. I led my first team down in Mexico six years ago, and we built a home for a homeless family. And I started teaching these guys the same things that I had learned. And it wasn't like the book is now it's just a small little guide book, a little field manual, right? And that, just my Journal notes and stuff like that, that I had taken and teaching these guys about the brain. And I started giving that to these guys as they came through the program. And man, I just watched these guys blossom overnight, what had taken me seven years to figure out on the mission field, with this little guide book, these guys were able to get on board and turn their life around. Within the first year or two of doing this, these practices where they're serving their community. I've got a guy who went through my program very, very early on, his name's Patrick, right. And you can look this guy up. He's at a Coos Bay, Oregon, he runs a nonprofit called Operation rebuild hope. And he went through my program when he was on suicide watch, actually. And he went through. And it changed his life radically. And he said, I want to go home. And I want to continue doing this. And so he had a passion to help veterans do repairs on their homes that they couldn't physically do because of a disability or age. And so he started doing that. And over the last few years, he's transitioned into housing, homeless veterans. And so he started what's called Brian's home. And it's a transitional house for veterans. And last two years, no, two years ago, the State gave him a $3 million grant because he was doing such a good job at housing homeless veterans that they basically turned over their whole Oregon coast, homeless Veteran Program to him. So they gave him a team of psychologists and social workers and peer support $3 million budget. And the first thing he said was, this is great, but I need emergency housing. So I need this hotel. If it's a nuisance hotel, I need you guys to help me purchase this hotel. So it can be emergency housing, to get him into transitional housing. And just this just last year, he took his first person all the way through and got them into permanent housing, homeownership. So he has the three tiers there, where he has emergency housing, to get them off the street, start getting them connected to services, then the transitional housing. And then he moves him from transitional to long term permanent housing through homeownership. And he's just doing an amazing job out there. Here's a guy who over the last five years, who was suicidal, and looking at homelessness, and now he's running the largest, most successful veteran homeless outreach on the Oregon coast. Like it's incredible, when you learn that the key to being successful is to help others. There's no limits to what you can accomplish out there. And that's what my program really teaches. And I break it down, I teach people how the brain actually operates. So you understand that this isn't hyperbole, this isn't some, you know, pie in the sky type messaging that I'm giving you that these these things and principles that I'm teaching are rooted in science. And they're backed by 1000s of years of Scripture. And then I take those three concepts, those three pieces, I put it together into an action plan in each chapter, and you go out and you do something, you do an activity, to prove to yourself that what I'm saying actually works. So we give you we introduce the concept, we show you what the science says, we tell you what Scripture says, and then we give you something to go and do physically so you can prove it to yourself. So really, I'm just Mr. Miyagi and people through the process, right? Like, in the beginning, they're just painting the fence and then they realize like, Okay, I understand why we're painting the fence because it helps other people. And that, in turn, helps me
Paul Zelizer 39:13
wax on wax off through trauma, right? That's right. If anybody's not from a place where the movie The Karate Kid is the reference point for you. We're talking about this movie. And it's a older man who's very skilled in martial arts, teaching a younger person martial arts by doing very repetitive tasks like painting fences, but the way he's teaching him to paint the fence is literally teaching him the basics of martial arts. And then eventually, he puts it all together and the kid becomes a champion. So that's the short version of the story. So Aaron, this is so exciting. I really encourage people to go get the book, check out the course you've got an app on the way right, so many good there's research partnerships happening And this is all like really incredibly effective in a space where we see just profound failure over and over again, and you're doing awesome work, can't encourage our listeners enough to go check out the book. Talk to us a little bit, you're a guy with like big visions and real capacity to make things happen at quite a impressive degree of scale. When you dream into this body of work, you know, three years out or five years out? Where's it going?
Aaron Quinonez 40:28
That's, that's a great, that's a great question. I am already moving toward that. So we created the book and an online course. And we're trying to get it into churches and veteran organizations so they can start utilizing this to empower the people that they're serving, and show them that there's healing through service. And so I want to help veterans learn that to be successful in life, they need to reinvest in their own communities and start serving where they have a, you know, a niche in their heart to serve. And so for me, I want to change the world through this philanthropic endeavor to teaching people that, that being successful isn't what you see on TV, it isn't the Bernie Madoff right, as much money as I can stack, and the yacht that I can buy. It's that's not success. Success is about helping other people be successful. And that's a huge principle that John Maxwell teaches, is that if you want to be successful in life, it depends on your ability to help others be successful. That's the goal. And so it doesn't matter what business you have, if you're selling ice cream, if you're like me, and you're a janitor, my job is to help my clients be successful. And you have to believe that down to your core, that whatever you're doing in business, if you're selling real estate, if you're selling insurance, whatever you're doing in business, that's not your job, that may be the title that people give you. But your job is to help others be successful. And if you can get that down into your heart and into your mind, that my job is to help others be successful, you in turn will have an incredible amount of success. So for me, I want to teach other people that right there to be successful means that you have to help others be successful. That's the that's the key. That's the secret. That's the goal. The more people that I can help an influence, the more successful I will become by proxy. And so you have to build trust with people because nobody wants to work with anybody that they that they that they don't trust, right. So you have to be able to build that trust. So for me looking long term, five years, 10 years down the road, I already have a branch that we started just a few months ago. Well, last month, actually in North Carolina, of the nonprofit, where there's a group of churches out there, they're going to utilize this with the active duty and start running this curriculum and taking trips overseas, helping these guys learn that there's healing due to service. But long term goal for me is really this app. So the curriculum that I created, goes into the app that I built, which is a suicide prevention app that the medical trials just came back, we were 100% successful. The the app, the app was 100% successful at preventing suicide, and it had a 0% risk. readmittance rate into the emergency room, which is huge, because a lot of times when somebody goes in for help with suicidal ideations, they'll come back within the first 30 days needing help again. And so with this, utilizing this technology, based on these principles that I talked about in the book, not one person had to come back in. So all of them are still alive that went through the medical trial, and not one of them had to go back in seeking help for suicidal ideations. So my my goal five years, 10 years down the road is that we're going to change the way people think about mental health. And we're going to give them the tools necessary to be able to help one another. Because depending on the psychologist and the professionals, it's just not a sustainable model, there's way more need than there is supply, there's were way more of us who need help, then there are therapists available to help us when we need it. So we need to be able to teach one another how to help each other just like first aid, right. And our job as the friend or family member is to keep that person alive long enough to get them to the professional medical treatment, just like with CPR, or the AED system or first aid, our job is to be the first responder to help them and get them to the doctor. And so if we can change this concept, and utilize this app, you know, I tell people that I may not change the world. But I think that this app through utilizing this app, we might just say the life of somebody who will.
Paul Zelizer 44:34
And thank you so much for being on the show today. It's been an honor to have you here.
Aaron Quinonez 44:39
Yeah. Thank you so much, Paul. I appreciate it.
Paul Zelizer 44:42
So listeners in the show notes will be the book you can go check out our CC operation rebuild home all the things we've touched on, check out the show notes and please do us a favor. Go to help people in your network about the great work that Aaron and his team are doing. We all know or if you don't Oh no, please do a little research on the profound mental health issues that our veterans are struggling with. And a simple book, maybe even just share this podcast link with them somehow get them in touch with what Aaron and his team are doing. Before we go, I just want to say, we love, love, love listener, suggested topics and guests. So if you have an idea for a show, please go to the where printers website, go to our contact page and we have our guidelines right there. If you there's three of them. If you go check, check tech, then please send in your idea. So for now, I just want to say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care in these intense times. And thank you for all the positive impact that you're working for in our world.