The Story
Ten and a half months in a fox hole in Beirut during hostile fire teaches you what a quarterly target really is.
Before the pitch decks, the keynote stages, and the seven-figure account books, there was a hole in the ground. Ten and a half months of it. No conference room. No coffee break. Just cold dirt, a rifle, the man next to you, and the discipline of doing the next right thing — over and over and over again.
For 10.5 months, eighteen of us — men of NavSpecWarGru2 and BMU2 — planned and re-planned from that fox hole, day and night, working to bring a measure of peace and calm to the region. Then, in the early hours of October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber struck the Multinational Force peacekeepers at the U.S. Marine barracks and the French paratrooper barracks. 241 American Marines, sailors and soldiers were killed and 128 wounded. I was one of those eighteen men, and I stayed onsite through the aftermath until we returned to the United States in late December 1983 — by the grace of God.
That is where the discipline of doing the next right thing stopped being a habit and became something else entirely: integrity and character.
The military didn't hand me a sales playbook. It handed me something better: the absolute conviction that you can outlast almost anything if you decide, up front, that quitting isn't on the table. That single lesson has been the engine behind every territory I've turned around, every team I've rebuilt, and every deal I've closed when the spreadsheet said it was already dead.
I've spent my career since carrying that mindset into sales — first as an individual contributor grinding out quota, then leading teams, then building the strategies and playbooks that helped organizations scale. Resilience isn't a slide in my deck. It's the deck.
"Character is what you do on month nine, when nobody's watching and nothing feels like it's working. Sales is no different."