Turning conflict and chaos into opportunities for growth and prosperity is no easy feat. Joining us in this episode is former Army Ranger, co-founder, and CEO of Combat Flip-Flops, Matthew “Griff” Griffin. Discover how Griff’s experiences in conflict zones shaped a business model that promotes peace through trade, bringing prosperity to areas of conflict. From a boot factory in Kabul to overcoming challenges with a guerrilla flip flop factory in his garage, Griff’s story is one of resilience and innovation.
This episode is packed with insights on leadership, perseverance, and the transformative power of honesty in business. Griff also shares his experiences creating award winning documentaries and the impact of educating families affected by conflict zones.
Check out Combat Flip-Flops on X – TikTok – Instagram – YouTube – Facebook, or visit them online at combatflipflops.com. You can also connect with Griff on LinkedIn.
Matthew Griffin: The amount of intensity and focus you need to bring to your life and change to stop focusing on yourself to focusing on others. And the more that you focus on others, the more successful you’re going to be. And the best team leaders that I’ve seen in the Rangers were guys that gave up everything–once they give up everything about themselves, but they made their men their primary focus.
John Berry: Welcome to the Veteran Led podcast, where we talk with leaders who use their military experiences to develop great organizations and continue to serve their communities. Today’s guest is Matt Griffin, CEO and founder of Combat Flip Flops. Welcome to the show, Griff.
Matthew Griffin: Well, thanks for having me, John. I’m looking forward to being here today.
John Berry: You’ve done some amazing things in the military, but after service is where you really stepped up and set the example for our fellow Veterans. At Veteran Led, we like to talk about having a bigger, better future after our military service. You create Combat Flip Flops, you’ve created a couple of documentaries, you’ve co-authored a book, and done a lot more things that I probably don’t even know about. Tell us a little bit about once you got out of service, how did you come up with a Combat Flip Flops?
Matthew Griffin: I went through the standard–getting a civilian job, figuring things out, learning how to be home with the family. I took a job as a homebuilder in 2006, and then I lost my job in the crash of 2008. I ended up getting hired by a company called Remote Medical International in Seattle, where I was the military sales manager, and I started putting clinics and importing pharmaceuticals and medical supplies into conflict zones around the world. I liked being alive. When I was going to these war zones, I didn’t have a platoon of Rangers and armored vehicles and body armor. I had a backpack, cash, and a smile, and I had to figure out how to get there, do my job effectively, and then get home. And being a map guy, if anybody who’s ever been to combat over the last 20 years, usually they have the daily brief that says, “Here’s where the bombs went off over the last day or 48 hours.” And then if you put all those on a map, you start seeing little hotspots or nodes where all the bombs and the attacks go off. And they’re typically around the embassies, military or military compounds, and reporters.
Matthew Griffin: I was like, okay, I’m just going to stay away from those areas the best that I can. And where are the areas that that don’t have bombs, and the areas that don’t have bombs or attacks or areas that are flourishing with small business. And so that was just the standard street markets. That was the standard grocery stores. Those are all the other places where the locals are living and thriving, and it’s all of the chaos around them. And I would stay above a grocery store. I would hire the owner’s brother as my driver and my fixer, and they would keep me alive because I was bringing prosperity to them, and it was regular business. And everywhere I went, I kept seeing this, whether it was Africa, Middle East, Southeast Asia. I would see small businesses, where there were leaders in their local communities. It just kept happening to me everywhere I went. Whether you call it the Ether or God or whatever, you listen to that little voice in the back of your head keeps saying, “Why am I being shown this over and over and over again?” One day, I walked into a combat boot factory in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Matthew Griffin: I had spent my previous three deployments there, only generally working during the hours of darkness, going after the bad dudes. And it was the first positive thing I’d seen. We’d always heard about these development efforts. We’d always heard about all of the building that was going up around it. I saw people working, and each person there was supporting 5-13 family members. I was like, “Okay, this is how we’re going to win the war. This is America. This is positivity. This is what we’re supposed to do. We are bringing prosperity to an area that never had it before.” I looked at the factory manager, just thinking about the Marshall Plan, post-World War II, and how Vietnam turned post-Vietnam. What are you guys going to make when the war ends? He says, and this is in 2009, mind you, he says, “We’re not going to make anything. Everybody here is going to go out of work. Nobody’s going to want to buy anything from Afghanistan.” So I went from inspiration to fury in about three breaths. And in that moment, I looked down on a table and I saw a combat boot sole with a flip-flop thong punched through it.
Matthew Griffin: And combat and flip-flops, the juxtaposition of the words, I went through my head and I said, All right, you mind if I run with this? And he says, “Yeah, sure, dude, go ahead”. And I set it down. I got in my car, went back to my hotel. I called my buddy, my Ranger buddy Lee in LA. It was like 2 in the morning where he was at. And I said, “Hey, man, we’re going to make flip flops at a combat boot factory in Afghanistan.” And he says, “Alright, man, let’s do it.” So we started.
John Berry: And I love the disclaimer, not for running, even worse for fighting.
Matthew Griffin: Yeah, bad for running, worse for fighting, correct.
John Berry: What’s interesting to me about your insight was that when I was over there, I was there as a logistician. I was an infantry guy that then got to be branch transferred to logistics. We had backpacks full of money. We call it FOO money, and we would use it to buy stuff on the economy. But it’s just like you said, it’s like, well, this is really a short term solution. Because once we leave, what’s going to happen to these businesses that we’re propping up? It wasn’t sustainable. We’re here now and everybody’s happy because we’re giving them money and winning hearts and minds. But what happens when we leave?
John Berry: Exactly. It’s laws of supply and demand. We had a huge international force there, really tough logistics getting into the country and plenty of cash. They would drive the price up and we’d be willing to pay it because we had to. And then when we leave, they’re used to living this lifestyle for charging whatever, just as an example, $5 for a loaf of flat bread. Well, now there’s not the money there. There’s not the demand there. So what does that do to their economy once we leave? And it destroys it, is what happens.
John Berry: So you came up with a plan to sustain it. And one of the things that impressed me most when you were talking on another podcast, you said, “Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.” It’s one thing to be able to say, “Well, this is what we’re going to do. This is how we’re going to do it.” But when you actually have to move product, move something from point A to point B, and get it there on time, it’s not that easy.
Matthew Griffin: Well, it’s not even that. It’s It’s seeing three to four months ahead and saying, I have to order these things from the supplier. I need to move it from outside of the country, inside of the country. Then I have to put it in the warehouse and distribute it and get it to the guys in time. You’re thinking multiple steps ahead in order to be successful in your annual plan, quarterly plan, even a weekly plan, ahead of time. You got to be ahead of it. And that’s something that I think the Veteran or tactical industry, they typically put the weight on the shooter the operator, the Navy SEAL, the Green Beret, the Army Ranger. But behind every one of those guys, there was 8 to 10 people working in the background for months on end making it happen so they could take care of something over a 2 to 5 minute mission.
John Berry: And even in logistics, the best plans fall apart. And you went through that in your story about how there was problem after problem, but you were vulnerable and open with your customers, and they stuck with you. So tell us about that.
Matthew Griffin: So we started a Kickstarter in 2011. We raised $72,000 against our goal of $15,000. We were the number one veteran-funded company in Kickstarter history at that point. And then we launched the business. We delivered late. We had all kinds of problems. We were making promises to our customers that we couldn’t keep, because we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We were just figuring it out. And we were very vulnerable and open with our customers about it. And they stuck with us.
Matthew Griffin: So I read the Timothy Ferriss 4-Hour Work Week book, which is…it was a great book, and it has a lot of great principles. But if you think you’re going to get into it immediately going on 4-Hour Work Week, you’re drastically wrong. So we had come up with the idea. We had built the product samples and the photo samples. We had gone and developed a website. We had gone to SHOT Show. We started releasing the product, and we were pre-selling the items. So we sold about 4,000 pair of footwear in about 48 hours, which was just mind-blowing for us. It’s like, oh, small business is easy. This is great. Well, at the same time, there was a cross-border shooting between US forces and Pakistani forces that shut down the entire Pakistan border for logistics to the US effort in Afghanistan. And that was the route that we were going to use to get our supplies into the factory. That cost us a $10,000 air shipment to get our materials in. That was out of our first go. It was like, oh, there’s a problem. Okay, it’s steep. We’ll pay it. There’s enough margin in there.
Matthew Griffin: We might break even. And then the Obama administration announced the end of the Afghan War in 2014. And so the Afghans had all of their funding pulled in the coalition leadership for their purchasing and for the building of their military, and it passed all the responsibilities over to the Afghan leaders. Well, they looked at the price of buying stuff in Afghanistan because you got to buy all this supplies from out of the country anyway. There’s no rubber trees, there’s no leather tanneries, there’s no shoestring factories in Afghanistan. So you have to buy everything outside the country, bring it in, manufacture it, and distribute it versus, well, let’s just buy it from China. It’s a significant savings, and we have a limited budget. We need to support our service members. So the Afghans cut all the contracts to the Afghan factories that we were using. So we were going to leverage their overhead. And so that happened. We said, we’re going to do one run. It’ll be a cool story. We could write a book about it. Maybe somebody will make a movie someday, whatever. And then we’ll be done. We’ll be fine. Even if we break even, it’ll be a good year long project.
Matthew Griffin: That’s just a really good story to tell. Well, we were supposed to take delivery in June, which then turned into July, which then turned into August. And so we were so fed up with it. My brother and I went down to the surplus store in Seattle, bought every duffle bag they had available, and then and we flew to Kabul to go get our footwear. When we showed up, we found that we had thousands of pairs of beautifully assembled footwear made out of bad materials. Our material supplier in Asia bait and switched us. So we just smoked about a pack of cigarettes in 20 minutes. We cried a little bit. We called our wives and told them what would happen. And bad news doesn’t get better over time. It just never does. And so I just crafted an email I took some photos, and I said, Lee, and he was still back in LA. I said, “Hey, you got to email our customers and let them know what happened, and we’ll figure it out.” But there’s no other option other than just to tell people what happened. Just be honest. And out of the 4,000 pairs sold, we had three people ask for their money back.
Matthew Griffin: And then when we got back into production, two of them repurchased. So it just goes into showing you how there are really good people out there that are willing to support you. If they see you’re working at a very difficult problem, they understand there are going to be problems while trying to solve a problem, and they’re willing to support you in doing it, and they did. And I’m going to–this is a longer response, but we found another factory. It was too expensive to work with. We found a third factory. They wanted to work with us. I leveraged every credit card I had. I bought 4,000 more pair of materials on my personal credit card. And then right as we were getting ready to ship them the materials, that factory called us and told us they just had their contract pulled. We were going to have to guarantee 80,000 pair of footwear to them in the next year. Otherwise, they couldn’t manufacture for us.
John Berry: And I read something, and I don’t know where. So I want to verify it here, but it said, basically, and I’ll just read from my book, Leaders never let Blue Falcons dictate the success or failure of the mission. When Army Vet Matthew Griffin started Combat Flip Flops, failure appeared at every turn. The first factory created a shoddy product that they had to give away. They found a second factory, but it shut down in the middle of production. And then, quote, you, “We made 4,000 pairs of flip flops in my garage to get the company going. It’s lots of hard work, but surrender is not a Ranger word.”
Matthew Griffin: Surrender is not a Ranger word.
John Berry: And it goes on to say, “Griffin was let down by his major manufacturers, but he knew his company’s success rested on his shoulders.” And so that’s, in essence, what you just told us. It’s not just you going all in, doing everything you can. You got to be able to rely on your partners, your vendors, everybody else. And when it falls apart, instead of pointing the fingers, which you could have several times, you pointed the thumb and said, “Hey, this is where we are.” I’m sure it was embarrassing and soul-crushing, but you took responsibility, shouldered more than your share of the burden for what had happened, and they stuck with you. I think that’s a really important lesson for anybody in business, that if you’re going to lie about something, you’re going to lose all credibility. But if you go ugly early and let them know, people are going to be more likely to stay with you. So once you got those customers or flip flops after, what, almost a year?
Matthew Griffin: A year, yeah. We had to ship that round of material to my house. And as it bobbed across the ocean, I sold everything of value in my house, and we built a gorilla flip flop factory in my garage, and friends and fellow Veterans showed up. And from 4 a.m. to 7 p.m., every day for four months, we manufactured flip flops. And I hand-signed a note in every single pair. We threw a piece of Bazooka bubble gum in there with them, and then people were stoked to get them. Just after being a part of such a story, I think they were just really thankful to be a part of it, overcoming such significant challenges because we all have challenges in our lives, and it’s very rare that we get to be able to push all the way through over this period of time. I think people were really thankful to be a part of that story and contributing to the success of the company, which has grown so much over the years.
John Berry: And did you find that that really built loyalty? That because they stuck with you initially, that those customers had a higher lifetime value that they kept coming back? Or were you even tracking that stuff back then?
Matthew Griffin: No, we do. We have every record of every customer that’s ever bought our stuff all the way back to the beginning. And I think the direct connection to me and our team, there was only four of us at the time. But generally, if you were going to write the company, I was going to respond back to you immediately. I don’t know how many hours I spend on customer service emails, customer service calls, but when like, oh, no, it’s the guy that I saw on TV. He’s calling me. Yeah, man, this is my personal cell phone. I just want to let you know what’s going on. And just being honest. I mean, that’s the best thing you can do, is honesty is the best policy. And if we screw it up, we will own it. But if people say, “Hey, man, there’s this problem”. I promise you I’m going to solve it. If you be patient with me, I will come through for you. And then you come through for them, and yeah, that builds loyalty. What other company is going to do that for you these days? It’s not going to be Amazon. It’s not going to be whatever online store you get.
Matthew Griffin: It’s like you get a call from the CEO.
John Berry: So at what point did you guys grow out of the guerrilla factory and into a bigger facility?
Matthew Griffin: So I made another bad decision of investing a significant amount of money into going to the biggest shoe show in Las Vegas. And we went down there and we were expecting buyers to come and look at our mission, look at what we were doing, look at our brand, and then be able to support what we’re doing in order to grow out. And while we were there, my brother Andy, who’s our production manager, President, he went to look at all the different suppliers there, and he found that Colombia had a free trade agreement with the US. They had beautiful leathers. They had amazing construction. We walked into their booth, and all of their shoes and their products were just unbelievably beautiful. And their pricing was spectacular. And I said, I looked at our mission statement. Everything always comes back for a mission statement. Empower the mindful consumer to manufacture peace through trade? There’s more to it than that. But there is nothing about our mission statement that said, “Afghanistan”. It’s like, we’re going to help entrepreneurs affected by conflict. Colombia is a narco finance insurgency with mountain people in Afghanistan, narco finance insurgency with mountain people.
Matthew Griffin: This mission is not just Afghanistan, it’s the world. How do we recover from war in a way that our government hasn’t been willing to in the last 70 years? And so we decided, hey, we’re going to start with these guys in Colombia, and that was in 2013. And as we were wrapping up the production in my garage, we started importing Colombian products. And we took the guerrilla flip flops factory. We sold all of our production equipment, our ovens, and our presses, and a few other things. And then we figured out the dimension of the box that they were shipping it to us in, and then re-cubed out every square inch of my garage to fit the most amount of flip-flops possible in there. And that’s right around the same time that the story, it picked up so much traction. We got invited to be on Shark Tank, and we fulfilled every one of those Shark Tank orders out of my garage.
John Berry: At first, you were skeptical of Shark Tank. Why?
Matthew Griffin: I’m not a big TV guy. I’m not a big pop culture guy. And in the limited times where I’ve been in a restaurant or something and seen it, and I was a struggling small business owner, watching these multimillionaires or billionaires tear down these entrepreneurs on TV, I’m like, wow, they’re just doing it for entertainment value. This isn’t cool. And that was my only exposure to it–maybe 15 or 20 pitches that I had watched collectively over a few years. And the producer called me and I said, “No, man, we’re good.” And I told my CMO, who was marketing guy. So obviously, he’s into pop culture and media and watching what’s going on. He says, “You just don’t understand the Shark Tank effect. It’s a real thing. You’re now being put in front of millions of as a cool and innovative product. It’s a brand launcher.” And so I called the guy back and I applied. And we got on and we got a three shark deal, which was amazing.
John Berry: What was that like working with Mark Cuban on that deal?
Matthew Griffin: Mark is a very busy guy. And the one thing that I will say about him is he always responds. And he will do it in a very direct manner that’s in your best interest, which is in his best interest. But if I send an email now, I will have a response in 30 minutes, which is just tremendous. I think about a guy who has got hundreds of businesses in his portfolio. I can write him directly, and he takes the time immediately to respond to me to provide direction. I think he’s just been great to work with. His team has done what they’ve needed to to support our business, and I’m just thankful that for his partner.
John Berry: You also have a long history of giving back, especially to Afghanistan. Tell us a little bit about that.
Matthew Griffin: Yeah. Our primary charity for the past–oh, man, I’m forgetting how many years we’ve been in business now–but we started in 2013 and it ended in 2021, but we put Afghan girls in school. We worked with Aid Afghanistan For Education, which is one of the leading literacy programs, Afghanistan for Women. The reason we did that is because educated women create educated families. Educated families are harder to radicalize. My mindset, my view, as always as a warrior, I want to win a war. I want to represent America positively. Winning a war doesn’t mean you have to throw the most around of lead down range. It means we have to have the outcome that we want. If our desire on this war and terrorism is to end terrorism, I believe the simplest, most effective and ethical solution is to educate women. If educated women are there, they’re going to make sure their kids are educated and they’re going to be harder to radicalize.
John Berry: It’s an outstanding story, but it doesn’t end there. You’ve also done a couple of documentaries that I’d love for you to tell us about–skiing the highest mountain in Iraq, and then, of course, the D-day jump at the 75th Commemorative Anniversary. So if you could just tell us a little bit about what was the inspiration for doing those, and did those help the Combat Flip Flops brand for you being the face out there doing these amazing things?
Matthew Griffin: So I’ll answer the second question first. I don’t think it helped the Combat Flip Flops brand. Yeah, I think just the way the media and social media goes these days people will see me, but they won’t associate me with a brand. And the documentary was more important than a marketing effort for the company to a degree. Accomplishing the mission and the message wasn’t salesy for my brand. It was getting that message out there. So Stacy Bare, he runs a program called Adventure Not War, and he was planning to be the first guy to ski off the tallest mountain in Iraq. And he called me and said, “Hey, do you want to be a part of this?” And I said, “Yes. Yeah, I do. So very cool.” We worked with Max Lowe and went out there and created a film. We had two cameramen, a couple of mics, three skiers, and there was five of us in a crew. We contracted some drivers and some helpers and a guide and went out there and we hauled our base camp up through 3,000 feet of minefields and ski off the top. And it turned out to be an award-winning documentary that got plenty of recognition in Cannes and Tribeca. That was my first taste of documentary film work.
Matthew Griffin: Then about two years later, I was going to go jump into the 75th anniversary of D-Day. I’m an Army Ranger, and I’m one of my buddies in a Ranger group floated that he was going to jump. So I went and I signed up with the Round Canopy Parachute team. That is an excellent organization, by the way, the Round Canopy Parachute Team. And I posted it on my Facebook, and a buddy of mine’s mom She has Scoti Domeij, and her son is Kristoffer Domeij, who was Sergeant First Class Kris Domeij, which was the most deployed soldier in American history to ever be killed in action. So he was killed in October of 2011, I believe, is the year. And she goes, I want to jump, too. And again, problems, solutions. You can’t tandem an older woman on a static line jump. It’s just too dangerous. And so we said, okay, well, we have to figure out freefall. And I called the Round Canopy Parachute team. Bill Markham and the guys there were amazing. And they said, yeah, there are freefall loads. They’re not guaranteed, but we can work with you to get a freefall load to make this happen.
Matthew Griffin: And so at the time, I didn’t know how to skydive. I had only been static line certified. So I had to learn how to skydive. I had to find a Tandem master. I found another Army Ranger to help Tandem her. And then, thankfully, the drop zone that jumped at was full of Red Bull guys. And so we found all the cameramen that we needed to make it happen. And we all went to Normandy with partnership with Google and Devin Supertramp. We all put it all together and we made this documentary that within less than a fiscal quarter made it into the Sundance Film Festival, which was pretty amazing. It was a good time. But I would say if you guys watch it, don’t watch it around other people if you’re afraid of crying, because there’s always one scene in there. I don’t know how many times I’ve watched it, but it’s always cutting onions.
John Berry: Yeah. Amazing documentary and so well done. And then that begs the question, what next? I mean, if we go through, you’re a 2nd Ranger Battalion. You’re an Officer, West Point graduate leading soldiers, and then come back, it starts to make a difference in those same areas. I think when I remember reading about this, it was the Combat Flip Flop came from the idea that the ANA, the Afghan National Army, we were putting them in boots, but they were used to moving around in flip flops because they were praying multiple times a day. So how did that click in your head? How did you say, wait a minute, these guys don’t wear boots. They should be wearing flip flops. That’s what they normally wear. How did that come about in your head? That wasn’t me.
Matthew Griffin: That was the factory manager who was running that factory. A former Marine named John Boyer was witnessing. I mean, his factory was right down the road from the basic training center for the Afghan National Army, and they were obviously going there to see what the soldiers needed so that way they could produce equipment. And then he just saw the problem of them losing tens of thousands of man hours per day because Afghan soldiers don’t know how to tie shoelaces. So he said, I’m going to create a product to fix this. And so this was his idea, which ended up with the original Combat Flip Flop. And my idea for it was, I think Americans would just really like a Combat Flip Flop. I think there’s a market for it. I think it’s a fun story, and I think people would want to buy it. We can match the two together, and that’s how we started the brand.
John Berry: During the brand building and growing the company, I’m sure you learned a lot of leadership lessons, but this takes us into the After-Action Review. Your three best examples of leadership and the three worst examples of leadership you observed either as a civilian or in the military. It can be you. You don’t have to name names. But if you wanted to share with our Veteran community the greatest examples of leadership that you observed.
Matthew Griffin: I’d like to start with… He was then Captain Brandon Tegtmeier. He was then turned into Colonel Tegtmeier, who was the Colonel of the Ranger regimen. But he said a line to me one time when I’d miss something as his Company Fire Support Officer, and he said, “Don’t expect what you don’t inspect.” And that one stuck with me. Don’t expect what you don’t inspect. A lot of people will tell somebody to do something. You think that it will happen, and then you get to the end, and you didn’t inspect it along the way to make sure that it was going to be right, and you’ll fail. And so he was always great about telling us and then checking in to make sure. And that’s something that stuck with me for a long period of time. Second best example of leadership, I have to say, is just Ranger team leaders. They are just dedicated. It’s like they’re a guy who stepped out of a following role into a leadership role. And it’s just something about Ranger team leaders when they finally know that they’re not just responsible for themselves, but they’re responsible for three other guys. The amount of intensity and focus you need to bring to your life and change to stop focusing on yourself to focusing on others.
Matthew Griffin: And the more that you focus on others, the more successful you’re going to be. And the best team leaders that I’ve seen in the Rangers were guys that give up everything once they give up everything about themselves, but they made their men the primary focus. And by having them be successful, they were going to be successful. Other examples of leadership, I’d have to say that I’ve had more examples of positive leadership, I think, in the civilian community than I have in the military community, because the military can get a little bit toxic every now and then. I’d have to say that just the focus on being honest, right? With all the leaders that I’ve been around, the guys who call it like it is. They don’t sugarcoat anything. And I’ve been around from investors to civilian leaders or whatever. But the guys who aren’t afraid to be truly honest with them when a problem comes up and answer the question, you’ll see it on the media and everything else. If you can’t specifically identify the problem and state what it is and the root cause of it, you’re never going to solve it. And so all the leaders that I know, when you ask them a problem and they look at it and they go, “This is the problem, this is why it happened.”
Matthew Griffin: They don’t place blame. They don’t focus on shaming somebody into it. They go, “Here is the problem. How are we going to fix it?” And they change everybody from a panic mindset into a problem solving mindset. And that is the one thing that I have to say. I have taken and brought into my normal life. It’s probably come back to bite me because I am a problem solver, and people call me to solve problems. But when you can clearly identify the problem, articulate it, get everybody to agree on it, that lets all of that go so you can focus on solving it. Those are the three examples that I would have. Bad examples of leadership. I’m sure civilians and military will get this, but you get the guy who gets into leadership, and they start sitting back on their haunches a little bit, resting on their laurels. But the guys that rest on the awards that they got when they were a junior dude and think that will carry them into being a better leader, and they really don’t accept the fact that the previous awards they have are going to not translate to their current responsibilities.
John Berry: Absolutely.
Matthew Griffin: I really just don’t like examples of bad leadership, but I am a firm believer that you learn more from bad leadership than you do from good leadership. I had a Ranger commander who was a prior service guy, and he would constantly show up late because of his previous accolades and everything else. And he would sit there and he would tell me on missions how much he didn’t like me. He would literally point out character flaws in me. And I’m a 23-year-old Ranger just trying to figure out life. And he would just sit there and tell me all the things that were wrong about me. Meanwhile, he wasn’t doing his job. And so that was another bad example. So you shouldn’t put down your subordinates. Even if they do have character flaws, you can’t just go and call them out directly. You need to get them focused on, “Hey, here’s where you’re at. Here’s what you can do to be better. Let’s make a plan. Let’s do this together. How can we get there? How can we make you improve and feel better about yourself and better about life?” And then just the other form of bad leadership, and I can’t get around it.
Matthew Griffin: I can’t not call it out. But the Afghan withdrawal. Everything from the civilian leadership to the military leadership of that was an absolute failure. And they put thousands of Americans at risk. They put thousands of Afghans at risk. They got innocent civilians killed. They got, just, it was just bad. I think if this is going to air before the election, everybody tends to gloss over it. It’s not coming out in the news or media, but I have to say the worst example of leadership I’ve ever seen in my entire life was how we handled our withdrawal from Afghanistan. I just like people to remember that.
John Berry: So many great lessons. I think one of the misconceptions about Veterans is, well, we know what great leadership looks like because we’ve experienced the military. That’s part of the story. But if we served in the military, we also know what bad leadership looks like. That’s why we love to hire Veterans, because they’ve seen good leadership, they’ve seen bad leadership, and then they can bring their own perspectives to our organizations. As you’re the CEO right now, how many employees do you currently have?
Matthew Griffin: We’ve got three right now. We’re a really small business. We outsource everything. We try to really grill it. And we follow as much as I bagged on Timothy Ferriss’s book earlier, we do follow a lot of the principles there. So we’ve got three employees right now, but we employ hundreds around the world, depending on the time of your production.
John Berry: Well, and really, you’ve built a model of efficiencies, and that didn’t come out of the blue. It came from a lot of failures, and you’re pretty open about that. How have you been able to take all that feedback as a gift and just take it as, Okay, this is another setback, or this is another supplier didn’t deliver? How do you not let that just drive you absolutely crazy?
Matthew Griffin: Life is full of problems. I think, what is it? It’s either the Buddhist or the Hindu. They say the human condition is suffering. We keep getting taught these lessons over and over again until we learn to get beyond. I would have to say that I was repeating problems. I have the same thing show up in my life over and over again. And that means I have to take an honest look at myself and ask myself, what actions am I taking that are creating these conditions for this problem to exist? And then what steps can I take over time to fix that and remove those problems from my life? And once you do that, and it takes years, years to figure out. I have a journal that I write in just about every other day, and I have it started at January 2, 2017, and I literally have a stack that’s almost waist high now of journals. And I have the majority of the book is full of problems and stuff I got to do. But I do take a section of every day at the top of my journal, and I write in GTHT: Good things that happen today.
Matthew Griffin: And I have to whenever something good happens in the day, whether it’s like, Hey, I got a free cup of coffee, or somebody called me and hadn’t talk to in a while, or my dog learned a new trick, or I got my truck fixed, or whatever it is, I write the good things that happen in that block. And as I’m going back through my journals that are just filled full of problems and stuff I got to do, it’s just a really daily reminder that’s right at the top if I’ve missed all of those things, good things are happening every day. And I can look back, and I know they’re happening because I wrote them down, and they’re just positive examples that say it’s so easy to get mired by your problems that you forget about all the good stuff that’s happening. And so you have to take time to write them down and acknowledge them. So that way you don’t get lost in the sauce.
John Berry: Yeah. Gratitude is so important because we get so wrapped up in all the problems. And the problems can just be all-consuming until we realize that, I think it was Sir Edmund Hillary, who said, “It’s not the mountain that we conquer, but ourselves.”
Matthew Griffin: That is truth.
John Berry: And you, obviously, being a skier and having had the opportunity to ski the highest mountain in Iraq, do you still ski? Do you still get out there? Do you still do a lot of adventure stuff?
Matthew Griffin: I moved to Hawaii in December, so I am an adventurous guy. I gave up the majority of my adrenaline sports because I found that my brain was riding too fast for my–and I didn’t have enough time to train. So I just went over to skydiving. That’s my adrenaline speed sport that I go to. And then I spend the majority of my days here getting my branch going. And then when I get time to myself, I do a lot of that here. So I spend time out in the woods being quiet and hunting sheep, cows, goats, pigs, everything else. It’s just fun.
John Berry: So you’re able to disconnect and enjoy life. When it goes to being able to share the successes, do you have a mentor or do you seek out mentors? Who develops you now that you’re the CEO of a company?
Matthew Griffin: I have mentors. I take mentorship seriously. I have three mentors that I work with, generally pretty focused. And I might talk to them once a month or once a quarter. It used to be a lot more back in the day, but I take mentorship very seriously. And I mentor guys on mentorship, which is if you seek a mentor who has the skills and ability to help you work through a problem, Be respectful of their time. Here is my problem, clearly articulate it. Here are the conditions that are leading to this problem, clearly articulate those. Here’s what I’m thinking about doing. Can you provide me some mentorship on this? Let’s schedule a time to go and go do it. So then you’ll get on a half an hour call with them. And for somebody like that to take a half an hour out of their time is a lot. They’re giving you a lot. And then they’re going to give you their advice, their unfiltered feedback. You write it down. And whether you like it or not, you have to take the actions that they give you. Otherwise, you’re just repeating the same things you’ve done before.
Matthew Griffin: And then once you’ve taken those actions for a couple of weeks, you go and you write the mentor. Hey, Okay, I did these actions. Here’s what I did. Here’s how it’s changed. It’s either better or worse. What can I do next? Let’s schedule some more time. And it’s a very focused process if you’re going to actually have a mentor to take it seriously. It’s not a counselor, it’s not a buddy, it’s a mentor. This is somebody who’s helping you become better at a certain task or skill. So treat it like that. And then when the guys that I mentor, we do the same thing. They tell me, Here’s my problem, here’s the conditions that are leading to that problem. Here’s what I’m thinking about doing. What can I do? And then I’ll have a half an hour call with them, and I’ll expect an email or a phone call 2-3 weeks later to see how things have changed since then. Then we’ll adjust fire and keep carrying on.
John Berry: So it’s not just the advice, it’s the accountability.
Matthew Griffin: It’s the accountability. Yeah, people give you advice all the time. What are you going to do with it? But if they give you advice and somebody of that caliber takes the time to give you advice, they’re not going to keep mentoring you if you don’t take their advice. So if you want to have access to those types of mentors, and people like that that are successful, they want to see others succeed. They do. They really want others to succeed. And if you come and you ask for their time and they ask for their advice, and then you just go down the same path, they’re going to stop mentoring. They’ll find somebody else who’s willing to take their time and direction and go be positive and go contribute significantly in the world.
John Berry: When we’re in the military, it’s pretty easy to demonstrate grit. We don’t have a choice. There are tough missions, and we just have to accomplish the mission. Mission first, people always. But as a civilian, we have more options, and we can back out at any time. You had a lot of opportunities building Combat Flip Flops to step away. I mean, you had your family, as you brought up in the past, worried about having another lean Christmas because of your adventure. What made you stick with it? How did you know that this vision would become a reality?
Matthew Griffin: It’s really what it was. Every time we ran into some problem, it just seemed just totally unconquerable. There was an outlier gift from the universe that just came in and go, Hey, man, I got the solution for you right here. You’ve worked hard enough. You’ve worked long enough. You’ve gone through every other problem. I’m going to give you this little gift. And I would say, Shark Tank was one of that for us. I was going to shut down the company before Shark Tank. Then they came along and we were supposed to air in November. So I went and I went and bought for Veterans Day, and I bought all this inventory. Veterans Day came and went, and they didn’t have our airing. We were financially deep in the red. And so we cleared out all of our inventory, got everything back up to break even. All of the inventory that I had would have sat on my desk. I might have had 30 pair of flip flops left. And then we got the call and said, Hey, you’re going to be on in two weeks. And we had to beg, borrow, and steal some cash to get back into production and make it happen.
Matthew Griffin: And that catapulted of things forward through the year. There’s no other way that I can describe it when I tell the stories to people, the things that have come along with us is there is some divine purpose in here. We’re supposed to be doing this. We are being positive representation of America and Americans abroad. We are helping those in conflict areas. We’re putting girls in school. We’re clearing landmines. We’re getting Veterans on surf boards. And for some reason, karmically, it just keeps pushing us forward. All I can say is it’s just faith.
John Berry: What advice would you have for a Veteran out there who is struggling, has started their own business, and is starting to feel the struggle and is questioning, do I keep going or do I stop?
Matthew Griffin: I’d say you’re going to to do a real honest assessment of your time. And what I found is as a young business owner who had gone through these training programs, who had access to all of the MBA programs, you should do this or you should do that. But when you get down to it, there’s a lot of shiny balls that are out there that will distract you from your time. And are you actually being truly effective and focused on things that are pushing your goals and objectives forward, which, as Mark Cuban says, “Sales cures all problems.” Like, are you spending the weight of your time generating revenue for your company to help solve the other problems that you have that might be related to logistics or design or manufacturing? And if you’re distracted and you’re surfing social media and you’re answering all the different emails to somebody who’s going to increase your return on ad spend by 50X and all that other stuff, are you not being effective? But if you find that you are truly being effective and your business just isn’t going for some reason or another the way you should, is how do you gracefully and respectfully take the lessons that you learned and pivot your life and take care of your employees and your team and your family members without crashing your own?
Matthew Griffin: I mean, businesses fail every day. It happens. Mine has almost failed multiple times. We’re still not a wild success. We’re not driving Bentleys or Ferraris. We still manufacture products in war zones, which you don’t make a lot of money at, like fighting the uphill fight against Nike and Reebok all the other guys. But if you’re comfortable with your life, then just keep going forward. And if it’s not something you feel like you want to do anymore and you got sold on the dream and it just really isn’t what you want to do, there’s nothing wrong with that. There really isn’t.
John Berry: Great advice. To simplify, what I just heard is, Hey, first look inside. Are you doing all the things you need to do to be successful? Then look at the market. And if the market doesn’t want you, then maybe it’s time to pivot.
Matthew Griffin: Yeah. If you’re focused on the actions and not the outcome, you’re likely going to fail. You really need to be looking at the outcome. Again, I will say, you go to all these courses and they say you need to be doing X, Y, and Z, and you take the actions X, Y, and Z. If these outcomes aren’t what they told you they were going to be, then you have to go back and look at your own actions. Look within about what you’re doing and what’s actually going to lead you to the outcome that you want.
John Berry: Well, thank you so much for your time today, Griff. Amazing story. How can Veterans learn more about Combat Flip Flops, or more importantly, learn more about you and your journey?
Matthew Griffin: If you want to learn about Combat Flip Flops, everything’s social–Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all that other stuff is @combatflipflops. You can find us all there. I’m personally on Instagram @combatflipflops.griff (G-R-I-F-F). And then we have a book that’s out there. You can find it on the website, you can find it on Amazon. And if you buy it on Amazon, leave a review. So thanks, guys.
John Berry: Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Led, where we pursue our mission of promoting Veteran leadership in business, strengthening the Veteran community, and getting Veterans all of the benefits that they earn. If you know a leader who should be on the Veteran Led podcast, report to our online community by searching at Veteran Led on your favorite social channels and posting in the comments. We want to hear how your military challenges prepared you to lead your industry or community, and we will let the world know. And of course, hit subscribe and join me next time on Veteran Led.
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