Connect with Michael Moore and Bob Wierema

The Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/
Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/
Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/

Connect with Katrina Ghazarian

Gameday HR: https://gamedayhr.com/

Katrina's Podcast: https://rss.com/podcasts/hrsucks/

[00:00:00] Katrina Ghazarian: Look at 2020, how much time did everybody spend defending their labels, defending labels that they don't even firmly believe. Not everybody's all the way Democrat and not everybody's all the way Republican. One of the greatest examples I heard, I think it was Andy Frisella who said it on his podcast, but he talks about 9/11, and he was like, “do you think they cared if it was Republicans or Democrats, when they flew those planes into the World Trade Center? No, they were going after Americans”. No one else around the world cares about these labels that we here in the United States want to defend all the time. And so, that really sticks with me how people are so quick to carry these labels with them and they'll go to the ground dying, defending these labels, they'll end family relationships and friendships trying to defend these labels that aren’t real, they're all lies. They’re not real things, so I want to create content that really helps people navigate through that identity and showing them we're very complicated creatures, you know?

We’re complex. And even then, who we are now, we're not the same person in a year from now, we evolve. We change; who I was last year, pre-pandemic, I'm a completely different person now. 

Michael Moore: Today on The Climb, Bob and I are joined by Katrina Ghazarian, and you don't have to go too much further than her landing page on LinkedIn to understand that she does shit that matters. She is voted the funniest in fifth grade, Forbes’ top social media influencer of 2020, a Gen Next member, CEO of Game Day HR, and so much more.

 Katrina, we’re excited to have you today and welcome. 

Katrina Ghazarian: Thanks. [00:02:00] Gosh, I am such a bad ass. 

Bob Wierema: I was going to say, you sound pretty important.

Katrina Ghazarian: You’re not supposed to read the voted funniest in fifth grade part as my bio – that's just a joke that I have on LinkedIn!

Michael Moore: Maybe let's start there. Your sense of humor developed early. Why were you so funny in fifth grade? 

Katrina Ghazarian: Well, chubby people have to be funny. You can't be chubby and lame, it's against the law. So, I learned at a very young age, if I was little huskier than the rest of the kids, I was going to have to at least make people laugh so they didn't call me fat girl names and it totally worked. 

Michael Moore: You know, I might've had a little experience in that too. 

Katrina Ghazarian: Were you chubby? Were you a chubby kid? 

Michael Moore: I'm still chubby, but I was funny, and I had a pretty good right hook too. So, if I couldn't make them laugh, then I got tired of it, it was go time.

Katrina Ghazarian: Oh yeah, same here. I was definitely beating up like the boys. 

Michael Moore: Okay. So funny in fifth grade, give us the background, give us the “you”. 

Katrina Ghazarian: Why would fifth grade even have these superlatives? We're way too young to have something like that. But for some reason, our trendy – I don't know who she was – teacher decided to put these titles in there and there were others; ‘friendliest’ and ‘best dressed’, which sure as hell wasn't me. Most athletic, which wasn't really me either. And so, I weighed all the options and I thought ‘funniest’ was the one I could actually go for.

And so, I started lobbying all the kids to vote for me. And it worked. I ended up winning and they put a picture of me in the yearbook wearing a Santa hat, and I'm going like this  [00:04:00] in the picture, it’s very flattering. So, I think I always enjoyed making people laugh. It was something that was very special to me.

There were tons of other things that I did in class or outside of class to be very disruptive and get in trouble, but at the end of the day people were laughing at me and that's all I really cared for. You struggle with your identity a lot when you're a young adult and you're in your twenties, and you have all of these influences telling you who you're supposed to be and how you're supposed to act. I really entered the corporate world very quickly. I was 18. I got a job at Washington Mutual. So, I was in retail banking at a pretty young age, and I would say all the things that were on my mind and coming out of my mouth, and management would tell me, “you're can't say those things”.

Bob Wierema: You can’t talk like that.

Katrina Ghazarian: I was like very perverted; someone said “balls” and I'd giggle. I was that person – the words like ‘percolate’, how do you not laugh at that word? Or ‘moist’, come on, come on. So, I think I started to go into a box at that point of trying to be what everyone said I was supposed to be. And so, I tried to be more proper and professional. And then I was just depressed trying to be something that I wasn't; I always felt ashamed because I would say something that I felt was like funny or was even the truth.

And so, I ended up gaining a ton of weight because I was so depressed about how I was [00:06:00] supposed to act. I was out of school at that point, so I was 18 or 19 years old. I go to the doctor and I had been there a couple of months before and he was like, “do you know how much you weighed in the last time you were here?”

And I said, “yeah, like 145lbs”, and he said, “do you know how much you weigh now?” And I'm like, “150lbs, 155lbs, and he was like, “you weigh 170lbs”. So, I had put on 25 pounds in a very short period of time and that was very unnatural for me. I worked out, I went to the gym throughout high school… And so I ended up getting back on track, and then it started to identify, why am I so unhappy?

Why do I just want to lay around and eat? And it really started to come out that people were just telling me who I was supposed to be and I ultimately was not happy being that person. It also wasn't really getting me anywhere. And so, I was supposed to get a promotion and I didn't. And so, I realized, why am I being everything you're telling me to be and it's not really getting me anywhere? And that was the start of the rebellion I would say. 

I was in banking for quite some time. The financial crisis hit in 2008, and so half of the branches where I was working were closed down. I ended up doing an internship for the Detroit Pistons and couldn't find a job for 10 months, which is an extremely long period of time when you've been working since you were 14. And so, I started to find odd and end jobs here and there. Ultimately, I landed a recruiting job, and then I was also coaching high school girls’ basketball. I think that reall...

Connect with Michael Moore and Bob Wierema

The Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/
Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/
Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/

Connect with Raleigh Green

Raleigh Green: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raleighgreenv/

Emerald Consulting: https://www.emerald-cp.com/

[00:00:00] Raleigh Green: If I was telling anybody, you got to start with yourself, you got to start with being real, and being honest, and you have to be happy. And you've got to have a smile on your face because nobody wants to deal with a dick. You’ve got to humble yourself because a lot of the times for you to build relationships, you have to get through a gatekeeper. And sometimes the gatekeeper is the toughest person to get through to get to the person that you want to really impress, or you want to do business with. 

I watched my father go into offices for five or six years and would walk in, sometimes with a meeting scheduled, sometimes without a meeting scheduled and would say, “I'm here to talk to the office manager. I want to do your office supplies”. And they'd be like, “Raleigh, we already told you we're using staples and we don't want to use you. We’re totally happy”. And he's like, “if anything comes up, just let me know. I'll come back next week”. And they were like, “no, no, no, don't come back next week,” and he never took no for an answer. And that was something that he really taught me early on is you can't take no, there is no such thing as no when you're selling yourself or selling a product – if you have the desire to talk to somebody or to meet somebody, then you have to become very creative in the way that you get to that person.

And a lot of times it was just persistence and not giving in to the word ‘no’.

Michael Moore: Welcome to The Climb Crossroads and Defining Moments. Today, we're joined by Raleigh Green, [00:02:00] founder and managing member of Emerald Consulting. Happy to have you here today.

Raleigh Green: Happy to be here. Thank you. 

Michael Moore: So, before we dive in in – because I've just got a lot of questions and Bob does too, with what we do for a living and our backgrounds, what you do we find incredibly interesting. Just tell us a little about you; where are you from, where you've been, where you're headed? 

Raleigh Green: Yeah, so born and raised here in Fort Worth, Texas. 

Bob Wierema: Great. I'm outnumbered again by design.

Raleigh Green: Born and raised here in Fort Worth. Went to Arlington Heights High School, went to the University of Texas on a track scholarship and came back to Fort Worth after four years of fun down at Texas, and actually finished my degree at TCU and then got married early on and thought I was mature and had the world by the balls and was ready to go conquer everything that was in front of me and after about 10 years, realized quickly that you don't have anything figured out and you're not mature and you better start figuring it out pretty quick. So, lived here in Fort Worth with my wife at the time, and ended up, unfortunately, getting a divorce. I have a beautiful boy from that marriage – he'll be nine in February. 

I moved after my divorce to Dallas and lived in Dallas for seven years. During that process, I put myself through business school and SMU and decided that it was time for a major change in every aspect of my life. And I met my current wife, my beautiful [00:04:00] bride as of July this year, in Dallas and moved her back to Fort Worth, which was a shocker for her, but she's a trooper and she's getting to love the community and love our neighborhood. We’re both entrepreneurs by trade; she just launched a business herself in March of 2020, she actually launched it two weeks before COVID hit and was in the process of starting her fundraising campaign, which was a very rough ride. And I had started Emerald Consulting a few years back, but really started picking things back up full-time with it. I would say in early 2018. So that's kind of where we are today. 

Michael Moore: On the theme of your wife – because Bob, Chris Powers, who we've had on the podcast and introduced us to Johnny, she was actually on his podcast. So, you sat in this room before – tell us a little bit more about the business and what she's got going on, because it's really neat. 

Raleigh Green: So, her name is Meagan. Megan Green. And she started a company called The Dowery. It's an online platform that connects local artisans from all over the country to grooms and brides that she created a wedding registry for.

So, she was also in a previous marriage and during her experience of registering for things, she found that things were very limited on what she could register for, and everybody went to the same big box retailers. And so, everyone for that year's home looked the same. They all had the same Pottery Barn or the same Bed, Bath, and Beyond or whatever it was. And she found [00:06:00] a hole in the market and said, “man, there's a ton of local artisans all over the country in the United States that only sell through their local retailers. And that's really their only channel. And these people aren't good businesspeople. They’re artists by nature, and so, they don't have the skillsets to push their products out onto some platform, a different platform than their local retailer”. So, she started doing a lot of research and we worked on her business plan for months on end. And we decided that now is the best time to dive in and try to tackle this 10,000-pound gorilla that's out there, and the business has been great. You can find her on www.dowery.com and it is not only a wedding registry gift site, but it's also just a standard platform that you can buy anything on. 

So yeah, it's been a rough year for fundraising for her business and for my business. But I feel like we finished the year pretty strong and she was actually able to raise a little over a quarter of a million dollars from friends and family, and we'll continue to raise capital this coming year. 

Bob Wierema: Well, I will definitely be sending this over to my fiancé here. We're hopefully getting married here in May.

Raleigh Green: There we go, congratulations. 

Bob Wierema: Yeah, we were supposed to get married last May and had the push and if she sticks around for another five months, this two-and-a-half-year engagement, we're going to get this deal done. I'll send it to her for sure. It's funny you say like that because I've talked to her and she's like, “yeah, well there's only like Crate and Barrel and West Elm and all the other ones” and whatever's kind of in style then is what everybody else [00:08:00] has. So that's exciting. I'll definitely send that over to her. That's great. 

Raleigh Green: It's a really cool concept and most guys aren't into it. We usually don't care what our wives pick and choose for what pottery we...

Connect with Michael Moore and Bob Wierema

The Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/
Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/
Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/

Connect with Brian Ferguson

Brian Ferguson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-ferguson-arena-labs/

Arena Labs Website

Brian Ferguson: You're at a level one trauma center in Washington, DC. We're in there on a Saturday night at one o'clock in the morning. This is typically when, because of people being out of bars et cetera, you get a lot of trauma. And one time there were two people in there screaming and another person moaning. Just hearing that as I was standing there, I thought ‘it's insane what this does to the human emotion and cortisol levels.’ 

And what's crazy is if you were to observe that and you think about this whole body of knowledge that's come out of the military in the last 15, 20 years about post-traumatic stress and about the implications of people who are in very high stressed emotional environments, either combat or otherwise, we've put a massive amount of resources into helping those people. And yet we ask these trauma nurses and ICU nurses and physicians to go home and have dinner with their families. And no one thinks twice about it because they're not deployed. 

So, we think about this as the environment is different. You might not be deploying overseas to Afghanistan or Iraq, but you are doing consequential, heavily emotional work that has a chronic element of stress. And when you look at the implications of chronic stress on human beings, that leads to higher levels of cortisol over time, not being able to focus, not being able to sleep. There's a second and third order, long-term impact that has. 

Michael Moore: Today on The Climb we are joined by Brian Ferguson, founder and CEO of Arena Labs.

I'm excited about this one. I don't know Brian as well as some of our other guests, but we were introduced towards the end of last year, both being Gen Next members and got a chance to get on the phone with them for about an hour. And I don't know, 30 seconds in, I thought, dang, dang, dang. We got to get this guy on the podcast. What an interesting background. 

He'll talk more about Arena Labs, but I think it's an interesting time to have him on because of the passion of what Arena Labs does, and the work that it's doing for our frontline [00:02:00] workers right now, which is so important.

Brian, welcome to The Climb. We're excited to have you. 

Brian Ferguson: Thanks fellas. I appreciate it. 

Bob Wierema: I can't believe he agreed to come on after talking with you for the only 30 minutes. I mean, that was some, you must have a lot of faith, right?

Brian Ferguson: Yeah. We actually need it. Well, I certainly do, but we should also give a shout out to our friend Janeel Alonzo and Michael Davidson. Michael's one of your previous guests and is one of my dear friends and been a huge part of my life. And then Janeel who works with Michael is who I think set this up. So super grateful to her.

Michael Moore: Yeah, Bob as they say down in Texas, ‘even the sun shines on a dog's ass every once in a while’, I was on that day. My bullshit was flowing, and we had a great conversation.

Brian Ferguson: Michael sound cooler in a Texas accent, by the way. If I said it, it wouldn't sound as cool. 

Michael Moore: We try. So, Brian, before we jump in, I got a little taste of this, but just give us the background. I mean, who is Brian? What shaped you? How have you gotten to where you are today?

Brian Ferguson: This is a random way to answer that question. But I have over the course of probably the last 20 years tried to refine an annual process where I just review the last year, think about the year ahead. And then I come back to what I call my life plan, which is really just my best efforts to aggregate everything I've learned in my life in the past and where I want to go in the future. The front of that document – I don't let myself go beyond one page – but the title of that first page is ‘who am I?’ And it's my best effort to get outside of a resume or  the way that we often introduce ourselves in these kinds of conversations to remind myself of who I am, but it’s interesting, I'm coming to you guys from Cleveland, Ohio. before we started recording, we were talking a bit about that, but I grew up in the Midwest, which I think at this chapter of life, because I'm [00:04:00] back here, I spent the last 20 years away from the Midwest living in Cleveland, Ohio where I think a lot of the things I value in life come out of having been raised in this blue collar community outside of Cleveland, Ohio. And I was super fortunate. I had this amazing upbringing and community;  my family and I grew up with the town that I grew up in.

When we moved there, there was just starting to be this push into the suburbs of Cleveland where we were, but I had this idyllic youth. Our house was right on woods and my brother and I grew up in the woods outside all the time. And then, my mom was a nurse, my dad worked in the energy business, and I just had this amazing youth in the sense of the neighbors, the community, my friends, and I was a product of a public school system. That was extraordinary. 

I think my mom being a nurse, I never appreciated how much that ideal of service was seeded in me from a young age and my brother and I both were always drawn to service in ways that just were natural to me. But now in retrospect, I think are more prominent.

And then, beyond growing up in that town, I went to college in Ohio and then I'm pretty fortunate to bounce around. I lived in Washington DC for a while. And the first part of my life was in public service, mainly in national security. So, defense and intelligence diplomacy – that realm.

And that was right after 9/11. So, I was an intern actually. I had a really crazy sequence of events. I ended up as an intern in the white house right after 9/11. And that was an insane way to see the world through the lens of ‘how do we think about the future of America after a consequential event like that?’

And I stayed in that realm for quite a bit, lived in London for grad school. And then later in life, I went into the military and spent seven years in the military. And that was all part of what I consider that chapter in the national security public service arena, and in the course of that I just increasingly had this desire to build something.

 [00:06:00] When I do any type of psychometric or character test, I tend to register high on creativity, autonomy, and I was really ready to leave the public service life and go build. And that led me to my current chapter, which is Arena Labs. But I think in all of that, the really important elements in my life, like any of us, the things that matter: I've got a daughter who's two years old now, so I'm experiencing life through her eyes, which is beyond rich, and Lindsey, my wife – we’ve actually known each other since sixth ...