No Barriers Podcast Episode 72: Business in the Time of COVID with Greg Brenneman

about the episode

Greg Brenneman speaks to Erik and Dave about balancing work and life in the time of COVID on this latest episode. His lengthy business resume and acumen have positioned Greg as an authority on how to succeed in the corporate world, but he is also a believer in spending equal time investing in family and giving back to the community. With his unique lens, Greg offers wisdom in the form of what he calls “the five F’s” and other strategies to prosper in both life and the workplace. 

Greg is Executive Chairman of CCMP and a member of the Firm’s Investment Committee. Greg plays an active leadership role in executing the Firm’s overall strategy while remaining actively engaged in completing transactions, developing strategies, and coaching the senior management of CCMP’s portfolio companies.

Prior to joining CCMP in October 2008, he served as Chairman, CEO, President, and/or COO of Quiznos Sub, Burger King, PwC Consulting, and Continental Airlines. In 1994 Greg founded Turnworks, Inc. (“Turnworks”), his personal investment firm that focuses on corporate turnarounds. Prior to founding Turnworks, Greg was a Vice President for Bain & Company. Greg currently serves on the board of directors of Eating Recovery Center, Hayward, PQ Corporation, BGIS, Baker Hughes, Baylor College of Medicine, and The Home Depot, Inc.

Greg is an Emmy Award winner and the author of Right Away & All At Once, Five Steps To Transform Your Business and Enrich Your Life. He holds a B.B.A. in Accounting/Finance, summa cum laude, from Washburn University of Topeka, Kansas, and an M.B.A. with distinction from Harvard Business School and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Commerce degree from Washburn University.

Resources:

Download or Purchase Greg’s book Today: Right Away & All At Once, Five Steps to Transform Your Business and Enrich Your Life

Explore the No Barriers Leadership Program


“It’s the fear of doing it that’s actually much worse than the actual action and doing it yourself. “


Episode Transcript

Dave:
I started myself by just writing a one page plan for my life. And then I just asked the question, how do I integrate my business and my life together, and that made a huge difference for me to think about work-life integration as opposed to work-life balance. If we focus on work-life balance, something's going to always be out of balance. But if you focus on integrating the two and you take the time to get everything onto a page you can actually execute on something that's on one page.

Erik:
It's easy to talk about the successes, but what doesn't get talked about enough is the struggle. My name is Erik Weihenmayer. I've gotten the chance to ascend Mount Everest, to climb the tallest mountain in every continent, to kayak the Grand Canyon, and I happen to be blind. It's been a struggle to live what I call a no barriers life, to define it, to push the parameters of what it means. And part of the equation is diving in to the learning process and trying to illuminate the universal elements that exist along the way. That unexplored terrain between those dark places we find ourselves in, in the summit, exists a map. That map, that way forward is what we call no barriers.

Dave:
Today we speak with Greg Brenneman who has served as chairman, CEO, president, or COO of the following companies that you'll recognize. Quiznos, Burger King, PWC Consulting, and Continental Airlines. He is currently the Executive Chairman of CCMP and a member of the firm's investment committee. In 1994 Mr. Brenneman founded TurnWorks Inc., his personal investment firm that focuses on corporate turnarounds. And before that he was the Vice President for Bain and Company. Greg currently serves on many boards, including Eating Recovery Center, Hayward, PQ Corporation, BGIS, Baker Hughes, Baylor College of Medicine, and The Home Depot Inc. Greg is also an Emmy Award winner and the author of Right Away and All at Once: Five Steps to Transform Your Business and Enrich Your Life. Enjoy the conversation.

Welcome to our new weekly podcast series where we continue to explore this extraordinary moment in our lives while remaining true to our core theme, what's within you is stronger than what's in your way. Special thanks to Prudential and Wells Fargo for their generous support of this podcast series. Well Erik, another amazing guest to talk to today. We are joined today by Greg Brenneman. Greg, welcome to the show.

Greg:
Thanks. It's great to be here, especially with two good friends. So it's a pleasure to be here with you guys.

Erik:
Well Greg thank you. Yeah, it's been so fun being a part of your life and getting to know your family and spending holidays together and skiing together and coming to your retreats. It's been a blast. And one of the things in the beginning of No Barriers, we started No Barriers with just some dirt bags and then we merged up with Dave and his team and we got stronger and stronger. Dave is not a dirt bag. Dave actually has an MBA, so he's smart.

Dave:
Thanks for clarifying that.

Erik:
Yeah, Dave is not part of the dirt bag squad. But once we started raising over a million dollars a year, I was lost. I was like what do I do. So the smartest thing I did was to reach out to people like you who know how to grow things, how to grow organizations, enterprises, and you have been so generous to help and give your advice to No Barriers and help us grow. So it's really appreciative, full gratitude for that.

As a business leader, I know you see the effects of this virus. So I thought I'd just start there with the question of what kind of struggles... And I know this is a big question. But what kind of struggles have you seen in the last several months with this pandemic?

Greg:
It's a fantastic question and I think we've all been trying to learn our way through this pandemic. So I have a lot of seats I sit in for vision points into this. I'm the Lead Director of The Home Depot. I've been on that board for 20 years. So I see it from the point of view of trying to run an enterprise with 450,000 associates and really take care of your associates during this time. So how does a business operate in this environment? I'm also Vice Chairman of the Baylor College of Medicine Board, so I see it very much from the infectious disease and medical side as well. And then we own, the company I operate that I'm Chairman of, CCMP Capital, we own eight companies that, depending on their end markets, have been affected a little bit to a lot by the virus. So I think if you kind of start with the virus in general, Thomas Sowell who's a Stanford economist and sociologist has this saying, "There are no solutions, only trade offs." I think that describes the virus perfectly.

Erik:
Yeah. We had Doctor [inaudible 00:05:08] and he was saying one of the problems is that this crisis sort of reinforces the brain patterns that you already have. So if you're fearful, you're terrified. If you have a bit of depression, well this just throws you right down to the bottoms of it. So it exacerbates all the inklings of tendencies and patterns that you already have.

Greg:
I think we have a huge opportunity to just help people through that fear that they have. Some of the same fear you as an organization help people through every day, overcoming their own barriers and what's in their way. It's a very similar kind of situation we're all in right now.

Erik:
You've seen a lot of struggle haven't you? I mean, you've seen a lot of the businesses struggling. Like my little slice of it is my brother Eddie, he opened up a World Gym like a month before the crisis. He pours his life savings into this business and then a month later it's shut down for 50 days. How are people surviving that?

Greg:
Well, you have to be pretty creative, and not everybody can first of all. I've talked to all the airline CEOs and of course they're hurting. And I've talked to the executives at Marriott and kind of same thing in the hotel and airline business. We own a business, Erik you know really well, called Founder Sport Group and they make uniforms for kids sports. So guess what happens? Most of our business is actually doing quite well. But guess what happens when there are no kids sports? Nobody buys a uniform, right? So soccer, football, baseball, basketball, YMCA, high school, college, that's their market. So we had to get a little creative with that business. We said we want to stay essential because we wanted all eight of our businesses to stay open. That was kind of the first thing. So what could we make that makes us essential? So we actually came up with... I didn't even think of telling this story, but with masks. So we started making branded masks because you have football teams and basketball teams, they'd love to have a face mask. So I've got these in all kinds of colors. This one happens to be a CCMP one I had them make.

So they stayed essential. And then I blew out an e-mail to the 650 or 700 CEOs and board members I know and told them about these masks and I'm now the lead sales guy for Founder Sport Group right at the moment. We're selling a ton of masks. So there was a company where the revenue dropped 90% literally. It went to 10% of its previous volume, essentially like a gym almost. It was basically shut down. And we said how do we pivot and do something different to stay essentially and to do something useful. So uniforms will come back now, sports will start again. In the meantime, we've got a whole other business, a whole other way of thinking money in and how to get money in and keep people employed and keep jobs. So it just takes a tremendous amount of thought and creativity to try and work your way through these things for sure.

Dave:
I'm really curious in the... Small businesses have been hit pretty hard by this Greg and when you have a small business... We're a small business. We have a team of 30. We were hit hard. What's your advice for how small businesses just kind of approach channeling their ingenuity. Is it about channeling creativity? Is it about waiting out the storm? Is it about all of that? How would you advise a small business owner to think about this?

Greg:
It's a great question Dave. I use kind of five steps to think through it and I'll run through those real quick to answer your question. The first one is have a plan. On one page, get a plan down. In a regular business, not profit, I think of market, financial, product, and people. But it's not too different in the non-profit world as well to think about that. And then get that down and meet with your team and refine that in time of crisis. So what are we really going to be good at? We started actually just talking about some of the things like doing a summit virtually. You guys are some of the most creative people I've ever seen. How do we reimagine what our mission is inside of that? And then I think you have to, as part of that, keep your in markets fluid. So when I started working through this crisis, basically we were trying to solve for supply chain issues in China because they were off in Chinese New Year and we were wondering if they were going to come back and make anything to supply. So that was the initial worry. And then six weeks later it became, is my business going to get shut down in the US.

So you have to be kind of fluid as you think through that and do some scenario planning and be a little bit flexible. So that's the first point, is have a plan, track your progress. Second point is build a fortress balance sheet. So I think you need to think in terms of having some reserves in your company or in your organization to actually manage through times like this. And that's kind of hard for people because as Erik said, with your brother Erik, he put everything he had into the gym. But whenever you start a business or are in a small business you do need to think about how do I get some liquidity. In this case, that PPP program, the combination of that and the ability to furlough people and pay their medical insurance and put them on unemployment actually provided a really nice, safe landing even though it was quick and not perfect in the way it was executed.

The third part is what you guys have been working on and what I just talked about relative to Founder Sport Group, is think money in not money out. There are different ways to attack that. But how do you think about how to generate revenue and train people as well and spread the message during these tough times? And then the fourth point is build a team. This is when you find out who you want to be with. Who steps up? Who has a creative idea? Who makes virtual, at home working really work versus who just complains about it? You figure that stuff out.

Erik:
And Greg, one of the things I love about the first thing, which is have a plan is you're not talking about this like 50 page complicated plan that nobody can understand. It's like a super simple thing that even I could understand.

Greg:
Yeah. No Erik, I think the way you actually plan your adventures and the way- Adventures is too light a word. You're up Everest, down the Grand Canyon.- is very similar to how I plan a business, which I don't think either of us are super complicated. We just try and take something super complicated and simplify it so we can put it on one page and execute it.

Erik:
And when you're talking about responding to crisis like we are now or in good times when you're just planning on growth, you changed the paradigm I think in a lot of ways because people kind of though okay, you can't do everything at once, you have to just do it step by step and be very careful and methodical. You kind of seem to throw that idea or philosophy in the garbage and do it all at once, which is the title of your book, Right Away and All at Once, where you lay things out like that.

Greg:
It's a great point. And I think actually as you're planning anything, the tendency people have is to get so complicated on one aspect of it that they lose sight of the bigger picture and what you're really trying to encourage your organization to do in whatever the task is is to rally behind a common goal and to know what their role in that is. By keeping that on one page and keeping it simple, you can actually execute it all at once and you can get everybody on the same rope team, going towards the same goal. When I was running the airline people used to ask me what about this, what about that. I said we're going east today and east is 090 on the compass. You can go 070 to 110, basically generally east and I'm going to be okay. But if you're going 270, the other direction, I'm going to turn your butt around.

And a lot of life is like that, whether it's an adventure or whether it's a business, you really are after that simplicity that will allow everybody to drive to the same summit.

Erik:
And if there is pain, get it over with past rather than delaying it in an excruciating way. Right?

Greg:
Exactly. I think the tendency of people is to say I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, I don't want to do any harm so I'm going to pull that bandaid off really slowly. We all did that as a kid right? It hurts a little bit, I'm going to take it off really slowly. And then you can always remember the doctor, maybe your dad that came and just ripped the whole thing off and it wasn't that bad. You get through it. It allowed you to get over it quicker rather than just dread it. It's the fear of doing it that's actually much worse than the actual action and doing it yourself.

Dave:
What do you think about the new world order for businesses for the time being, for many businesses has been this Zoom conferences like we're doing right now and one of the things that I've noticed is that it has exposed what maybe used to be a line we would draw between work and life. I'm curious if you think this will have any lasting positive parts to that whole thing that you also talked about in your book, which is about this is more than just business, this is about your life and it's about enriching all aspects of your life. And whether this is helping us come together in any way in that aspect of our leadership.

Greg:
In many ways I think this has been a great enabler of people coming together because regardless of where we live, regardless of our socioeconomic status, regardless of, as a neurologist talked about, our natural tendencies, we're all in it together. So we've all kind of fighting through this together. I do think there are some trends that are going to be really super interesting going forward. One of them is what we're experiencing now. We're already talking about, in our company, doing half of our board meetings in person even coming out of this, and half of them using Microsoft Teams, which is the technology we use. We use Zoom or whatever. And that will cut down on travel a whole lot. I think from a person life perspective it will give you more evenings with your family and more time to focus on what's really important in life.

Erik:
Greg, do you have... Changing [inaudible 00:15:32] a little bit. A lot of the way we see the world is through our backgrounds and our upbringings and you grew up on a farm in Kansas. You experienced hard work as a kid. We've talked about this before. That sort of creates your perspective in life, what working your butt off as a kid...

Greg:
It does.

Erik:
Yeah. So tell me a little bit about what that was like growing up in Kansas as a kid.

Greg:
Well, I grew up Mennonite, so I have Amish relatives. For those of you, the horse and buggy folks. So our town was 3,000. It was a dry town, so there was no alcohol there. Basically all there was to do was play sports, think of some prank to do because there's no other entertainment, and work. So I grew up from a very young age, really starting in the third grade I always had a job that I had during the summer, during school, and sometimes even during the school year I was playing sports. I think that actually creates in you just an ability to see the beauty in work as kind of God's gift to us, to reach other people, but also to enjoy in part of what we're doing. I do think that having grown up working very hard, and I still have that work ethic today, is really helpful in these kinds of times because there's always something you can do not to be frozen and to push forward.

Erik:
And so that work ethic and that appreciation for work sort of has grown into a mindset or a philosophy for you because you don't think of business people of having a mission, but you're very mission oriented and I think it's underlooked. You have helped people create work and the ability to work and make a living and the dignity that that comes with all over the world through World Vision. So talk a little bit about how that's led to some of the work that you do around the world.

Greg:
It's a great question. So I really truly believe that God put business people on this earth to create jobs, to create jobs. By creating jobs for people, you actually create livelihoods for families and you create the ability to kind of speak into people. My great uncle was one of my mentors. He actually invented the auger that takes grain from the combine to the wheat truck. And then he invented the first machine that cranked out the hay bale, the big round bales and the big square bales. He turned that into a Fortune 500 company in my hometown. And then he actually said... He'd tell me, "Greg, my mission in life was to mechanize things for the farmers so you didn't have to walk with a pitchfork and pitch hay on a loose wagon." But he said "My calling in life was to give away all my money before I die." But he also saw this ability to go into Latin America where people were poor. And he traveled the world in the 1970s before that was cool. And to actually create things that started jobs.

So he created in Bolivia what is still the largest dairy in Latin America. He did it solely for the purpose of actually creating jobs for people that otherwise didn't have jobs. So my family has carried on that mission and we're doing a lot of work to do that in Honduras. In rural Honduras we actually have driven water to I think now through World Vision, about 250,000 people. We've created communal farming. And then we set the farming to be able to do crops starting with peppers and tomatoes and higher value added crops. And the people down there went from living on a dollar a day to just doing that, they were living on $15 a day. And then some of them have got into doing coffee, and we're doing organic coffee and exporting it to the US and Europe in this thing called Café 504. 504 is the Honduran area code.

The farmers that have these one acre plots that are doing coffee are now living, and their families on $50 a day. So now their kids go to university, they don't walk everywhere, they ride these little motor scooters, their kids can be in school. Life has changed dramatically. And then in the urban areas a few years back we actually came up with this program to help them come out of gangs and get trained and get jobs. So this year I think we'll graduate about 5,000 youth between 15 and 25 in Tegucigalpa, Honduras into jobs, to create a livelihood. That might be working in the fast food joint, it might be working in the movie theater, it might be starting their own business, working for the telecommunications company, working for the bank. There's so much demand for employers to hire these kids. We did about 1200 graduates last year and we'll do 5000 this year. We're just teaching them life skills and skill that will help them and then the employers are hiring them down there. So it's really pretty cool at a place where there's 25% youth unemployment, to be able to kind of help out and get them out of the gangs.

Erik:
But when I talk to you Greg, I always get hopeful because I realize there are smart people in the world that are really using their business history and what they've learned to create all kinds of positive change in the world. So isn't part of the rural folks who are growing coffee, isn't it teaching them ways of doing business in a different way so that they can up their living? Like co-op and stuff like that right? So you're teaching them actually ways of approaching things that can make huge changes very quickly.

Greg:
That's absolutely right. You get irrigation to them is kind of the first part. And then we bring in experts that actually teach them how to grow a higher grade of coffee that you can export. Some of the highest grade coffee on the earth by the way. I mean, they're unbelievable. And then we set up a co-op that they run and manage entirely. So it's actually run and managed by a board and led by local Hondurans that actually they bring their coffee to the co-op, they're part of the co-op and the co-op is actually the marketing vehicle to export the coffee. The co-op itself is just a nonprofit pass through to create a better market for their coffee essentially and make sure the grade of their coffee is right. So you're absolutely right. There's an enormous amount of training that goes into all of that.

Dave:
Greg, what's your advice? You look at your business resume and it's just phenomenal and the work that you've done across every business you've worked at. And now here you are talking about this incredible work you're doing to transform a country and maybe even an entire region that's very purpose driven. What's your advice to our listeners who are thinking how the hell do you find time for all of this kind of stuff, how do I... I get a lot of people who come to me and say "You're so lucky. Your work is your passion and it's so purpose driven." How do you advise business leaders who are nose down, they're grinding away, and yet they know they want something more but they just can't figure out what? How do you start with that process?

Greg:
Yeah. I started myself by just writing a one page plan for my life essentially. What do I really want to accomplish in my life? What are the blue chips in my life? And then I just asked the question, how do I integrate my business and my life together, and that made a huge difference for me to think about work-life integration as opposed to work-life balance. I think if you focus on work-life balance, something's going to always be out of balance. But if you focus on integrating the two and you take the time- And it takes time to get everything onto a page.- you can actually execute on something that's on one page.

Erik:
And you have something called your five Fs, which helps you to kind of keep things in perspective or prioritize. Tell people about the five Fs.

Greg:
Faith, family, friends, fitness, and finance. Will what I'm doing drive me closer to my maker or push me further away? Family, is this something that's going to allow me to build my family in a way? My parents, my kids, obviously my relationship with Rhonda in a way that's positive or negative. I've done plenty of things in life where I can say I sacrificed family for a job or an adventure or for something and that's going to happen, but how does that equate as you think about it? And then the next one is friends. So is this going to bring me closer or push me further away from guys like Erik? Am I going to get so busy that we don't have time to do our normal bike rides or hikes this summer or ski in the winter? Those friendships that are so important to me, am I going to lose that as part of this? And then fitness is the next one. And I love to stay in shape. I think it's really important. Is what I'm doing going to drive me away from being able to stay in some sort of shape and do the things I enjoy?

I mean, you can't go from zero to hanging out with Erik without a little bit of training. It's impossible. So maybe a lot of training. And then the final one is finance. Is what I'm doing going to put me so far behind the eight ball with the bank or with whatever I'm doing that I'm going to lose control of my ability to execute on those other things that I want to do. So that's how I make decisions. You can actually think of your life plan that way too. If you put faith, family, friends, fitness, finance across the top of a paper and then just list two or three or four things under each of those that you really want to get done, pretty soon you have the blue chips on one page.

Erik:
And one of the things I loved about your book is that it's obviously business principles and ideas, but it's also things apply to your life and your family. So sometimes, maybe it's a natural feeling, but I feel like I'm crushing it in the mountains, but maybe I'm failing as a dad or as a husband. So how do you apply this stuff? Any ideas or advice to apply this stuff to your family? You've been married for 35 years. That's pretty impressive.

Greg:
A long time. I married Rhonda before she knew any better I think. David Brooks is a New York Times editorialist, wrote The Road to Character in the Second Mountain. He has a saying that there are resume virtues and there are eulogy virtues. Resume virtues are what somebody reads when they do your bio. Eulogy virtues are what you want them to say at your funeral. So I said writing a book, it felt like a resume virtue. And then finally somebody said "Hey, you can write what you want." I said "Well, I'm going to do every other chapter, business and life." So the business chapters are the ones I outline for business here earlier. But there's a corresponding life chapter to them that's the one page plan for your life corresponding to the one page plan for your business. On the build a fortress balance sheet, I call that in life, choose freedom. So set yourself up so you don't have so much debt that you can't choose freedom in your life to live your life in the right way.

There's money in not money out is the business principle and that's about how do you build masks when you were building uniforms. How do you do telemedicine when you were doing medicine? What's the creativity? You guys are doing with your virtual summit. But the life side of that is think money out not money in because generosity is the only cure for materialism. And as the 15 major world views, Christianity, Judaism, Hindu, Muslim, the Enlightenment Movement with Immanuel Kant, atheism, Richard Darwin. The only thing they all agree on is that we ought to give alms to the poor, that we ought to help people out less fortunate than we are. So there's a corollary life to every one of the work ones. In work it's choose team, clean house if necessary, but in life it's build a life team. And if you think about it, who you have close to you that's really empowering you and driving you is so important. I say you can't do this with your mother in law, but you can apply this concept that I'm about to explain with anybody else.

If you look at your life, we all have in our... If you ever read Winnie the Pooh when you were a kid, there was Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh, and it's the donkey that always has his head down and he's always frustrated and everything. We all have Eeyores in our life and they kind of drag us down. You don't have to get them out of your life, but if they're in your inner circle, think of life as concentric circles of people you deal with frequently, you might just want to move them out of concentric circle or two and deal with them a little less frequently.

Dave:
Greg, where can our listeners go to find your book?

Greg:
You can actually get it on Amazon if you like. So it's there. And there's an Audible of it as well, so you can listen to it as well. So it's right there so you can grab it.

Dave:
Right Away All at Once: Five Steps to Transform Your Business and Enrich Your Life. And as always, we'll put any of the things that have been discussed in here that have appropriate links, those will be in our show notes at nobarrierspodcast.com. Greg, this has been an amazing tour of how to live life, how to run business, all the things that you've been so exceptional at in your life. You've also just been an amazing supporter of No Barriers over the years. We're so grateful for that as well. You've guided me as a leader of this business and nonprofit and I know that we'll continue to learn a lot from you as we move forward in the midst of this crisis with No Barriers. So thank you Greg.

Greg:
Well thank you. You're very kind. And Erik, it's always great seeing you.

Dave:
Well Erik, I'd love to have you highlight what you heard today that really stood out.

Erik:
Greg and I, one of the things that we do together is skin, which is like you ski uphill with these fabric... They used to actually be seal skins. But you put them on the bottom of your skis and you can actually ski uphill. So we'll be huffing and puffing our way up the mountain. My strategy is I keep Greg talking because he's so fast. If I ask him a ton of questions and he's talking the whole time, he's not breathing and it slows him down. But in doing that, I've learned a ton of stuff. I just, Greg was thinking in this No Barriers way long before No Barriers was even in existence. So many of these principles that he talked about today are so right in line with what we do. And I would also say that Greg's a person of faith and we were talking one time, and a lot of the No Barriers principles... I mean, we're a secular organization, but I don't know, paraphrasing, they're kind of like taken right out of the Bible.

So there's so much intersect. And I love mostly the idea that these ideas that we heard today, they are important for business, but they're very translatable to family and life and I mean, I'm speaking personally. Sometimes we can crush it in our businesses, but do we integrate our family and our friendships and our faith into that equation and be super proactive about it? So that's the inspiring part for me about the message that Greg gives us.

Dave:
I completely agree with that being the power of today's conversation in a very practical sense. I've been talking to lots of small businesses and other nonprofits that are struggling. And the simplicity of what Greg proposes we all should be doing, which is we should put on a single piece of paper, down what we want to do in this time, what we want to focus on, and why. It's a profound thing to do as a businesses to say all right, we got to put it all down on a single piece of paper. It really helps in a way that it's hard to understand when you're kind of in the midst of all that uncertainty and the crisis and there's all these things coming at you. You just got to pause and put it down on a single piece of paper and say "Does this seem right? Does this seem like what will get us to the other end of this?" So I love that principle. It's something I've always believed in and I think it's something those of us who run businesses need to pause and do frequently.

Erik:
Yeah. Rip those bandaids off quicker than later.

Dave:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well thanks again Greg.

Greg:
Thank you guys. It was great to be with you.

Erik:
Thanks Greg.

Dave:
Well as always, you can find our show notes at nobarrierspodcast.com. If you're interested in joining any of our virtual No Barriers programs, check them out at nobarriersusa.org. Thanks so much.

Erik: No Barriers.

Dave:
The production team behind this podcast includes Senior Producer Pauline Shaffer, Executive Producer Dedrick Jong, sound design, editing, and mixing by Tyler Copman, graphics by Sam Davis, and marketing support by Megan Lee and Carly Sansmark. Special thanks to the Dan Ryan Band for our intro song, Guidance. And thanks to all of you for listening. We know that you've got a lot of choices about how you can spend your time and we appreciate you spending it with us. If you enjoy this podcast we encourage you to subscribe to it, share it, and give us a review. Show notes can be found at nobarrierspodcast.com.

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MORIAH (MO) LEUTHAUSER

Program Manager

 

Moriah (Mo) Leuthauser grew up in a small town in Western Colorado. There she spent time outside with her family- skiing, backpacking, climbing and camping. She was introduced to adaptive recreation through an internship with a nonprofit organization that offered recumbent cycling tours from Telluride to Moab for disabled veterans. She was inspired to get involved with adaptive recreation after seeing the joy and healing that she had witnessed it bringing.  She attended Grand Canyon University, where she worked as a guide in the outdoor recreation program and received her Wilderness First Responder certification. Then, she worked at the National Ability Center as an adaptive ski instructor and as an adaptive raft guide for multi day rafting trips. During this time, she earned her PSIA Adaptive Level 1 cert and her Swift Water Rescue Level 4 cert. She now works for No Barriers as the Warriors Program Coordinator, but most enjoys opportunities to be in the field. In her free time, she enjoys mountain biking, rock climbing, skiing, board games and gardening. She hopes for a future where outdoor recreation is more accessible for all people and she plans to devote her career to this cause.