Thoughts from a Vetrepreneur: Chayse Roth, Multi-faceted Businessman

Vet·tre·pre·neur(vettrəprəˌno͝or): a military veteran who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial and personal risks to do so.

Chayse Roth was a Marine Sergeant when I met him in 2008. He left service as a Gunnery Sergeant in 2013. Twelve years later, he’s a businessman and entrepreneur with great experience. He’s finished college and has an MBA. He’s started and run multiple businesses, primarily in the service sector, as well as a very effective non-profit called the Veterans Business Collective. He’s thoughtful about his successes, honest about his failures, and generous about helping other vets get into business. Put him in your network.

-Russell Worth Parker, Editor in Chief, Lethal Minds Journal

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Who are you? Also, I normally ask people what their business is, but you have and have had a pile of them, so can you run me through the history?

My name is Chayse Roth. I was in the Marines for the first major portion of my adult life. I went to boot camp two days after I graduated high school in May of '01. Stayed in until December of 2013, left active duty, and had to figure out who I was going to be when I grew up all over again. I looked at my options as far as getting a job: go to corporate, be a contractor, all the different ways somebody can make money. There was really only one thing about the Marine Corps that I didn't like, and it was the pay scale; the fact that I could look into my future and know that no matter how hard I worked, I was never going to make more than “X” each year. So, when I was looking at what I was going to do post-military, I wanted to not get caught in a salary trap where I know exactly how much I'm going to make no matter what I do. I felt like the only place I could really do that was to be in business for myself.

The flip side of it is that everything's on you. So, if you do well, it's on you, but if you do badly, that's on you too. And there's a lot of factors that influence it. I don't have any control over what president bombs what country during what part of what year that affects the economy and oil prices, and everything else that inform spending decisions of consumers that affect my business. I think during COVID was a good example too. Things that people think are secure can suddenly become insecure, even from an employment perspective. I think anywhere you're at, feeling like you have security is kind of an illusion. So I don't think there's as much risk in business as people tend to think.

When I left active duty the first thing I tried was with another former Marine Raider. We had this grand plan for how we were going to conquer the world and within about three months realized we didn't know what we didn't know. We didn’t know how to sell, or what we had, and we didn't know how to charge for it. There's a lot of a lot of things other than delivering the product that we didn't know. I still think we might have had a useful product if we knew how to market it and sell it to the right customer base, which was something we didn't figure out. So, three months into that, we're like, ‘This is clearly not going to work.’

I partnered with my brother-in-law to buy a local cleaning and restoration company that had been around for twenty years. Then we bought a coffee shop and ran that for a year, and decided that was a terrible idea.

Chayse Roth supports numerous non-profits

Why?

There were just a lot of aspects about running a coffee shop that weren't as cool as I had thought they would be. Each type of business and industry has its own unique set of challenges and things that you don't think about until you're in the thick of it. In that sort of business, if you can find a place to buy your paper coffee cups that's one penny less than somewhere else, you must make the switch. You might change cup suppliers six times in a year to try and save that penny, because when you're selling things that are $3, you're counting on these couple of pennies per sale over thousands and thousands of sales to make the year. It was aggravating to me to have to look at such small economic factors of the business.

I also didn't like having a physical location. It's got to be open whether people are coming or not, right? You're paying someone to be there seven days a week. Plus, certain industries attract certain types of employees. Are they people that you're going to enjoy spending your day with, and having to manage and deal with the sorts of problems they’re bringing to work? My personality works well with certain types of people and not with other types of people. Everybody looks at a coffee shop and says man, it'd be so cool to have one of these. I love being in a coffee shop. I think I'd rather just be the customer in a coffee shop.

How'd you get out from under that thing?

We just sold at a loss. It was painful because I don't like losing. The financial aspect of it was annoying, but not catastrophic. I just looked at it as I paid for some education. I learned some things about myself, about business. You don't always get the opportunity to have that kind of learning occur in an academic environment, so it cost me less in effort and time than my MBA did, and I think I learned a lot more on that little adventure than I probably did in the academics during my MBA program.

So, then what?

Well, still the cleaning company. Then I got into a boondoggle with a marketing company. There was some more learning that occurred there as well. And then another boondoggle into civil construction. None of it was profitable because while we did millions in sales, there was never any money to show for it. And so, I left both of those very close in time frame.

What do you think about that, as far as knowing when to walk away?

It’s tough because there's so much hype online. You see all these stories of massive success in business, and talking about the hustle and the grind and don't quit and don't give up. And coming from our background in the military, it's beaten into your head that you never quit, you never give up on something, and so I think it gets tough for guys to look at a situation and realize that quitting is exactly what needs to happen. I look at it as it's more of a course correction. And any money that's invested, if you don't think you can easily recoup it within a reasonable amount of time, then just look at it as a sunk cost, right? It doesn't matter what you do. The money's spent. So having a psychological hold on it is not doing you any good. Ask ‘How am I going to take what I got out of this failed venture and apply it to my next venture in a way that's going to help prevent me from failing again or accelerate my success in the next thing?’

When I decide to get into a deal or do a deal, you know, I always talk to my wife about it and, you know, we sit and we look at it and we think, is it right for us? Do we think we can make it work? Is it worth trying to make work? And if so, and at the end of it, it's hey, if it doesn't, what's the worst that's going to happen? We're going to learn some things. And that's just going to make us better on the next one.

Sometimes you learn hard lessons, but you always have to learn.

So now, it was just the cleaning business again...?

My business partner with the cleaning and restoration company is also my brother-in-law. He just retired from the Marine Corps Reserves as an Osprey pilot in December. But a long time ago, he was a Marine Corps Reserve enlisted dude who was an HVAC guy. He wanted to get into HVAC. There are a multitude of reasons why I thought that was a great idea. He started putting some effort into getting a license and went to community college for a year because he hadn't touched HVAC in twenty years.

Meanwhile, we started trying to find an acquisition to do because I’m a big believer that getting something that's running is way less of an uphill slugfest to profitability. We spent maybe a year looking for a local acquisition, but the PE firms have kind of ruined the HVAC buying market. Private equity has been investing in home services really heavily for the last several years, and they have been buying out anything that was even slightly profitable and also paying crazy multiples that made the market kind of unrealistic for folks that don’t have a $100 million private equity fund to pull from.

So after trying to make an acquisition work, we decided to stop wasting time and just do it on our own, which was kind of cool because that put me in control of the branding, so we were like, ‘All right, what are we going to call it?’ He flew Ospreys. I jumped out of them. I called in air support all the time on deployments. We’re Air Support Heating and Air.

And I know intuitively it's a veteran-owned company.

Yeah, and that's kind of what we were looking for. We wanted to have something that kind of tied into both of our military service experiences and something that was fun and different, and a brand that wasn't as centered on me or him as individuals. That way, everybody in the company could feel like they're a part of something and contributing to something. I trademarked it, though. I trademark all my brands.

Would you ever franchise this one?

I'm not a big fan of franchising. I did that once, and I did not enjoy that because when someone buys a franchise, there's a better than good chance that that person is not very wealthy and they're probably investing everything they have to do it. The franchisee is betting 100% of their family's financial future on your ability to make them successful. And so, if you really care about people, it’s a huge burden to shoulder because it comes down to the operator's ability to use the system and adapt to their own market and just do the work. So, while you don't have 100% control over their success, they look at you as their key to success, and they're betting their 401ks and they're maxing out credit cards to get into business, and if they fail, the consequences of that failure are catastrophic. I'm not able to sleep at night if they're not doing well so it's just not a good fit for my personality. It’s a great business for making money. I just don't have the stomach for watching people put their life savings into something and maybe not being successful because they didn't fully emotionally and intellectually understand the gravity of what they were trying to do by getting into business. Franchise sales guys are really good at painting a perfectly rosy future for them that may not exist and very likely won't exist because they probably don't have any business being in business.

I have some buddies that are in franchise systems, and they love it and they're killing it. But they'd probably be successful outside of it, too. They have the personality and the drive involved to just not fail, right? They're just going to gut through it and figure it out. So, when you put somebody like that in a franchise system and you give them the marketing support, you give them the operational systems, you give them the supply chain that keeps their costs low, those guys are rock stars. But they could have just started their own thing, too. They're just the person who's going to win.

What did you know about business generally coming out of the Marine Corps? Or did you just start swinging the axe and hoping it was going to work out?

I knew about as much about business coming out of the Marine Corps as I knew about special operations going into MARSOC. I went to business school in 2015-2016, hoping it would make me a more capable business owner. But I feel like most of the course curriculum is designed to make you a really proficient mid-level manager at a really big company like a Johnson & Johnson or a place that has tens of thousands of employees and they can plug you into any department and you know enough about all the functional things to be in charge of something without really being a domain expert in anything. And then, most of the higher-level analytical tools and courses are not applicable to me running my little business here in Wilmington, North Carolina.

I don’t have the same sorts of supply chain issues and logistical challenges. I don't have 100,000 people that I need an HR department to worry about and stuff. So, while there was a lot of good learning there, I didn't find most of it to be directly applicable to the day-to-day running of the smaller types of businesses that I've found myself in.

I've got buddies who went to Harvard for their MBA and told me the degree program was entirely a networking thing, where you’re basically paying to network your way into the Ivy League post-MBA club. What I got out of that is that it’s valuable because it's really hard to network up. I think that's one of the generational challenges people face when their dad did [something], their dad's dad did [something], and now they're trying to shoot for the moon, and they don't have the social capital to help get there. Which I think is a common story for a lot of military guys. I mean, social capital is a real thing, and it's important, so it makes sense that, you know, people would invest heavily in going to Harvard for an MBA just for the social capital aspect of it.

Network, network, network…

Can you talk about risk?

I remember our first [SOF deployment]. They said, "Hey, you're going to go to Tajikistan." And I was like, "Okay, I've never heard of that, but what are we going to do there?" And they're like, "We have no idea what you're going to do there." And I thought ‘What do you mean? why are we going then?’ They said, basically, ‘Well because you gotta. I don't know but you're gonna go on the ADVON and you're gonna figure it out. You're gonna go meet with the country team and figure out how you can be useful and what you're gonna do.’ So we just went and met with the country team and they introduced us to the Tajik Border Guard Commander and it was like, ‘Alright, I guess we'll come work with the Border Guard and train these guys.’ We figured it out. I felt like I could apply that same kind of mindset that, if there's an obstacle, I'll just figure it out.

There's a cost to that; a cost in time, a cost in emotion, sometimes a monetary cost as well, but the flip side of that is not knowing sometimes is why you are willing to do it. Sometimes when you know all the risks and how hard it's going to be, it's easier to say no, and then you don't pursue the opportunity.

Speaking of risk, can you talk about financing a new business? How do you go about doing that?

There are a lot of ways you can go about doing it. Banks only give money to people who don't need money. So, if you need money to start a business, a bank's not going to give it to you. Buying a business is easier because the SBA will fund an acquisition, as they're basing the risk on the business you're buying's track record of success. So, they're betting on this business that's been here and doing this thing every year for twenty years. They're assuming it'll continue to do that for the duration of the loan, however long that takes to pay back. But even then, they're going to say, ‘What's your track record in this industry? What experience do you have? Why should we assume that you're going to be successful running this thing that you've never done before?’ So even if it's a really good business and you put together a really good plan and you can say, ‘We're going to take it from this to this, and here's how we're going to do it,’ they're going to look at you and go, ‘Yeah, but you've never done it. So why should we bet on you?’ So not having history in it is difficult.

So, what did you do?

Air Support HVAC started very humbly. We bought a van, wrapped it, had the website built, invested in the brand package, got all that done. Built the website, social media accounts, Google accounts, and did all the things that I learned needed to be done by owning the cleaning and restoration company for ten years in the fall of 2023. We hired our first guy in January 2024 and put him on the road, and started shaking the tree. An advantage that I had is that I’ve been in business in this town for ten years, so I already have a customer database I can sell to. The other thing was the Veteran Business Collective.

What is the Veteran Business Collective?

The Veteran Business Collective is a 501(c)3 some dudes and I put together about five years ago now. I was bemoaning the fact that I couldn't find a vet group in our area, and I went and checked out the VFW. I was a life member because my grandpa, who was a Korean War vet, bought me a life membership to the VFW for my first deployment to Iraq, but I had never been to a meeting because I was too busy deploying. It wasn't exactly what I was looking for.

I checked all the local nonprofits, and at that time, Bunker Labs was hyper-focused on tech incubator startup-type things for veterans, but didn't care too much about the existing plumber or handyman or HVAC guy and stuff like that. So, we saw kind of a gap, and... I called some buddies, and I said, ‘Hey, I think I want to start this networking group for veteran business owners in our area. What do you guys think? And they're like, ‘That sounds cool.’

So we put it on a calendar, and I had fifteen people show up during COVID to what ended up being our inaugural meeting. We looked at the calendar it was the second Thursday of the month and so we said ‘All right, we'll just do it on the second Thursday next month and so we did it again the next month and we had thirty people show up and then thirty turned to forty and before we had like sixty to eighty people every month showing up to this VBC thing. And it was super cool because it ended up being not just business owners trying to, you know, do referral business with each other. That was an aspect of it. But we had people that had other nonprofits showing up that wanted to just bring awareness about their nonprofit and what they were doing, which was good for other members that didn't know that this nonprofit existed, and it was a service they could use and stuff.

So it really turned into a collective of, like, resources for veterans. Now if a guy shows up and says they want to start a business, it's like, ‘Go talk to John because he'll educate you on what it takes to get money and what your options are there. You should talk to this other guy because he owns a marketing agency and he can give you an idea of what that's going to look like for whatever type of business you're doing, and then you've got thirty or forty other people here that are all in different lines of business and you can just have conversations or you can do a ride-along.’ We have a chapter in Jacksonville, North Carolina, one in the tri-cities of Tennessee, and last year, one opened in Pensacola, Florida. I think that's the current active ones.

A Veteran Business Owner addresses the Collective

And how does somebody interested in starting a chapter do so?

Contact the VBC, either through one of our social platforms, like LinkedIn or Facebook, or they can just email me and have a conversation with me. Mark Arrington, also a former Raider, is the president right now. He's the overall president and the Wilmington chapter president as well. He's been the president for, I think he's at a year and a half right now. He'll be coming up on two years at the end of this.

How does someone become a member?

They go to veteranbusinesscollective.org and sign up, but you can also just come to a couple of meetings and check it out and see if you like it. You don't have to be able to attend a local chapter meeting to be a member. Some businesses can benefit from being a member without having to be local, you know, like Mark. He’s a mortgage broker; he can write mortgages in any state in the country, so it benefits him to network with anybody who's in the military. Me and HVAC? It doesn't do me a ton of good personally to network with somebody in Tennessee because I'm not going to drive out there to fix your HVAC. But I'm still a resource if they want to talk to me about something, and maybe they know something I don't know, and it's still good networking.

We've had new businesses started just because two guys were at a VBC meeting and found out they had similar kinds of goals and ambitions, and started talking and had a beer, and a month later, they're doing a startup together. I think we charge a hundred dollars a year, something like that.

The meetings that I've been to have a specific format. What's that format? So the format, usually it's, you know, like the first thirty minutes or so is, get a drink, get some food, kind of settle in, do some open networking, and then we have a formal meeting where we get everybody's attention, the chapter president gives a quick down and dirty of what the VBC is for any new faces in the room.

We do an around-the-room intro and name what kind of business you're in and your branch of service, just so you can see if there are people there that you know you need to talk to that night for a specific reason. Maybe you're looking for an insurance guy, and that guy said he's an insurance. Then we have veteran spotlights, or business spotlights, whatever you want to call them, where if you're a member and you want to give your pitch to the group, or maybe you just want to educate the group on a particular topic, you can speak. It could be on any topic, but as a member, you get the floor for seven minutes. We'll do two of those in a meeting. Sometimes we have a guest speaker. We've had state representatives and senators come down and talk. We've had other nonprofit leaders come and talk. So if we have a guest speaker, that'll go. Then we do success stories where we take a minute for everybody who's had some sort of business success or transactional success to highlight that

Is there a member database?

Yes, on the website www.veteranbusinesscollective.org there's a chapter database for each chapter, and it's got all the members so you can use VBC members for business. The speed of trust with veterans is high because we have that shared background. So you kind of automatically extend some trust because you just assume the guy's not going to screw you over and that if there is a problem, he's going to do whatever it takes to make it right. That's one of the advantages of kind of sticking in the veteran community. Plus, for me, I know what it's like to leave active defense and try and figure it out. So, if I can help a guy and spend my money there instead of somewhere else, that's what I'm going to do. The idea is that we can all help each other.

For it to really have as much value as possible, we need to have as many members as possible, and the members need to participate, so it's more than just ‘go to the website, pay the hundred bucks, and get your name on it.’ You've got to put the time into it to spread the word, help grow the membership, and then participate to create more value for everybody. With Air Support, VBC is something we looked at as leverage that we thought would help us fast forward our timeline a little bit to being profitable.

Has that played out?

It has. It took a while to get hot this year so we were just slow. On a Saturday morning. I'm like, ‘I've got to find some stuff for my guys to do next week. Like, these guys, I've got to pay them. We've got to make money. We haven't had much going on for two weeks.’ I thought, ‘You know what? I'm going to remind everybody who's in my contact list who still lives in this area that I exist and that my company exists.’ I typed like eighty text messages Saturday morning, and I sent them to everybody I could think of. Just taking the time to sit and text a bunch of people I know and remind them that I exist bore fruit.

What would you do differently?

I mean, I've told more stories about how I've failed in business than how I've succeeded. I've had a half dozen failures and two businesses that are running and paying me money right now. So don't be afraid to just dive in and try something.

Of course, hedge your bets and mitigate as much risk as possible. I wouldn't advise someone to bet their entire life. savings on something that they have zero knowledge of, without doing a good amount of due diligence. One is, what industry do you think you're interested in? Why? Why is that interesting to you beyond thinking you can make money in it? What are the opportunities? What are the challenges that you know about? Who are the types of people that the industry attracts, both customers and employees, and what types of problems come with those customers and those employees, and are those things you want to deal with daily? Because there are very few situations where there's passive ownership. You're going to deal with things.

The other thing is, if you think you want to own a business in roofing, call roofing companies and ask them, ‘How long have you been in business? How'd you get into business? Why'd you get into business? What's the day-to-day like? What do you like about it? What do you hate about it? Would you do it again?’ Ask a hundred different people who are already doing that thing everything you can about it, and then compile all that data into something usable and say, ‘Okay, I still think this is a good idea.’ Or ‘I've talked to a hundred people in this industry who hate life and wish they'd never done it, but they feel like they’ve got to keep doing it because they don't know what else to do.’

Business is stressful. You should not go into something that you know is going to create more stress than necessary for you. If you don't want to deal with teenagers with blue hair, don't own a coffee shop.

What's the single biggest challenge you've had thus far? The hardest thing about all this?

I'm not a one-answer kind of guy. I'm an over-thinker, and so an answer to this kind of question is very difficult because all things in business are challenging. Sales is challenging. Hiring is challenging. Managing employees is challenging. Cash flow management is challenging. It's all super challenging, and it can all be very stressful. It can be hard on the family. Finding time and feeling comfortable stepping away from the business to go on vacation when you feel like, ‘I got to be there to cradle my baby and make sure it's going to be okay.’

I can tie that all back to one concept from the Strategic Coach Program. And the concept's called The Gap and the Gain. One of the most difficult for me is staying in The Gain and out of The Gap which is a psychological thing where high performers or business owners or special ops guys or whomever...we have this ideal in our minds of where we think we should be, whether it's fitness, our shooting ability, financial goals or headcounts at the business, or whatever it is. But the ideal is something that always changes as you get closer to it. So, if your ideal is a million dollars in sales this year, but as you as you hit nine hundred thousand, you're like, ‘Man a million doesn't seem that good anymore, because I'm at nine hundred thousand and it hasn't changed my life as much as I wanted it to. Maybe two million is what I need.’ When you chase the horizon, you can't get to it. And if you're always focused on it, you never see how far you've come. And so you stay in this psychological place called The Gap, between you and your ideal, without seeing The Gain, which is you now compared to you six, twelve months ago. And when you're always in The Gap, psychologically, it's really tough because you're only seeing your shortfalls and shortcomings, and you don't celebrate the victories. It just looks like the whole world's falling apart. You have to step back and ask, ‘Am I still getting paid? Are my guys getting paid? Are we still making forward progress? Did I take my family on a vacation? How's my daughter doing in school? What's my time with her looking like? It's challenging when everything is on you to pick your head up and say, ‘You know what? I haven't missed a birthday or a Christmas or a trick-or-treating, or anything since I left active duty. Not one ballet performance, not one school event.’

I feel like being a Raider and being in that community made some things more difficult. You have the can-do, climb over any obstacle, attitude, but you also have this mission debrief, hypercritical aspect to yourself as well, where nothing that you do is ever good enough. And so, you always have to level up just to try to be the average guy, right? And you're always focusing on what we didn’t do well and how it could have been better. And so I know I've taken that with me into business and so I always see all the opportunities to do better and all the things that we're not doing perfect and all the things that we're not doing right and then I forget to look at the things that we are doing right and the things that we are doing well and to congratulate the guys on the things that they are doing well and celebrate the small daily victories. If you look at Air Support's reviews, I think we have three one-star reviews and probably close to 300 five-star reviews, and we've been in business for eighteen months. And that one negative thing just sucks so much bandwidth. And you forget to celebrate the fact that, yeah, but I've had 300 other people say we were great. And so, take the screenshot, text it to the guy that got the review, and be like, ‘Hey man, awesome. Good job today.’ Instead of telling him about the one thing he did, he forgot, or he screwed up, or whatever. That's always going to happen. So, I think that for me, it's staying in the game and staying out of The Gap and looking for the lessons learned and trying to improve but not making that the point of every day.

What lessons have you learned in service that have helped you as a business owner?

You need to always be striving for improvement, right? When you first set up security you might just be in the prone next to a stump while your buddy starts digging the fighting hole and then the next day you're in a fighting hole together and you have more security and the next day you have sandbags and then six months from now you've got Green Beans back behind you selling you mochaccinos.

You need to have AARs. But just because you're always improving your position doesn't mean you shouldn't celebrate all the little things along the way. I was an absolutely piece of crap lousy leader as a young NCO and the things that the Marine Corps had shown me about leadership at that point that made me that way. When you first hit the fleet, your NCOs are just a bunch of fire-breathing Corporals, and everything's still kind of like boot camp, screaming, yelling, and all that kind of stuff, right? So, early on in the Marine Corps, that's what leadership was. It was scream, yell, be a dick, get the job done. I don't care what you have going on at home. I don't care if it hurts. It doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the training plan for the day and screw everything else, right? And, um... MARSOC changed that for me because that wasn't the attitude that we have at MARSOC.

MARSOC turned into, ‘Hey, man, I heard your wife's got a thing going on. Like, do you need some time? And it's like, ‘Yeah, man, like, a couple of days would make a big difference for us right now.’ ‘Okay, go. We got it. We're not deploying tomorrow, so you know, take a few days and handle it.’ And that completely changed how I looked at leadership. I think probably the most valuable thing I got out of the Marine Corps is having a people-first approach to how I lead my business and really listening to the guys.

I got a guy that's got kidney stones right now, can't work. He was super stressed about it. I went to his house today and he's like, ‘Hey, I'm really sorry this is happening. I know we're super slammed and you need me in the field and everything.’ I'm like, ‘Bro, you have no control over your physiology. It's not your fault, let me know when you can come back. We'll be okay. And you're going to be okay because I'm going to pay you anyway, because it's not your fault, you know? So like get healthy and come back to work.’

For what I call Vetrepreneurs, people leaving service or people who are already vets that want to follow in your footsteps, what quick advice do you have?

I'd say plug into a network of veterans who are already in business. It doesn't matter what kind of business; you need to be able to have a pool of people you can call and talk to and tap into as you're going through your process of figuring out exactly what it is you're going to do. It doesn't have to be the same branch of service, same job, whatever, but they've been to boot camp of some sort, they did some time in the military, and now they must do something different, and they're in business. Because they're going to have an experience that's similar to yours, same sorts of emotions and struggles and things, and they're going to be relatable, and they're going to have lessons learned that are going to save you years of trials. When I left, we didn't have all these awesome transition assistance programs. These different VSOs that help vets get jobs and start businesses didn't exist. They're there now. Plug into them. Use them. But find vets. I mean, not that you can't learn from civilians, and you should network with civilians and know them, too. But they don't have the same background, so their obstacles and struggles might not be the same and as relatable as yours. I think that's like the biggest thing because you're going to find everything else you need through that network.

How can people find you?

They can email me at chayse@airsupporthvac.com. Air Support Heating and Air on Facebook. People can DM me. Chayse Roth is my name on LinkedIn. I don't check it every day, but I'll get back to guys. Anybody who reaches out and wants to talk business or transition, or just military, can come to the VBC.Lethal Minds is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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