From Military to Sustainable Business: How Michael Klepacz is Fighting Plastic Pollution

Welcome to the show.

Tired of the hype about living a dream?

It's time for truth.

This is the place for tools, power and real talk, so you can create the life you dream and deserve your ultimate life.

Subscribe, share, create.

You have infinite power.

Hello there and welcome to this episode of your ultimate life, the podcast dedicated to one purpose, and that is to help you create a life that you love.

A life of purpose, prosperity and joy.

And I'm honored today to have a glorious soul who shares that kind of feeling with me.

Michael Kleppatz.

Klepac.

Pretty close.

All right.

It's a.

Yeah, Fluker, so I pay attention, but I did it wrong anyway.

Clepach.

So, Michael, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

So, Michael, the first thing I want to ask you is Weaver.

I just asked you a question before we started and I said, what's on your heart?

And you were saying some things that are real valuable about how you've turned the things that are on your heart into a business.

And I want you to just start where you were and tell me what is on your heart and why.

Yeah, I would say what's on my heart is mostly it's a bunch of negative things.

I'd say this podcast is a lot of positive stuff, but I'm really fueled by negative things.

I think that when you're comfortable, you just want to sit in the hammock and enjoy life, but when you see things that are worthy to change, you do.

And so, yeah, I'm just, I'm a little bit upset that we've started poisoning ourselves and poisoning the world and we should be able to live to be 120, apparently, and we're not.

And that's the result of our choices as humans.

And so that's kind of what's on my heart.

And that's sort of the mission I have with what I do for a living, which is eco friendly sustainability stuff.

So I want you to tell me more about that.

A question I love to ask to start with.

And now that you've said what's bothering you, what I want to focus on is what you're doing about it.

So my question is, how's Michael Clipach now I can say it better.

Adding good to the world.

I tell people, especially in like the entrepreneurship circles who are always talking about, oh, impact, impact, impact, that it's my job is to have maximum impact by having not no impact.

Right.

So like basically my job is trying to reverse microplastics, essentially is what it boils down to.

I'm like antimicroplastic anti.

You know, chemicals that stay around in our world for decades and more.

Saw a commercial the other day that said every piece of plastic ever created is still here.

Yeah, And I don't know if that's exactly true or not, but since plastic is so foreign to anything that there is, it's probably true.

So what brought you to the place to where your biggest, your deepest heart concern is how we're poisoning ourselves and trashing the planet.

So I was a project manager in the Air Force, and I got medically retired from the Air Force.

And when I got out, I was just.

I spent like six months just staring at the ceiling, you know, wondering where I was going to go in life.

Because I had planned since pretty much being 12 years old, to be in aviation.

And at that point in time, 2007, I was not thinking about sustainability or chemicals or anything like that.

In fact, I was renowned for being covered in chemicals.

They called me Pig Pen at work.

I would always be jet black from all the grease from being on airplanes.

And as I got out of the Air Force and started eating non Air Force food, right.

Just the regular food that you find, Air Force food is pretty good.

You were always in really good shape.

And.

And I started gaining weight, like a lot of weight.

And I'm like, what's going on here?

So.

So me with my project management hat, you know, with.

Which is all about mostly efficiency, I started looking at what's going on with our food because we are what we eat and you are what you do not excrete.

And so that was the first rabbit hole was GMOs and pesticides and herbicides and.

And.

And the nutrition content of the food that we have today, because you look at Italians versus someone from Ohio, they could eat similarly and have completely different results.

So you had a personal.

It's interesting.

It always.

Almost always it comes down to we have a personal experience.

Sometimes they're mostly, they're hard or difficult or not what we want.

Sometimes they're good ones.

But having those experiences drives us to ask questions and do stuff.

So when you dug into that and realized that you were gaining weight because there was garbage in the food, what did that make you decide to do?

For a while, I kind of just sat on it.

You know, I just sort of let it simmer in the background.

But by.

This is going to sound dumb, but by 2009, it was.

It was July of 2009, which is Mulberry season.

I'm from Ohio, so.

So it's Mulberry season.

And to me, mulberries are better than any other berry.

And so I.

So where are you now?

Are you still in Ohio?

I'm in Poland.

Well, I thought you were, because your phone number's like a weird thing with plus some digits and whatever.

So.

Yeah, yeah.

Plus four, eight is Poland.

Yeah.

Okay.

So you were in Ohio, and now you're.

Now you're in Poland.

Anyway, go back.

So mulberry season in Ohio.

Yeah, mulberry season in Ohio.

There's mulberry season here, too.

And I asked my uncle, hey, do you want the mulberries from this year?

He said, no.

So I grabbed a tarp and some rope and a wrench, and I slung the rope up into the tree and started shaking it.

And I'm getting rained on by mulberries.

And that was when I had, like, an epiphany.

I'm like, this is great.

I could do this forever.

And so I started looking into actually using my process management skills to redesign greenhouses.

And I discovered this thing called aquaponics.

And just, you know, how can we human beings use science to maximize nature, not fight it to, you know, give ourselves abundance and healthy food?

So that was, you know, two years later almost, but that's when it really hit.

And what did you do with it?

So you, you had this itch to maximize.

Use science to maximize nature in a.

In a mutually supportive way instead of fighting with it.

And then what?

Then I, I.

So I started building models of greenhouses, and I visited as many different styles of models of greenhouses I could find.

Like, we had the, I think it's called the 977 foundation in Toledo, Ohio, has, like, a geodesic dome greenhouse, and zoos have many different kinds of greenhouses.

And there's plenty of agricultural greenhouses in the vicinity.

And I was just looking at them through this project management efficiency lens going, okay, where's the energy being used?

Where's the water being used?

Where are things being lost?

Like, one big thing is like, can't we devise some kind of system to pull the water back out of the air as it exits the greenhouse so that we can use that water again?

You know what I mean?

So more closed loop thinking.

So then I decided I was going to drop out of school and tried to go to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo for their agricultural program in California.

And that was now 2010.

None of that worked out.

As things do, sometimes you fall on your face.

And I had an adventure in California instead.

And I ended up doing a program at UCLA for business.

So then I got more into the entrepreneurship side rather than actually getting my hands dirty.

So this is fun because part of the thing that's really valuable in these shows is for people to hear because I talk about your ultimate life purpose, prosperity and joy, blah, blah blah.

And everybody hears this woo woo stuff, only they don't realize that it is the practical application of these truths and principles that we talk about that causes these kind of results that you're looking for.

So that's why I'm walking with them on your practical journey.

You didn't go to Cal Poly.

You did this business thing and, and, and took it where, like, what kept you going?

Well, so after the UCLA thing, I ended up getting accepted to a business school in Poland.

And by that point I had been completely into permaculture, which is kind of a sustainable agriculture movement.

And regenerative agriculture wasn't really a big buzzword at the time, but it is now.

So when I moved to Poland, I told the girl I was dating, like, listen, when I'm done with school, if we're going to be together, you got to agree that we're going to live out of the city, that I'm going to have a farm.

And so I started renting a farm here to convert to a sustainable farm, not only so I could secure good food for myself, but also sell it.

And yeah, it was a really, it was an interesting adventure, but they kind of got squashed a little bit because of legal things in Poland.

Like you have to be certified to have a farm and you know, they don't really want to give farmland to foreigners and stuff like that.

So it's always been like two steps forward, one step back.

And that's okay.

It is.

And that's really good to share that because when you're trying to create a life that you design as opposed to a reactive life about crap that happens to you, you're going to experience two steps forward, one step back, and sometimes one step forward and two steps back and it makes you sometimes question your motives, your outcome, your vision, your desire and everything.

So you ended up moving to Poland because you got this business school.

Klepacz is a Polish name, a Polish derivation.

Yeah.

Did you have immediate ancestors there or not?

Yeah, I still do.

I still do.

So it was, was.

Do you now have like Polish citizenship and stuff?

No, I have my permanent resident card though.

Oh, okay.

There's a couple of things I could do with like my grandparents marriage and death certificates and Stuff like that.

It's.

It's a little bit complicated because when my family left Poland, Poland didn't exist.

Poland didn't exist until after World War I.

Before that it was like Germany and Prussia and Austria.

Okay, well, that's up close and personal to me because my wife's mother, I think, or grandmother was born in a piece of Poland that is now Ukraine or a piece of Ukraine that's now in Poland or something.

And her dad, my.

My wife's dad, not her granddad, but dad was born in Ukraine.

And so we have talked off and on about, you know, exercising, whatever those things are, to get some kind of European thus and such and haven't done anything.

But anyway, so that's kind of interesting.

So you're in Poland.

Did the girl come with you?

Well, so I met her.

So kind of in between the exiting the military and becoming obsessed with sustainability, I, I came over here and was teaching English for like six months and that's when I met her.

But I didn't know it was like a me meeting her kind of situation until I was out in California doing my thing and she found me on Facebook or something.

Then we started talking and then I came out here for Valentine's Day in 2011, and then she came to visit me in 2011 while I was doing US UCLA stuff.

And then we decided, all right, let's find a way for us to be together.

So I found a school that would accept of us veteran.

And so, yeah, so she's from Warsaw, which is where I live now, and I've been here since 2012.

So.

Cool.

So this became a long term thing.

Good for you.

Yeah.

Now we have a four year old daughter.

We've been married since 2020.

Okay.

How ultra cool.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Anyway, so, so you're, you're in Poland, you moved outside the city and you're obsessed with sustainability.

And then tell me where it's gone from there.

Where are we in 2012?

13, 14.

Somewhere.

Yeah.

So in 2013 or so, when I started renting this farm, it became clear that because I don't come from money or anything like that, like there's no friends, family, and fools that I can ask for money for anything, you know?

And so I was like, all right, we need to do something to help this farm get off the ground faster, you know, and so I decided there was a lot of empty buildings on the property and that we would turn some of them into workshops and that because of the connections that I had in The US we could start to produce certain very easy to produce products here and then just export to the states and import dollars, which at the time was really good.

Cool.

So what kind of products are your first products?

The first.

The first products we started doing was this waxed yarn called Hempwick, which survivalists and smokers use as a source of fire.

I've sold enough of that stuff to wrap around the world, but it's very niche.

And then the second project that we did as we started to kind of develop, you know, non polyester products was a guitar strap.

So we made a leather free vegan guitar strap for a client and then after that was dog collars and dog leashes made from hemp.

And it's just kind of snowballed into us using our imaginations to imagine new versions of products based on plants, essentially.

So you've walked.

We're going to pick up the journey in a minute, but I want to stop here and just ask a question.

So you're now to the place where you are creating a living.

You've moved to a foreign country.

You found the person that you're having a permanent relationship with.

You allowed your experience to wake up a fire in you, which you followed.

You scrabbled your way through creativity and determination to create products and export them halfway around the world, principally to make a living.

And to me, I'm looking at that story as how this coalesces into the possibility and the truth of Michael literally creating a life for himself.

Would that be true or did I miss something?

It seems pretty accurate.

So what would you say to people who hear your story, which we're not even done with yet, and say, yeah, whatever, that's good for him, but I could never do something like that.

Me, I'm different.

You know that story that we've all heard, what would you say to someone like that?

I would say you can't because you don't.

Well, say more.

I get it.

You can't because you don't.

And that's absolutely 100% true.

But that's not going to motivate anybody to action.

So let's get a little deeper.

Yeah, that's true.

You know, I think nobody likes to be uncomfortable.

You know what I mean?

Like every most regular folks, I would say they want security, they want steady income, they want, you know, Masklo's hierarchy of needs to be steady, you know what I mean?

And I have become professional at not doing any of that.

You know, like, I've.

I've just, you know, crashed on Friend.

Like, I've probably lived on couches for like, four or five years total of my life, you know, for one reason or another.

You know, like one little, like, thing is an example.

Like, when I was in high school, I moved out when I was 17.

And it's because when I was in high school, I had two jobs, a girlfriend, and two different schools.

And I was putting over 100 miles a day on my car.

It was like an oil change a month, you know, And I had to do that to do all of those schools and all of those jobs, because I went to high school and I went to aviation technician school at the same time.

But then I realized if I go move in with my college friends, I'm right in the middle of all of it.

And Now I'm driving 25 miles a day instead of 100, you know, and so I ended up sleeping on a couch, you know, and.

And I didn't have a lot of money, so I washed the dishes instead of paying rent.

You know, I was the house mouse.

I wasn't very good at it, I'll admit.

Especially if they ever see this, they'll be like, oh, he was terrible at it.

But.

But yeah, you just, you just kind of have to.

You look at the goal, you have a goal, and you're like, it's not going to be easy to get there.

And you just, you just make it happen.

You know, you just roll with the punches.

So two things, or you can take it easy.

I want you to commit to sending it to them so that they definitely see it.

Will you do that?

Sure.

Okay, cool.

Because I want them to get their little moment of glory about being in this.

So one of the things you said.

I'm going to say it in a little bit different words, is you've made a choice, an intelligent, intentional choice, to get comfortable with being uncomfortable with being in stressful, boundary challenging situations.

Is that fair?

Yeah.

I've had.

I had a colleague of mine this summer said, if I were you, I'd have a rope around my neck.

And I was like, that seems like a very extreme thing to say.

But, you know, for me, it's just the.

The pressure of entrepreneurship.

Like, the pressure of, for example, having an entire family who works for you.

And, you know, you pay yourself last and you pay your people first, and you might have to have a bank loan because of a pandemic and all these other things like that.

Pressure can be motivation, you know, rather than.

But some people just want to kind of curl up into a ball and woe is me.

And I just don't have.

I don't have time for that.

I think there are a lot of people my age who are way ahead of where I could be, you know, But I think by the time I get to the end of my life, I will be exponentially past these people who are having me now.

So I want to.

I hear you.

I hear the language you're using, and I want to reframe some of it.

Because way ahead, you're only using the measurement of externalities like money or career.

And so someone who uses that as a measuring stick would look at it and say they're ahead of you.

When the path you've described of resilience, of choosing to get comfortable with the growth curve, which includes discomfort, means that you are actually way ahead of them.

And if, either during the pandemic or during the next catastrophe that comes, and who knows when that's going to be tomorrow or five years from now, they're going to be at a disadvantage because they don't have the hardening of resilience and of the experience both of the years that happened before as you made a choice to build that.

And we haven't even got to going through the pandemic yet.

And so I don't.

I just, I'm not going to buy the idea that that measure is the appropriate one.

Is that, Is that okay?

Yeah, sure.

I mean, I wouldn't say.

I wouldn't say that.

I would say, if not in income, not at the level of income, but maybe at the level of life, comfort.

You know what I mean?

Like my, my former accountant who I went to school with as kids, we were best friends growing up.

You know, he makes, you know, 300k a year, and he's got the cool house, he's got all the kids, he's got like, all the, all the boxes are ticked for that standard American life.

You know what I mean?

Just like when I was 18, getting into aviation, I thought, by the time I'm 25, I'll have a snowmobile, a jet ski, I'll have a house in the burbs and, you know, do all that other stuff.

But one thing that, like, he has with his life is he doesn't have any time.

Like, he, he might make 300k a year, but he can't enjoy it at all, you know, and I might make a fraction less, but I have all the time in the world.

Well, I was going to ask you.

He has X, Y, Z.

And the question that, that always makes me want to ask is if he were to tell the truth to himself or to you and you or him, he would ask himself, is he happy?

Like, does he wake up every day just happy to be alive and about the life that he has?

Maybe, maybe.

I think that people, you know, they have different values and they've been exposed to different life situations and scenarios.

Right.

And so I know I wouldn't be happy.

You know, I'm going to say I don't think so, and I'm perfectly willing to be wrong.

And I'm not doubting if I don't know him, obviously, but when I.

My own experience is having had all that and been through that mess, 90% of the people that I know that have it, that ought to be happy because they have all the stuff aren't.

In other words, they.

They feel like there's an emptiness, like this isn't really filling the thing.

You know what I mean?

Like, I talk about your ultimate life.

Like, I don't have that.

And I thought I would kind of feeling.

Sure.

Would you agree with that or you think I'm full of crap?

I mean, I've been listening to a lot of people talking lately about, like, the American pursuit of happiness in itself is toxic, you know, because like, happiness is this, like, fleeting thing that within the founding fathers papers of starting this country is something that's supposed to be the thing that we're pursuing.

We're supposed to be constantly running after what makes us happy.

And, you know, science seems to be finding out that happiness doesn't usually come from internal things.

It comes from, you know, like helping others and, and doing good things and making other people's lives better give you this feeling of happiness.

And so.

That goes back to my very first question.

I agree 100%.

We are physically built to love and serve each other.

When we are in that activity, we create the neurochemical cocktail that makes us feel good.

Yeah, and my experience is that there's a spiritual analog to that and there's some kind of spiritual neurotransmitters, whatever that looks like.

Because in addition to the physical sensation that oxytocin and serotonin and all that crap creates in us, there's a deeper and more something sense of satisfaction that penetrates to the core when we're in.

When we choose to be in love and service, even when it is at our own discomfort or accompanied with some kinds of struggles.

Do you agree with that or not?

Yeah, I definitely agree.

I think that, you know, it's, it's, it's Getting over these struggles that bring resilience.

Right.

And like a lot of so, so I've, I try to mentor as many people as I can and I find that, you know, the ones that, who've had the hardest lives have the most grit, you know, generally speaking.

And they're more, they accomplish more.

I have a saying and I say the crap that we have, like good things happen to us and bad things happen to us.

Externalities, the ones we remember more than anything and seem to have the biggest impact to the bad ones.

The difficulties, the struggles, the betrayals, the bankruptcies, the illnesses, whatever they are.

And those things can either ruin us or they can refine us.

And sometimes they do both.

They might ruin us for a while and then we take a different view or choose a different path and then those same things refine us and then becomes more substance of us.

We seem to actually grow in substance when we have chosen to be refined by those things.

Yeah, yeah.

I was think, I think a lot about, you know, oh, I had a woe is me.

My dad was an alcoholic, my dad was not an alcoholic.

But you know, so then I become an alcoholic or my brother, which I don't have a brother says woe is me, my dad was an alcoholic.

I'm never going to touch alcohol.

So like two boys from the same father can observe a situation and say, I'm going to embrace this or I'm going to deny this.

And the same thing can be said for, you know, oh my, my dad was a criminal, so I became a policeman or whatever, you know, so it's, it's interesting what people go through to embrace something versus not.

So we're talking about creating a life intentionally purpose of the show and to offer the insights, the encouragement, the assurance that you can build any life you want.

And I call it ultimate life purpose, prosperity and joy.

And I realize everybody's going to use whatever words they want.

And where you are, do you feel like you're building that?

Do you, do you feel like the life you're building is one of satisfaction, purpose, us, prosperity and joy?

Yeah, yeah, I do, I do.

I, I, when I started this company I said okay, what would it look like?

If so there's a few permaculture principles, right?

This, this design thinking that I was speaking about earlier, that's mostly around having an eco friendly lifestyle.

If that system would create a company, what would it look like?

And today it's called like triple bottom line thinking where it's like planet people, profit and things like that.

And so I always tell people that, like, I'm not willing to climb the mountain on other people's throats.

You know what I mean?

And a high tide raises all ships and all this other kind of conscious capitalist phrases that you hear people say, I'm saying all the time.

And I just.

I just.

I know that, like, I can sleep good at night knowing that.

That I'm doing things without compromising.

You know, some people say, they talk about situational ethics and, you know, our inability to actually live like that.

And you're telling me you sleep at night because you have found a way and have created, not found.

You created a way to live, create business, create jobs, create income, have a kid, have a relationship, have a company that doesn't.

Life isn't full of those kind of compromises.

Yeah.

Why is that so important to you?

Like, what is in your heart that says, this is who I am?

Yeah.

You know, in.

In business school, I always heard this phrase from multiple different instructors, professors, et cetera, that basically, at the end of the day, the job of business is to maximize profits for the shareholders.

And then when you hear someone speak like Simon Sinek, and he's talking about how profits are a result, you know, of doing something, it's not the purpose.

Right?

So, you know, I'm.

I'm often challenged by people who, like, we could just take the guitar strap, for instance, right?

Like, the.

The material that we use to make the guitar strap and the labor that we pay to make the guitar strap makes it to where it costs me more to make one than you would find at a local store here in Poland.

Right?

And so people say, well, why wouldn't you just make $1 guitar straps that would end up retailing for whatever, $7, whereas you're making guitar straps that cost $8 or more, that might retail for 50 or more.

And it just.

It just seems obvious to me that we.

We can have good, affordable products that make our lives better without making our lives worse.

So would you.

Go ahead.

I think that we will.

No, no, I was just gonna say we.

Most people just stick their head in the sand, you know, and they just.

They don't think about the end of a life cycle of an item, and they just, oh, well, you know, it's not my problem.

And, you know, but like I said in a speech I gave the other day, the world that we have right now is the result of projects.

You know, it's the result of people had a vision of having something a certain way and we could have good results or bad results or even wonderful and abundant results.

But right now we seem to have a lot of, you know, money focused, toxic results.

Mentally toxic and toxic for our lives, our longevity and for the planet.

So I love that.

And we're going to dig into all three of those.

Mentally toxic, planetarily toxic, you know, toxic for the people.

The lingering open loop that I had is.

So if your guitar straps sell, create, if you take.

Cost you a bucks to build them and somebody can build one for one and sell it for seven, and yours are hanging in the store next to a $7 guitar strap and it says, you know, ultra cool, vegan, whatever it is, guitar strap, buy this because you're conscious.

What are they?

What do you sell them for?

I've, I've seen the guitar.

So, so I don't, I don't have a brand or anything.

I, I do what's called white label manufacturing where companies and brands find me and I, I make what they dream and I put their name on it and then I sell it to them.

So I've seen some of our guitar straps, depending on the bells and whistles, sell for as high as $80.

Why?

What, what is it?

I mean, people pay like designer brands and other things.

People pay ridiculous prices when, yeah, you can argue that it's made better or this, that and the other, but there's a limit to that.

So why would somebody pay $50 or $80 or, or anything in between when they could buy a $10 guitar strap?

What would drive that decision?

I think I, I think partly it's the novelty of it, right?

So it's like you can have like a full leather guitar strap, you know, like a really beefy one.

And you know, if you take care of that strap, you're going to have that thing for life because like leather is for life if you keep it conditioned and stuff.

And then.

So I think someone who might be like a finger quote stoner or, or something like that might look at a hemp guitar strap and say, yeah, that's super cool, I want that.

But in an objective point of view, if you compare like the cheapest seat belt, like polyester guitar strap to one of ours, you know, the seat belt one kind of cuts into your neck, it slides on your T shirt if you're performing because it's got very low friction and ours is soft, it absorbs sweat, it's washable, it's.

Did I say it's soft?

It doesn't cut into your neck.

You know what I mean?

And it's just, it's a different user experience then if you just get the lowest end, let's call it like student level guitar strap, you know what I mean?

Like, oh, I just bought my first $200 guitar.

I'm gonna get a $5 guitar strap and a couple nickel picks, you know what I mean?

Yes.

People have preferences.

All right, I love that.

And we're going to dive into the preferences.

Why do you think people have preferred to create pursue dreams that create the toxic planet?

And for me, even though toxic planet is important, more important, and I think they're related, is the toxic heart that everybody has the hierarchy of so and so is better than so and so because they have more money.

And you know, I call it the religion of money.

What is it that makes us choose that spiral of options?

I think for me, and I would be happy to have a debate with anybody, it's greed and short term thinking.

I wouldn't disagree.

The basics, greed and short term thinking.

Short term thinking is I want everything.

I want, I want it now.

Greed is just part of that religion of status and money, Meaning if I have more of it and it being money and the things that it gets, then I'm more important.

And I guess I'm just going to boldly say someone that believes that has established the locus of value, personal worth and value outside of themselves.

My value is because of that thing, whether it's my bank account or my car or whatever.

That is what gives me value and has missed the whole point of the truth, which is your value is yourself.

Yeah.

Would you agree with that or would you think that I'm being overly woo woo.

It's just enough woo.

Just enough woo.

All right, well, I want you to walk me now through how you did that.

You're in Poland, you're renting this farm, you're starting to build these products.

You're exporting them to the US you have connections there because of your time in business and the Air Force and stuff.

What happened to you during the pandemic?

It was a three or four year chunk of crap.

The pandemic was interesting, right?

So like, firstly, it happened because.

Well, I mean, firstly, what happened to us was I said to all, all the employees, I think there was around 25 or 30 at the time.

I said, I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.

You know what I mean?

One of the more interesting things that didn't happen to us though was we didn't have to shut down because we were already what I call a decentralized factory.

So within our facility, people are always like, oh, I want to come and visit and see it.

It's like, well, you're not going to see much because most people work from home.

And it was true then, it's still true now.

So like we will build modular machines and just take raw materials and packaging to people and pick up finished product and then take it back to our warehouse and do quality control.

And, and that's how things were when the pandemic started.

That's how they continue to be is this decentralized model.

And for us, our business started booming a bit because E commerce was going crazy.

People are at home, they have money to spend and stuff like that.

But once that big wave ended, the opposite though was all the boats on Long Beach.

One of our clients had like 100 shipping containers waiting on the ocean for months, you know, and then like if you're a wholesaler and your job is to sell the stores, the stores jobs are to have product to sell to people.

And if your wholesaler has, you know, product waiting on the ocean, boo hoo, I gotta find a different, I gotta find a different wholesaler, you know, so they might look in, you know, New Jersey or around Maryland, in a different port town for different wholesalers because the west coast is shut, shut down basically.

And so, yeah, it created really weird effects that like I'm still feeling today with supply chain and delivery issues and other things like that.

So overall, so you just said one of the key things, you're still experiencing supply chain abnormalities because all of the wrinkles and backups and backlogs caused by governmental choices during the pandemic, without even talking about whether they were right or wrong, haven't ironed out.

Yeah, yeah.

Calling it a bullwhip effect.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So how long will it be in your business before that is 95%, you know, negligibly residual?

I'd say it's happening like this was the, this year, this like after the summer.

This was like the first time where I looked and I said, things are starting to normalize again, you know, because, you know, like I said, if you're, if you're a wholesaler and you start to lose clients to different regional wholesalers, you have to fight to get those back, you know.

And so imagine that you do have a wholesale business, your warehouse goes empty and then one day you have 100 containers show up and your client list has been cut in half because you couldn't supply them for the last four months.

And just a lot of challenges, you know, I Don't envy those, those people, you know.

Yeah, no, I get it.

So that's fantastic.

So, so we've talked about some of the logistics and the, the choice.

I guess the thing I really want people to take away is, you know, whatever you want, listeners, but is the story of resilience, is the story of choice, is the story of the real possibility of creating things like you want, of creativity and finding different ways to do things, of creating a vision and actualizing it.

So if you, like you said, you mentor a bunch of people, tell me what that means.

What do you mentor them in, helping them do what?

I think it really depends.

It's a lot of people who are like young inventors or just people who want to get into entrepreneurship in general, people who are interested in sustainability, that kind of thing.

I would say the entrepreneurial youngins in like the late teens, early 20s, college kids are the most fun because, you know, you just get to push them outside of their comfort zone, which I find entertaining.

One of the things I read the other day is that Poland itself, at least in this one article, is what was talked about or extolled as becoming a new sort of European economic superpower in terms of its economic growth and stuff like that.

Is that, are you seeing that?

And where does that position you in terms of growing your influence, your company and your opportunity to create more of the vision you had when you started this sustainability journey?

So for me, most of the stuff that I do is still American based.

So the university that I went to, they'll throw students at me every once in a while because they have a mentorship program.

And it is really cool to watch Poland kind of grow in leaps and bounds, you know what I mean?

Like, like, no offense to Toledo, Ohio, but like Warsaw, Poland is way nicer, way safer, way cleaner, way better public transportation, weight, everything.

Why, no offense to Toledo.

Why not say offense to Toledo, Ohio?

What's going on here?

I don't know, but you know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, you know, people have different values.

You know, it's like I know that if I have a meeting downtown, the best way for me to get there is to jump on the subway because then I can read a book.

I'll be there in 20 minutes and if I take a car, I'll have to fight through 30 some minutes of traffic, you know, or if I take my motorcycle, I'll have to constantly try to stay alive, which is a different adventure.

But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it is.

So I won.

I love that.

Right before the pandemic in November of 2019, literally months before I was in Warsaw.

The BNI had their global convention there that year and I, Joy and I, my wife and I attended that.

So I had a chance to be there for you know, a week or two and we visited, we stayed a couple of weeks.

We spent some time in some other cities in Poland as well and we quite enjoyed ourselves in that.

Not that that's anything other than an anecdote.

Right.

Are you going to stay in Polish?

Yeah.

It is too bad.

It would have been delightful to see you.

Are you going to stay there?

We have, we have talked about maybe moving everything to Italy because like in general it feels like Poland's kind of anti entrepreneurial.

Why?

Just the bureaucracy and the way that they tax people and things like that.

It just seems to kind of put a burden on the entrepreneur.

Right.

Whereas like in the States, if you wanted to start a side hustle, you know what I mean, you pay money based on your results, you pay money based on your profits, but here because of things are a bit more socialized, you end up having to pay the government a set amount of money no matter how much you make.

And so let's just say it's 1,500 PLN that all of a sudden turns into X amount per year.

And that amount per year might be the amount of money that someone wanted to have a side hustle just to improve their lives.

And so yeah, there's just a bit of kind of, you know, overregulation over taxation here that is stunting growth.

But it's changing.

Is Italy better?

I don't know.

I think it's a different form of bureaucracy.

I've been trying to interview a lot of people from Italy because people are like, don't go to Italy, it's too bureaucratic.

And I'm like, you know my impression Pepsi, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't know that Italy's any better for socialist.

It's tax grab or anything else.

Well, I want you to teach me something now.

Let's come to the place where you, you view me as someone that you're going to distill a little bit of your heartfelt and hard won learning love to tell me some stuff that would help me have confidence in my ability to create or my willing increase my willingness to listen to my intuition or the kinds of things that it really takes to launch on some journey like this.

I would say that it's, it's really, it's a muscle, you know what I mean?

It's like, like I said earlier, you can't because you don't.

Like, I can't draw because I don't.

But if I did draw daily in a year, I'd be great at drawing something.

You know, it's the same for creating.

It's the same for asking questions.

Like, I think that we have an education system that's good at creating employees, but we don't have a system that is teaching people critical thinking and like, the right questions to ask, you know, and that if you do, if you do, if you are able to formulate the right questions, then you're on the right track.

Because for me, wisdom isn't knowledge, but knowing the right questions to ask.

You know what I mean?

I do.

And I love that.

Tell me where people can find out more about you if they want to find out more about the clepach story.

And see, get a hold of you, find your stuff.

How do we do that?

Right.

The easiest way is MichaelClepach.com, just a little blog that I've been putting up recently.

I'm on all the platforms.

I'm on Instagram, I'm on LinkedIn.

I was the first Michael Cloughbatch on Facebook, but now I'm not.

So for me, LinkedIn would be great.

My personal email, even, which you can all find that on michaelclebhash.com because I love to talk to people and learn new things and create new relationships and make progress.

Michael, I love everything that you're about.

You've touched my heart and inspired my action and the listeners today.

Thanks for being with me today.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

You're welcome.

I really want to acknowledge the story you've told, what you've chosen to do, and who you're being in the world.

Thank you, folks.

I want you to just listen to this.

It's a great story.

You know, I've known Michael for maybe not quite a year now or something, and I can tell you that the person you're seeing is the real deal.

He makes conscious choices.

He's proven over and over again that you can do what you want to do and get through hardships and do it wherever you are.

And that those things and the stuff he's taught us today are key drivers and tools that you can use to create your ultimate life right here, right now.

Your opportunity for massive growth is right in front of you.

Every episode gives you practical tips and practices that will change everything.

If you want to know more, go to kellenfluker media.com if you want more free tools, go here.

Your ultimate life Ca subscribe with your heart in the sky and your feet on the ground.