Monday Motivation.

Good morning, Cadre crew. Just give it a second here, just to make sure I see the little dot pop, the notification, the Cadre notification. I know that we're good to go. Hope everybody had an amazing weekend. Got my little juice, got my coffee, got my water. It's my normal routine, right? My coffee's decaf. I always roll with decaf. Just. It is what it is. I got my big smoothie today. Spinach. Let's see. So spinach, kale, banana. What the heck else did I. Blueberry peanut butter. It's amazing. Morning, Katie.

Hope you had a great weekend, too. Alright, guys, so at Cadre we have this amazing Wednesday meeting. It's called our video meeting, where all of our wellness experts get together and we talk about different, maybe video recommendations for each other, or we give each other feedback on the videos that we produced for the previous week, or livestreams or whatever that looks like. But I was challenged last week to present a video on basically the inception and the startup and the journey that is Cadre.

So let's go. Yeah, it was. I'm going to take you through this ride, and it's been an amazing ride. It's been an amazing journey with some wonderful people. You're going to quickly hear how I turns to we, right? Because there's nothing you can do in any company that you start without we. If it's an I company, you guys are going to struggle. That's all I got to say about that. But. So, a little about two years ago, I was mentoring an individual who was a freshman in grad school at Notre Dame. In their entrepreneurial journey, I could the entrepreneurial program, and he's on his own entrepreneurial journey, and he really wanted to get in kind of like the healthcare startup space and all those things.

And so he would always send me messages like, hey, what do you think of this? Or have you heard of this one or whatever, right? And one of them was this company called Ophelia, which is a space. It's in the substance abuse space, which I'm very well aware of. Right. And so as far as the space is concerned, they help individuals with substance abuse, specifically opioid use disorder with buprenorphine, and connecting individuals to buprenorphine and doctors and all those other good things. And ask me, what do I think of Ophelia, and do you think it will be successful?

And all those other things. I took a look at it and I researched the company and all those things I looked at and I said, you know, here's the issue. It's not solving the core problem before the problem started. Right. So, like, we have to. It's almost like waiting to get to doomsday in order to solve the problem. Like, how can we effectively address all these things, whether it's mental health, wellness, substance abuse, financial ruins, all those things, like, how can we help educate and inform so people don't need to fall off the cliff.

Okay. How can we get to that point? And unfortunately, that's a problem, right? And so the problem is that it fell off. People fall off the cliff, and then they would need Ophelia. So with that being said, you know, I thought about this, and I thought about this, and I woke up, and I was thinking to myself, we have to be able to address something like this from the perspective of hitting it head on early. Right? How can we hit this head on early? Hence how Cadre was born. And what our goal was, was to build a wellness platform that ultimately serves individuals before they even know they need the help.

Educate, inform, take the right steps, you know, whether it's anxiety, depression, mental health, financial stress, meditation, yoga, all encompassing and bringing it all into one. But here's the big but the journey's not all that easy to the finish line, right? And so, you know, I called. I had kind of had this revelation at 230 or three in the morning, and I called, you know, who's now my. My co founder, my partner on this, you know, Katie Donovan, and asked her, like, what do you think about this?

I have this idea. It's like peloton for the mind and all those other things. And so you start just whiteboarding stuff, right? You start putting a bunch of stuff together on the whiteboard, and then ultimately what ends up happening is you figure out which direction you want to go, right? You figure out what direction you want to go. And building this app, I never thought that would be entering the tech space. I never thought that this would be the direction that we potentially go. But once you start in with your ideas and your concepts and your vision, you have to race to, like, what, you know, proof of concept, you know, and building this amazing team behind you.

Right? And so the very first thing we did is we started looking at different individuals in the space, or space, is to try to identify who's the best 10, 12, 15 people that would be able to go along this journey with us, right? And so, you know, we started scouring different networks and all the things and found our core group. And we found our core group. We realized real quickly, you know, we got our group together in Vail, we met in Vail. We discussed Cadre. We went through all these different opportunities together on mission, vision, values.

Where should we go here? How should we market this? What's the idea look like? And then just really tried to, like, spearhead our ABCD in that 1st 60 9180 days of the business. What you'll find is selling an idea and a concept to people is very complicated. It's very, very complicated. People in the world, including myself, sometimes we want the finish line, right. The process itself is actually the most beautiful part. That's the journey. That's the dream, is to be on that whole journey together.

But for some individuals, we have to see the finish line. We need the definitive and all those things. And so our group went from 15 individuals through that veil trip and 60 9100 days after to really kind of formalizing our final team on this journey, which was eight from that group that kind of went on. So we've added about 50%. And so that's normal. That is absolutely normal. If you start a company and you have ten people to start, odds are you're going to churn over quite a bit to begin with.

But I'm telling you this. Those eight people, those nine people, those ten people, those 15 people that are in your corner and that are backing each other up through the whole entire duration while you're building something, those relationships will last a lifetime. So never, ever forget that. That we, that team, that community, that bonding, that experience is. Is absolutely everything. And so, you know, I just encourage you, when you're taking those steps in or you're starting your own enterprise, that you always remember just how important that team is and find ways to help one another through the sacrifice that you all make with time and all those things.

So Cadre has developed and established our core group of individuals, our core business function, who we're going to target, what's our brand, our logo, you know, building all these things together. But that journey, from a whiteboard to finding team members, to establishing how you're going to go to market, to finally finding product market fit and ultimately selling your platform to the world is an incredibly complicated journey. It's complicated. You need stick to it ness. You need to be able to find ways to continue to go, no matter what, even when everything in your body sometimes is telling you we should stop or we should quit, and you got to keep moving, and you got to keep going, and you got to keep finding a way to proceed.

So if you're out there and you're starting your organization today, there's three bits of advice that I want to tell you right away. Number one, as the person with the idea, your idea is only as good as how you can execute. Everybody can come up with ideas. Can you actually execute on this idea? Number two, there's an adage that's this. If you want to go somewhere fast, you go long. If you want to go somewhere far, you go together. You're only as good as your team. Right? So again, number one, idea to execution.

Number two, team. Team. And number three is, it's going to be hard. There's this other adage where every overnight success takes about ten years. There's truth to every single one of these things, so keep smiling, keep having an amazing attitude. But I just wanted to take you from a little bit of the journey, how we started Cadre. Where was the idea, where was the concept behind it, and why? To ultimately building a team and building a team together on this journey to last but not least, is providing a service to our customers that we're dying to do our job every day.

When we meet with our teams, when we meet our leaders, is, would we use this platform? Is this the platform that we want to wake up to every single day to ultimately roll out to? Do I want to wake up to the Cadre platform? Do I want to end my day on the Cadre platform? Do I want to do all those things? And that's what we're striving for, for our customer base. Our customer base is everything to us. Okay, so next, we have lots of amazing things as we end February. We're going into March. So, as you're aware, we're almost wrapped up here with March, which means you're two thirds, excuse me, with February.

So you're two thirds done with Q one already, which is crazy to think about that, right? So here you got, you know, your last, last month of the quarter, which is March, so knock it out of the park. You know, be a leader. And leading can be listening. Leading can be helping. Leading can be picking somebody up when they're down. There's so many different ways to lead. Leader. Always remember this, a leader is never a title. If. If you view your leadership as a title, you got a problem there. But that's.

That's for another day. But we have so many amazing things happening. We have our Cadre commitments that are being rolled out for March. If you don't know what our Cadre commitments are, please check both our website, social media, or I will be. We'll be posting them in team Cadre. So you'll be able to see our Cadre commitments someday. Those are going to be tied with bonuses and incentives and swag giveaways and all those things. But please participate in our Cadre commitments. Those are going to be amazing this month for March, which will be fantastic.

We have a remarkable crew here ready to go for our lives this week. We have all of our pre recorded content that is continuing to be rolled out. It always seems like we have the next and the next and the next videos that are amazing. Then last but not least is we're building this for you. Again, I want to stress this. We're building this for our customers. We're building this for our listeners. We're building it for you. We're not building it for us. We are the ones with the lived experiences that want to share that.

What we hope helps change your life or makes changes in your life that ultimately, like I talked earlier about, the why of this is we don't want to see people fall off the cliff. We want to educate, inform and inspire and motivate prior to. To any of those things happening in your life that maybe it's losing weight, maybe it's meditating, maybe it's stress, maybe it's anxiety, maybe it's substance abuse, maybe it's mental health, maybe it's financial, a potential financial disaster, bankruptcy, all those things.

We do not want the cliff to come into your life. We want to help that before you get to that cliff, because we've all been there before and we know what to expect in each one of our respective cliffs, if that makes sense. So, Cadre commitments are coming. Please participate in those. You're going to see me. I hop on those. I can't wait for those. I can't wait to download them, put them in my office, print it off and have it be something I can see every single day. If you keep those reminders in your life, those are going to be a really, really, really good thing.

Again, want to circle this all the way back? Number one, so glad you're here. Number two, in building a business, it all comes down to ideas, to execution. Number two is the team. And number three, expect it to be hard. What did you expect? You're starting a company. It's going to be hard. So always remember that. Right. So that's a little story about the journey of Cadre, how we're here, how we wound up here today. Very, very exciting to be a part of this with y'all and can't wait to look forward to our future together.

Download those commitments. Listen to the lives. Have fun. Participate in the community. We want to hear from you. We want to hear from you. We want to know who our user base is. Our user base is almost to a thousand now, which is amazing. So our base just keeps growing and growing, growing on our Cadre platform. So please, please, please participate in our community. Please engage with us on our video live streams and or our prerecorded content so we can change and build the app that you want. That's our goal.

That's our dream. That's our vision. Have an amazing day. Take care of yourselves. And then start off March strong. Finish off February just the same. Take care of you all. Have an amazing day. Talk soon. Bye.