You're listening to software, radio, special operations, military news, and straight talk with the guys in the community.

Hey, welcome back to an episode of Soft Rep Radio. I have today a very special guest, and his name is Francis Rochopi, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about him, but first I need to point out that we have a merch store.

When you help keep the lights on, when you go and buy one of our mugs or our shirts and you support Soft Rep, go check out our merch store, and also we have kicked off a really cool book club, and it's software.com forward slash book hyphen club, I think.

If not, you can find them, but just looking up the software book club. Get involved in that, and we have a lot of books going out to a lot of our members that listen.

So without further ado, did not put too many commercials in front of you. The person that we have today, I'm going to read you a little bit about him real quick, founder and creator of the Jedboro podcast and founder of FR six as a guest with me today, and who I brought on to the show for Soft Rep Fran has served 13 years in the United States Army as a green beret, deploying three times to Iraq and spending several years operating across Africa.

A lifelong sailor Fran volunteers to teach veterans to sail as the race director for sail head of veterans service organization dedicated to reducing the veteran suicide rate.

He also served as the director of global security for Snapchat. Fran is a performance development coach for Boston University men's rowing and heads leadership programs for retro fitness using his five components of a performance mindset.

So Fran has a BA in journalism for Boston University and MBA from NYU Stern. He holds the highest certifications in the corporate security industry and has been recognized by the FBI and the DHS for his leadership and innovation and Fran, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I need to go to the merch store.

Yes, please check that out. Check us out. And also I'm sure that the Jedboro podcast which you helm has its own merch.

We do have our own merch and I built the store on Shopify. That was an emotional experience to try to have actually it was easy, but for me it took quite a bit of time to figure it out.

You know the hardest part is the pictures. Like what pictures are you going to put in this thing?

Because I tried taking pictures in all these different places of like our shirts and our sweatshirts and our hats and I could never get it right because I don't have like a light booth and I get you to create one.

And then I said, you know what? Screw it. I wear this stuff. My team wears this stuff all over the place when we do these recordings.

People are going to wear it in the real life. Let's just put pictures of people wearing our stuff like me and everybody and the rest of the team in all these different places and then people are going to actually understand what it looks like.

So that's what we did and we just launched women's t-shirts because I totally screwed that up too. I bought all this merch like a year ago.

I was super excited about it and I went to my wife and I was like, hey, check it out. Here's all the merch and we go through it and she's like, well, where's the women's t-shirts?

Right. And I'm like, what do you mean? Like that's the smallest and she's like, no, no. Women's shirts are different than men's shirts. They're cut differently. You idiot.

And so I so after a year I've got out. I did it right. I took the advice and I got we got women's cut t-shirts.

A little v-neck right goes a long way and a little bit on the ribs, you know, a little specific, you know, and same thing for my wife, same thing.

It's like, hey, I got shirts made for the shops. You know, our logo's all over it. She's like, yeah, okay, well, did you get any women's shirts made? And I was like, well, again, here, small, right? Media, right? Here you go.

She's like the cut did. It's exact same thing. So you had no idea. What a great lesson if you're going to open up a fashion line or put some merch out there and you're listening and you have your own show and you're trying to work on Spotify to get that up listed.

...