March 7, 2018 - Sean Hannity Show
24:56
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| This is an iHeart Podcast. | |
| He's been a great asset to the team. | |
| And it's it's fun to have him around and uh he's he's just soaking all this stuff up like a sponge. | |
| When Eric Schubert hired Chris Brewer to join the Vancouver, Washington Office of Express Employment Professionals, he thought he had a winner, but he didn't know the full extent of the journey Chris had taken. | |
| After a year, both men are sure they've made the right choice. | |
| On this edition of On the Job from Express Employment Professionals, we meet a young man whose life took a radical detour and who landed on his feet in a job where he can help others every day. | |
| If you want to find your next job, or if you're a company hoping to grow your workforce, Express Employment Professionals is for you. | |
| Find more information at ExpressPros.com. | |
| Chris Brewer and I are driving around his hometown of Vancouver, Washington. | |
| He tells me that he dropped out of high school at age 15. | |
| And then I started working, got my first job at a golf course, and worked there for about a year, then just started working odd jobs, and then worked for Lesh Schwab tires for about a year, and then I quit that job and joined the army. | |
| I worked on the driving range so I was a moving target. | |
| That's how that's all that was. | |
| I I washed golf carts and did the driving range and literally turned into a moving target whenever I got in that golf cart to go get the range balls off the driving range. | |
| There's a funny commercial you've probably seen with that same theme. | |
| So you can probably picture Chris under fire from golf balls. | |
| But it's all part of something we'll learn about him in much more depth. | |
| He's unstoppable. | |
| What'd you learn from that job? | |
| Golf balls hurt. | |
| Um but it taught me a lot of uh responsibility too because I was there by myself. | |
| So I I had in that part of the golf course, so I had to stay on top of uh getting you know golf balls for the driving range and uh having enough golf carts ready for um when people would show up for the twilight golf at about 2 30 in the afternoon and but it's a lot of self-responsibility because you had to work by yourself and stay up on top of everything. | |
| After the golf course there were odd jobs, then the tire store for a while, but an event in 2003 inspired Chris to make what he thought was a move into a lifetime career. | |
| And it's one day I just up and quit and was like, I'm gonna go join the army, because my friend Kane, who um I went to high school with was killed in Iraq in 2003. | |
| And he was the first person from Vancouver to be killed in both con or in either of the two conflicts, and I was like, I've well I gotta do it, finally do it. | |
| And so I did. | |
| And my parents were not happy at all about me joining the army. | |
| I walked in, kind of disappeared for two days, and I was like I was walking in, I was like, hey, I joined the army, I leave for basic training in in uh a week. | |
| And they're like, so that's how that went. | |
| How old were you? | |
| 21. | |
| Chris didn't really know what to expect from basic training. | |
| The army takes raw recruits and tries to toughen them up. | |
| Well, uh the hardest part for basic training, and like I told kids when I was a recruiter, it's like if you've ever went to a sports camp, basic training will be a cakewalk for you. | |
| But so Fort Knox, Kentucky has these hills that are notorious throughout the army called Heartbreak, Misery, and Agony. | |
| And they are just so insanely long and steep. | |
| Like one of them, it's so steep, like when you're going up, you can actually reach your arm out and touch the asphalt is that steep. | |
| So that was the hardest part for me was those three hills, because I had just spied them. | |
| So they were not fun. | |
| Other than that, it was easy. | |
| Korea has been in the news a lot lately. | |
| Both the South, where the Olympics were held, and the North, where the political situation has us on guard. | |
| Chris served two tours of duty in South Korea. | |
| And that place is the most beautiful country I've ever been to. | |
| The people are super Friendly, um, very welcoming in when they find out that you're an American. | |
| And um yeah, I'd recommend anybody goes to Korea in a heartbeat and not be afraid of the guy that's in North Korea. | |
| So when you're deployed to Korea, what's your day-to-day like there? | |
| In all honesty, it's the exact same as it would be a stateside for me. | |
| Because my job I worked with a Patriot Missile System, so like we trained a lot, but I still woke up and did PT at six thirty in the morning. | |
| And PT stands for physical training. | |
| All right, so exercise and so forth. | |
| Every mor um Monday through Friday exercise. | |
| After that, it was on to the motor pool for maintenance of the vehicles, and the time was filled with plenty of training on their specific job responsibilities, which Chris can't go into in too much detail. | |
| But his overall impression of the people of Korea and the country was overwhelmingly positive. | |
| Now talking with Chris, you can hear how life in the army goes in cycles. | |
| Korea, then back to Fort Hood, Texas, then Korea again. | |
| But Chris's life was about to undergo another big change. | |
| After a chance meeting, sparked a conversation. | |
| This was one of the first things Chris wanted to tell me as we were having breakfast on the day of our interview. | |
| Like most everything else Chris says, he sounds a bit nonchalant about this, but his eyes are sparkling. | |
| And then 2000 ten, I got stationed in Fort Bliss, Texas, which is in El Paso. | |
| So the middle of the desert, and that's where I met my wife. | |
| Um she worked at a gas station or a convenience store, whichever you prefer to call it. | |
| And I just happened to come in one day and I got to talking to her and I got ready to leave about 30 minutes later because she looked really bored. | |
| I was like, I go, I started talking because like you look bored, is what I let off with. | |
| We got soccer and I went to go walk out, and she's like, Well, you're not gonna ask me for my phone number? | |
| And I was like, I was like, Well, can I have your phone number then? | |
| And here we are all these years later. | |
| Now we're married, we've been married for uh February twenty-sixth will be a year. | |
| That happy event was still far in the future when Chris was sent to the Middle East. | |
| In 2011, I got deployed to Bahrain, which was the most miserable year of my life. | |
| I don't know if you've ever been there, but Bahrain's eleven miles wide and thirty-one miles long, so it's crazy small and take you about an hour to drive around the whole entire country. | |
| Um and I was on a little itty-bitty air base, which was uh RIFA Air Base. | |
| Okay. | |
| Um and our job was ballistic missile defense, you know, from anything might be coming like out of Iran or anything like that. | |
| To pass the time and stay fit, Chris lifted weights. | |
| Now, when I was preparing to meet him and learn about his life, I did hear that he'd had an accident when he was in the service, but I pictured something service related. | |
| The incident that was to end his dream of serving twenty years in the military happened in the gym and was just an unfortunate and awful fluke. | |
| It happened when I was in Bahrain. | |
| What happened that day? | |
| I was actually I was just working out at the gym. | |
| I mean, I really was just trying to because I had a l I had a good amount of downtime, so I'd work out two times a day. | |
| And so I'd try to go for a new record for weight for me, and my back didn't like it. | |
| That wasn't quite the end of Chris's military career. | |
| He was assigned to work in Northern Virginia for a while, and then became a fantastically successful recruiter. | |
| But army doctors caught up with him, found his extensive injuries, and realized that he shouldn't stay in the service. | |
| So I got medically retired because of my back. | |
| Uh I would have did the full 20 if I would have had the chance. | |
| So how do they tell you? | |
| Do they send a letter? | |
| Do they call you into the office? | |
| What how do you get this news that that your whole life is about to change? | |
| Um, so what you do is it's called a medical board. | |
| So your case gets presented to army doctors, and you go through the med board process, which takes about seven or eight months. | |
| And at the end of that process is when you find out yay or nay that you can either stay in or you gotta go. | |
| So and I I knew that I wasn't gonna be staying in. | |
| So I was I started preparing, started getting everything all packed up and ready to go, and then I uh got the letter in the mail, said you I took all my ninety five days of vacation that I had saved up, and I came home to Washington. | |
| All right, you're here. | |
| You're now you'd have to take sort of a left turn. | |
| This was wasn't what you planned. | |
| You had a different plan. | |
| So w what what are the kinds of things you start uh doing once you're back home? | |
| Um so there for about a month or so I went into a pretty dark space and I was just in a downward spiral, and I thankfully I had my friends Jason and Sherman and Richard who owned the brewery. | |
| They're like, hey Chris, like you want to come help us build the brewery, and I was like, sure. | |
| So I did that for the first six months that or after that initial like depression phase. | |
| Because it's a a lifestyle that you get so used to, you know, do it for ten years, and then they tell you you can't do it anymore, and you don't I didn't know what to do with myself. | |
| So that then I helped them and it got to get really grill they weren't my friends per se then. | |
| They were acquaintances that I knew, but then over the six months of us building that place, we became really, really good friends, and it altered my life, like they were great, and it and it made me feel like I had a purpose again. | |
| As you're starting to get to know Chris Brewer, you can probably tell that having a purpose is key to his sense of well being, whether it was working on Patriot Missile Systems or switching to recruiting before he was, as he says, med boarded out of the army. | |
| After the break, we'll learn more about how he helped his friends build their microbrewery in Vancouver, Washington. | |
| And once that volunteer gig was done, how he pursued and earned a job at the Express Employment Professionals Office in Vancouver as a staffing consultant. | |
| You're listening to On the Job, the podcast from Express Employment Professionals. | |
| One company is on a mission to put a million people to work each year. | |
| Sounds like a big number, doesn't it? | |
| Not to express employment professionals, seeking a skilled labor position or administrative work. | |
| Maybe you're an executive looking for a career that fits. | |
| We take pride in connecting the right people with the right company. | |
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| Go to Expresspros.com to find a location near you. | |
| Welcome back to On the Job and the story of Chris Brewer, who found meaning helping others find jobs after his own career reached a turning point. | |
| Chris didn't go directly from the army to Express Pros. | |
| He did what many people recommend when thinking about life transitions. | |
| He dove into an all-consuming volunteer job to acquaint himself with civilian life and get his mind focused on positive energy. | |
| In an industrial area of Vancouver, Washington, a microbrewery is becoming a destination for beer lovers. | |
| Brothers Cascadia is open every afternoon and evening with food trucks out front for those who love fine beer. | |
| Jason, the brewmaster, is showing me around. | |
| So uh in the fermenters, uh this is where we're gonna add yeast and let uh fermentation happen. | |
| Uh the the beer will sit in there for roughly two to three weeks uh while it's finishing. | |
| We may add more secondary ingredients to that or not, depending on the beer. | |
| And then uh this is also where we'll uh carbonate uh the beer and then package it as well. | |
| So where did Chris fit in here? | |
| Well, once he had reconciled himself to leaving the army and spent a month or so with his head down, he offered his services completely as a volunteer to help build this brewery. | |
| Yeah, my name is uh Sherman Gore, and uh one of the owners of Brothers Cascadia Brewing here in Vancouver, Washington. | |
| Sherman Gore has poured himself a glass of Cascadia's best beer and sits down to talk with me about his friends. | |
| How it how I met Chris was uh basically about how I met everybody that is a part of this family here at Brothers Cascadia. | |
| Uh the three owners, Jason and Richard and myself. | |
| Uh we were all bartenders and servers and brewers up in a place called Northwood up in Battleground Washington. | |
| And uh we were able to get a bunch of people behind us for the brewery. | |
| And uh Chris happened to be one of our regulars there, and uh we got to know him and uh Through circumstances, uh, since Chris didn't have a job at the time, he started volunteering down at the at the brewery and uh became one of the uh the family members down here and he was here at least five days a week helping us out. | |
| It was uh it was an agreement, it was incredible, incredible. | |
| He wasn't just someone that showed up every day, he actually he brought something every day, you know. | |
| So it was uh it was fun to be around, but he was also he was willing to learn from some of the uh the electricians and contractors, and also uh he was willing to do research and and all sorts of stuff. | |
| So he became we asked him, you know, after after a little while was hey Chris, would you like to help with this? | |
| You know, this has become became kind of a thing that uh that Chris really made himself invaluable just through hard work, even with if he didn't even have any skills in a certain area, he'd be he made himself valuable in that area and became just like well, Chris is gonna help us with this, and we're gonna help us with that. | |
| And uh I mean he really is kind of a one of those old old school stories to where he really got involved and and he made himself to it that we couldn't imagine it without him now. | |
| So then it's uh yeah, yeah. | |
| I mean, he's just part of the family now. | |
| It's that's just how it is. | |
| Became such a part of the family that he had his wedding here. | |
| Part of the family, maybe, but remember two things. | |
| Chris was a full-time volunteer in the effort building the brewery, so he didn't have a salary during that time, and there was never any promise made about the future there. | |
| It's a micro staff as well as a microbrewery. | |
| So once the hard work of constructing the place was over, Chris was once more forced to confront the future. | |
| Where could he go from here? | |
| On the hunt for paid work now, Chris attends a job fair. | |
| Eric Schubert, who with his wife Julie runs the Express Employment Professionals office in Vancouver, Washington, had sent someone from that office to the fair. | |
| And the story behind it was before I met Chris was that Chris was at this job fair, he was coming out of the military, um, looking for his first civilian job, and um he met Michelle. | |
| And um the first thing that Michelle noticed was now this was after the fact, of course we found this out, but noticed that his hair was long and and he he he was nice and and and really looking forward to starting a new job, but he came in the next day completely high and tight haircut, ready for an interview with his suit and tie and all this kind of stuff, and Michelle didn't even recognize him when he walked in the door. | |
| But he took it, he obviously took it serious. | |
| I mean, he was ready, and uh, and that's that's when he ended up meeting with me. | |
| All right, now you have a lot of meetings. | |
| I've seen I've been in the office for a while, a lot of people come in and out of there. | |
| When you had that first meeting with him, what what stood out to you? | |
| Hmm. | |
| Well, to me to me, I could instantly uh instantly tell he was polished. | |
| Um which which was kind of funny in the beginning because that's Michelle was like, I don't remember him looking all polished when I saw him at the interview, but uh it was fun and it was a big joke for a while. | |
| But but um, but that was my thing is he came in looking all polished and he um he did he just had a good attitude about about life in general and just just wanted to help people and he he spent the you know the first few minutes of our of our meeting talking about um his recruiting experience for the military and um and that's I mean that's helping people get into the military and we're also helping people find jobs, so it seemed like that was a good match. | |
| And I just said, Well, what do you think about working in up in here for us? | |
| And that's where it's kind of started. | |
| And uh and I and I said, Well, can you I mean, can you start tomorrow? | |
| Because we we were in need of some help at the front desk. | |
| I said, because I think you'd be awesome at it. | |
| And he says, actually, Eric, I'm I appreciate it, but I'm gonna have to turn you down. | |
| And of all things, when Eric offered me the job, he's like, So can you start tomorrow? | |
| And I was like, No. | |
| And he gave me this funny look because like I just offered you a job and you're telling me no, and I was like and and I was a little thrown off by that. | |
| Because I'm like, what do you mean? | |
| Like, you're gonna be great. | |
| Like, why are you gonna turn me down while he was getting married the next day? | |
| Like, well, in my defense, I'm getting married on Sunday. | |
| I'm a well, she my fiance, they have a wife now. | |
| And um, I was like, she's flying in in a couple hours, and we're everything's already paid for and we're doing everything. | |
| So he ended up having I said, Oh, well, why didn't you say so? | |
| I'm like, you made me think that I was like offering you a bad position or something, and so then he um he ended up going off and get got married, and then he then he started shortly after that. | |
| It's been almost a year now, and it's been a great experience so far, and I love waking up and doing what I do and helping the people that we get to help because Eric and Julie took me in and helped me out when I was in a in a bad bad situation, and I just love the end of the day. | |
| I feel like I truly accomplished something by helping people find their find jobs. | |
| I'm getting them working so they can still take care of their family, and that's a really really good feeling to me. | |
| Chris is um a busy bee. | |
| That's Tunisha Williams, a fellow staffing consultant at Express Pros. | |
| That's what I call him. | |
| Um, because bees are a very important population insect for this world to go around. | |
| So um I call him a busy bee because he does whatever he can to help the teen, to help himself, to help everyone around him. | |
| So being a busy bee, he's always moving and doing whatever he can to make sure that everyone is successful, not just himself. | |
| As when he was talking about his resume, he was real proud that he was one of the best recruiters in the country. | |
| From a from a statistic standpoint, and um, and that that appealed to me as well because I'm like he's obviously got the drive. | |
| And my own dad was a recruiter for the army in the past. | |
| So I I know how much it takes to go to all the high schools and to go to all the career centers and and and I mean it there's a lot to be considered one of the best in the country as a recruiter standpoint. | |
| Um and so I I knew I knew he would be successful here. | |
| Like just knowing that drive in itself. | |
| I knew I knew he could do it. | |
| So that was one of the big decision-making factors for hiring him too. | |
| Um, I would say someone who is definitely um having a heart of helping people. | |
| I think that's the most important thing. | |
| The actual staffing consultant position can be taught, but you have to have a heart for people. | |
| That's the only way you'll be successful. | |
| And tell me about some examples in the last six months of of how you've seen that in Chris, that that he's just not doing the job, but has that, as you say, a heart for people. | |
| Um, well, Chris, um, his willingness to help people is not just in associates, is also in his clients, as well as even us as co-workers. | |
| He's always there in the mornings. | |
| Um, he's there kind of waiting for us, ready to go, kind of prepping us on everything we need to do that we may have missed. | |
| Um, so he's very verbal and he's you know, he cares about us a lot, even on a professional and personal level. | |
| Chris's path at Express Employment Professionals has borne out everyone's confidence in him. | |
| He started as a front office coordinator, really the heart of the operation in some ways, helping people who come in the door find their way through the system to jobs. | |
| After six months, a position opened up as a staffing consultant, and that's what he does now. | |
| So he's also interfacing with clients as well as associates. | |
| There's a great example of how Chris has gone above and beyond to help everyone. | |
| And it really just depends on like we really try to take care of our associates. | |
| So we have like I said, the gummy bear vitamin factory. | |
| Um the production is done here in Vancouver, right down the road. | |
| It's about two and a half miles, three miles from here. | |
| Um the packaging and sorting and all that for the Gummy Bear Vitamins is done up in Ridgefield, which is just up the highway, I think eight exits from here, nine exits. | |
| Um, but I was talking to our local public transportation, and they have a bus that runs out there a couple times a day. | |
| And I spoke to them, I spoke to their uh like president of uh the division that does the planning for the routes uh last week. | |
| Um to see if maybe we could get them to shift um the pickup time a l like a few minutes earlier, so we could because then if we could, I could get associates that are on public transportation out to work at the Ridgefield factory with public transportation. | |
| So I told them how many people we have working out there and they're uh strongly considering changing the the bus schedule so people or our associates can get to work. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I mean I've been doing this a long time. | |
| I've never had somebody call the bus station ask them to change their schedule for a bunch of people looking for work. | |
| Um that was pretty neat. | |
| That was pretty neat. | |
| We don't have an answer yet but he did say that it was it was a good possibility. | |
| He's been a great asset to the team. | |
| And um and it's it's fun to have him around and uh he's he's just soaking all this stuff up like a sponge and um I can just tell in his heart he really loves to help people so this is a I think this is a good long term fit for him. | |
| I get the sense that you're a bit of a spark plug here in the office, that people kind of count on your good energy and your high spirits, and it kind of helps bring the office forward. | |
| Is that sometimes a struggle for you, or is that something that comes natural, or how does that work with you? | |
| It comes naturally. | |
| I've always been a wiry person when it comes to moving. | |
| I'm sure my coworker said, and my boss said something about it. | |
| I move at 100 miles an hour. | |
| Are you, if you catch me moping going slow there's something wrong and they will call me out on it like what's wrong Chris you're not your normal self and it's happened before and it's just how I am you gotta so I have my boss when I was in Korea his name was uh staff so then he was Staff Sergeant Keel he used to tell us every day he's like if you're not gonna give me a hundred percent why are you showing up he's like I need people that are trained and ready to go to war and want to do what they have to do if we have to do it. | |
| So I that's how I've been ever since 100% no matter where I go what I'm doing. | |
| And you're not gonna well no one's gonna change me. | |
| I'm gonna be myself until the day that I'm gone so I may not be as fast in 20 years but I'll still be giving it 100%. | |
| That's Chris Brewer, a staffing consultant with Express Employment Professionals in Vancouver, Washington. | |
| And that's all for this edition of On the Job. | |
| Find out more at ExpressPros.com and you can listen to every podcast this season at Expresspros dot com slash podcast. | |
| This podcast is produced by your host Steve Mencher for Mensch Media, iHeartRadio and Red Seat Ventures. |
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