2/12/22 - Weekend Listening from Intercontinental Exchange

In the ornate Boardroom of the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday stood sufficient special warfare expertise to mount another raid of an ISIS outpost in Syria. Instead, the operators were selling coffee.

“The most exciting part of this business is the customer,” Evan Hafer, Founder & CEO of Black Rifle Coffee Company (NYSE: BRCC), told my colleague Ryan Green in one of our “CEO Spotlight” interviews. “It has always been about the customer, not only the inspiration that I think we bring to the veteran community, but our ability to expand our influence and serve those who serve, to celebrate the true American success story that started in my garage.”

Hafer is an entrepreneur and former Green Beret who founded Black Rifle with a one pound roaster in 2014. He watched his Austin, Texas-based company go public on the Big Board this week after a $150 million combination with SilverBox Engaged Merger Corp I, a SPAC sponsored by SilverBox Capital LLC and Engaged Capital LLC. Shares of the company ended their first day of trading up 30%.

Along with Hafer on the Black Rifle management team stands co-CEO Tom Davin, the former CEO of 5.11 Tactical and himself a former recon officer of the U.S. Marine Corps. Toby Johnson, the company’s COO, earned her wings as a pilot of the AH64D Apache Longbow gunship. And Mat Best, Long Rifle’s Chief Branding officer, deployed five times to Iraq and Afghanistan under the 2nd Ranger Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment of the U.S. Army.

As the Black Rifle team stood on the NYSE Bell Podium, they were surrounded by hundreds of employees on the Trading Floor who once wore the country’s uniform. Their ultimate goal is to hire 10,000 veterans as Black Rifle expands its footprint across the United States. As part of the SPAC combination, BRCC and SilverBox Engaged are donating more than 530,000 shares of the new company to the BRCC Fund, whose mission is to better the lives of veterans, active-duty military and first responders.

Black Rifle follows a long line of successful firms tethered to the national identity. Over a century ago, another entrepreneur, Perry Randall of Fort Wayne, Indiana, received permission from Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the 16th U.S. President, to use his father’s likeness as the brand for Lincoln National Life Insurance Company.

Abraham Lincoln was born on this date in 1809. Today, Lincoln National Corporation (NYSE: LNC) has a market cap of over $13 billion. For this week’s featured episode, we spoke with Dennis Glass, who has served as Lincoln’s president and CEO of Lincoln for 15 years and is preparing to hand the reins to Ellen Cooper, the firm’s Chief Investment Officer, following the company’s 2022 Annual Meeting in May.

The view from Radnor, Pennsylvania:

• Lincoln Financial CEO Dennis Glass Reflects on the Plans that Underlie Change Companies must be able to pivot and adapt to whatever their clients and the broader business environment throw their way. Since a CEO can’t call timeout in the middle of a quarter, the longtime boss of Lincoln Financial (NYSE: LNC), Dennis Glass, knows that success is born in planning, well before execution. Dennis explains how careful preparation has been his secret weapon in building an effective management team and how he’s built and led a Fortune 500 company through crisis and growth.

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