Welcome to invest in yourself the digital entrepreneur podcast. Join the podcast mogul Phil Better as he interviews successful entrepreneurs that make their living in the digital world. Now let's join your host Phil Better as his special guest today on invest in yourself the digital entrepreneur podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. I'm, of course, your host with the most feel better. And today, I am very excited to have the, founder of one range, mister Steve Gilman. Steve, thank you so much for being here. Phil, thanks for having me.

Huge fan

of the show, and I'm excited to to chat today.

Well, now now now I feel some pressure now that I have a huge fan on the show here. Steve, I have your buyover here. It's quite impressive. Just a quick look at it. But I would love for you to introduce yourself to my audience so that they can hear from you who you are.

Yeah. Awesome. Thanks, Phil. Steve Gilman, cofounder and CEO of OneRange, professional development solution platform. My background is is as varied and as nontraditional as you could get. I have a background in engineering. I've played professional baseball. I'm a former intelligence officer, as a civilian as well as a military reservist.

And I kinda recreated myself in my late twenties by going back to business school full time. That launched me into an entrepreneurial journey. My first company was, Block Party, live event, National Sports and Hospitality. And I've worked to invest and advise in other early stage growth companies. So still figuring out what I wanna do with my life, but everything I do, I, I go full steam at it.

No. It certainly shows that going from mechanical engineering to entrepreneurial life. That's that's insane.

Yeah. You you don't meet many mechanical engineers at spring training.

That that's I'm pretty sure that's, for all sports.

That's yeah. So that happened. There there was a logical thought at one point behind it. I think, you know, I I love the math and physics. And going into undergrad, I had the ability to explore. I also wanted to serve in the military as a pilot. And so I was born a year before Top Gun came out. I was kind of in that cadre.

And I thought a technical degree would do it. And I enjoyed meeting everybody there, learning what I did, but I never saw myself as an engineer, you know, a technical person throughout my career. It was just kinda what I did during during those years, and

it's helped me to get to where I am today. Yeah. Because I I'm guessing, mechanical engineering, you need to have your ducks in a row. You need to be able to visualize everything better and have a plan of action before going into anything.

Without a doubt. And I think most of engineering tends to be problem solving and, going with the ebbs and flows of requirements and changes and things like that. I think what I realized in undergrad is I love studying it. I love the design path that I was on. So being able to see, touch, feel, part of different groups that produce different

you

know, I was part of society of automotive engineers. We produced a hybrid go kart and raced that every year, did that for a few years. Love that. I realized the actual path that I wanted to be on in design if I went to work for a larger corporation was more limited in scope. So you can work for Boeing, but you're designing a door latch handle for thirty years. Right? And so It's

gonna be the best door handle latch of life.

That's it. And it's me and a team of 50 other folks making sure the factory safety is right. And so, I love working with engineers at this point, but I never saw myself carrying that throughout a career, which is where kind of that nontraditional reinvention came from.

Oh, I I love that. So would you say that is your why? Like, your your why that you decide to jump into the entrepreneurial space was because you didn't see yourself, designing door latches for Boeing for the next thirty years?