[00:00:02] Speaker A: Ramping up your business. The time is near. You've given it hard, now get it in gear. It's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart. I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, not an attorney, but I do marketing for Gearhart Law and I have my own startups.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: Welcome to Passage to Profit, the road to Entrepreneurship, where we talk with celebrities and entrepreneurs about their stories in the business world.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Now it is time for Yvonne Yumba and Michael Lorero with StreetReady New Jersey. StreetReadyNJ.com I think what they have fills a huge need, and I'm so excited to hear from these enterprising young men. So please tell us all about what you're doing.
[00:00:52] Speaker C: Hello, everybody. Ivan and Mike. Here we are the creators of StreetReady. StreetReady is an education company that really tries to create a first responder out of every citizen in the United States. And we do that by teaching our three pillars, which is first aid, self defense, and de escalation. I'm going to be a practicing physician in about two or three months. So I see a lot of patients that come in and they die because the ambulance took too long, right? Or no one on scene knew how to respond. So our method was to bring our training into everyone's home, everyone's school, everyone's business so that you could be a first responder. Mike.
[00:01:25] Speaker D: Yeah. Well, these are all skills that Yvonne and I wish we had growing up. And even to this day, you know, we're still refining those skills. We focus a lot on sexual assault offense, abduction prevention, aggravated assault offense, and then we have our de escalation and first aid. Now these are things that we want to make people confident because we've noticed when people leave our seminars, they leave with this sense of confidence that they are more capable, more knowledgeable, and more prepared. You know, as we say, they're street ready. And we've heard the personal stories that people have brought back to us about being a potential abduction victim or their little brother was choking on their food and they were able to perform the Heimlich and save their little brother. You know, so when we hear stories like that, that's the most motivating thing to us. You know, we, we're trying to help people. Ultimately, that's what we're doing. So we combined our skill set. I've been training martial arts for over 20 years. As Yvonne said, he's about to graduate and be a doctor. So we brought these skill sets and we're trying to just give them to everybody.
[00:02:24] Speaker A: It's kind of an unusual combination. How'd you guys find each other?
[00:02:27] Speaker C: I went to college in California. I moved to Newark, New Jersey to start medical school. And I, you know, I had been into the martial arts as well. I was doing jiu jitsu. I wanted to learn some striking. I, I asked the guys at the gym, I said, I need an instructor. I want someone that is a specialist in this. And they said, you have to meet this guy called Animal. I said, animal. This guy called Animal. Animal was Mike.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: What kind of animal are you?
[00:02:51] Speaker A: He's not a kitten.
[00:02:54] Speaker C: He's definitely not a kitten. Maybe another feline, but.
So I went home to visit my family in California. I get off at Newark Airport, I go and, and the next day I'm going to go to his house to do a training session. And you know, I don't know what to expect. I walk into the backyard, I see this guy, long hair, goatee, very Zen, very quiet, you know, long face. You don't really know what to expect. Right. So, you know, we start talking and we become friends. And then throughout the months that we know each other, we do all the martial arts, we cover everything and we see that we have a shared friendship. And through that friendship, we said, you know what, I want to take the hidden curriculum that they keep in medical schools. I want to take the de escalation strategies we've learned and applied throughout our whole life. And he said he wants to take the self defense things he's taught to police officers, to citizens. And we want to create a curriculum that anyone, whether you're 5 or 85, right. So we want something that everyone could have access to and understand. And that's how Street Ready was born. That's how we met.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: That's great. So if I'm on the subway in New York City and I want to make sure that I'm safe, what are some tips that you could give me? Always position or on the subway platform.
[00:03:58] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. Either way you can position yourself like against the wall so you know that there's at least nothing behind you and you're, you're safer in that aspect. And then just your situational awareness, you know, keeping your eyes open, not getting complacent. Like nowadays we get lost in our noise cancellation headphones and our eyes are just looking down, stuck on your phone. Being complacent is probably the big thing. You know, people nowadays aren't really Situationally aware. And I think that's what leads to like a lot of, lot of accidents. So it seems like these are basic common things, you know, like keep your eyes open, keep your ears available, and just be aware. But that's lost easily.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: Nowadays you guys travel the country presenting this information to groups in person, which I think is hugely powerful. Where do you go, what age groups, what kind of venues?
[00:04:45] Speaker C: The answer to that is we go everywhere. We have this general citizen seminar that we offer everyone composing of our three pillars. We go to school, so we've, we've done work at colleges, Rutgers University, New Jersey City College. We've done work at private schools, elementary schools. We go to businesses. We've done it work for like storage sites, we've done it for medical practices, medical businesses. We go anywhere. We bring all the gear, we bring all the material and we have these movie like seminars. So for an hour and a half, two hours, we take you through different scenarios. We have fighting scenes, we have hands on training, we have everything that you could ever want. One more thing that we talk about in terms of situational awareness for the subway that Mike and I were just talking about earlier is understanding baselines. Like what is common, where you are and who is outside the norm. Right. If you go to the New York Public Library, if someone comes in there with a jacket, a hoodie, he's outside the norm. If the library is loud, that's outside its baseline. So understanding the baseline of the area that you're in helps you understand when you're not safe. We need to escape the situation.
[00:05:42] Speaker B: That's great.
[00:05:43] Speaker D: Some people ask us, you know, well, is your demographic? And that's always a tough question for us because it's literally everyone, you know, because we think everyone needs these skills, you know, whether you're a young child or you're an adult or a senior. These skills bring confidence, you know, and awareness and all that. But we will tailor these seminars to that specific group, you know, so a seminar you're getting when we're dealing with a high school may be different than a seminar that you're dealing with an organization or a business or something of that nature, you know. And then we have like women specific self defense seminars. So they're tailored to everyone. But we do a lot of storytelling and the seminars themselves become a story, you know. Our goal is that you become a storyteller afterwards, a street ready storyteller. And then you're telling everybody else like what you've experienced. We try and avoid any violence if we can.
[00:06:34] Speaker A: I'VE seen videos of attackers simulations where somebody with a knife is more dangerous.
[00:06:41] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: Than somebody with a gun at close range.
[00:06:44] Speaker B: I do think that your point about situational awareness is so smart and strong because my daughter and I were in the mall and it seemed like this guy was following us around. And you know, so we. I forget exactly how I feel like we de escalated by escaping this guy, but he would show up like, what is he doing in this store? Like, what's he doing in this store? Like, he doesn't look like he would be shopping here. So I think we might have gone into like Victoria's Secret.
[00:07:07] Speaker A: I was gonna say it wasn't that. Victoria's Secret.
[00:07:09] Speaker B: Yeah. So just to get rid of him.
[00:07:12] Speaker C: Another thing for our audience at home is usually whenever you're walking near someone, you don't really walk in step with someone unless you know each other. But if someone is walking in step with you, your red flag should be going off.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: What is one top thing that would help keep people safe?
[00:07:26] Speaker C: The concept of knowing who you're dealing with. So we had someone that is very close to street ready, our street ready team, and someone that knows these de escalation tactics. He's actually a police officer and he was a rookie cop responding to a call with his buddy, maybe first few months on the job. And they got a call from NJ Transit and they said, there's a naked man, he's about 6 foot 5, 240 pounds, wet, right? He's speaking loudly, he's being aggressive. The train conductors don't know what to do. So the rookie cop, they hear it on the radio, they said, we have to respond to this. They're the only ones near. So he talked to the conductors. The conductors move everyone outside that main station where he was. And they walk into this, hit a train. So they walk in, they see the man. The man is belligerent, his eyes are red, he has dreadlocks, big muscles, just charging them. And they say, hey, sir, what's your name? Sir, sir, what's your name? And the man says, my name is Jesus. Well, the cops say, well, we're messengers. We were sent here from God to actually help you. The 6 foot 4, 250 pound man with dreadlock stops. He says, oh, you're sent here from Jesus. They say, yeah, we have a special message for you at the hospital. And naked man just puts his hands out. He allows the cops to take him to the hospital where they took him to a psych ward.
[00:08:34] Speaker B: How did they say that? Like, how did they come up with that.
[00:08:37] Speaker C: One thing we teach is who are you dealing with? Right. Knowing your audience. What's your name, sir? If someone says, my name is Shakespeare. Okay, Shakespeare. Well, I'm Othello. I'm also a playwriter. You have to know who you're dealing with. So if you ask the name, it helps you understand mental status. It's a reason why everyone needs free Ready because these things are secrets that they don't get access to.
[00:08:55] Speaker D: These are all like extreme situations that you're using these de escalation skills and things like that. But we've also had a couple guys come up to us after our seminars and be like, man, I think street ready may have saged saved my relationship. Just knowing how to de escalate and communicate with their partners. You know, seeing that, hey, they're acting a little bit under the influence. Maybe they're a little frustrated or angry or something like that. Just having that recognition and being able to learn how to empathize, ask the right questions and then continue to problem solve from there. We're saving relationships. Forget about like saving these lives and stuff like that too. You know, communication.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: We sign up Elizabeth.
[00:09:32] Speaker C: So where to find us? You can find us on Instagram reetreadynj. You can find us online at www.streetreadynj.com. and just those two places are where our team works and they can tell you where to follow up with us and how we can come serve your organization well.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: Thank you. That was really great.
[00:09:49] Speaker A: Passage to Profit is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing in 38 markets across the United States. In addition, Passage to Profit has also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P2P team, our producer, Noah Fleishman, and our program coordinator, Alicia Morrissey, and our studio assistant, Risiket Bussari. Look for our podcast tomorrow anywhere you get your podcast. Our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram X and on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without checking with your legal professional first. Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] and contact us for a free consultation. Take care, everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.
