316. From Survival to Success: Marvina Case’s Incredible Journey

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The Daily Helping Episode 316: Marvina Case

Marvina Case: [00:00:00] God made you perfect. That's it. God made you perfect. God does not make mistakes. People do. So, we must forgive.

Dr. Richard Shuster: [00:00:14] Hello and welcome to The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster, food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, tools to win at life. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, and whatever you do, this is the show that is going to help you become the best version of yourself. Each episode you will hear from some of the most amazing, talented, and successful people on the planet who followed their passions and strived to help others. Join our movement to get a million people each day to commit acts of kindness for others. Together, we're going to make the world a better place. Are you ready? Because it's time for your Daily Helping. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Daily Helping. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. And we have an amazing guest to share with you today. Her name is Marvina Case, and she is the founder and CEO of Set Aside Queen, with 24 years of government contracting experience, and she has shepherded over $200 billion in U.S. Federal contracts. She's worked with everybody from Dell to Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and many, many others, including the DOD, NASA, and the Office of the President. And you might be wondering, because this sounds a little different than many of my guests, why are we talking about government contracting on The Daily Helping? And I'm excited to tell you why, because so many people think this is something that you can't do if you're a small business, this is impossible. Marvina is going to tell us how, if we have an idea that can help people, even if you're not a huge company, even if it's just you, how you can get involved in making impact through government contracting. I can't wait to have this discussion. Marvina, welcome to The Daily Helping. It is awesome to have you with us today.

Marvina Case: [00:02:09] Thank you so much, Dr. Richard. I am very excited to be on as well.

Dr. Richard Shuster: [00:02:12] Well, this is going to be really neat. And I happen to have the advantage of knowing a little bit about your past, which is crazy and unbelievable. So, I want to jump in the Marvina Case time machine and let's go back and talk about your superhero origin story. So, tell us about that moment that put you on the path you're on today.

Marvina Case: [00:02:35] Honestly, I think it started from birth. And the reason why I say that is I was literally and figuratively born in a toilet. My mother went to the hospital and she went to give a urine sample and I came out.

Dr. Richard Shuster: [00:02:47] Oh, my God.

Marvina Case: [00:02:47] So, the way I look at it is there was nowhere to go but up from there. I always say I was born in the toilet. God is my sinner. There is no place else to go but up. And the reason why I say that is it's how I look at life, it's how I've gone about things, and it's the only way that I've survived. If you see everything as a negative, you can't see the positive that comes out of negativity. Basically, in simple words, it's like saying from the dark comes the light, from the light comes the dark. There's always going to be light. You just need to wait for it. And patience is not one of my strongest virtues, but I'm working on it. I'm a work in progress, so I keep trying. But I know from my experience that when I keep a positive attitude and when I go about life in that way, things happen and things change. So, we'll fast forward a few years to college. I had a great childhood, two parents. I grew up in a very poor area, Gary, Indiana. I was shocked when I was 16 in the stomach coming back from a volleyball game. And, you know, some people could look at that as a negative too. It made me realize that I wanted to get out. I didn't want to live in that type of environment. I wanted more. So, education had not been my "focus." I did very well in school, but I really didn't have any aspirations. And at that moment I said, This is not the life I want. I don't want to raise my kids in this environment. I don't want to live here. And I don't want other people to live like this either. So, I'm going to do something to help people because my mom had always done that, my grandmother had always done that, my father. So, I had shining examples on how to help people. So, I decided to go to Purdue. I didn't initially get in because of the fact that I had the great grades, but I didn't attend school enough my senior year because school was very easy for me. So, I had to take a GED and then try out for the basketball team. I am freakishly tall. For most people, they don't see a woman my size. I think I'm in, like, the 99th percentile. I did have an accident where I lost a couple inches, and I'm still in the 99th percentile, just to give you an idea. Initially, I was almost 6'7", 6'6-1/2" is what I like to say because all of my shorter friends had that half inch so that's what I say. But now, I'm a mere 6'4". So, with that being said, this is how things happened, I made the basketball team. I was going to be the starting center. And unfortunately - some people might say - I was in a car accident. I was in the best physical shape of my life. I had 7 percent body fat. You couldn't ask for a better body on a person. And I could run. I could jump. I had an excellent three show - three throw - I can't talk today. Oh, excuse me - excellent three shot. And I also was doing very well in school. I got to go visit my sister who was in graduate school at Northwestern University in Illinois because I was thinking about going there after I graduated, and I wanted to see what it looked like. Well, unfortunately for me, I got hit by two semis. You might say unfortunate in the sense that I'm sure the person felt horrible, but that accident actually saved my life. I got hit by two semis. I had about, I think, it was probably about 30 seconds, but I really don't know. How they show you in the movie where time is very slow, it was very much how it felt for me. It felt like a minute. That 30 seconds was maybe 20 minutes because my brain was working that way. Like, I really sat down and thought about it. I was traveling in between two semis. The first semi driver fell asleep on a highway called I-65 right outside of White County, which is in between Gary and Lafayette, Indiana. I was on my way back from visiting my sister with my best friend at the time. And in between the two semis, the first semi in front of me started swerving. It's a two lane highway. So, I was terrified as I did not want to be sandwiched in between the two semis. So, what I actually did was I flashed and blew my horn and waited until what seemed like he was driving steadily and in one lane. I waited a minute to make sure he was going to stay in that lane. And apparently in that minute, he fell back asleep or something happened, I'm not sure. But as I was passing him, he swerved over, hit the back of my car, and hit it in a way that the front half of my car was ran over by the set of wheels. I was in a brand new 1992 Honda Accord because my grandmother told me if I graduated high school, she would buy me a new car. Because that was her goal, because she said, "If you don't get pregnant and you graduate high school, I'll buy you a new car because that will help set you up for life." So, my brand new car was ran over, hot brake fluid, shot up, burnt 60 percent of my body, face, neck arms. And my friend was sitting in the car. He was asleep. He slept through the entire accident. During that time, which again seemed like 20 minutes, it was probably about 30 seconds. I was beating him with my right hand basically saying, "Jump. Jump. We're going to die. Jump. Jump. We're going to die." And he didn't wake up. I thought he was dead. I thought that when we got ran over, when the hot brake fluid hit me, that maybe it did something to him and he had honestly just died because he did not respond to me beating on him. So, in that time I pulled my shirt over my head, undid my seatbelt and jumped out of my car. Because I knew if I stayed in the car, I would die. I could hear the second semi blowing his horn, like I'm going to hit you, do something, get out. So, I did what I thought was best, which was, you know, just to roll out, and I did that. And as I was rolling out, my car started to spin and it hit me. That may sound like a horrible thing, but I wouldn't be here today if the car did not spin and hit me. It threw me about 40 feet and I skidded on my face into water. I don't know what type of water it was, maybe a little lake, something on the side of the highway. And I passed out face down in water. After this accident, my friend woke up. He wasn't dead, obviously. He woke up and he got out of the car. It only destroyed the driver's side of the car and the front half of the car. All he had on him was a little cut on his nose from where the glass, a little shard of glass cut his nose and bruised kidneys. The bruised kidneys were from me. I did more damage to him in that accident than the car accident did. He was looking for me and couldn't find me and was hoping I wasn't the pile of goo that was in the front seat. So, he started looking around and followed the trail of blood down to the water and pulled my head out of the water. I stood up and my back went like this, and I was like, "I don't feel right." And I was breathing and air was coming in just way too easy. And he had this look of shock on his face and he said something to me, which was "Whatever you do, don't touch your nose." So, obviously, the first thing you do when someone tells you not to do something is touch your nose. So, I touched my nose and it fell off. That startled me. I fell backwards. I hit a rock, busted the back of my head open. It seems like a horrible thing. But when I was rushed to the hospital, they found out that I had a base brain tumor. And had this accident not happen, I would have been dead within six months. So, sometimes what seems like a travesty is actually a blessing in disguise. Because being in the physical condition I was at that time, you would never think anything was wrong with me. I was physically healthy, in the prime of my life, Olympian like body. I'm in good shape. I'm in good shape. There's nothing wrong with me. So, I wasn't going to the doctor for them to check things like, Does she have a brain tumor? Because that's not something you would think about as a freshman in college. So, they found the brain tumor. That was wonderful. I was able to have that removed, for a little small part there, but removed. They never would have found that otherwise. And they told me, "You're never going to walk again." I said, "I may never run, but I'm going to walk. I will walk." And I went through physical therapy. I was in a wheelchair for six months. And I was eventually able to walk. But the doctor told me, he said, "You can walk but you can't play basketball anymore. Because if someone pushes you the wrong way, you really will not walk again." So, that was it for me. No basketball career. No scholarship. What do I do? Well, I don't believe in giving up because I wasn't raised that way. And where there's a will, there's a way. My parents always taught me to look at things outside the box. I grew up in my grandmother's and father's kitchen. Food was a way to bring our family together. So, I started catering around campus. And this may not sound like a lot of money in today's terms, but I was making between $60,000 and 100,000 a year catering, so I paid my way through school. I graduated owing nothing. I graduated. I got my degree. And I realized that I need to continuously help people because I should be dead. Nobody should survive what just happened to me. There must be more. There has to be a purpose. And it took me back home to my parents. Everything they did wasn't for their glory. It was to help others achieve and grow. So, I wanted to do that too. I catered for a while. My business was jack of all trades, catering and event planning. Let us be your ace in the hole when you have a full house. After graduating, I wanted to leave the area. We had had some issues in Indiana. Unfortunately, most people think the Ku Klux Klan originated down south. It originated in Crawfordsville, Indiana, right outside of where Purdue is. And my fiance was a white male and I had a cross burn in my yard, so we decided Indiana probably wasn't the place for us to be. So, I looked for a place that had a large number of interracial couples. We moved to Arizona. I had a little savings, but not enough to "start life" over again. And we moved to Arizona and life was good there. I got into technology with an art history degree, I should say. But technology in Arizona was big at the time, you're talking about 1996, 1997. So, I got into technology and I realized that technology was my sweet spot. So, that's when I started thinking, how can I use technology in order to help people help themselves? And I decided that I needed to learn first. Because before you do anything, you need to build a foundation. So, I worked on that foundation, learning from all of the large companies on what they were doing. And I made them a lot of money and they were paying me shillings on the dollar. If a shilling, I don't even know. That's probably more like a quarter, a shilling.

Dr. Richard Shuster: [00:15:03] I don't know what the exchange rate on a shilling would be.

Marvina Case: [00:15:08] But, you know, I'm making them tons of money and it's really not coming through. And it's not about the money for me. I wasn't seeing them do the Humanitarian work that I wanted to see done with the money that they were making. So, I decided to go after it myself. And that's kind of my story and how I ended up creating this company.

Dr. Richard Shuster: [00:15:30] Well, we're going to pause because there's so much to revisit and unpack. My goodness. And Marvina, you know, for those that have listened to me for a while, the way that I describe the car accident that broke my spine was almost identical. It might have been 30 seconds. It felt like a lot more. That phenomenon is actually known as tachypsychia, where the brain slows down our perception of time. But incredible revelation in that, like you said, you had a brain tumor that would have been fatal. It would have been 100 percent fatal. It would have never been discovered until it was too late. And because you touched your nose and it fell off and fell backwards at that exact perfect spot and cracked the base of your skull open, the doctors were able to find, operate, and remove the tumor. And this was decades ago. So, just remarkable, that series of events that led you to survive that accident and, ultimately, put you in this arena where now you're in the technology space, you know you want to help people but didn't like the exchange rate on shillings to dollars, and so you decided to start your own business. So, tell us about that and what you do.

Marvina Case: [00:16:56] What I do is I do what the Federal Government - which is the people - wanted to do. I help ensure everyone is treated fairly under the law and in business, as well as give people that warm and fuzzy feeling. I help people who may not think that they have a chance to do business, do business. And I do it in a way that allows them to give back. I won't work with you unless you have a heart for giving. And the reason being is that we all need help. Everyone needs help. And we need to help each other. So, what I do is there's something called a Set Aside. And what a Set Aside means is exactly what it sounds like, money set aside from the Federal Government to help what they perceive as marginalized groups of people. Well, the issue with that is, under these set asides, if there is a person who qualifies for them and does subpar work, it basically costs the American people money. Because what people sometimes don't realize is the government is the people. We are the government. So, if we put in subquality products and services, who has to pay for that? We do. We pay taxes. And I don't like to give money away to pay taxes when it could be used to do things like educate people, help the widows and orphans, to uplift people. So, I wanted to come up with a solution that was, basically, 360 that treated everyone the same. Because at the end of the day, we're all Americans regardless of what you are, female, male, sexuality, complexion - I don't care - furry, I don't know all of them today. But no matter what you are, you're still here and you deserve to be treated like everyone else and have the same opportunities as everyone else. And we want quality products and services. Well, the Set Aside program allow subquality products and services to come out. Now, that's not everyone. I'm not saying that, but it does happen. And the government, because of the size of it, doesn't tend to go after people who do subquality work. They tend to just do it again. You may have experienced this before, Dr. Richard, if you've ever seen a road that's been torn up and they fix it, and you're like, "Okay. It's fixed." And then, three weeks later they tear it up again to redo it. Well, who paid for that? You did. I did. Our neighbors did. That doesn't help anybody. Giving someone something based simply on a topical characteristic and not having them be accountable is not beneficial to American society, that individual, anyone. So, what we've done is we've created this program that allows the best products and services to be utilized as well as uplift people. We give them what's called a hand up, not a handout, because there is a difference between the two and a lot of people don't realize that. So, our program is to work with the best products and services, regardless of who they're from, and to position them under my umbrella of companies to sell them to the Federal Government, which is the people, to save the people money. As you can see, it's a big circle. I like to say it's like the circle of life from Lion King, basically -- And that's pretty much what we do. We try to make the world a better place. And you work with us, and what happens is you keep $0.99 out of every dollar you make. One percent is donated to charity in your name. And it has to be a charity that we've approved. Those charities, basically, we require them to have 85 percent or more of their actual funds going to helping people, not administrative costs. Because, unfortunately, again, this is another racket, a lot of charities don't actually do charity or they do what I call 10 percent. Ten percent is not enough. I want to see the money actually help people. So, we work with charities to give a hand up, not a handout. There's accountability involved. And that's the main focus of everything we do, accountability. Everything we do has a cause and effect, and we want to make sure that that effect is positive. So, that's our process.

Dr. Richard Shuster: [00:21:20] So, I just want to kind of summarize some of this because this is so great. That if you are a small business owner and have a product or service that you think can help people, what your company does, Set Aside Queen, is it positions them within your network of companies to move those into the Federal Government. That's awesome.

Marvina Case: [00:21:45] You're amazing.

Dr. Richard Shuster: [00:21:49] It's called reflective listening. It was hammered into us in graduate school. No, but seriously, I love this. And I especially love the charitable aspect of this, because, again, it's people helping people helping people. And so, I don't know if you're Simba or Rafiki in this whole process. But I absolutely love that you're doing this because it allows, really, the little guy, the guy who is not Hewlett-Packard, the guy who is not Lockheed Martin or Dell or some of these huge companies to level the playing field and have their wares make a difference in the world. That's incredible.

Marvina Case: [00:22:36] You're absolutely right. And what people don't realize is that the little guys do the majority of the work in the United States. Yes, we've got big conglomerates, but who hires the most people? All these little companies. And they care and they care about their products. They tend to be better quality products. So, they just don't know the way to get out there. And the way to get out there is two ways. You can do it yourself. There's programs out there called Apex Accelerators. I always tell people, "If you can't work with me right now, please go to Apex Accelerators. They help you set it up yourself." The Federal Government wants to work with American companies. Sixty to 80 percent of all bids only have one person bid on them. Federal bidding is 600 billion to 800 billion a year. The average government contractor makes $3 million a year. It's a recession proof industry. It's a way for you to give back to your community. It's a way for Americans to help America. And it allows us to become what we used to be, which is a top nation where people want to come here. And we can improve society and help those that are in a situation where they are unable to help themselves. So, that's the bottom line. I know it's not a religious show, but I'm very much Christ-centered. And my belief is, there is no greater religion than helping children and orphans. And as I said before, I'm from Gary, Indiana, which was the former murder capital of the world, so there's a lot of widows, there's a lot of orphans, there's a lot of fatherless children. And the way that I can help them is by doing this and helping those people who may not see their potential realize that if I can do it, they can do it. I had everything that you could say against me if I looked at it that way. I'm multi-ethnic. I'm female. I'm over six feet tall. I was born in the former murder capital of the world. I have something called Giganticism, so I'm deformed. I also have Keratoconus, which means I'm legally blind. But if I can do it with all of that, so can anyone else. You are only limited by what you believe you can do. I hate to say it, but I think it was Marilyn Monroe that says everything is possible. It is. You know, even the word impossible says I'm possible. So, it's kind of a joke to me when people say, "Well, I can't do that." I'm like, "Why can't you do it? Be honest with yourself. Why can't you do it?" You can be successful in America. There is no American dream. There's just the American reality that you make.

Dr. Richard Shuster: [00:25:33] Very much well said, Marvina. I so appreciate the work that you are doing in the world to impact so many people. And your story is inspiring, and that's ridiculously understated. Marvina, our time together has flown by, and as you know I wrap up every episode by asking my guest a single question, and that is, what is your biggest helping? That one most important piece of information you'd like somebody to walk away with after hearing our conversation today.

Marvina Case: [00:26:03] God made you perfect. That's it. God made you perfect. God does not make mistakes. People do. So, we must forgive.

Dr. Richard Shuster: [00:26:12] Well said, Marvina. Thank you for that. Tell us where people can learn more about you online.

Marvina Case: [00:26:17] You can go to setasidequeen.com. You can find us on LinkedIn. You can go to one of our parent companies, SwetSpot LLC. SwetSpot is spelled with only one E, so that's S-W-E-T-S-P-O-T.ai.

Dr. Richard Shuster: [00:26:34] I love it. And we'll have links to everything Marvina Case in the show notes at thedailyhelping.com. Well, Marvina, this was really a treat. Thank you so much for joining us today on The Daily Helping.

Marvina Case: [00:26:47] Thank you so much, Dr. Richard.

Dr. Richard Shuster: [00:26:49] Absolutely. And I also wanted to thank each and every one of you who took time out of your day to listen to this conversation. If you liked it, if you're inspired, if you loved what you heard, go give us a follow on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five star review because that is what helps other people find the show. But most importantly, go out there today and do something nice for somebody else, even if you don't know who they are, and post it on your social media feeds using the hashtag #MyDailyHelping, because the happiest people are those that help others.