Every meaningful thing I have built started with a relationship I had no reason to expect would work. My first investor was a man named Willis Mullet. I did not meet him by networking at an event or through a warm introduction. I met him because I walked up to a stranger in a coffee shop in Pensacola Beach, Florida and asked him to look at what I was working on. That stranger connected me to Willis. I was a Marine lieutenant with a business plan, no product, and no connections to anyone with money. Willis met with me twice and wrote a check for two hundred thousand dollars. That relationship exists because I was willing to talk to someone I did not know and one conversation led to the next. My first contract came the same way. I went door to door to hotels on Pensacola Beach and asked general managers if they would be interested in automated outdoor equipment rental lockers for their guests. I had nothing to show them except a plan and my word. Innisfree Hotels said yes. That relationship has survived my company being destroyed by a billion-dollar partner and rebuilt from scratch. Their owner Julian Macqueen agreed to continue with twenty-seven of their properties because the connection we built was based on trust earned over years, not a single transaction. I grew up as a child of single parents. My mom and dad separated when I was five. I spent weekdays with my dad in the Central Valley of California and weekends with my mom three hours away in San Jose. My dad was quiet, introverted, and all business. He worked at a federal prison and taught me that you save every dollar and prepare for the worst. My mom earned her masters degree, built a six-figure career, and taught me to go after everything like today is all you get. They gave me opposite blueprints for how to connect with the world. My dad showed me that consistency builds trust. My mom showed me that energy and conviction open doors. I use both every day. The relationships I have lost taught me more than the ones I still have. My best friend David and I were brothers. I helped him get away from gangs growing up and watched him build a life from nothing. He had a son, a home, a future. Then he shot himself without calling me or anyone else. My brother John Blake fought Crohns Disease, depression, and addiction for years. He was the strongest person I knew. He died of a fentanyl overdose trying to help someone else get to rehab. My sister Megan was murdered in 2018. Three people. Three failures of connection at the moment it mattered most. Those losses did not make me withdraw. They made me aggressive about staying connected to the people around me. As a Marine Captain I check on the Marines and sailors I serve with not because I am told to but because I know what happens when no one makes that call. I am the godfather to Davids son because I will not let that connection die with him. My company Daily Adventure Box is built on connection at its core. We install automated rental lockers at hotels and military bases that put outdoor equipment in peoples hands. Every locker is an access point for someone to grab a paddleboard or a kayak and spend a few hours outside instead of alone in a room. I built this for military bases specifically because I have seen what isolation does to service members. Getting people outside and around each other is one of the simplest ways to build the kind of connection that keeps people alive. I am starting my MBA in Finance at UNCW to scale this company nationally. The financial knowledge matters. But what actually scales the business is the same thing that started it. Walking up to people, building trust, earning a handshake, and delivering on what you said you would do. Every hotel contract, every military base agreement, every investor check started with a conversation between two people. Relationships are not a side effect of what I do. They are the infrastructure everything else is built on. The people I have lost remind me of that every day.

I am a Marine Captain, startup founder, and incoming MBA student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. I believe I should be considered for this scholarship because I do not separate academics from execution. Everything I study gets applied to something real. I earned my Bachelor of Science in Recreation Administration from California State University Sacramento in 2019. I started as a Mechanical Engineering major, shifted to Computer Engineering, and ultimately found my direction in Recreation and Park Management. That path was not indecisive. It was me figuring out what I actually wanted to build. The recreation degree gave me the foundation for what I am building now. I made the Deans Honor List, completed a full internship in recreation and park management earning the highest grade in the course, and took coursework in facility management, program planning, budgeting, marketing, and recreation law. Every one of those subjects has shown up directly in running my company. I also took Air Force ROTC coursework and was near the top of class before a friend convinced me I was a Marine and that I needed to go to USMC OCS instead. Outside of academics I commissioned as a Marine officer through Officer Candidates School, completed The Basic School twice after being forced to redo the entire six-month course one week before graduation due to circumstances involving my command and COVID, and earned an air contract to fly planes. At flight school in Pensacola Beach I had months before classes started. While most lieutenants went to the beach I went to coffee shops. Six hours a day I built the business plan for Daily Adventure Box, an automated outdoor equipment rental company. I pitched strangers for feedback, went door to door to hotels, and earned my first contract before I had a product. I raised seven hundred fifty thousand dollars from investors I cold-approached, expanded to five locations, and built a technology platform that maintained a five-star rating on both app stores. After a billion-dollar technology partner sold their division without telling us and forced us off their servers, I rebuilt the entire company from scratch. New hardware made from recycled plastic, new locks, new software. I now own every piece of the system. I reduced hardware costs by over sixty percent and earned contracts with MCCS Camp Lejeune for three military bases and with Innisfree Hotels for twenty-seven properties across six states. I was also selected as a Marine Raider Officer through MARSOC Assessment and Selection, one of a small number chosen each year, and I am currently in the Individual Training Course while simultaneously starting my MBA and managing the company. I serve as godfather to my best friends son after he took his own life. I am actively involved in my community through installing outdoor recreation access points on military bases where service members and families otherwise have limited options. Every locker we install puts paddleboards, surfboards, and kayaks within walking distance of barracks and base housing. I have seen what isolation does on military installations. Our lockers are a direct response to that. The biggest challenge I faced during school was losing my sister during my junior year at Sacramento State. Megan was murdered in 2018 by a man she had just met. She was my older sister and despite the path she had gone down with drugs and gangs and homelessness she was good to me growing up. My family gave her every resource to change direction. She did not want to change. That taught me something I carry with me now. You cannot force someone onto a different path. But you can build things that make a better path available. Losing her while trying to finish a degree and prepare for a military career was something no course or counselor prepares you for. There is no framework for continuing to perform academically while processing that kind of loss. I overcame it by doing the only thing I knew how to do. I kept going. I finished my degree. I completed my internship. I went to OCS and commissioned on schedule. I did not take a semester off. I did not withdraw from courses. I showed up every day because stopping was not going to bring her back and falling behind was not going to honor what she would have wanted for me. That experience set the pattern for how I handle everything now. When my best friend killed himself I was in the middle of MARSOC selection. I completed it. When my brother died of a fentanyl overdose in July 2025 I was rebuilding my company and preparing for graduate school. I kept building. Between 2018 and 2025 I lost my sister to murder, my best friend to suicide, and my brother to fentanyl. Those losses are the reason I do not waste time, do not wait for perfect conditions, and do not assume tomorrow is guaranteed. This scholarship would go directly toward my MBA tuition and reducing the twenty-two thousand dollars in student debt I carry from my bachelors degree. I am not applying because I need someone to take a chance on me. I am applying because the work is already happening and financial support allows me to keep executing without the debt becoming what slows me down. I am balancing active duty service, a growing company, and graduate school at the same time. Every dollar I do not have to borrow is a dollar that keeps me focused on building instead of managing debt.

The most valuable online tools I use are not the ones designed for studying. They are the ones I use to build real systems that force me to learn by doing. I am the founder of Daily Adventure Box, an automated outdoor equipment rental company with contracts on three military bases and twenty-seven hotels. Running this company while pursuing an MBA in Finance has turned every online platform I touch into a classroom. I built Fund Adventure, a live investment portal where potential investors can view our locations, equipment, revenue projections, and fund specific adventure boxes directly through the platform. Building it required me to learn Stripe for payment processing, Supabase for database management and authentication, and GitHub for version control and deployment. None of that was taught in a course. I sat down, read documentation, watched tutorials, and built it piece by piece until it worked. That portal is live on our website and processes real transactions. The finance concepts I am learning in my MBA program now have a live application I can test against immediately. When I study capital structure in class I can go apply it to a real cap table. When I study financial modeling I can run projections against actual revenue data from our operating locations. I am currently building a calendar system using Google Calendar API that will allow customers to view equipment availability and schedule rentals across all of our locations in real time. This requires integrating third-party APIs, managing time zones across six states, and building a user interface that works for both hotel guests and military families. Every piece of that is self-taught through online documentation, developer forums, and platforms like Stack Overflow. I am also developing a program proposal for MCCS, Marine Corps Community Services, to expand our locker installations across additional military bases nationally. Building that proposal has required me to use financial analysis tools to model unit economics per location, project revenue at scale, and demonstrate return on investment in a format that military decision-makers understand. I have used online resources from the SBA, SCORE, and various financial modeling platforms to refine how I present the business case. The MBA coursework gives me the theory. The proposal forces me to apply it under real constraints with real stakeholders. Platforms like Coursera, YouTube, and MIT OpenCourseWare have supplemented my understanding of corporate finance and accounting principles. But the honest answer is that I learn best when the stakes are real. Reading about payment processing is one thing. Wiring Stripe into a live portal where an investor is putting in actual money is a completely different level of understanding. That is where the learning sticks. Every tool I use connects back to a live business that is operating today. The MBA gives me the frameworks. The platforms give me the ability to apply those frameworks to something that matters right now, not in a case study but in a company I built and a community I serve.

I am building Daily Adventure Box into a national outdoor equipment rental company, and I am building the financial knowledge to do it right. The idea started my senior year of college and became real at a coffee shop in Pensacola Beach, Florida. I was a Marine lieutenant waiting to start flight school with months of empty time ahead of me. Most guys went to the beach. I spent six hours a day writing business plans, designing an app, and teaching myself how to pitch. I walked up to strangers and asked them to review my work. I went door to door to hotels asking if they would contract with a company that did not have a product yet. One said yes. An investor I met in a coffee shop gave me two hundred thousand dollars after one pitch. I built the first automated rental locker, installed it, and expanded to five locations. Then a billion-dollar technology partner sold their division without telling us. The terms required them to drop every commercial partner. They pulled our system offline, crashed our app, and forced us to tear everything down. I rebuilt it. New lockers made from recycled plastic. New locks that I own. New software I control. I reduced hardware costs by over sixty percent and earned contracts with three military bases and twenty-seven hotels across six states. Nobody can pull the rug out again because I own every piece of the system. What I am building next is scale. I am starting my MBA in Finance at UNCW to learn capital structure, financial modeling, and institutional fundraising at the level this company now requires. I can build a product and sell it. I need the financial fluency to raise institutional capital, structure franchise agreements, and model unit economics across hundreds of locations. The impact is already happening. Every locker on a military base gives service members and their families access to paddleboards, surfboards, and kayaks they otherwise could not afford or find. I have seen Marines sit in barracks rooms with nothing to do. Isolation on military installations is a real problem. Our lockers put outdoor recreation within walking distance of where they live. As we scale, the environmental impact grows with it. Every rental replaces a purchase of gear that gets used once and discarded. Our lockers are manufactured from recycled plastic, and I am working to source material from The Ocean Cleanup project so that plastic pulled from the Pacific Garbage Patch is built directly into our products. I am not building a concept. I am building a company that already operates, already earns revenue, and already makes a difference on the bases and beaches where it exists. The MBA is how I take it from where it is to where it is supposed to be.

My name is Shay Putnam. I am a Captain in the United States Marine Corps stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. I commissioned through Officer Candidates School and completed The Basic School in Quantico, Virginia. I earned an air contract to fly planes and reported to flight school in Pensacola Beach, Florida. After deciding to focus on building my company, I was redesignated as a logistics officer and moved to North Carolina. I was selected as a Marine Raider Officer through MARSOC Assessment and Selection and am currently in the Individual Training Course. My current education goal is completing my MBA in Finance at the University of North Carolina Wilmington starting May 11th. The military shaped this goal directly. At flight school I had months before classes started. Instead of waiting I spent six hours a day in coffee shops building a business plan for Daily Adventure Box, an automated outdoor equipment rental company. I went door to door to hotels pitching a product I had not built yet. The discipline the Marine Corps gave me is what made that possible. I raised seven hundred fifty thousand dollars and expanded to five locations because I treated building the business with the same intensity the Corps taught me to treat everything. The MBA gives me the financial skill set to scale it nationally. The biggest challenge I have faced was having my business destroyed by forces outside my control. I partnered with a billion-dollar company and built my system around their technology. They sold that division without disclosing it and the buyer required them to drop all commercial partners. They pulled us off their servers, crashed our app, and forced us to uninstall every location. I rebuilt the entire company from scratch while serving active duty. The military does not stop because your business is falling apart. I did both, and the company is stronger now because I own every piece of the system. I also lost my sister to murder in 2018, my best friend to suicide, and my brother to a fentanyl overdose in July 2025. Managing grief while maintaining performance as a Marine officer and running a business is a challenge no training prepares you for. I handled it by not stopping. Community is built into what I do every day. Daily Adventure Box operates on three military bases at Camp Lejeune, New River Air Station, and Camp Johnson. Every locker gives service members and families access to outdoor equipment they otherwise could not afford or find. I have seen what isolation does on military installations. I have watched Marines sit in barracks rooms with nothing to do. Our lockers put paddleboards, surfboards, and kayaks within walking distance of where they live. That is community support through access, not through a pamphlet. Beyond the business, I check in on the Marines and sailors I serve with. Not because a command brief told me to, but because I know what happens when nobody makes that call. I did not call my brother enough. I did not see what my best friend was going through. That made me the kind of leader who pays attention to how people are actually doing. I also serve as godfather to my best friend's son. He took his own life and I committed to making sure his boy grows up knowing his father was a good man. That is the most personal form of community I know.

I have never been addicted to drugs. But drug addiction has taken from me in ways that I will carry for the rest of my life. My brother John Blake battled Crohn's Disease from the time he was young. The pain was constant and it put him in and out of hospitals more times than I can count. Doctors prescribed pain killers to manage it. Those prescriptions became a dependency, and that dependency became an addiction that he fought for years. He attempted suicide multiple times. He went through periods of depression so heavy that I did not know if he would make it through. But he did. Near the end of his life he was in the best place I had ever seen him. He was working out, making country music that suited his voice, and was engaged to his fiance Dilen. He was happy and he was fighting. On July 14th, 2025, John went to Detroit to help a recovering addict get to rehab. While he was there he bought what he thought were pain killers. They were laced with fentanyl. My brother died trying to help someone else fight the same battle he had been fighting his entire life. That loss changed me. I barely drank before and I stopped almost entirely after. I watched what substances did to the people around me my whole life. My sister Megan went down a path of drugs and violence that ended with her being murdered in 2018. My best friend David struggled with alcohol and shot himself. My brother fought pill addiction for years and lost to fentanyl on a night when he was trying to do something good for someone else. I am not in recovery. But I am a product of what addiction does to the people surrounding it. I grew up navigating the fallout. I lost three people I loved to it directly or indirectly. That is not something you move past. It is something you carry and decide what to do with. What I have decided to do with it is build. I am an active duty Marine Captain and the founder of Daily Adventure Box, an automated outdoor equipment rental company operating on military bases and hotels. The entire model is built around getting people outdoors and active. I have seen what isolation does. I have seen what happens when someone has nothing to do but sit alone with their pain. Access to outdoor recreation is not a cure for addiction. But it is one of the simplest interventions for the isolation and boredom that make addiction worse, especially on military installations where substance abuse rates continue to climb. I am starting my MBA in Finance at UNCW to scale this company nationally. Every location we install is one more place where a service member or a tourist or a family can grab a paddleboard and spend a few hours outside instead of sitting in a room. I cannot go back and save John or Megan or David. But I can build something that makes the kind of access they needed more available to the people who come after them. I am moving forward by building and serving. That is the only response to loss that has ever made sense to me. I plan to continue to build and also join the FBI after the USMC to capture/kill those responsible for bringing evil to this world.

Mental health is not an abstract topic for me. It is something I have watched destroy people I love. My best friend David shot himself while I was going through Assessment and Selection for MARSOC. We had talked on the phone two days before and planned a trip with the friend group. He had a son, a house, a girlfriend. He had pulled himself out of a rough neighborhood and built a life. Something broke that I did not see, and he did not call me. I am still angry at him for that. But I am his son's godfather and I will make sure that kid knows his father was a good man who worked hard for everything he had. My brother John Blake battled Crohn's Disease his entire life. The pain led to prescription pills, which led to addiction, which led to multiple suicide attempts and years of depression. Near the end of his life he found a way through it. He was working out, making country music, engaged to his fiance Dilen, and the happiest I had ever seen him. On July 14th, 2025, he went to Detroit to help a recovering addict get to rehab. He bought what he thought were pain killers from the wrong person. They were laced with fentanyl. He died trying to help someone else fight the same thing he had been fighting. My sister Megan struggled her entire adult life. Drugs, gangs, homelessness, violence. She had every resource available to her. Family support, money, places to stay. She could not find her way out. She was murdered in 2018 by a man she had just met. Three people. Three different mental health battles. Three deaths that did not have to happen. As a Marine Captain I have watched the military lose more service members to suicide than to combat. That is not a statistic I read somewhere. That is something I have seen in my own unit, in my own circle, in my own family. The culture in the military still treats asking for help as weakness. I have been part of that culture and I have watched what it costs. What I do now is simple. I talk. I check in with the Marines and sailors around me not because a command brief told me to but because I know what happens when someone does not get that phone call. I did not call John enough. I did not see what David was going through. I will not make that mistake again with the people I serve with. In my company, Daily Adventure Box, the entire business model is built around getting people outdoors. That is not a mental health program on paper but it functions as one. Access to outdoor recreation reduces stress, builds community, and gives people something to look forward to. Every locker we install at a military base or hotel is one more access point for someone to grab a paddleboard or a kayak and spend a few hours outside instead of sitting in a barracks room alone. I have seen what isolation does. Getting people outside and active is one of the simplest and most effective interventions there is. As an MBA student I plan to carry that same approach. Check on the people around you. Build things that get people out of isolation. Do not wait for someone to ask for help because the people who need it most are usually the ones who will never ask. I learned that the hard way three times. I do not plan to learn it a fourth.

Daily Adventure Box is an automated outdoor equipment rental company I founded while on active duty in the Marine Corps. We install smart lockers at hotels and military bases that rent paddleboards, surfboards, kayaks, camping gear, and other outdoor equipment to guests on demand. Instead of buying gear they will use once on vacation and either throw away, leave in a garage, or haul across the country, people rent it from a locker for the day and return it when they are done. Every rental replaces a purchase. Every locker replaces a retail shelf full of products that get used once and discarded. That is waste reduction at scale without asking anyone to change their behavior. People still get the experience. They just do not have to own, store, or dispose of the equipment to have it. But sustainability in our model does not stop at the business logic. It is built into the physical product. Our lockers are manufactured from recycled plastic. I am currently working to source plastic pellets from The Ocean Cleanup project so that plastic collected directly from the Pacific Garbage Patch can be utilized in our locker manufacturing. The vision is a product that pulls waste out of the ocean, turns it into functional commercial infrastructure, and then uses that infrastructure to reduce consumer waste on the other end. The locker itself becomes part of a closed loop. Plastic that was polluting the ocean gets repurposed into a product that prevents more waste from being created on land. That is not a marketing angle. That is an operational goal I am actively pursuing because it makes the business stronger and the environmental impact measurable. I see myself scaling Daily Adventure Box to hundreds of locations nationally over the next five years. Every location we install reduces the volume of outdoor equipment purchased by tourists who use it once. We extend the lifecycle of premium gear by rotating it across thousands of renters instead of letting it collect dust after a single trip. And every locker we build is made from plastic that would otherwise be sitting in a landfill or floating in the Pacific Ocean. At two hundred locations that is a measurable reduction in both consumer waste and ocean plastic, backed by real revenue and real unit economics that investors can underwrite. The intersection of finance and sustainability is where the leverage is. There are plenty of people who care about the environment. There are fewer people who know how to build a financial model that proves a sustainable business scales profitably. One good model that shows investors they can generate returns while reducing environmental impact does more than a hundred awareness campaigns. Capital follows proof, and proof requires the financial literacy to present it in a language that moves money. That is why I am pursuing this MBA. Not to learn about sustainability in theory, but to build the financial infrastructure that takes a company I already created, one that is already reducing waste and repurposing ocean plastic, and turns it into something that operates at a scale where the environmental impact actually matters.