Rick Franco has worn many hats throughout his military career. But the loss of a once close friend catapulted him and three service member buddies to a new venture: making bourbon.
Franco, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, along with his friends RJ Casey (Special Forces), Mike Trott (Air Force) and Harold Underdown (Navy), started Four Branches Bourbon to provide active-duty service members and veterans with a product rooted in patriotism, friendship, service and entrepreneurship.
The brand, which launched in 2023 and has since helped raise more than $500,000 for veteran causes, has an emphasized impact on Franco. His post-service life harkens back to his early military days, namely one specific individual who changed Franco’s life in more ways than one.
He enlisted in the Marines and the Reserves in 1993, later commissioned as an infantry officer in 1995.
He got off active duty in 2002 and then out of the Reserves around 2005 before he began contracting for the CIA. For the past approximately 20 years, he’s had his hand in different ventures.
That included defense contracting for about a dozen years and being on both the business and ground sides of the equation. He ran a couple different companies and was chief operating officer of a combat veteran nonprofit out of Montana.
Franco spoke to Military.com about his bourbon business and what inspired it.
Who is Greg Wright?
It could be argued that Four Branches Bourbon became a tangible idea decades earlier, through a timeless friendship between Franco and a man named Greg Wright.
Franco and Wright started their military careers together roughly 30 years ago at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). Their bond was instant.
“When you go to school like that, you bond with other cadets, other classmates,” Franco said. “So, you know, four years at VMI, Greg and I became friends. I was one class ahead of him and in OCS [Officer Candidate School] and through IOC [Infantry Officer Course], but we all lived on the same island in Camp Lejeune.
“In fact, he lived down the street. When I went on deployment, he actually stayed at our house. So, we were friends in school; we were friends in the Marine Corps, running around thinking you’re Maverick and Top Gun.”
You got the tiger by the tail and you own the world, right? We were doing that.
Franco later did a tour at Lejeune and then another in New Orleans, causing him and Wright to lose touch circa the year 2000. Franco got out of the Marines and as part of a described civilian stint, he was building homes before coming back to work as an anti-terrorism force protection contractor, one of the Marine Corps’ first, for Booz Allen.
Franco was still in the Reserves and then went to a lot of different schools, both on the civilian side for Booz Allen and on the military side, for the Marine Corps. They were all different instructor courses complete with varied military levels.
One day at the end of an instructor’s course class at Fort Bragg, Franco was approached in a manner that was reminiscent of “a movie scene.”
It was an instructor who provided Franco with a sheet of blank paper with different phone numbers written on it. Franco, having essentially no real defense contracting experience, started calling the numbers on the list.
Franco felt it wasn’t the right fit for him, so he kept his options open and refused that particular job.
He ended up joining a different company, with his first task to head to Iraq.
“That was a really bad time in Mosul,” Franco said. “A lot of my time in the agency as a contractor, several times, I felt like I was at the wrong place, the right time if that makes sense. It’s timing, right? Most things that happen in people’s careers are timing.”
Upon his return to the states, Franco got called into the civilian company’s office and was asked if he could review myriad resumes. That’s when Franco, who “remembers clearly, like it was yesterday,” received a phone call.
An office secretary was conducting a vetting checklist and said the letters “VMI” out loud.
“It ended up being Greg on the other line,” Franco said, adding that he 100% supported the mission and then told office colleagues that Wright was “in.”
‘I Fell on my Knees’
The rekindling of friendship between Franco and Wright was unfortunately short-lived.
After Hurricane Katrina demolished Franco’s house in 2005, he put off another deployment to rebuild. At the same time, he knew Wright was going to deploy but didn’t know the exact date.
While contracting and out at a casual cookout on Dec. 7, 2005, with another Marine officer, Franco received a phone call from a woman who was sobbing on the other end of the line.
She kept saying over and over, “Putty’s dead, Putty’s dead,” Franco recalled.
“I’m like, stop. Who is Putty because I didn’t know Greg’s call sign when he deployed,” Franco said.
She said ‘Greg’ and it kind of rocked me to the ground. I fell on my knees, I was like, ‘Oh, f***.’
That was when he booked a trip to Washington D.C. to help retrieve Wright’s body. It led him and colleagues to Germany, where Franco was presiding over 12 coffins returning, Wright’s included.
The de-briefing of Wright’s family coupled with the wake and funeral “stayed with me for a long time,” Franco recalled. He also developed a rapport with Wright’s father, which started by sending him his son’s armor.
Four Branches, Four Co-Owners
Starting his own bourbon-based company seemed like a slam dunk of an idea for a guy like Franco who has excelled in numerous careers.
“I thought it’d be super simple,” he said. “I’m thinking, I’m a pretty accomplished guy—Marine officer, CIA contractor, run some businesses. Can’t be too hard to do that. Buy some glass, get a sticker, put it on the bottle, put it to all my friends on Facebook and we’ll be sold out in a day.
That’s all fine and dandy until Uncle Sam tells you can’t sell it on Facebook. So, you learn the hard way.
The reality of the distilling industry prompted Franco to reach back to other military roots, including Mike Trott—an Air Force veteran and CIA officer whose son worked with Franco on the same base overseas.
The pair joked, ‘Everyone needs a SEAL.” So, they reached out to Harold Underdown, a retired Navy command master chief, to gauge his interest in the budding business venture.
They wanted to round out the new executive team with a veteran from another service. Franco contacted RJ Casey, formerly of U.S. Special Forces, who at the time was on a movie set in Budapest as a military and medical advisor.
Building a Brand on ‘Honor’
The company’s headquarters are technically Franco’s residence in Tennessee. Bardstown Bourbon Company “does the heavy lifting” for the four, bottling, blending, laying down and distilling the product in its Kentucky factory.
This April will be three years since launch.
“It’s been a mix, man,” Franco said. “As you possibly can imagine, you’ve got four guys who came from an operations background in the military, [with] no idea of this industry. So, it’s been the steepest learning curve we have ever had.”
It’s “probably so steep,” Franco added, that had someone told them about the regulations and the industry being so cash intensive then it may have never got off the ground.
But too stubborn, too dumb for our own good, whatever you want to call it—we forged ahead.
The brand has built itself on a reputation of not encouraging a problem but finding a solution, by making bourbon and alcohol more broadly a way for military service members and first responders to be congenial rather than emotionally retreat.
As Franco put it, “It’s not going away. We can either bury our heads in the sand, we can tell everybody not to drink. Well, that’s unrealistic, that’s not going to happen. So, we can change the message on how we drink, how we honor.”
That led to Four Branches Bourbon slogans: “Serve honorably. Drink honorably,” and “Sip to remember, let’s not drink to forget.”
It’s about remembering the hard work, the promotions and retirements, the birth of children or passing of friends. There’s a palpable feeling when tying congeniality with purpose.
“Don’t disarm the memories of men and women who did not make it back, but more importantly, please do not disarm your own memory. … I will always sip to remember the Gregs in my life, the Greggs that didn’t come home. We all will, right?” Franco said.
Four Branches Bourbon gives back, donating 4% of its gross income to different military and first responder groups, organizations and nonprofits like the CIA Officers Memorial Fund and Folds of Honor. More than 30 organizations have been on their radar.
Some bottles have been auctioned off for tens of thousands of dollars. It’s not perhaps about the bourbon itself, Franco acknowledges, but the connection between service members. The memories, like the sips, are always remembered.
“We will undoubtedly have those hard conversations and lean into them because they have to be had,” Franco said. “And that’s what we use our bourbon for, right? We can sit down at the kitchen table around the campfire, wherever it may be, and have that conversation.
“We might cry, we might laugh, we might do both. That’s what it’s about.”
