When John Lynch nearly lost the company he founded due to a hostile takeover, he dug deep into his scrappy Jersey roots and the words of an old high school friend – one Jon Bon Jovi, of all people – and found the courage to fight back, save his company and write a page-turner of a novel based on the ordeal.

Born in Sayreville, New Jersey, to working class parents in a very happy family, Lynch always aspired to do something – do more – with his life. Digging in with dogged determination, Lynch got his MBA from Wharton and decided to move to Poland to help aspiring business owners just as Communism was crumbling in the Eastern European country some 30 years ago. “To watch a country come to life as a newly-formed democracy was awe-inspiring,” Lynch says now. He fell in love with the country and its people, and through a series of fortuitous events, started an apparel design company called Lynka, just outside of Krakow. Cut to 2020, and despite the pandemic storming around the world, Lynch and his team of 250 were one of the most respected and successful apparel decorators in Europe, winning countless awards and selling to customers in 25 counties across Europe – where the company is so ubiquitous in the promo space, it’s decorated 85 million garments.

But before the halcyon high earlier this year of merging his company with New Jersey-based Top 40 supplier Vantage Apparel (asi/93390) Lynch lived through a surreal and jarring experience where a company that had invested in Lynka tried to take the company right out from under him, locking him and his employees out of their facility, changing passwords on emails and banking information, and spreading rumors about the status of Lynka and Lynch himself. Lynch, who fought back and emerged victorious, would tell friends and business colleagues the story, most of whom would listen, slack jawed, to his mind-boggling tale and say, “It’s just so unbelievable and such a great story of resilience, you really should write a book.”

And so, after five years and many, many iterations of his manuscript, a publishing house in Poland produced “The Ark,” Lynch’s fictional-but-based-on-a-true-story account of his experiences. Released just two weeks ago, the thriller is climbing the best-seller lists in Poland and will be published in the U.S. within the next few months.

Click below to listen to Lynch’s wide-ranging interview with Michele Bell, ASI Media’s vice president of Editorial, Education & Special Events, and learn the one thread – woven into Lynch’s DNA from his Jersey days – that propelled him forward even in his darkest moments. “I just kept thinking of the album – Keep the Faith – by my old high school friend, Jon Bon Jovi,” he says. “And that got me through it.”

Podcast Chapters (Available Only On Desktop)
1:50 Lynch’s NJ background and going to high school with Jon Bon Jovi
2:45 How he got his start in business, in the most boot-strap of ways
3:00 What it was like to start a business in Poland 30 years ago, as Communism was crumbling
4:50 How watching Poland’s new democracy take shape changed Lynch
8:10 How his Mom, a waitress in a NJ diner, made an introduction for him that changed the trajectory of his success
10:07 Lynch’s “fake it til you make it” moment that led him to the promo industry
16:50 The genesis of his novel, the thriller “The Ark,” that’s loosely based on a hostile takeover of his company
18:10 The business crisis that nearly broke him, and how a Bon Jovi lyric saved him
20:40 How Hemingway, John Grisham and Ayn Rand influenced his writing
27:40 Why he believes that being an entrepreneur is an honorable profession
28:30 How to lean in to resilience in the face of daunting adversity (20+ book publishers turned him down)
31:00 The current state of his company’s partnership with Vantage Apparel and the ownership structure
33:30 Why Vantage was his first choice
36:00 Lynch’s take on the current state of the promo market in Europe
39:00 What changed his mind about being totally Work-From-Home
39:40 The ultimate question for a native New Jersian: Springsteen or Bon Jovi?

John Lynch next to the cover of his book