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Veterans know how to lead. The lessons we learned in the military form the foundation for bigger successes in business, entrepreneurship and community.
Host John S Berry, CEO of Berry Law, served as an active-duty Infantry Officer in the U.S. Army, finishing his military career with two deployments and retiring as a Battalion Commander in the National Guard. Today, his veteran led team at Berry Law, helps their clients fight some of the most important battles of their lives. Leading successful teams in the courtroom, the boardroom, and beyond, veteran leadership drives the firm’s rapid growth and business excellence.
Whether building teams, synchronizing operations, or refining tactics, we share our experiences, good and bad, to help you survive, thrive and dominate.
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[00:00:00.09] - Kate McCauley
When I took over five years ago, I thought, why are we not growing? Why are we not growing? When I took over, I looked at what we weren't doing, and we were not doing a lot of fundraising marketing. That was a lot of growing for us if we could have done that in the beginning a little bit better. Within the last five years, we've been able to increase our revenue about almost $4 million.
[00:00:23.08] - John S. Berry
Welcome to Veteran Led. Today's guest is Kate McCauley, CEO of Wounded Warriors Family Support Organization. Welcome to the show, Kate.
[00:00:34.17] - Kate McCauley
Thank you so much, John. It's great to be here.
[00:00:36.17] - John S. Berry
Well, thanks so much for coming. Now, you are actually in Omaha, Nebraska, correct?
[00:00:40.17] - Kate McCauley
I am in Omaha, Nebraska. Our headquarters are here at 110th and Q Street.
[00:00:46.13] - John S. Berry
This organization has been around for about what? Thirteen years? Is that right?
[00:00:49.09] - Kate McCauley
Twenty-two years.
[00:00:50.05] - John S. Berry
Twenty-two years.
[00:00:50.22] - Kate McCauley
Yeah, time flies, doesn't it? When you're taking care of veterans?
[00:00:53.18] - John S. Berry
Yeah, and it seems that you go back. It's like when you tell me that something was in the '80s and you tell me that that was 40 years ago. It hurts my feelings. It's the same thing. Been around for a while. One of the things that we bring up is there are lots of organizations that use the Wounded Warrior name. This is important because we have a lot of veterans that listen to this show that run companies that are starting companies that want to start a nonprofit. There's a huge lesson here, which is trademark your property. Apparently, you may or may not be able to trademark the name Wounded Warriors, but it is important to protect that intellectual property because there are about how many organizations that use some variation of Wounded Warrior or Wounded Warriors?
[00:01:34.15] - Kate McCauley
I think the last time we checked into that, there were probably over 30 nonprofits. Like I mentioned earlier, they're not all on a national level. A lot of them are smaller organizations that are statewide type of veteran organizations.
[00:01:49.07] - John S. Berry
It comes down to a specific name, Wounded Warrior Family Support Organization.
[00:01:56.05] - Kate McCauley
Yes. All I tell people is Omaha, Nebraska, our founder is retired Marine Colonel John Folsom. He actually founded the organization when he was over in Germany. It started off with a pass the hat. As we had injured, combat-wounded men coming in, the first thing they were doing was cutting their clothes off. He knew right away the hospitals didn't have any linens, they didn't have any towels, they didn't have anything to put on that veteran once they are in treatment. They went back to their unit. We have a couple of board members that have on our board since the beginning. They're founding board members. They served with colonel, and they basically passed the hat through their unit. It was really a lot of red tape to get the hospitals to be able to accept the gifts. That's how the organization was basically formed back in that day. A funny story that I didn't find out until later. The family support came later when the wives started showing up with their injured husbands. They weren't supposed to come to Germany, but a lot of them did. They had to find a place to put the wives. That's when they started finding, lodging, and really resourcing.
[00:03:05.13] - Kate McCauley
That's really pretty much how the organization was founded.
[00:03:09.11] - John S. Berry
What services do you provide to veterans and their families today?
[00:03:12.22] - Kate McCauley
What's different about Wounded Warriors family support is that we give direct support to the veteran. They're getting something. We're not just having a big gala event with a fundraising activity. We're actually directly supporting that veteran. One of our most expensive and probably our best program, well, they're all great, but is mobility as freedom. We're working with combat wounded veterans that are missing limbs. Sometimes it could be a half of their body that they're missing. Sometimes it can be two or three limbs. But what happens is as they age in place, they've probably gotten their $25,000 stipend from the VA, and they're losing their driving independence because the vehicles are so expensive. Then once they get the modifications, it really puts them out of the ballpark. You're looking at sometimes uppers of $150,000 for this veteran to be able to drive independently and safely. We work with a lot of organizations and a lot of companies that will actually give us $80,000 to purchase a truck, and then sometimes the organization will pick up the modifications. But the organization has been doing this particular program since 2018. You could probably say about $1.5 million each year goes to that specific program.
[00:04:30.16] - John S. Berry
I think it's an important distinction because we want to get veterans all the benefits that they earned, but even if they get all the benefits they earned, sometimes that is not enough.
[00:04:39.19] - Kate McCauley
It's not enough. With the cost of everything, we used to be able to buy a truck three or four years ago for $34,000 for an F-150. Now, they're in the upper '60s. Again, addressing the veteran suicide, these men, mostly are men that are critically injured, are losing their driving independence. They're isolated. They're by themselves. A lot of their wives have left. Their children have grown. We're looking at veterans that have been injured for 10, 15, up to 20 years ago, so they're not getting any better.
[00:05:12.12] - John S. Berry
A lot of the listeners on Veteran Led, are veterans, veterans, a lot of them have service-connected disabilities, but they feel they want to give back as well. They understand that there are veterans who need additional assistance. They're looking for that additional mission, that additional purpose. To find that and to find a way to give back. How can veterans who want to help families, severely disabled veterans and their families, what can we do?
[00:05:40.13] - Kate McCauley
Really for us as an organization, what you can do is really get the word out about what we're doing, what programs we have. We are 100% transparent on charitynavigator.org. You will see that we're not 98, we're not 96. We are actually 100% transparent. Letting people know that we are the Wounded Warriors Family Support. We're located in Omaha, Nebraska. If you have a platform or you have a business or you're a veteran and you have a group of veterans that you follow on your Facebook, if we could get on your network to share the programs that we have. We have three other programs we could talk about as well that the organization supports. That would be really great because we are internet-based, pretty much as far as the organization goes. We have six employees and seven board members, so we're really small. Because of that, we're able to make decisions as an organization. We're able to help more veterans because they're getting the direct support and not have that high, high cost of the fundraising in overhead.
[00:06:42.10] - John S. Berry
I think there's an important lesson behind the lesson here, which is that if you believe in something, and there are other organizations that have a synergy that you might be able to collaborate with and work together, join forces, there is opportunity there. I think it's important to ask for help. Ask for what you want. There are so many great partnerships that we've fallen into just because we were aligned with that other organization. We said, how can we help? How can we work together? I think in a small organization, you're struggling. There are usually other organizations that don't see you as a competitor, but as a collaborator and want to work with you. They understand that that synergy of working together could provide a much bigger future for both organizations or multiple organizations.
[00:07:25.12] - Kate McCauley
I will say back in time when it was just Colonel Fulsom and myself, we were able to really listen to what the veterans needed and really take those lessons and turn them into programs for veterans. That's one thing that we do is we really work closely with the families. Not only the families, you have wives that are caregivers. There's not really a lot of caregiving programs out there. There are now, but there didn't used to be. But we do have a respite care program for veterans and caregivers, too.
[00:07:55.16] - John S. Berry
With all of these programs, who's running all of them?
[00:07:59.13] - Kate McCauley
Well, me. No, I will really honestly tell you, the great American people that give to our organization is who we can thank. We're not federally funded. We grew up here in Omaha. We're proud of our veterans. We want to serve our veterans. And so that's what's most important for us to say thank you, because without the American support, we wouldn't be here. Listen, it's not wartime. Yeah, we have a great name, but that's not going to take you through everything. We're here for 22 years. We want to be here for 22 more and make even more of an impact on our community and for our veterans.
[00:08:37.12] - John S. Berry
Kate, how did you get involved?
[00:08:39.16] - Kate McCauley
Totally by mistake. It was a godsend that I didn't know about. I was a real estate agent for many, many years since 2000. I can't even tell you. Actually, it was 1996. Colonel Folsom was actually a realtor as well, and he was deployed, and he was in my real estate office, and I would see his inbox full. There was so much mail in there, and I thought, What? What's up with this? Well, he was deployed, and then he came back, and then he was deployed again. We got to talking. We were eating pizza just at the office, and he said, hey, come see what I do. I said, I'm not really interested. I need to sell some houses. This was back in 2007 when the real estate market bounced. I went from a great job to really having no income coming in. I worked a lot of REO companies. He just kind of said, hey, look at what I do. In the meantime, my son, which was 18, had just signed on to go into the army, so he's going to basic training. We had something similar to talk about. He's like, oh, have him become a Marine.
[00:09:40.20] - Kate McCauley
I'm like, Well, it's a little late for that. He's already enlisted. But we became really good friends, and I started working for the organization part-time. I said, as long as I can do my real estate on the side, I'll be fine. I thought, we're just going to go through a couple of years of this uncertainty with the real estate market. Well, it ended up coming to a point where I had to select, what are you going to do? Are you going to give 100% over here, or are you going to do 50/50? Colonel deployed again, and he said, can you take over for me while I'm gone? I said, yes. I had operated my own business for many years. That's how I got associated with the organization. I was the first employee, and here I am 18 years later.
[00:10:20.04] - John S. Berry
How many veterans have you helped?
[00:10:22.05] - Kate McCauley
Hundreds of veterans, hundreds of families. Honestly, it's so hard to count because you have family members, you have single veterans, you have caregivers that you help, just hundreds of thousands over the past 22 years.
[00:10:37.11] - John S. Berry
What metrics do you look for to keep the organization going? Because I think a lot of times people think, oh, I'm going to start this nonprofit. And it's like, no, it's a business, and you have a different tax form at the end of the year, but you got to keep it funded. You have the same problems that any other organization has.
[00:10:53.09] - Kate McCauley
And we do. And like I said to you earlier, we've been very fortunate that America loves us. I will tell you that because we get gifts that are unexpected. We got one today from an estate that's over $300,000. Like I said, we're just very blessed. But there is transparency. There is a lot of reporting that goes into that to keep the charity rating high where people of a certain caliber, they want to give to the organization. They want to give to organizations that are going to be here in five years. They want to make sure that we're going to be viable for what they're basically investing in us. We have about a 44% retention rate over the last 22 years. That's pretty good for donors. But our donors are aging, so we have to always look for ways to pull in other revenue. It could be a matching gift, something with AI online that says, hey, thank you for your contribution. Does your company match? There's always little things that we are looking to do, especially in marketing, to get that outreach out so people do want to team up and give to the organization.
[00:11:55.23] - John S. Berry
Yeah, I think the transparency is so important because you just don't know sometimes. We see all the news stories where someone is given a bunch of money to an organization. They find out that most of the money they're giving is going to pay salaries and to keep the organization running, and it's not going to the veterans. We want to make sure that if we're giving money, it's going to the cause. I like that 100% rating and the transparency, because it is key, it is important. I think the bigger donors see that and they say, if my life's work is going to support an organization, I want to know that I am truly helping the people that I want to help. For us, if we want to help our heroes, we want to make sure that it's going to them. We want an organization that's been around for a long time, where there's transparency and we can see the stories of how it's made a difference. But what advice would you give to that new organization that wants to help veterans, and they have no history, and they don't have any trees?
[00:12:51.05] - Kate McCauley
I will tell you, it's very hard. When I took over five years ago, I thought, Why are we not growing? Why are we not growing? Well, Colonel Folsom didn't believe in marketing. He didn't believe in fundraising. In the charity world, there's a balancing metrics for your rating. He didn't believe in that. When I took over, I looked at what we weren't doing, and we were not doing a lot of fundraising marketing as far as really getting in there and spending money and doing some of the things on our website that need to be enhanced in order to bring in some extra donations and things. I think that's really important. I think for me, I got in on this while it was a very small organization, and it was really difficult to build off that. But as we became a national organization and got recognized, money started coming in from all over the United States. It's not just Nebraska; it's from all over the place. But a CRM, the customer relation management, is the biggest thing. QuickBooks works just fine for a certain period of time, but that was a lot of growing for us.
[00:14:00.03] - Kate McCauley
If we could have done that in the beginning a little bit better, I think it would have been better long haul. But I do know some veterans that were injured that started their own nonprofits, and they were staying around the same revenue that our organization was. We're not a combat wounded veteran. We're an organization. So, I had to take a look at that to say, okay, what are we not doing? What are we missing? Within the last five years, we've been able to increase our revenue about almost $4 million. We went from being at this stage to really bumping up to the next stage, which just basically gives us a lot more power and funding to do these big initiatives that we want to do.
[00:14:43.19] - John S. Berry
I love to use nonprofits as the example here because a lot of organizations, they think, well, if we're growing, what does that mean in terms of revenue? No, it's about how many people you can help. The more revenue you have, the more people you can help. Whether it's a nonprofit or it's your private organization, if you believe in what you are doing, you want to help more people, you want to scale it so that the mission can reach critical mass, so it can help more and more people, and it can actually have an impact, put a dent in the problem. And so, growth is important. And I think that, unfortunately, too many of us see this, well, I just want to have this little thing that I'm going to help some people. But it's like, Yeah, there are a lot of people that need your help. And if you really want to make a difference, there's almost a moral obligation to grow the organization so that you can build it at scale to something that help many more people that need it. Because for all the people you help, you see so many more that you can't help.
[00:15:35.08] - John S. Berry
It's heartbreaking.
[00:15:36.07] - Kate McCauley
It is heartbreaking. There's a lot of need out there right now, especially food insecurity is probably the biggest need that we're seeing at the organization. And then with the flooding in Texas, we're trying to support some of that, too. So we're fortunate that we do have a surplus every year so we can fund some of these smaller things that need our attention.
[00:15:57.23] - John S. Berry
And that's a great point. I mean, you may have a disabled a veteran who is receiving disability payments, and that may be enough for the veteran. Yes, there's more. They have dependents. But a lot of times a big family, I've seen it where the kids don't know where their next meal is coming from. And you would think, but they're getting a disability payments, but the cost of living goes up. There are other life tragedies that we all experience, and it's difficult. It's difficult to see those heroes, the less than 1% that raise their hand, to watch them suffer. For their children If they're not going to have food insecurity, it's-
[00:16:32.17] - Kate McCauley
Like you said, they don't want to ask for help.
[00:16:34.20] - John S. Berry
No.
[00:16:35.07] - Kate McCauley
A lot of times, it's a family member or a friend contacting us to say, hey, what do you do? Could you support this family? We're always going to take a look to see what we can do to support the family. Sometimes it doesn't always fit our mission, but sometimes we can make that exception, too, if the case is good enough. That's just from being a smaller organization. Our board of directors are lenient that way. If we need to take a look at somebody that has had a tough go, we're definitely going to do that.
[00:17:06.06] - John S. Berry
Yeah, because I think the most important thing that sometimes as veterans, we fail to recognize often enough is that when we deploy, the family members also feel it. They are also impacted. When dad's not there or mom's not there because they're deployed, and then when they come back and if they have disabilities, guess who feels it? The family member who has to help them through their physical... Yes, there's physical therapists on things, but you know when someone's injured day to day, the activities of daily living, when you have to have a family member support, that takes something out of that family member. It takes their time, it takes patience, it takes effort, it takes a lot. As much as you may love that family member, families are families, and it's tough. It's tough to care for a family.
[00:17:52.07] - Kate McCauley
Like I said, they've been injured for 10, 15, 20 years. We have spouses, we have children, secondary caregivers. There's a lot to be said about that. There's a lot of need. For our respite program, we do home health care, and we do food assistance and some things that they need around the house done, and we can do that for them as well. Just stuff that we've created to help ease the pain of the daily living when they're going through something.
[00:18:21.07] - John S. Berry
Absolutely. Now that we know the mission and we understand how it affects and why family support is so important in that title because it is about supporting not just the veteran, but the family. Let's go into the leadership aspect of that, and we'll go to the after-action review. Okay. I asked for three examples of great leadership and poor leadership. You do not have to name names. If it's in the nonprofit world or even in your professional world. I love to hear them.
[00:18:47.05] - Kate McCauley
Well, I would say from some of the things that I've went through, as my background with the Wounded Warriors Family Support, would be that if nonprofits are competing against each other, first of all, that's not how I don't agree with that. I think all nonprofits have their own niche and have their own way of doing business. I think we all should work together. I think that when nonprofits get to where they want to sue each other, that the money that they're using to make those lawsuits, if I could go to Congress, I would, would not be allowed to use it with donors' money. A charity is all donor's money. That would just keep that stuff from happening right away because that's happening a lot, let's face it. Good leadership would just be being accountable to my employees that work for the organization, to our board of directors that govern us, the accountability for our charity rating, and just basically be in there every day. I work one-on-one. I can work with a family. I can be on the phone with an investor. It just my day can go all over the board. I'm still very hands-on working with veteran families.
[00:19:58.21] - John S. Berry
Outstanding. We've talked about good leadership, and I think you touched on some bad leadership, but what have you seen in the nonprofit world? If you look at bad leader, usually when I make a decision about who I'm going to support, it's about the leader.
[00:20:10.20] - Kate McCauley
Well, the one thing I want to say about veterans and nonprofits is that sometimes nonprofits are utilizing or exploiting that veteran for their appearance or their loss of leg. They want to get that shot, that picture. This stuff is not fun to look at. It's not fun to talk about, but it's real life. That's not something that we want to do. We're very careful not to exploit our veterans. But we also need to get the word out for our veterans. The thing I wanted to say is the nonprofits, they over promise. There's a couple of organizations, I won't name them. They've promised a veteran house for over 10 years. This veteran still thinks he's getting a house. They're doing a capital campaign. They've been doing it for 10 years. In my opinion, he's not getting a house. That just makes it harder for them to ask us a good reputable organization for help because they've already been misled by somebody else. That would be bad practices, especially in nonprofits with veterans. I bet you when you talk to some of your veterans, they'll say, They don't want to ask for anything because they don't want to be promised and let down because our veterans have been let down a lot, let's face it.
[00:21:29.11] - John S. Berry
Yeah. Integrity is doing what you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do it. I think sometimes what I've seen in both the private sector, public sector, and nonprofits is people generally want to do the right thing, but they can't always deliver. So they may have a vision, but that vision is a fantasy unless you can execute it. I think sometimes you get a bunch of well-meaning individuals who believe they can help, who want to help, but simply do not have the background or the skills to get it done. That's why a lot of businesses fail.
[00:22:06.05] - Kate McCauley
That's a really good point to make.
[00:22:08.02] - John S. Berry
Because I don't think a lot of people go into nonprofit saying, We want to disappoint people, or we want to hurt people, or we want to be financially unstable. Nobody wants that, or at least I hope not. But the reality is that it's tough out there. It's just like running a business. You have to be competent to be successful. For some people, if it's your first time in, when people come to me and they say, I just got out of the military and I really want to start this nonprofit, I just say, Look, get in the commercial sector, learn how to operate as a business organization with a budget. Learn how marketing works, learn how sales works, learn how operations, finance, learn about IT, learn about HR, because once you're a nonprofit, you're going to have to do all those things. Hey, if you want to be a team of one, an army of one, and you want to go out and help people, then do that. But if you think you're going to build something with zero experience, it's not going to happen. You're going to learn. I mean, look, even people with MBAs, even people who've worked for corporations for 10, 20, 30 years, they still fail every day.
[00:23:16.14] - John S. Berry
They make mistakes and we learn, but there's that base level of knowledge that we have that we say, Okay, I know enough to understand the big picture. I think, unfortunately, a lot of really well-meaning people I know because I've met some of them, I've tried to help some of them, they had an idea and they brought a couple of people on, and then the next thing they know-
[00:23:37.16] - Kate McCauley
It didn't work out.
[00:23:38.12] - John S. Berry
It didn't work out, and they've disappointed people, and they feel disappointed, and they're heartbroken about it, and people are mad at each other, and It's tough. So, develop that core competency before you start it, know what you're doing or be that army of one, or, better yet, don't start at the top, start at the bottom. Go work at a nonprofit first before you start one so you can learn how to do the things that need to be... It's amazing to me. You could show up at an organization and learn so much just at the lowest level, the lowest echelons of the organization, so you can really see how it works. You hear about people all the time that are the CEO of the company that started off in the mail room.
[00:24:16.20] - John S. Berry
Well, there's a reason for that. They started off in for years. They learned how the organization worked and how it ran. A good friend of mine, actually, you probably know him, Tony Goines. He used to be the Director of Economic Development for the State of Nebraska. Marine, great executive in the banking and finance world. He started off, he wanted to go into banking and he got a job. He wanted to be a loan officer. They said, You're a Marine, machine gunner, you'll be a security guard. But he took that job. When he took that job, he got the attention of other people because he showed up every day with shined boots, a pressed uniform, said, yes, sir, and did a great job. They said, we can count on you. That's something, that's character that We need this organization. We're going to give you a shot. He eventually did become a loan officer. Then his career skyrocketed from there. But he didn't walk in getting the job that he wanted. I think a lot of us think that we can just start something and it's going to work out great. It doesn't. Those of us, even with experience, been doing something 20, 30, 40 years, we learn something every day.
[00:25:17.09] - Kate McCauley
Definitely every day, every day, especially in the nonprofit sector. It's every day. We have a different day, it seems like, all the time.
[00:25:24.12] - John S. Berry
Well, Kate, where can our listeners learn more about the Wounded Warriors Family Support Organization.
[00:25:32.05] - Kate McCauley
We'd like you to visit our website, woundedwarriorsfamilysupport.org or wwfs.org. Our office is right over off 110th and Q. Give us a call, 402-502-7557. If you know a veteran, a family that are in need, or you just want to learn about us, and maybe you want to partner with us, give us a call. We answer our phone. We'd love to hear from you.
[00:26:00.10] - John S. Berry
Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Led, where we pursue our mission of promoting veteran leadership in business, strengthening the veteran community, and getting veterans all of the benefits that they earned. If you know a leader who should be on the Veteran Led podcast, report to our online community by searching at Veteran Lead on your favorite social channels and posting in the comments. We want to hear how your military challenges prepared you to lead your industry or community, and we will let the world know. And of course, hit and join me next time on Veteran Lead.