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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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[00:00:01.19] - Ed Tuorinsky
The military teaches you integrity, honor, doing the right thing, and getting it done to standard and to the mission needs. The commercial world, those drivers are different and are building something that is a long-term value.
[00:00:18.18] - John S. Berry
Welcome to Veteran Led. Ed Tuorinsky is a US Army Veteran and the founder and CEO of DTS, a cyber security and compliance firm serving the defense industrial base. Ed has also served as the President of the NVSBC. Welcome to Veteran Led, Ed Tuorinsky.
[00:00:41.22] - Ed Tuorinsky
How are you doing, John? Thanks for having me.
[00:00:44.06] - John S. Berry
Great to have you here. There's a lot to talk about. Many of our Veteran clients are looking to get into the GovCon space, and many of them are members of the NVSBC. This is a great opportunity to have a discussion about everything that you do. But we'll go back aways. For those of you that don't know, I was commissioned as an Infantry Officer from College of William and Mary back in 1997. And Ed, you were commissioned as an Artillery Officer, isn't that right?
[00:01:11.23] - Ed Tuorinsky
It was transportation.
[00:01:13.10] - John S. Berry
Okay, transportation. That's right. And so, you've parlayed that logistics experience into your current career. So, take us into that. After you left active service, how did you begin your civilian career that has got you to the place now where you're the CEO of a cyber security network defense company?
[00:01:31.09] - Ed Tuorinsky
Well, it's the good old army adage of the guy that doesn't step back gets the job. So, when I initially went into Korea, I worked as an S3, and the colonel that came in at the time, he was an IT guy. We had four computers for about 1100 people in the battalion. He said, we need to create a local area network, wide area network, and start using computers. Since I was the one guy that could turn a computer on, I got the job. That's kind of where it started, is working in computers with Korea, built the networks, got to develop some programs. We used Access for a database. We used Excel, which at the time was revolutionary, trust me. Started to be able to connect with each other from the local drives and share information because we were dispersed across all of Korea, all the way from DMZ, all the way down to Pusan. It really helped with communications on class level, of course, but just the general day-to-day operations of a battalion. That led me down that IT path, which I did not study in college.
[00:02:46.19] - John S. Berry
Yeah, let's clarify. You were a transportation officer. You were not comms. You were not working for the G6. You were the transportation officer in a battalion. So, you're battalion level staff, and you're the guy that is basically doing what the signal officer would do. That's what we call the signal officer back then.
[00:03:07.12] - Ed Tuorinsky
Yep, back then, the signal officer was like, all I deal with is radios, man. That's it. We set up comms and communication, we go to the field. I mean, it obviously transitioned into that over time. So, IT was my collateral duty. We still had to do all the movements, all the logistics, all the contracts with moving supplies in and out of the DMZ. This was a little side job that was given to me. It started with a colonel that was a great colonel. Cosio, was one of the great leaders. We're talking about that at the end. He said, we have to do this. We have to figure it out. We got to get better. I sat down with him, and he gave me the leeway to learn and understand and just take it and run with it, and I figured it out.
[00:03:58.09] - John S. Berry
How did that affect your military career? Did you continue to push more towards the IT side, or was that after you got out?
[00:04:06.22] - Ed Tuorinsky
It continued to go in that direction. When I got back to the states, I was actually deployed over to Germany in Kosovo for the Kosovo campaign, and that was purely logistical. Supplying the... It's an ADAG, was an operation out of Ramstein Air Base into Albania. Then we moved in through Greece, ran the port in Greece up into Kosovo. It was the initial status of that engagement. We created Camp Bondsteel and other camps. We brought in all the equipment for that. At that point, it was purely just to go on a day-to-day. How do I get supplies from point A to point B? Where is it needed? Really looking across there. One thing I did notice at the time, you might want to cut this. We didn't know where anything was. We knew where it was when it got to the port. We knew where it was when it got on the plane, got off the plane, got on the ship, got off the ship. But in transit, in between, we really did not know where things were because there was no way to track it. It's not like you can put an air tag on something and know exactly where your kid's bicycle is that he left at the playground.
[00:05:20.13] - Ed Tuorinsky
At the time, when I got back, I talked to the leadership at Seventh Transportation Group and said, hey, look, we really need to figure out how to track things. Then that got me put on another special project with SCIC. It was a contractor. We were developing a new logistical system to do in transit tracking of logistical assets. Still at the time, it was really expensive to put active RFID, so that's where you're pinging it constantly. That was only on the major weapon systems or on munitions or things we need to track. Then passive RFD was on tool paper, boots, MREs, whatever it might be that we're concerned about, but if it falls off the boat, not a big deal. That was my first foray into large IT systems. They were using Oracle and SAP to develop these systems. I was in charge of the military side of testing those systems at Fort Story down in Virginia Beach. It progressed as I was going through my military career. Then that's what led me into the civilian sector. When I got out, I had a lot of different job offers. It was right when the dot-com bubble burst, so probably the worst time to get out of the army.
[00:06:45.05] - Ed Tuorinsky
There were no jobs, but I picked up a job working as a contractor for NAVC. My first job there was working on the vertical launching systems. I was the logistician tracking all the parts. There's millions of parts on the vertical launching system. They had about 400 people in Crystal City was tracking all of these parts across the entire Navy. I was tasked as a contractor to build a database to track them all and know where they were, if it needed to be flown out to the ship, it was a critical part, if they were coming in for refit or they're coming in for dry dock. That was my first time that I built a system on my own.
[00:07:26.05] - John S. Berry
I think it's important to take the experience here. Sometimes the problems that we see in the military, and turn them into our strengths in the civilian world. Because even in 2005, when I went to Iraq as a Company Commander, I can remember sending my UMO, my unit movement officer, along with the connexus. We still couldn't find all of our shit. And then we fell in on equipment. I remember talking to Company Commander over there where we're signing for the equipment, they're trying to find stuff. And then there's all this excess equipment. Where did all this come from? He's like, I don't know, man. It was here when I got here. I think the ability to track our stuff, and I've been out since 2017, so I don't know. But it seems like our ability to track and find our stuff has been the narrative of army logistics. I know you tried to solve that huge problem. And made some headway. Then you come into the civilian world and you realize, no, people expect to know where their stuff is.
[00:08:22.16] - Ed Tuorinsky
Yeah. People expect that the military knows where their stuff is also. I think that's a little bit of a misnomer. But it's come so far. Then obviously, technology. Even when I was in the army, we went to the Walmart warehouses at the time. Amazon was still coming around. But how did they know that when somebody buys a pair of underwear in Little Rock, Arkansas, how do they ensure that that stock gets restocked? How does that all work? It's that whole supply chain from end-to-end. They're using very expensive enterprise resource planning system so that they know where the stock is, where it's being manufactured, how far it is in the process of being shipped to the United States. Looking at those warehouses and looking at how far beyond they were, some of the military. Now, our military is great. We designed some of the most advanced weapon systems in the world, but logistics was kind of behind there. When I got out I saw a gap between what we could do in the defense industrial base for the military using some of the unclass commercial technology and just try to blend those two together. Then it did come full circle later on in life, but that's really where I got my start is taking the commercial best practices and applying them to the DOD, the logistical apparatus, to make it even better.
[00:10:01.23] - John S. Berry
At that point, you are working for another company. When do you decide to found your own company?
[00:10:10.03] - Ed Tuorinsky
After I worked for L3 Communications, I came into a subsidiary of them. It's a very large organization. Worked there for several years and got recruited by a small firm. I was about, I think, the fifth or sixth person that came on to the firm. They worked more on the consulting side and not as much as the IT, so they consulted on larger projects, IT projects. I worked with the business owner that grew the company. We went to 30, 60, 80, 100. Was it a company for over five, six years? At that point, I had the idea of maybe I could do this on my own. It was not the brightest idea at the time. From there, I did go to another IT company, worked on honing more of the IT system development, software development skills. Then one day, I said, You know what? I'm going to try this. I feel like I have the military experience. I have the, you know, the commercial experience. One of my mentors that I had worked with for a while, I spoke with him about it, and he was like, I will work with you to help you out.
[00:11:25.13] - Ed Tuorinsky
That was the first contract that I got as a company. Started the company, filled all the paperwork, and our first contract was a training support contract for the General Services Administration. We actually still have that contract today. I was working with Everett at E3, federal, and he really helped me understand the complexities of government contracting. It's a lot of paperwork, it's a lot of compliance, it's a lot of proposals. Once you to get into doing the work, the good thing about in the government space is you can win two, three, four, five-year contracts. Typically, let's not talk about DOGE, just ignore that whole f****** thing. But it's a good space to be able to have that consistent revenue and that basis to grow a company. That's where we started and started to win some other contracts under his guidance and grew the company, and it kept going from there.
[00:12:30.12] - John S. Berry
Let's talk about the size of the company now. Are you just doing GovCon or are you also doing commercial contracts now?
[00:12:37.04] - Ed Tuorinsky
In another brilliant decision of mine, I was looking, kind of going back full circle, information, Security, understanding the difference between unclass, classified work, it was beat into us, is that you are the stewards of this information. You are the ones that need to protect the government's secrets. There's a process to do it. You if you go into a skiff, you put your stuff away, you walk in, you sign in, you walk into the door, you do your business in there, you walk out, nothing goes in, nothing comes out. Those worlds were separated. Then in about 2018, '17, '18, I started to look at information security on the commercial side, and it was nonexistent. Commercial companies didn't understand that they're all in the cloud, they're paying for Google or Microsoft, and everything is just open to the world. I talk to companies like, "Hey, you might be a law firm, you might be a cupcake, but you're storing customers' information, credit card numbers, you're storing their personal information, you're storing some of their intimate information, depending if you're a law firm or just a bakery. If that information comes out, it's going to hurt your company." Just the ability for people to protect that information was so foreign.
[00:14:02.20] - Ed Tuorinsky
For me, coming out of the military and then into government contractor, protecting information was key. Every single day was beat into you. In 2019, I started to get into the commercial cybersecurity, right in time for COVID. So, another great decision. So, all my big decisions tend to be right aligned with an economic disaster. So next time I do one, I'll tell you so you guys can know that something crazy is going to happen. So, we got into really securing information for companies, their networks, their data, fundamental level. And that led us into more complex security, into compliance requirements, and running whole companies' IT security programs for them, monitoring, protecting them, incident response, user management, vulnerability management. Really grew into something that was a little more advanced than I had first known. We learned a lot about it. One thing is the commercial market and the federal market are similar but completely different. There's a different way of accounting. There's a different way of sales. Commercial contracts are much smaller, faster, shorter. The sales cycle is different. Government contracts are longer, but they're harder to get. There's a lot more compliance requirements in those.
[00:15:33.15] - Ed Tuorinsky
So had to learn a whole new business side of the house. Over the years, we've worked on honing both sides of our business. We were larger. We went through the whole DOGE things. We lost a little bit through there, but it looks like we're going to expand out. But the commercial market is going well. Cybersecurity, information security is something that every company needs, and that's going well, then the government market is changing right now. I would say to anybody that's getting into the government market, I almost think it's a great time because all of us old people that know the rules and understand how to play the game, that's changed. Coming into the market with fresh ideas, new ideas, not understanding, well, I did it this way before, and it resulted in this win or this loss, those rules are changing. I think it's a great time, especially for Veterans, to get into the market and try to help solve some of these big daunting problems that the DOD has. I mean, Golden Dome is probably one of the biggest projects, but there's a lot of solutions that the DOD and the federal government need right now.
[00:16:51.20] - Ed Tuorinsky
I think Veterans coming in and going back to just, I'm sure you got a lot of extra duties, just go do it and you figure it out. Coming in and helping with those solutions is going to be key to getting our government to where they want to go.
[00:17:08.04] - John S. Berry
How big is your company right now, Ed?
[00:17:11.23] - Ed Tuorinsky
We're around 50 people right now. Once again, we had more. DOGE took care of those. We are growing again. We're still a really small company. We like being a small company. We're looking to stay a small company for the foreseeable future. I like that the leadership team and the management team are on the same page and that I know everybody in the company at this point. That's positive. When we were getting bigger, I was starting to not know some people. We would hire people and they would show up at the holiday party. I'm like, I have no idea who you are. We are growing again, which is a positive. Every government contractor has gone through this, I think, downward slope over the last six months. My advice is to hang in there and make it through. Then for new people entering the market, it's a great time. I think it's a really great time. Come with new ideas, come with solutions, come with different direction, teach us, old guys, a different way of doing business.
[00:18:25.15] - John S. Berry
That's great. There's a lot of gold here, but I just want to point out some of those key points you made. Number one is, just because you don't have the experience doesn't mean now is not a great time to get in. You got to learn at some point. When the world is changing, the best time to plant a tree was yesterday, so jump in. Love that. Number two is, yeah, so government contracting, we're seeing cuts, but that's a great time to get in, too. I mean, it's a loss of opportunity for some people. It might be a gain for others. Sometimes you look at something as an opportunity lost. Sometimes that just means that more people drop out, and it actually creates more opportunity. A lost opportunity is sometimes more opportunity. The third thing that I really like you said is those ancillary duties, those other things that you have to do in the military, as much as they suck at the time, those are sometimes the greatest opportunities. You never know how much that learning experience is going to mean. I think of all my painful experiences in the military. Pain is a teaching tool, and I learned a lot great things.
[00:19:30.17] - John S. Berry
And I hated it when I found out that I was going to be from a line Infantry Platoon Leader to becoming the Support Platoon Leader. And I did an NTC rotation as a Support Platoon Leader. And then I get in the National Guard as an Infantry Captain, and they move me to Logistics. So, I got to go to Fort Eustis as too.
[00:19:48.20] - Ed Tuorinsky
Welcome to the dark side.
[00:19:50.12] - John S. Berry
Yeah, but I learned so much. Don't get me wrong. I mean, hey, to be able to close with and destroy the enemy is a great, it's a great skill to have, but those logistics skills have saved us time and time again. Even as a law firm, even as a lawful, even as a service business, in the service industry, logistics absolutely matters because that's your bottom line. If you can't control the logistical tale of your organization, you're in trouble.
[00:20:18.23] - Ed Tuorinsky
No, I completely agree with you. I learned so much through logistics and working on those large-scale operations. That's one of the things I, you learn to love about logistics is you have to understand the full scope of what's going on, what's going on at the front, what's going on at the back, what's going on in the middle, understanding the movements and the needs, and that complexity, I think, really helped me when I came into the commercial world to be able to look at something at a grand scale, but also focus in on needs in certain areas and then fix them. I think you hit on a great point on the company side is it's not just about winning. It's not just about money. At the AAR, you can kind of talk about different leadership styles. The military teaches you integrity, honor, doing the right thing and getting it done to standard and to the mission needs. The commercial world, those drivers are different. I think there's a lot of companies that drive towards the dollar, the win, the money, and aren't building something that is a long-term value. It's a short-term gain over the long-term value of an organization.
[00:21:45.19] - Ed Tuorinsky
That's why I like to do business with Veteran businesses, Veteran owned- company, and Veterans. We all have that basis of understanding, and we're going to work together. It doesn't always work out, but I know I can, you know, something goes wrong, I can call you John and say, you know what? This is all fucked up. Let's figure it out. None of us are going to come out of this with a positive, but we need to do the right thing for the customer. We need to get the job done, and then we'll figure it out. Other people that weren't in the military tend to take offense to that approach. It never works out. It doesn't work out, but it gets ugly real quick. As a lawyer, you probably are in the middle of a lot of those arguments.
[00:22:30.00] - John S. Berry
I think that is an outstanding point. I have burned a lot of bridges with vendors that had they been Veterans and had they been actually able to accept real feedback, I think we could have salvaged the relationship. But just like you said, when I've worked with other Veteran companies, and so I was like, hey, this is jacked up. Let's find a way to fix it because we got to put our clients first. I remember my CMO once was talking to an SEO vendor, search engine optimization. It's like, he said, is that the best you can do? And they got offended. They called me and said he was being rude and obnoxious. And I said, he asked if that was the best you can do. If that's offensive to you, get out of business. Just go away. I've learned to tone it down a little bit with a non-Veteran, but I generally try to hire veteran vendors all across the spectrum, whether it's headhunters or in-IT or any type of sales, marketing, finance. Now, I love to hire lawyer Veterans because they get it. They love our clients, and they want to serve our clients, and they understand what it means to support and defend the Constitution.
[00:23:37.03] - John S. Berry
They raise their hand. But I can tell you, yes, I have run into the same frustrations on the commercial side where I'm thinking, who are these charlatans. It's like, Look, I'm giving you the opportunity to make this right. You screwed up. I'm calling you out. Let's just make it right. Instead, they get offended, they get defensive, and they hide. And they hide behind their lawyers, right? And then that's where we go in. And then we got to go toe to toe with their lawyers and say, look, your client's jacked up. And like, Yeah, okay, how do we fix it? And it's like, we wasted time and energy because you didn't have integrity. You didn't have those core values that you have in the military. I am with you. I agree. When we look to hire, we give the Veteran preference every single time, not just in employees, but also with vendors. Anybody we're going to work with, we want them to believe in our mission, but we also want to have the same core values so we can work together. This takes us to your last position, where you give back. Three years, for three years, you were the president of the, and I always screw up the acronyms, NVSBC.
[00:24:42.14] - John S. Berry
What does it stand for and what did you do?
[00:24:44.21] - Ed Tuorinsky
All right. The National Veteran Small Business Coalition, it's a nonprofit and it has two pieces of it. It has a coalition which advocates for Veteran businesses. It's done a lot on the hill to help put Veteran companies first. That's one of the biggest pieces of saying, we just went through it, John. Veteran companies, they consist of everybody from all different walks of lives, and they have a good core set of values, and the government should be buying from them first. We're trying to promote that use of Veteran businesses in the DOD and the federal government. The other side is the Educational Foundation, and that does training, it does networking, it does mentoring. They have mentoring programs for people who are thinking about getting into it, to link them up with somebody. Most of the mentors have built a business, sold a business, sometimes multiple times, and they will talk them through the process of starting a GovCon business. They also link up smaller companies with mid-size companies to work together. Then they have lots of networking. Networking is the key. You got to get out there. You got to talk to people. You're going to do business with people you like.
[00:26:03.02] - Ed Tuorinsky
So, get out to the events. They have breakfast, lunch, and dinners all over the United States. NVSBC.org. You can look it up. That's a great organization. They also, if you become a member, they have a lot of free training. You can take on anything from business plan 101 to how do I go from $2 million to... You're not going to go to 50. $2 million to $10 million, then $10 to $20, and $20 to 50 million. So, a lot of different techniques on how to understand the government market space, understand how the government does business, and win contracts. The best thing for me is the community. It's a group of people; I like to call them self-weeding out. Some Veterans aren't the greatest, but if they're not, they'll get weeded out of the organization. We work together to support each other, to make the community better and our business is better. It doesn't mean we're always going to work together, but we help each other out, and it's a safe space to talk about real issues. Other spaces, I'd be concerned because I've opened up to other companies, and they have taken that information and stolen work from me or taken employees from me.
[00:27:19.04] - Ed Tuorinsky
Not to say it wouldn't happen, but in this community, it would only happen once. He would be out. It's a safe space where you can be honest talk about issues, get good feedback, and do business with other Veterans.
[00:27:36.00] - John S. Berry
That's a great point about how you like to do business with the people that you trust, and you want to do business with. I don't know if you've ever met Todd Connor, the founder of Bunker Labs. I have. I hear. Yeah. So, he talks about... He was accused of likeerism, which is not favoritism, but it's like, well, when you do projects, Todd, you only do it with people you like. He's like, yeah, I only want to work with people I like to work with. If you're difficult to work with, if you're an asshole, why would I spend my time? And I think, Ed, as I have matured, I was always so focused on the destination. And now it's more, the two things that matter more than the destination are the people and the journey. And if the people suck, the journey is going to suck. So I really want to work with the best people, people that I like to work with, and I want to enjoy the journey. I want to have a good time because the work is hard. I want to do great things for my clients.
[00:28:33.04] - John S. Berry
But hey, if you're going to embrace the suck, it should be temporary. And it's a lot easier to embrace the suck when you have your team of warriors, your people with you, as opposed to a bunch of outsiders that really aren't on board with your mission, don't understand where you came from. That is the one great thing about the Veteran community is we all share that common bond, those common values. Hey, we've all in the military, we've all worked for assholes. We know. We know. It's one of those things. Because we have that leadership experience, we know what good leadership looks like. It doesn't mean we always exhibit it, but we know what it's like, and we know what it's like to be on a high functioning team, and we know what it's like to be in a toxic team. When you can find the right people, it's great. How can Veterans learn more about NVSBC?
[00:29:28.07] - Ed Tuorinsky
NVSBC.org go there and find out what events they are having. I would say attend an event, go to a dinner, go to a breakfast. They have them in DC, San Antonio. They have them in Columbus, a bunch of different places. San Diego. Attend an event and get to know some of the people. The event prices for non-members are relatively, obviously, got to cover the cost of the food. That's what they're doing there. But listen to some speakers, get to know some people, and see if it's a fit for you. There's also a large conference. I know it is an expense. I think it's going to be in New Orleans this year. We just had it in Orlando. We're moving to New Orleans. It's in the May time frame. That's when you're going to get 2,000, 3,000 Veterans together, a couple of thousand different companies. It's a great time to really hang out, get to know the people. If you can get to New Orleans, and obviously, there's expenses there for companies that are startups. They do have scholarship programs for that. You can apply if you're a brand-new company. They collect money through the different fundraisers, and they give out sometimes up to 10 scholarships.
[00:30:41.14] - Ed Tuorinsky
That'll pay for your entry fee, it'll pay for your hotel, it'll pay for your flight to go to the conference. If you're just starting out, I recommend it. If you're a business that is already active, I think that annual conference is a great time to get to know that community. We were all there. We work hard and we play hard, so it's usually long days and long nights.
[00:31:05.13] - John S. Berry
Seems to be true of just about any Veteran conference. It takes us to the After-Action Review, your examples of great leadership and poor leadership. You don't have to name names, but I'd love to hear at least three examples of great leadership, and then three examples of the bad leadership that you wish to never emulate.
[00:31:25.00] - Ed Tuorinsky
I've been thinking about this one, and I'm trying not to have it too I'm descriptive, so the people are like, oh, that's me. I'll start with the great leadership. There's a lot, in my military career, I was lucky to have a lot of great leaders. Even starting out as a young second lieutenant, I had leaders in Korea in my battalion that took me under. One, and I'll mention, their name is Master Sergeant White. I had a job. You know this. I had no idea what I was doing. You show up and you're like, here you go. Now you're running logistics for an entire battalion. I'm like, why? I learned that back at Fort Eustis, but it was like a platoon. It was like 20 of us. He really took me on and worked with me. He had 35 years in the military. I'm a young kid just getting out of college and really taught me how to be that initial leader of my unit. It wasn't platoon leader, it was on staff. I think we had 20 soldiers in our unit in S3, but taught me how to listen, taught me how to take advice, taught me how to take credit for what I should take credit for and then give credit out.
[00:32:56.22] - Ed Tuorinsky
It was just a really nice bond of of him taking the time to do it. I know he's done this plenty of times, over and over again. I've seen it in the movies when you look at the worst, where he was that grizzled old sergeant or the warrant officer that has been doing this forever. I had the chance to take that on. Conversely, I had some other ones that just tried to thwart my every step along the way. For some reason, they just had a, I don't want you to be successful, and I'm going to put you down so that I can be successful. The Blue Bird mentality. I don't get that.
[00:33:41.14] - John S. Berry
The Blue Falcon mentality, right?
[00:33:43.06] - Ed Tuorinsky
Blue Falcon, that's what it is. Blue Bird was the bus. That's what it is.
[00:33:45.19] - John S. Berry
Yeah, the Blue Bird was the bus. Yeah, that took you the range.
[00:33:48.17] - Ed Tuorinsky
But that was my first real experience. Then I had leaders when I was deployed. A lot of they were many flag officers that came in. The Kosovo was... Bosnia and Kosovo, it was one of the first campaigns since the Vietnam War. There have been small ones, but this was one of the larger ones. Really, they were projecting the leadership of what we're going to do because all of us were new. We've never done this before. It was different than the last 20 years with Afghanistan and Iraq. There's a lot of experience. And lieutenants and captains and sergeants, they've been there, done that. We were all green. We've never been. We've been trained. We've been to NTC. We've been to Hornfield. We've been to all these places, but this was a real environment. They sat us down and they really spoke to us on what was going to happen. They told us the reality. They told us the good the bad and the ugly. They gave us confidence as leaders that we can do this and we're going to achieve this mission. The mission objective did change from initially we were going in as a combat unit, and then it was a peacekeeping mission.
[00:35:16.09] - Ed Tuorinsky
But it was great confidence. I don't know how to project it, but to get up in front of a bunch of junior leaders, we were all junior officers and NCOs, and project that level of clarity, confidence, clear objectives, and this is what we're going to... They didn't tell us how to do it. They just said, this is what we're going to do. There was no doubt that we couldn't do it. That's something I'm still thinking about being in this briefing room in the hangar when we were going to a combat situation, and I'm like, I can do this. I've never done it before. None of us have. But when we walked out of there, we were ready to achieve the mission objectives of going into Kosovo and taking out Milosevic, and that obviously changed as we were going through it. But I'll never forget how the flag officers, just a level of confidence that they weren't worried at all. It made us feel great about what we were about to do. I'm sure you've had experiences like that also. I don't know how they did it. To this day, I want to be that type of leader of instilling this over sense of calm and clarity and ease of something so complex that they boil it down to something so easy that everyone understands it, and we're all going off to do our part to make it happen.
[00:36:58.20] - John S. Berry
Yeah, that's outstanding. I think about as a trial lawyer, I still get to do that. Convinced, hey, we are going to go in there. We are going to win this trial. We are conditioned to win. We've done the work. You know, nothing is guaranteed, but we have done the work, and we're going to win. And I think going in there, we can't promise results to clients. But when I'm talking to my team before we're going to trial, we are convinced we're going to win. Because if you're not, you're going to lose. And juries can see. If you're uncertain, they'll be like, oh, if he's not really sure, how can I be sure? And so, I think that it's the same way with leadership. If you, as the leader, don't have the conviction that you're going to go in there and win, your team can see it. They know when you're scared. And so, if you're scared, say you're scared. That's fine. But I think as a leader, yeah, it's great to go in there to take on the big challenge and say, I have no doubt you can do this. Of course, to be fair, those GOs are probably in the back hanging out in their Humvees while you're getting shot at.
[00:37:58.12] - John S. Berry
As the young lieutenant in Germany, we got on the planes. That's right. Or from Tampa. But anyway, so, Ed, where can Veterans listening learn more about DTS and you, Ed Tuorinsky, the CEO of DTS?
[00:38:16.10] - Ed Tuorinsky
DTS, you can go to dothesecurity.com, and it's our website, and it talks about... We are updating our website; it talks about all of our commercial work that we do and our government side of our work. Our marketing team and our outreach team does a great job of putting things out on social media. This was, I know, one that we're really excited about. We have YouTube clips out there. Also on our website, there's lots of articles from leadership articles to how do I understand information security or what does cybersecurity mean? A lot of articles that I have written, some of our subject matter experts have written, a lot of great information out there. LinkedIn is probably the best way to really connect with me and our team. We actively post on LinkedIn. I message people on LinkedIn back and forth. I think that's how you reach out to me, John. That's my main point. I'm old. I'm not a Instagram, Twitter X, or whatever else is out there. LinkedIn is really the spot where I like to project what we talk about what we do, comment on other people's posts.
[00:39:35.18] - John S. Berry
Outstanding. Well, thank you so much for joining us today on Veteran Led. And thank you that all you continue to do for the Veteran community. Once again, if you want to get involved and you're struggling in business, there is something out there for you, or if you just want to get started. So, I can't stress enough how many people have come in and said, John, NVSBC has changed my opportunities. For us at Berry Law, we want to help Veterans get those disability benefits they earned, but a lot of times, then they're like, okay, now what? Now what do I do? I need a mission. I need a team. You can go out and find one and join a team, or like Ed, go out and create one.
[00:40:20.02] - 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 Led on your favorite social channels and posting in the comments. We want to hear how your military challenges prepared you to lead your and we will let the world know. And of course, hit subscribe and join me next time on Veteran Led.