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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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[00:01:53.670] - Patrick Flood
The amount of my ego that I've been able to set aside both as a father and also running this reminds me an awful lot of leading men in combat, is that it's not about me.
[00:02:07.410] - Freddie Kim
Welcome to Veteran Led Podcast. Today I'm your host, Freddie Kim, with Mil-Spec Talent. I'm here at the Veteran Edge Conference in Dallas, and I'm sitting here with Patrick Flood. He is the founder of Owners in Honor. You were an ROTC commission officer.
[00:02:27.450] - Patrick Flood
That's right.
[00:02:27.870] - Freddie Kim
Georgetown.
[00:02:28.590] - Patrick Flood
Yeah.
[00:02:29.140] - Freddie Kim
And you served in Special Forces, 7th Special Forces Group.
[00:02:32.200] - Patrick Flood
I did. Yeah.
[00:02:33.410] - Freddie Kim
And you have an interesting story of just why you joined in the first place.
[00:02:37.480] - Patrick Flood
Unconventional.
[00:02:38.300] - Freddie Kim
Unconventional.
[00:02:39.250] - Patrick Flood
I stayed unconventional my entire career. Yeah.
[00:02:41.900] - Freddie Kim
Yeah.
[00:02:42.540] - Patrick Flood
What do you want to know?
[00:02:43.610] - Freddie Kim
So, so you talked about your family serving as well.
[00:02:47.030] - Patrick Flood
Sure.
[00:02:47.270] - Freddie Kim
How did all of that impact you?
[00:02:48.960] - Patrick Flood
Yeah, I mean, so I'm a third generation American. Service to the country was always a big deal. My family came over during the Irish Civil War, so getting a second chance as a, as a family was always really a big deal. Being able to serve the country in some way. Most of the family members that I've had— my dad's one of 9 kids. My dad was the only one that served in the military. Both my grandparents served. Grandfather served in the military, but everyone ended up in teaching or some medicine or some other service. Sort of oriented things. So it's always been a big part of our— we're also Catholic, so it's very much service-oriented. Book of James, like, you know, it's not just faith alone, but works that you see. And so all of that stuff, we lived it. And for me, it just seemed to me to make a logical sense for me to be able to— my older brother went to West Point, so to go into the Army, have the Army pay for college, probably financially I wasn't in a position to be able to to get a good college paid for.
[00:03:46.500] - Patrick Flood
So I would have had to, you know, work through some smaller state school to be able to do it. So it was a great opportunity that the Army gave me to be able to get a scholarship. And then I got a Presidential Leadership Scholarship, went to a good school, and then, yeah, and then that's where the road gets a little curvy. So I got commissioned during a big downsizing of the United States Army and ended up as an armor officer without a branch. And so ended up in the reserves. I worked in politics for a couple of years in D.C. and then moved out to L.A., worked in entertainment. That's— we didn't cover that, but worked in entertainment and was in the reserves. And so when I was in the reserves, you're— at the time I just had to find the local reserve unit and it happened to be a quartermaster unit. I would say that at first I was unhappy because I wanted to be an active duty combat arms officer. And what it comes down to is that sometimes leadership chooses you, and it didn't, didn't matter that I was not in the unit of my choice.
[00:04:44.530] - Patrick Flood
I had, you know, men and women that I needed to lead and be able to, to provide, you know, service-bound leadership to them. And it was a great experience because it was really resource-constrained, and so you had to be very creative and entrepreneurial. We worked with both the Marines at Camp Pendleton and also the Air Force at L.A. Air Force Base. So, it was great to be able to work inter-service before that was really a thing. And then I had a younger brother commit suicide. I was a working actor at the time and felt kind of on the wrong path to being able to do something where I could serve others as much as I wanted to. So, the Army had a voluntary recall program to active duty. I came back in, did a 12-month contract as a signal officer, got assigned to 7th or to 3rd Special Forces Group, 2nd Battalion. And then 9 months later, September 11th happened, which is sort of a left turn that I wasn't anticipating. Ended up in Afghanistan in late January 2002 and deployed. You know, we were there for 7 months or so and then came back and then redeployed 3 or 4 months later to—
[00:05:51.210] - Freddie Kim
You were right in the beginning.
[00:05:52.760] - Patrick Flood
Yeah, to Qatar. And then we set up the JOC in Qatar. So, I was one of very few signal officers with any combat experience. So, a lot of us all got concentrated in a special operations' signal unit, and then we went over with General Harrell and his package. So, the SOC Forward to then set up a lot of this stuff pre-invasion. And then I deployed right after the actual ground war happened. And then I had a great boss at the time, Pete Gallagher, who said that I think you're a great officer, but I think that you're not as interested in the technical aspects of being a signal officer. And I think eventually you're going to plateau. But I've seen how much responsibility you can handle. I see that you're entrepreneurial, you know, again, and I think that being a Special Forces officer might be a better fit for you. And so, I was like, all right. So, he gave me some opportunity to be able to, you know, because you're 24 hours a day and 8 hours a day. So, I trained for 8 hours a day with a guy who is a squadron commander over at, at the very Special Forces.
[00:06:52.600] - Patrick Flood
And so, it was great. So, I came back, went to selection, made it through. And then ended up through another twist of fate because I was a fluent French speaker, got assigned to 7th Group because my former battalion commander when I was in 3rd Group became the group commander of 7th Group. And so, I had an opportunity to be a team leader a little bit longer than I think I was going to be if I went back to 3rd Group. So, I took the opportunity and then I was a team leader in 7th Group. Yeah.
[00:07:15.330] - Freddie Kim
Awesome.
[00:07:16.070] - Patrick Flood
Well, long story short.
[00:07:17.260] - Freddie Kim
No, it's all good. It's all good. Fascinating. We glossed over this, but for your family, that was a hell of a time when your brother died by suicide.
[00:07:26.330] - Patrick Flood
Yeah.
[00:07:26.520] - Freddie Kim
And your younger brother. And then your older brother was shot in Afghanistan.
[00:07:29.620] - Patrick Flood
He was shot in Iraq, technically in the chest, but he was, he was located in Iraq.
[00:07:33.960] - Freddie Kim
Yeah.
[00:07:34.130] - Patrick Flood
But so, yeah, it was— it's kind of why I'm doing what I'm doing now, it turns out. And I didn't know— I think a lot of us don't know exactly what it is that we're trying to do, what problem we're trying to solve when we, you know, strike out to be entrepreneurs. But I think the problem really that I was trying to solve is that I don't feel Veterans, whether they're on the sell side or buy side of a business, have a lot of people that are non-predatory or non-resource-driven or finance-driven to be able to give them good advice. And the likelihood that someone's only going to do one or the other one time in their life is something like 80% of business owners or sellers only do it one time in their life. So, my dad and my mom had a pretty rough week in April of 2007. You know, previously they'd lost a son to— who was born a little bit premature. So, I'd already lost another brother. And then I lost a brother to suicide about 8 years earlier than that. And then both my brother and I— I didn't know he got injured at the time, but he got shot in the chest in Samarra, Iraq, in like on a Wednesday and on a Saturday or a Friday, I got blown through a wall in Afghanistan in the Sangin.
[00:08:48.320] - Patrick Flood
And so, both of us are extraordinarily stubborn. And so, we recovered in theater, but my parents had kind of had it at that point. And there were a lot of glass balls in the air being business owners, being able to run a clinic that had been running for about 25 years. So they started considering— it was a small rural clinic, so general. My dad was a PA, so he was a corpsman in the Navy and then got a direct commission into the Army as a PA and then served most of his time in the Army in the reserves, went to Desert Storm. But his focus was being a practitioner, being able to treat patients. And it was his business, without getting into the numbers, to get the nitty-gritty, was sold at about a quarter of the value because he just didn't know who to talk to, which is As it turns out, the more that we're working in Owners in Honor to be able to help people search for businesses, the more we're engaging business owners and realizing that so many of them never really consider the exit. So even at Veteran Edge, part of the reason I'm here is I did an exit planning called vision evaluation session where you start talking to people about understanding that it's just like military decision making where you want to consider the end at the beginning because it matters, like who you're going to sell it to, how you're going to sell it, the valuation of the business, and then quite frankly, how you build the business out.
[00:10:05.950] - Patrick Flood
Because if you're building it in certain ways, it either— it's more valuable to certain customers that are eventually going to buy it than others. So, if you understand that stuff at the beginning, you can very rationally start making some decisions in your business to be able to do a better job. So this year at Owners in Honor, we launched a platform should be completely functional hopefully by the summer in partnership with the Exit Planning Institute, which is— they have 9,000 certified exit planning advisors to be able to help any Veteran business owner who has an EIN and a DD-214 to be able to understand and get educated about the exit process. So, everyone can come in for free and learn how to do it. And then our goal is to be able to provide them a vetted certified exit planning advisor that's ideally a Veteran geolocated wherever they're at so they can go and meet with them, determine if they actually want paid services by someone to be able to help them do something or they just need advice. Either way, I want Veterans to know that there's a resource out there for them should they need it.
[00:11:04.960] - Freddie Kim
So just the interest— there was a session here at Veteran Edge about just Veterans. Well, how do they define transition?
[00:11:11.790] - Patrick Flood
Sure.
[00:11:12.200] - Freddie Kim
Right. How long has it been for them? And then also just Veterans wanting to go into entrepreneurship, some myths about that. What are you currently seeing from the students who are interested in being entrepreneurs? What kind of misconception could they be coming into the program with?
[00:11:31.890] - Patrick Flood
Sure.
[00:11:32.220] - Freddie Kim
To be a business owner.
[00:11:33.810] - Patrick Flood
Well, a couple of different things. One, and then there are some things that I'm asked sometimes, what are some things that people need to consider before starting out as an entrepreneur? So, I'll start out with first what I think some maybe misconceptions are. So one is that there's been about 20 years of experience within the Veteran ecosystem for nonprofits focused on startup. There's, there have been two smaller or two acquisition-focused nonprofits that have been created over the last 10 or 15 years. It, for whatever reason, it never got the same amount of heat. That the startup focus has been. I mean, even to, to the point this event, right, is even really started around people starting businesses. So, in that starting a business is much more volatile than buying a business is— what is the misconception? One, starting one is that in order to be an entrepreneur, I have to have a blue ocean idea. I have to try to solve someone's problem and figure out a way to do it uniquely to myself or figure out a way that I have something to give to the customer to be able to help them solve the problem.
[00:12:43.150] - Freddie Kim
That's true to an extent though.
[00:12:44.120] - Patrick Flood
Which is always a thing that you need to figure out as a business owner. But it's, you don't need to start out from scratch. There's a lot of businesses, you know, there's going to be between 3 and 5 million businesses that are going to be transitioning that are all over $1 million in enterprise value in the United States in the next 7 years. There's not enough human beings in the United States to be able to buy all those businesses. So, most of them right now are being bought by private equity, getting rolled up. Some are being bought individually. We believe our thesis is that Veterans are best suited— and this goes to the other misconception— Veterans are best suited to be able to actually take over from someone else. That is the thing that we have done our entire career. We have taken something that someone else has had, left seat, right seat ride, and then tried to improve it without denigrating the person before us,
[00:13:32.970] - Freddie Kim
of course,
[00:13:33.540] - Patrick Flood
and trying to leave something better for the person after us. Really legacy.
[00:13:36.750] - Freddie Kim
A good point.
[00:13:37.310] - Patrick Flood
Legacy focused, steward focused. And so For us, we believe that the likely Veteran entrepreneur landscape can be tripled to maybe even 5x in the next couple of years. If we get more people to understand that acquisition is a different place to be able to do it, you don't need to have quite as much risk as starting it yourself. And there's a lot of opportunity out there. Where we come in is to really try to educate them and mitigate risk because, because there's the opportunity. Around opportunity, there's always predators. There's always people that are going to try to take more than what would be considered market fair. And so what we want to be able to do is really give as much information as possible to the Veterans and help them make informed decisions. We're not going to make the decisions for them. If they want to use our program, one of the other programs, doesn't matter. We believe that us working together with the other two programs, that we should be able to exponentially affect the Veteran landscape with— also with working with Veteran startup entities because a lot of those are 10 years old.
[00:14:35.920] - Patrick Flood
They're people that should be considering an exit. And just talking today, just today, I've talked to probably 11 people, I think, just today. And our session was—
[00:14:44.860] - Freddie Kim
interested in an exit.
[00:14:45.890] - Patrick Flood
Exiting. Yeah. Right. And our session was yesterday and we had 40 people in our session. And then tonight we're doing an event at SMU that's focused more on acquisition. So the goal is, is that we're trying to find— and most of the Veterans here who own businesses would like a Veteran to take over the business, but where are they going to find them? And so we ideally are creating that pool of Veterans who are looking all over the country to want to buy businesses, to be able to then connect them in a virtuous circle to the Veterans that want to exit a business and then try to get everyone the best valuation possible, make it fair. Our backstop is the Small Business Administration and then the VBOC to be able to make sure that most of them are using Small Business Administration loans, being able to self-fund it instead of getting outside investment, because there's always a cost to capital, whether that's going through a bank and interest rates or going through a human being and dealing with the psychological control cost. So being able to understand all that, mitigate it, and then be able to make good choices.
[00:15:35.230] - Patrick Flood
And then for us, it's to be able to get them connected, help them search, help them learn about it. Those are the two misconceptions. I think one is in order to be an entrepreneur, I need to do— I need to do a startup, right? Two, I don't have the skill set to be able to buy something. I don't know how to do it or who to talk to because now we're trying to close that gap. The two things that I would say that they need to really consider whether you're building a business or buying a business, is the business is an asset and it's likely your most valuable asset. So it's more valuable than probably your retirement. It's more valuable than probably your 401(k). And if you don't treat it as such, you're going to end up getting a lower valuation for it on exit. So for us, we want to make sure, just like you would with your retirement, get a certified exit planning advisor, just like you would a certified financial planner, to be able to then help connect the dots to make sure you're mitigating capital gains tax on exit, you're maximizing your tax value, maximizing your ability to either maintain legacy or find the right customer for your business, etc.
[00:16:31.900] - Patrick Flood
And then the other part is that as you're building the business, knowing that eventually you're going to sell it, starting with the end in mind and saying, hey, as I build the business, this second part is applicable, I think, to both as well. And it goes really, quite frankly, to most of the Veteran transition organizations as well. We partner with 5 of the major Veteran transition organizations because we don't want to do that part. They do an excellent job. We don't want to replicate what they're doing.
[00:16:58.310] - Freddie Kim
Nonprofits.
[00:16:59.080] - Patrick Flood
Nonprofits. So like Commit Foundation, Honor Foundation, FourBlock, Next Stop, Special Operators Transition Foundation, because we want them to sort of go through the discovery process of finding your why. And that's really the second thing that we tell people to be considerate of is yourself. Know yourself. Like when you're going and looking for a business or selling a business, what is it that you're trying to achieve? Is it— if you're selling a business, what type of buyer do you want? How much money do you want? How much control of your legacy do you want to have? Like, answer those 3 questions. Fourth question, what do you want to do when this is over? So another gigantic peak of people that commit suicide are small business owners who then exit their business and don't have a life plan. So number one, Veterans, number 2, small business owners. So being able to make sure that, hey, as you're doing this, what are you going to do next and how does that fit in with your life plan? And then secondly, what is your financial— what is your— looking to search for a business, what is your financial need and why?
[00:17:57.900] - Patrick Flood
And what is the horizon of needing that money? And how do you plan for that? Because we don't want someone to acquire something that's too big or unnecessarily big and then takes on additional risk that maybe they didn't need to do.
[00:18:10.620] - Freddie Kim
Yeah.
[00:18:11.280] - Patrick Flood
If they'd realized a little bit more how they could make money, how much money they were going to make, and the fact that you're building an asset. And of course, most importantly, and we talk about it with all of the Veterans that go through our program, of which we have about 400 in our program right now being educated, is talk to your spouse, talk to your family. Absolutely. Small businesses are called family businesses for a reason. It's all intertwined. If your spouse and your children understand what it is that you're doing, they're going to understand. Yeah, they're going to understand. Yeah. When you're doing a weekly service call, night service call, right, that what you're doing is serving other people and trying to do something important. And the more they understand what you're doing and why you're making the choices you're making, doesn't seem arbitrary. And it doesn't help us to further isolate ourselves. Veteran business owners, as it is, are an isolated community, which is why, you know, the CEO Circle is so great because it connects people that are also like-minded. Because of the isolation problem post-acquisition or post-transition. And then, you know, once you are a business owner, it's even worse.
[00:19:11.380] - Patrick Flood
So it's magnified. And then now, you know, considering the fact that now you're going to exit, now who are your people?
[00:19:17.210] - Freddie Kim
You've obviously shown resilience quite a bit, you know, through everything you've, you've, you've done. And you have this purpose, this burning platform that you're on, supporting Veterans and helping the US economy. Right. Has there been a lesson or something that you recall from service that's helped you persevere? For example, for me, one of the things was, is just able to take all the commotion and all the inputs and factors in and just keep everything at bay and de-escalate very hairy, difficult situations. Right. Being able to de-escalate that. That I took a lot from my time in the Special Forces. How about yourself?
[00:20:01.080] - Patrick Flood
I think a lot of it is similar to what I was talking about, exit planning. Understand the end state. What am I trying to achieve? So it's been great. I went through the Honor Foundation and sort of actually both, and I think uncovering not just that I wanted to serve other people, but how I wanted to do it, I think was a big deal. And then similar to— are you a parent? Yes, I am too. The amount of my ego that I've been able to set aside, both as a father and also running this, reminds me an awful lot of leading men in combat, is that it's not about me. And the more that I can take it out of— and it includes people telling me And every startup, you know, we were a startup as well. It is a nonprofit. The number of people that told me couldn't do it, wouldn't work, can't do it. They were smarter, better, cooler, had a dad that could beat up my dad, you know, all, all of the stuff. And you're just like, and, and to, to not take it personally, but to understand that they're coming from it from their perspective.
[00:21:07.100] - Patrick Flood
They probably have some scar tissue too. And it reminds me a lot of working in Afghanistan or Peru. So I worked in Peru for a year and a half or 2 and a half years. And they had had a war with Chile.
[00:21:18.060] - Freddie Kim
Yeah.
[00:21:18.240] - Patrick Flood
And they talked incessantly about how the Chileans were going to invade. And one of the things that we tried to help them work through is the fact that they're actually allies. They're both allies of ours, and we needed them to work together because otherwise they were going to expend a ton of resources.
[00:21:31.770] - Freddie Kim
Yeah.
[00:21:32.250] - Patrick Flood
Considering a fight with each other that we would never allow happen. And so the same thing in Afghanistan when you're talking about— I mean, I don't know how much you've served in Afghanistan, but You have villages that are talking about someone who made a transgression 3 generations ago, and that's why they don't trust them. And so, right, one, you have to validate that it's real to them. So that's their reality. So you can't say this doesn't matter. What you can say though is that given that that is real, let's then work on something that we have in common together. You don't want your kids killed. You want your girls to go to school. All of them felt the same way. So let's focus on that. And then from that, let's build security, from that. Same thing with what we're doing here. There's been a lot of, you know, turd burgers that I've had to eat because I don't mind, because I think the mission's bigger. And so I don't, I don't care. And, and I want to be able to also build an organization that's not charismatic, that doesn't rely on me. So just like when I was a team leader or a company commander or a battalion commander, I made sure that I was— the longer I served there, the more relevant I became.
[00:22:33.640] - Freddie Kim
Awesome.
[00:22:34.050] - Patrick Flood
Yeah.
[00:22:34.440] - Freddie Kim
Patrick, I could talk to you for another hour or so. You could catch up. Yet we have to wrap this up. How can people find you and why should they reach out to you?
[00:22:44.540] - Patrick Flood
Yeah. So if you're a business owner who's considering— a Veteran who's considering selling your business or a non-Veteran, quite frankly, would like to sell it to a Veteran, contact us through our website, ownersinhonor.org. There's a link to sellers for an inquiry. Or otherwise, if you're a Veteran and you're considering acquiring a business, would just like to learn more about it, go to our website, go to sellers, click on that. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn, Patrick Michael Flood. Pretty— it looks like me, maybe less facial hair. But otherwise, yeah, just connect with me there. It's always great because there's a lot of stuff that we post on there or we post in our— or just on our LinkedIn page to keep people up to date. We have events all the time. We're doing an event tonight in Dallas at SMU. We're doing an event in April at Vanderbilt in Nashville. The following month we're doing an event at a different location. This September we're at Texas A&M. And a couple of other places. So yeah, just keep in touch with us.
[00:23:33.640] - Freddie Kim
Honorable mission. So, thank you. Such a good time.
[00:23:36.160] - Patrick Flood
I appreciate catching up. You talk to you, sir.
[00:23:43.760] - John S. Berry
Thank you for joining us today on Veteran Led, where we seek to help Veterans build an even bigger, better future after military service. Unfortunately, for some of our Veterans, the roadblock to a better future is that they are not receiving all of the benefits that they earned. If you need help appealing a VA disability decision, contact Berry Law.