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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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Welcome fellow veterans. From the tip of the spear to in the rear with the gear, I went from active-duty Infantry to reserve-component logistician. I'm your host, CEO, entrepreneur, trial lawyer, and Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) John Berry. The military lessons that I learned helped me grow an eight-figure business that has maintained consistent annual double-digit growth, landing on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in America every year for the past seven years and has allowed me to continue to serve America's heroes.
In today's episode, we'll talk about event-specific training, and outcome-specific training. If you served in the military, you remember having to take a mandatory physical fitness test, and there was always that team member who couldn't pass the running portion of the test. And usually, this was the man or woman who was often in the gym on the exercise machines and lifting weights.
Unfortunately, this individual just could not run. And then after they failed the physical fitness test, they'd get a counseling statement and their solution would be, well, I’ll work out more and do cardio. Well, what does do cardio mean? Because the problem that you need to solve is the test requires you to run two miles fast or whenever your branch was. In the army was two miles.
But as a leader, I don't care how fast you can run two miles on the elliptical trainer if you can't run two miles fast enough on the earth. The elliptical trainer is better than nothing. But like most cardio machines, it won't necessarily make you a better runner. It won't allow you to practice the mechanics of your running, and it won't develop specific muscle endurance that you need to run the two miles fast enough.
Now, running alone won't get you there either. I remember talking to soldiers who would come with plans like, "Well, I'm going to start running five miles a day every day." And that plan was bad because they couldn't sustain that. They couldn't run five miles a day every day. And their plan was to run at the airborne shuffle pace.
And well that may have built some endurance it didn't build the type of endurance that they needed to run the two-mile race fast enough at a fast enough pace with a long enough stride. Similarly, I had soldiers who said, "Well, I was a sprinter, so I'll just do a lot of sprints. I'll do 20-50 meter sprints a day."
Well, that's great. And that may help a little bit, but it is not going to help you run the two miles faster. It's not going to build the cardio endurance that you need, and so the lesson here is that you train for this specific physical fitness event. And we also had push-ups and sit-ups, it’s the same thing. Someone would talk about how they did abs every day, yet they couldn't do 50 sit-ups. Why? Because they weren't practicing the actual event, which was doing the sit-ups. And the lesson here is the more specific you get in training, the better the outcome.
Now, I had a football coach who would say, "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten." So, as you train for this specific result, you will hit plateaus from time to time and then you must modify also the training to do something different to get a different result.
Now, I've also noticed that some of that result that you really want has to come from the hunger to get it. I've seen teams beaten bad and they seem to come back stronger after the beating. They find some level of desire. But even if the desire is there, how do you know what specific training you should do?
Well, I think the best example and the best thought process for this was used by the Olympic rowing team from Great Britain that won the gold medal. Their entire philosophy through their training was to ask the question, will it make the boat go faster? If it doesn't make the boat go faster, we won't do it. Similarly with a company, will it help the company grow bigger, faster, and better? If it doesn't, we don't do it. So, having iced coffee on tap was seven flavors of syrup help us grow bigger, faster and better? No. Will having nap rooms in our office do that? No. Will beer on Friday do that? Well, maybe. I mean, it's bad decision making, hinders sleep and you may have some team members in recovery. But having a social event, well, that might help the organization gel a little better. There might be some good team bonding there.
And so, you as a leader have to make that decision. But the key is to make decisions based on the outcome. Will it make the boat go faster? And this is how these eight men on the rowing team got the gold medal because every single decision they made was in line with making that boat go faster. Should we eat pizza and drink beer tonight? No, because we're training in the morning and that won't make the boat go faster. And that is the logic we have to have. We have to understand that our goals happen because of our decision making and the decision making that drives the actions and the actions drive the results.
So, for instance, should we be publishing all of our standards? Yes, that is going to help us scale. Should we be paying above market for team members that we're recruiting? Yes, because that's going to get us high performers. Should we pay maternity leave? Now, this is something that we couldn't do when we first started out as a company. It seemed like, wow, that's a crazy expense to be paying maternity leave. But it's one of the best things that we did because it helped us attain and retain the best talent. We found that people who wanted lives, who wanted to go on maternity leave, if we could pay for that, we could keep them on the team. And it didn't make any sense not to do it because some of these team members had been with us for years. They had grown up with us and now they're moving on to another season in their life. And we don't want to lose them because we can't support them.
What about more office space? Should we get more office space? Why? Why would we need it? Right. How does it make the boat go faster? Well, if we get more office space, that's going to force the function of us hiring more people to fill that space and more importantly, to pay for that space. So, if we have a growth plan that says we're going to need the space in three years, if we buy it a little bit early or we lease a little bit early, that's actually going to force us to grow now. So, yes, it does make the boat go faster. What about the new software we're thinking about buying? Is that going to help us get bigger, better? Yes. If that software is going to make us more efficient and is going to help our team members work faster without exhausting them. Absolutely.
After Action Review:
1. If you want results, you need to plan specific training to get those results.
2. Train for this specific test or challenge that you are facing.
3. If it doesn't get you closer to your goal, don't do it.
Three Down:
1. General training does not solve your problems. I thought that if I had monthly training on the training calendar for every section, that we would get better. But the reality is I didn't understand the problems, and I didn't tailor the training to solve those problems.
2. Doing more of the same thing will not get you outsized returns. At some point, you must shift your strategy to avoid stagnation.
3. Achieving outstanding results requires doing what is necessary to get there and not just what is reasonable.
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 @veteranled 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 subscribe and join me next time on Veteran Led.