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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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[00:00:01.20] - John S. Berry
Who's more difficult to break in the humans or the horses?
[00:00:04.11] - Lane Robison
The horses takes time and consistency. The humans take a little bit of just understanding them, figuring out how each person tics. The way that you teach one person is not going to be the way that you teach the next person or the one after. Horses, every one of them is a little bit different, too. They've got personalities just like us.
[00:00:20.04] - John S. Berry
Welcome to Veteran Led. Today, we're at Camp Cowboy with program director, Lane Robison.
[00:00:27.13] - Lane Robison
Well, thank you for having me.
[00:00:28.19] - John S. Berry
Well, thanks so much for having me and our team here. My second time back here. An amazing program founded by your father, and now you're running the show.
[00:00:37.13] - Lane Robison
Yes, sir. I was working for Larry Mahan years ago, and I've had a close hand with the program since we started. But in 2019, I was working for Larry, and my dad called me and said, Hey, I think Tony might be wanting to step down. Would you be interested in taking over and running the program? I said, Yeah, absolutely. I'd been working, training for him for a while, and so I had my own ideas of how the program should be. Then I came back and messed with the curriculum a little bit, and we've been running since.
[00:01:02.18] - John S. Berry
It's not always easy. I know I took over my father's business, so I know that that's not always easy, but sometimes it's the best opportunity for the other generation to lead and your opportunity to step up. What have been some of the challenges you've had stepping into your father's shoes and taking over?
[00:01:21.15] - Lane Robison
One of the biggest things early on for me, public speaking has always been something that's a little washing my way. But at the time, I was a kid. I was 19, 20 years old, and I've got all these people ranging from 25 to 65, 70 years old that I'm a subject matter expert as far as horses go, and they're grown adults like, What am I going to learn from this kid? And not necessarily anybody had a chip on their shoulder, but it was a little bit after a little while showing how much I knew and being able to talk to people, kind of established a lot of credibility. And then as classes went on, it just came up to where people definitely think a little bit more out of me than I'm worth, I'm most days. But just establishing that credibility, mostly.
[00:02:04.19] - John S. Berry
Now, when people come to camp, cowboy, and it's a great mission, helping veterans and active-duty military, teaching them how to become cowboys, teaching them life lessons, teaching them business skills. At some point, as you're leading individuals through this, you make them do some pretty hard work.
[00:02:25.15] - Lane Robison
I'd say so. I mean, we work at a pretty slow speed, easy enough for them to bite onto. We cover a lot of ground in the 90 days that they're here, but never so much that if they miss a couple of classes, that they're not just going to be so far behind the ball and catching up. Most of it, it's not overly exerting. We're out here for some pretty hot days this time of year. In the wintertime, there's some pretty cold days, but nothing too out of what they've seen when they're in the service or just what they do on a regular weekend, I'd say.
[00:02:55.14] - John S. Berry
It's about getting stuff done. I want to take you back to a story about you and your father when you wouldn't study. Tell us about that.
[00:03:04.23] - Lane Robison
Well, many years ago, for anybody that parent portal first came out, I'd come home from school, and they have the little paperwork that they hand you to do. I had some stuff that I hadn't turned in or hadn't hit the grade book yet. My dad asked me, hey, have you done your homework? My little paper that they wanted me to do, I had definitely done. I was like, Yeah, I did it. He goes, oh, well, you got zeros in the grade book. I was like, they're either not graded yet or I'd turned it in late, whatever. He goes, well, if you've got zeros in the grade book and you said your homework's done, well, it's not. So, what you're telling me is not true. You're lying to me. You're going to go ahead and start. So, you don't want to do school? That just spiraled into, well, you're going to be Mr. Manual labor around here for a little bit. I got everything taken away except for a set of Converse shoes, some toughskin jeans, and some white T-shirts and a Rice Farmer hat. I moved hay bales from one barn to another barn.
[00:04:01.00] - Lane Robison
Then when that one filled up, I moved them out of that barn to another barn, and definitely ran the gauntlet for about a week. Then after that week of just doing stuff from crazy hours of the night, I'd work till late at night, and then go home, shower, go to bed, wake up early in the morning, start off for school, and we'd go through that. After that, it was apparent that school was pretty important to me.
[00:04:24.10] - John S. Berry
Outstanding. Camp Cowboy is a school. It's a 90-day program with curriculum. Tell us a little bit about the Camp Cowboy curriculum.
[00:04:32.06] - Lane Robison
It's just the introductory, the fundamental basics of horsemanship from the ground up. We start these guys, as you saw with class this morning, just how to correctly approach a horse in a safe manner. Everything that we teach kind of stair steps onto the next thing, their ground manners, and how they're going to work with these guys on the ground is going to translate to how they're going to manipulate energy when they're asking a horse to turn or move off on their back. All the way through the program, they're just going to learn not just the horsemanship, but also how to take care of these animals, how to feed them, how to clean their stalls, make sure that their water is good, how to perform farrier care, or at least be knowledgeable enough to see what good farrier care looks like. Same with veterinary care, just a well-rounded deal. When a student graduates, maybe they want horses, maybe they don't, but they're going to have all the skills to be able to go be a successful horse owner and an equestrian by the end of this thing.
[00:05:24.17] - John S. Berry
What have you the changes that you see in some of the individuals? What do you see?
[00:05:28.14] - Lane Robison
Well, there's a few different key times you see change. A lot of times in the beginning of the class, you got a bunch of guys and gals that are clammed up. They're like, Oh, this is a new environment, a lot of new people, new information coming at me. I don't quite know how I'm going to handle all this. Then there's that turning point where class 4 or 5, they're like, Oh, I was stationed in Hawaii. Oh, really? I was stationed in Hawaii, too. Then they start pinging back and forth, Oh, when were you at this base? Then it just becomes a tight knit little deal as far as with their other students. With the horses, with every student, it's a little bit different. There's a thing we do called join up, follow up, which especially for the guys with a lot of anxiety or PTSD, it's something where you're pushing a horse around a pen, and then you've got to be able to completely shut off your energy. When you do that, horses read and they feel everything. You can be like, all right, my energy shut off, and just, I'm relaxed.
[00:06:24.01] - Lane Robison
If you're not relaxed, that horse doesn't drop off, doesn't join up. When they join up that horse, when you When you drop your energy, that horse essentially stops running and then walks straight to you. I couldn't put my thumb on it on why it works the way it does. But for whatever reason, just being able to see that reflection of self-energy with a horse, it touches a lot of people. I've had a lot of our more, I wouldn't say breakdowns, but our bigger emotional outburst, where you see a guy just like, Oh, my God. This is the calmest I've felt, or whatever it might in that moment right there, and that's usually pretty early on in class.
[00:07:03.23] - John S. Berry
Yeah, I think the parallel is that as humans, we can feel someone else's energy. We know if someone's upset or angry or they're agitated or they're nervous, and we can feel that. Sometimes that affects our interaction with them. It's interesting to see individuals getting closer to horses, and they can experience it with horses before they can experience it with humans.
[00:07:25.04] - Lane Robison
Oh, absolutely. More times than not, I've had folks come back. The key to all this is communication. You're using nonverbal communication to work with these 1,100-pound animals that they don't speak English, they don't speak Spanish, they don't speak German. It's all energy and body language. We had a gentleman a while back. He was like, My wife, my kids, we don't really talk a whole lot. By the end of the 90 days, he came back up and he's like, Dude, I'm talking to my kids, and they're not worried about me yelling at them. Me and my wife are having conversations, and we're not arguing all the time. He goes, Just simply being able to drop my energy level and not just get huffy. I've seen that on a rinse and repeat kind of thing over the years. A lot of different people, they're being able to learn how to interact with the horse has made them better for being able to with their personal life or their job life or just all sorts of different places.
[00:08:15.10] - John S. Berry
Yeah, I think I heard that 70% of communication is nonverbal.
[00:08:19.07] - Lane Robison
Absolutely.
[00:08:20.11] - John S. Berry
Through that experience, through, I think that self-actualization, that, Hey, this is my energy, and I can control it. Right. And then if I don't control it, it's going to affect my environment and this 1,100-pound animal.
[00:08:35.22] - Lane Robison
Oh, yeah. Because they're constantly seeking to equalize. So they're going to match your energy. So if you're fired up, That's what made them such great beast of burden during wartime. If you're confident in the mission and confident in what you're doing and you thought those other guys were the heathens that you're going to go destroy, your horse is like, Oh, this guy is jacked up. He's ready to go. I should be the same. If you were worried and I'm like, Oh, I don't know about this. That horse is going to be exactly the same, and feeding off of that. Now, I've seen it plenty of times myself, riding young horses or riding up the mountains. If I was worried about what I was doing, my horse clammed up a little bit. If I'm just confident in what I'm doing, even with a young horse, it may not have even done that before. They're always a little easier to do it with.
[00:09:21.14] - John S. Berry
Tell us a little bit about your experience on the ranch as a cowboy, handling horses, riding horses.
[00:09:30.00] - Lane Robison
From a young age, I've been on horses as long as I can remember. My dad and I broke my first horse when I was nine years old. Over the years, to make money to buy vehicles or whatever I was trying to buy at the time, we'd buy cheap horses and problem horses, young horses, and I'd ride them, fix them up, tune them up, and then sell them to somebody who'd like them. I've had some really wonderful mentors over the year. My dad, who's a very accomplished horseman, and most people probably don't know to the level. I got the opportunity to work for Larry Mahan for a few years. He's one of the best equestrians in the world, five-time all-around world champion, twice, and a bull riding world champion, just like the Michael Jordan of rodeo. But he was very accomplished in the rodeo scene, but that man was a 78-year equestrian. His biggest thing was constantly to be a student of the horse. A lot of what I teach in class and how I talk about things emulates the things I learned from him. Actually, Larry, one of his biggest things is there's four things that horses need to be successful.
[00:10:37.22] - Lane Robison
Most people don't understand the fourth one just with other people, let alone with animals. But the three things most people believe horses need are food, water, and shelter or space. But the fourth thing is unconditional love. Whether it was a $50,000 breeding stud or a $500, cheap horse, Larry loved every one of those horses, unconditionally, the same way. I try to bring that into the program and a lot of the things I learned from him there.
[00:11:05.04] - John S. Berry
To show the horses the love, you got to take care of them. You're teaching everybody that comes to Camp Cowboy, how to properly care for that horse, how to have that relationship with the horse. Who's more difficult to break in? The humans or the horses?
[00:11:23.23] - Lane Robison
The horses take time and consistency. The humans take a little bit of just understanding, I'm figuring out how each person takes. The way that you teach one person is not going to be the way that you teach the next person or the one after. Horses, every one of them is a little bit different, too. They've got personalities just like us, but I don't know. It just depends on the day, really.
[00:11:43.15] - John S. Berry
Lane, how much does it cost a veteran or military service member to participate in Camp Cowboy?
[00:11:48.12] - Lane Robison
Camp Cowboy is free for vets, active duty soldiers, and their family members, and first responders as well. It roughly costs us about $1,500 a student to put them through, but it's free of cost to all those that are qualifying.
[00:12:00.00] - John S. Berry
The classes, you said, are 90 days. How many classes are there every year?
[00:12:03.16] - Lane Robison
We do three classes a year, going Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We have a morning class for those that are retired or that can make it. We also have an evening class catering to those that are still working or active duty.
[00:12:16.02] - John S. Berry
For a veteran or military service member that wants to apply or a first responder that wants to apply, what do they need to do?
[00:12:21.17] - Lane Robison
All they have to do is go on to our website, campcowboy.org, and there's a nice little box on there. It says, reach out, sign up for a class, or find out more. And reach out to myself or my director of operations, Jimmy Tucker, and we'll get it settled from there.
[00:12:36.03] - John S. Berry
You have some events as well, which one of them is the Cowboy Ball. Tell us about that.
[00:12:40.10] - Lane Robison
Our year-end ball is November 22nd, and that's kind of our big extravaganza for the year. We do some end-of-the-year awards. We have some auctions, some silent auctions, different things. But that's our breadwinner. That's what funds our entire program for the year, what makes it possible for us to be able to go out there. That and our wonderful sponsors like yourself that make it possible for us to do the things that we're doing.
[00:13:04.02] - John S. Berry
How can other civilians or veterans who want to support this organization, how can they help Camp Cowboy?
[00:13:11.04] - Lane Robison
Reaching out and donating money. Horses aren't cheap, feed's expensive. This tack that we use is fairly expensive, too. Going on to our website and going to the donation page, that goes a long way. If you can't afford to donate or you want to come out here and donate some of your time, which is probably the most precious commodity, you can reach out to us and come out and volunteer your time and help take care of some of these animals, meet some of these vets.
[00:13:36.12] - John S. Berry
I want to emphasize how structured and well-run the program is. Camp Cowboy has been going on for how long now?
[00:13:43.12] - Lane Robison
Inadvertently, since about '06, '07. As an official program, we became a nonprofit in 2016.
[00:13:50.13] - John S. Berry
You graduated approximately how many people from this camp?
[00:13:53.02] - Lane Robison
I'd say probably closer to 1,700 people over the years that we've had come in and out of the program. One of the most unique One of the things about our program is that when they graduate, it's not a good job, see you later. It's you saw what the program can do for you. Come on back, pay it forward to the next generation of student, embody the make a difference every day, and come back out here and help your brothers and sisters learn about these wonderful animals. I've had students that graduated from my very first class on Leland. You might have met him this morning, that him and his wife were some of my first two students in 2019. They come back every class to help pay it forward to the next generation of students.
[00:14:29.10] - John S. Berry
I think that's important because it speaks to the value of not only the ranch itself, just being on the ranch, but also of what they received. They are coming back. If you graduate the class, you can come back and be an instructor. A lot of people do. They volunteer their time because they want to continue to be part of it.
[00:14:47.11] - Lane Robison
No, absolutely. It rekindles that camaraderie that a lot of guys and girls lose when they get out of the service. Even the spouses and the kids, everybody grows up in that. When their husband or wife or parent or whatever that case is, when everybody leaves the service, they lose that same community that everybody grows up in. Me being an army child is growing up like you're with those people. Then when your parents get out and stuff like that, it's cool to just still be back around those folks.
[00:15:17.00] - John S. Berry
There are a lot of success stories for veterans with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder who have come through this program, who have experienced equine therapy, and it has done wonders for them. But it's not just for disabled veterans, it's for just about any veteran, military service member, or first responder. Is that correct?
[00:15:36.12] - Lane Robison
Absolutely. We give them a path and the curriculum to go down. For some people, we've had folks that come out. They're like, We just want to hang out. We don't want to get on a horse. We're like, Okay, fine. We do that. We have some people that are like, Man, I just want to be a cowboy. Tommy Watkins, who you'll probably meet this evening, he's like, I want to be a cowboy. He came out here, learned the basics, bought a ranch, has been building barns, building stalls, got a couple of horses now. His whole thing is, I want to go, and I want to rodeo, and I want a team rope, and I want to be the best cowboy I can be. You have a pretty wide range of people coming in, and we just try to help cater the program to best fit the needs of the student.
[00:16:20.14] - John S. Berry
It's like you said earlier, you don't train everybody the same way. Not everybody learns the same way. I think there's a lot of gold in that. But the other thing, and I think the one thing that might hold some people back is, I've served in the military. I've deployed several times. I spent so much time away from my family. I'd love to do this program, but I don't want to not be around my kids. I don't want to take that time away from my spouse, but it doesn't have to be that way with Camp Cowboy.
[00:16:41.21] - Lane Robison
No, absolutely. One of my favorite things, especially recently, we've got a lot of family members coming through, a lot of parents going through with their kids, a lot of spouses going through together. It's not just for the person. It's for the husband, the wife, the father, the mother, the siblings. Bring them out. We had a gentleman just graduated with his oldest and his youngest daughter, I guess, all three of his kids, and he's bringing back more family members. There's another family that just went through that. I think for the last four classes, there's been one of their children in each class, and they've got three in this current class.
[00:17:15.22] - John S. Berry
I heard a great story from a veteran who had been through. He had severe post-traumatic stress disorder. He was not communicating well with his family. He was not getting along with his family. As he came to Camp Cowboy, he wanted the opportunity to... He thought, I could bring my son. He said, We didn't talk much, but just being around my son and going through the same thing, we actually shared that time and bonded, and it wasn't something that would have happened had it not been for Camp Cowboy. He's now a longtime supporter. But tell us about that. In the family dynamic, you see families talking more. The kids aren't on their phone the whole time. They're actually interacting.
[00:17:49.20] - Lane Robison
Oh, yeah, they're engaged. Well, with family members having something that they're going through together, but everybody grows up thinking about cowboys and Indians or the cowboy rides away, things like those old West heroes, things in movies. And so when you're out here with the horses and doing all the things, it keeps the kids connected and paying attention to what you're doing. The parents, they're loving it, not just because they're learning something, too, but you're seeing their kids are really hyper-focused on something and learning something and kind of getting something out of it. It just creates some common ground for them to understand and learn together. Most things in life, if you're the parent, you've been there, you've seen it, you've done it, you know more. If you're the kid, you're not as experienced, you haven't seen as much, when you're bringing both of you onto a complete level playing ground, it just creates a little bit of a unique thing between the parents and their kids.
[00:18:48.19] - John S. Berry
Yeah, imagine learning something with your children. A lot of times, as a parent, you're the expert, and you're going to teach your child how to play the piano or how to ski or whatever it is that you do well. But in this one, you're right. Doing something new and learning together is a whole different dynamic and creates a whole different level of trust and respect.
[00:19:07.13] - Lane Robison
Oh, absolutely. You're no longer the subject matter expert. You're leaving it out to myself or the staff. You're just along for the ride and learning alongside your kids.
[00:19:16.11] - John S. Berry
As we close out, once again, please tell our audience where they can learn more if they want to participate in Camp Cowboy or the alternative if they want to support and donate to Camp Cowboy.
[00:19:25.10] - Lane Robison
Absolutely. They can go to our website, campcowboy.org, or our Facebook, or our Instagram, Camp Cowboy 2016. I think those are our social medias, and they can find our donation button and just follow that. If they want to find more information or get involved, we have the corresponding links to those on our websites and social media.
[00:19:45.14] - John S. Berry
The final thing is, well, a big part of it is the ability and the opportunity to learn how to become a cowboy. You offer other services as well, such as Camp Cowboy University and some other things. Tell us about those.
[00:19:54.22] - Lane Robison
Absolutely. We have our Camp Cowboy University. It was formerly called Train Our Troops, but We have 250 online courses and real-life certifications that are completely free for all the students that come through and other veterans that are out there. It's got things so complicated as a graphic design and stuff as simple as how to deal with hard to deal with people in the workplace. There's a lot of range in there, and I think there's 30 real-world certifications on the thing completely free, hundreds and hundreds of hours of online education right at your fingertips. Another thing that we do with our students as they come in, we try to figure out if a particular avenue that they want to go, whether they're wanting to try to find a job or they have a goal to do something. Then we have a wonderful rolodex of sponsors and friends of the program that we try to find them an avenue to go do whatever they're trying to go do, keep their feet moving forward, so to speak.
[00:20:44.03] - John S. Berry
Yeah, I think That's the big takeaway here is you don't just come to Camp Cowboy and learn how to become a cowboy. You learn how to become a better human being, how to interact with people, but also to set goals and to plan for your future.
[00:20:54.23] - Lane Robison
Well, I think that hits the nail right on the head with it.
[00:20:57.19] - John S. Berry
If you want to learn more, please go to campcowboy.org.
[00:21:06.03] - 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 subscribe and join me next time on Veteran Lead.