In this episode of Veteran Led, John S. Berry sits down with Ray Toenniessen, Deputy Executive Director of the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) at Syracuse University. Through IVMF’s innovative programs, including Onward to Opportunity and their entrepreneurship initiatives, the institute serves over 20,000 service members, Veterans, and military families annually.
Ray offers insights into authentic leadership development, drawing from both his military experience and civilian career. The conversation delves deep into what makes an effective leader, emphasizing the importance of being present and avoiding ego-driven decision-making. Ray’s perspective on translating military leadership skills to civilian success provides valuable lessons for Veterans in transition and established leaders alike.
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Developing yourself as a leader is really taking those bits and those nuggets over time of leaders that you’ve worked for or you interact with and finding those pieces that fit with you and your personality, not to make you into somebody else, but develop yourself as your own unique leader.
Welcome to Veteran Led. Today’s guest is Ray Toenniessen. A lot of Veterans ask, how can I give back to the Veteran community? How can I become more involved in the Veteran community. Well, for some people, it becomes a career, and that’s what Ray did at IVMF. So, Ray, thank you so much for coming on to Veteran Led today.
Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
Well, first, tell the audience what you do at IVMF and your title and what that actually means.
Sure. I’m Deputy Executive Director at the IVMF. So my role really is to drive forward the day-to-day mission of the institute, focus on tackling all of the issues, challenges that face our military-connected community. And for us, that means service members who are getting ready to leave the military, Veterans who have already transitioned, and of course, their family members.
What does IVMF stand for?
IVMF is the D’Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families up at Syracuse University. And while we’re based up in Syracuse, central New York, a lot of people maybe never heard of it unless you follow basketball, we’re really a nationally-facing organization. We have about 110 full-time team members who live and work in 18 states around the country. We serve about 20,000 service members, Veterans, and military families every single year through a variety of different programs and services.
Some of those programs are to take Veterans and make them even better leaders in the civilian community. Actually, today, we’re at JPMorganChase headquarters. Yesterday, we heard from Jim Boeheim, the famous Syracuse basketball coach. You guys have done a great job of bringing amazing speakers and an amazing program for us at CEOcircle. But as I look at it, we’re probably at the pinnacle here. There are a lot of other programs that you use to help Veterans, especially Veterans who want to continue to lead, to grow in their civilian capacity. So tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, that’s right. We really look at it as a full life cycle view or a continuum, if you will. And we do this in a couple of different ways. One, around more traditional careers and employment, we have a big program called Onward to Opportunity, where service members, Veterans, family members can come in, go through about 40 different tracks of training that all lead to an industry recognized credential. So this could be training and certificates in IT, cybersecurity, aerospace, defense. We’re launching something right now with Micron around semiconductors. Those all lead to that industry-recognized certification, and then we help them either get their first job out of the service or maybe get a better job if they are underemployed and they’ve been out for a little while. And then, as you mentioned, we have a whole suite and portfolio of entrepreneurship and small business training. So everyone, as you said here at CEOcircle, you and your peers in the cohort have been in business a while, right? You’re operating, your challenges are much different than someone who’s just starting out and is saying, well, do I want to start a business or maybe I’ve been in business for a year?
The nice thing about our entrepreneurship programs is there is something for everybody. So whether you are just at that early stage or you’ve been in business for a couple of years, you’re looking to go to that next level or maybe you’re operating a 10, 20, $100 million company, we have some type of training program or resource opportunity for you to take advantage of.
How is that funded? I know that here we don’t pay to go. I’ve been in other groups where you pay to go. But here it’s like a mastermind group. But also, we’ve got bankers that are helping us from JPMorganChase. It’s a very well-put-together organization. I would say meticulously planned quarterly meetings. Obviously, it costs money. Where does that money come from?
Nothing’s free, right? Free to you guys, but nothing’s free. So first, I appreciate you saying that. That’s just a reflection on our team and the work that they put into it, and the JPMorganChase team as well. This program, specifically, is a partnership with JPMorgan. But our relationship with JPMorgan which a drive to the funding question, goes all the way back to 2011. At the time, you might remember the Veteran unemployment rate in some populations was as high as 30 plus percent. And JPMorgan and some other companies were really looking at how do we tackle this. At the same time, we had this interesting history, long-standing history at Syracuse University with the military and Veteran community. We really thought there’s no university out there that’s harnessing the social capital and resources of higher ed to tackle these issues and challenges. We came down, pitched JPMorgan on this idea to launch what was then the Institute for Veterans and Military Families, and they committed with an initial seven and a half million dollars, and we were off to the races. From there, we’ve been funded. Everything we offer is completely free.
We are funded through individual philanthropy, corporate philanthropy, foundation grants. We do some contract work with the government, but that’s less than 5% of the work that we do. It’s mostly philanthropy. It’s companies like JPMorgan, Google, Pfizer, as I said, Micron earlier, the Schultz Family Foundation. So Howard and Sheri Schultz and their family foundation have been huge supporters of ours over the years. Then Dan D’Aniello, who happens to be a Syracuse University alum and a Veteran of the Navy, also a longtime supporter, two years ago, came to us with just a phenomenal commitment of $30 million to endow and name the institute. And so that put us on a great path to solid financial footing moving forward. We’re continuing to fund our individual program with corporate foundation and individual philanthropy, but we’re 100% soft money funded.
The interesting part about this is you are a Syracuse ROTC graduate, combat Veteran, and then you come back to Syracuse for this role, this position. Why? Why did you come back to help Veterans? Obviously, you come back from the deployment, you get out of military service. For a lot of Veterans I meet, it’s, well, I want to do something else first. I want to get as far away from the military as I can. But you leaned into it.
Look, John, I’d be lying if I said that it was this big strategic plan to do this work the last almost 15 years. Honestly, it’s exactly what you said. I got back from a deployment, got back from Iraq in 2009 and in 2009 got pulled up into the three shop, for those of you that have ever had to experience that, not the most glamorous role after coming back from a deployment. And I had really just started to think about what does life look like. It was an interesting time in the army. And I had really just decided I thought I could do more on the civilian side. And so started to look at what could my transition be. Quite honestly, I didn’t have much of an idea. And I was stationed down in Virginia at the time. Then I was going to head up to Syracuse to see some family.
Fort Eustace?
I was at Fort Eustace. I spent a bunch of time at Fort Eustace. Yeah. And I was going to head up to see a basketball game, actually. It was winter, and I was looking for the basketball schedule, somehow stumbled on the jobs website at the university.
There was this posting for a national program manager for this initiative I had never heard of called the Entrepreneurship Boot Camp for Veterans. This was a program that Mike Haynie had started when he left the Air Force and went and became faculty at the business school up at SU, where we were taking, at the time, wounded, alienated-injured service members and Veterans, fund them to come to the university for a 10-day emersion program on how to launch and grow their own business. The program wasn’t there, obviously, when I was in school, but I started to do some research and I thought, this is maybe I could sink my teeth into. And honestly, I thought, I could do it for a year or two while I figure out what I want to do for the rest of my life. Well, 14 years later, my one-year plan evolved. And that is really, I give all the credit in the world to Mike Haynie and his vision and what we launched back in 2011 with the institute, because I’ve just been able to take on new opportunity after new opportunity and see that come to impacting this space.
And so as you said, I did my undergrad at SU, commissioned out of there, and then served. It’s been phenomenal professionally for me, but also a deep personal connection and interest in this work, too.
What’s fascinating to me is you live on the other coast.
Yes.
You have a great role, and so I take you travel quite a bit.
I travel quite a bit. It’s been that way since I started in 2010. That’s really just the nature of the organization. When you’re funded by soft money dollars, you have to go where it is. And we had the pleasure listening to Phebe Novakovic last night, the CEO of General Dynamics. And she talked about, where do you deliver most value to the organization and getting close for her to that decision maker. And my role is very similar to that. I have to be where the opportunities are that we can find common goals and mission between our funders and our work in order to translate that into impact and service to this population.
Well, let’s talk about one of those, and this is not necessarily on the funding side, but Bunker Labs.
Yes.
What went down? I remember Bunker Labs, like 2020, I was going to give a speech there, and then the thing in Omaha shut down because of COVID. That’s how I got back in. I have some friends we’re talking about, and now it really… Have you acquired Bunker Labs or what’s going on there?
Yeah, that’s exactly right. We had a long-standing partnership and relationship with Bunker Labs and with Todd Connor, their founder. I can remember back when Todd launched Bunker, this maybe 2011, 2012, going out to dinner in Washington, DC, him talking about, I’ve got this new thing I’m launching. We were doing Veteran entrepreneurship work. And so we worked with them for years. Joint partnerships, joint programming, joint events. You know sort of ebbs and flows as things go. And then about a year and a half ago now, we were actually talking with the Bunker Labs leadership of how do we work more closely together? And it didn’t start down the path of, Hey, let’s acquire Bunker Labs. It really started with, we do a lot of work around programmatic evaluation and efficacy, and they saw that as something that maybe they could bring us on to do. So we started to talk about what that looked like, and then we started to engage with their board. And I think that their board and their leadership, I give a ton of credit, was really forward-looking to say, how can we sustain what’s been built long term? And when you operate a nonprofit, it is a constant churn of fundraising, staying relevant, adding new programs.
And so I think for them, they really looked at, okay, we could continue to go this on our own and try to do this, or is there an opportunity to bring them into the IVMF add to the continuum that we’ve built with some of the great programs that they have and really turn it into a one plus one equals four type opportunity. And that’s what it’s been. So a year ago, we formerly acquired Bunker Lab, their team and their programs. We brought them into the institute. And so now what you see today from our entrepreneurship portfolio is really a whole suite of programs that Veterans, military spouses can fit into no matter where they are in their entrepreneurial journey. So it’s been great. We’ve learned a ton from it. It’s those if I knew then, what I knew now. But we’ve been able to lead through those with some great leadership on our team, on the Bunker team that’s come in. And I think it’s been a great result, and we’ve increased impact there, too.
And the founder of Bunker Labs, Todd Connor, is here today. And he’s one of those guys that I think he’s great at starting something. And he’s the person to say, I love to start something, make it real, and hand it off and let it flourish.
That’s a great point.
You guys truly made that come true for him. So I’m sure he’s grateful. That’s probably why he flew to New York to be here today.
That’s right.
So I want to take you now to running these types of programs. It takes a lot of leadership. It takes a lot of leadership skills, especially when there’s volunteers, and even the participants are volunteers. You got to make it valuable enough that people show up and that people continue to volunteer, and people continue to donate money. It takes those skills that we don’t necessarily learn in the military, and that’s going to take us to the after-action review, the three examples of great leadership and the three examples of horrible leadership. But before we get there, I want to know, what did you learn during your military career that helped you, the role that you’re in right now?
Yeah, that’s a great question. As I reflect back on my time and you hit on leadership. For me, I think for anybody that served in the military, you get great examples, as you said, of phenomenal leadership and what I would call subpar leadership. And so I see you developing yourself as a leader is really taking those bits and those nuggets over time of leaders that you’ve worked for or you interact with and finding those pieces that fit with you and your personality not to make you into somebody else, but develop yourself as your own unique leader and then leaving behind and keeping in the back of your mind the things that you really saw and didn’t work, and those things when you’re maybe more junior in the organization and you say to yourself, if I’m ever in charge, I’m not going to do that. Sometimes people forget those things over time. So I think you really have to catalog those types of things. So for me, it was really learning about allocation of resources, whether that’s human capital, dollar resources, and putting things to their first and best use. I was a transportation logistics officer, so we were on the support side.
And so for us, it was always looking at how do we accomplish that mission for whoever’s out there to get them what they need and putting our resources to their first best use to make that happen. And I think it’s no different whether you’re running a not-for-profit or a for-profit organization. The skills and leaderships that you’re using to accomplish those missions are the same. It’s just that your impacts and your measures and your KPIs look a little bit different. So I think I’ve been able to take those learnings from resource allocation, from strategy to the military, but also combine it with a lot of what I’ve learned post-military. Frankly, a lot of that has come through sitting through our programs and watching our speakers and interacting with our participants. I love learning from our participants. I think I learned just as much from them. I think is, if not more, that they learn from us as we’re putting these programs on.
Outstanding. And so I did brush aside the question, but what were the examples of great leadership that you’ve seen? You don’t have to name names, but what were the examples of great leadership that come to mind when Ray thinks this is what good leadership looks like?
Yeah, I’d say one of the top is being present, being a present leader. And I think in this day and age, that’s frankly harder than ever. As I said, we’re a large organization, 110 employees, $24 million a year operating budget. We’re a fairly large organization and have people all over the country. We have probably about 60% of our team up in Syracuse, 40% spread around the country. I have to make sure that I’m a present leader to everybody. We leverage a lot of technology. We leverage a lot of opportunities like this to bring some team members who typically don’t get to interact, to make sure that they get to interact with myself or Barb or other folks on our leadership team but also interact with their peers. So a big one for me is being that present leader. I think back to being a young junior officer and seeing the battalion commander, the brigade commander, out walking the motor pool, right? During maintenance time and being that present leader, talking to individuals, how’s everything going, not as a way to micromanage, but to make sure that they know you’re there and you’re supportive of them to get that work done.
Outstanding. Okay, well, you gave me one. But give me the bad. What’s the bad? What do you hate to see in a leader?
I think letting someone’s ego get in the way of achieving the mission. I think for me, all Oftentimes, as you progress in leadership, you need to have someone that keeps you grounded. You need to have some thoughts that really keep you grounded and keep you focused on. For me, it’s always trying to bring it back to, is this good for the Veteran, the service member, the military family member in the context of what we do? Bringing it back to that. If I bring it back to that, then the decisions actually become much, much easier because I’m centering it back on that. And I’ve had leaders in the past where maybe you just see them advance and that ego gets in the way and all of a sudden they become more concerned with building their own profile than the profile of the organization or their own advancement than the advancement of the people that are coming up behind them or the people that they’re or the mission that they’re tackling.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Ray Toenniessen. Where can Veterans learn more about IVMF and the D’Aniello Institute?
Yeah, you can go to vets.syr.edu. That’ll take you right to our website. You can navigate through all of our programs, our research, opportunities we have. We’re also on every single social media platform. So if you search IVMF or D’Aniello IVMF, you’ll find us no problem.
Yeah, I think the great takeaway is, this is a business school. For a lot of us entrepreneurs, I was an English major. My first experience, I had a paper route when I was 10 years old, but I didn’t really… You don’t know what you want sometimes when you’re a little bit younger, then you figure, okay, this is something I want to do and I want to continue on this entrepreneurial journey. But who’s there for you? What do you do? This is an actual business school giving their resources to help Veterans. This isn’t just some dude who came up with his own education, edutainment, where it’s like, you can’t even tell if this stuff is legit. No, this is legitimate curriculum from people who know what they’re doing, and they’re providing it free to Veterans. I mean, there’s nothing better out there.
That’s it. We couldn’t do what we do, again, without all of our supporters, all of our funders. We’re looking forward to what the next five 10 years bring for us to provide that value to participants.
Yeah. So Veterans that, if you’re a star and you want to become even better and you need help and you want a peer group, but you also want to make sure that you have all the resources around you, this is one of the best things that I’ve ever done. So thank you so much for everything that you do and everything that IVMF does.
Yeah, thank you.
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 industry or community, and we will let the world know. And of course, hit subscribe and join me next time on Veteran Led.
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