In this episode of Veteran Led, John S. Berry sits down with Yolanda Clarke, a former Army Intelligence Officer who has successfully transitioned into the role of CEO at Powder River Industries. Named after her Wyoming roots, Yolanda shares how authenticity and transparency shaped her company’s identity while navigating the challenges of building a business during frequent PCS moves as a military spouse. Her unique perspective on leadership, shaped by her military experience, offers invaluable insights on pushing high performers beyond their comfort zones and maintaining high standards in the civilian business world.
Through compelling stories and reflection, Yolanda opens up about the hard lessons learned in business development, including a pivotal moment involving a $600 million proposal that taught her the importance of clear communication and proper business protocols. She discusses the delicate balance of being a “good guy” in business while protecting your interests, and shares powerful insights about leadership accountability, team building, and the transition from military intelligence to corporate success.
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If you’re going to go soft on them, you’re not going to get anywhere. You have to push them further than they would push themselves. The high performers come in and they expect that. They want that. They’re not going to work for you if they don’t see you as a high performer.
Welcome to Veteran Led. Today’s guest is former Army Intel Officer Yolanda Clarke, now the CEO of Powder River Industries. Welcome to the show, Yolanda.
Thanks. Thanks for having me.
You were an army officer, your husband, a Marine.
Yes.
Now, you’re the CEO of a company.
Yeah.
How does that happen?
I guess, well, I always set pretty big goals and I want to keep the story interesting. I guess along the way, I met the like-minded person, my husband, and he It also sets pretty big, hairy, audacious goals. We’ve been able to align our energy and goals and focus and keep it together. We just keep… Now we’re old, slightly used soldier and Marine that in our geezer phase of life, the geezer era. The goals we set are bigger and harder, and you just keep trying and trying to make an impact.
As far as getting into understanding that you are going to run a company. And I understand you’re raising a family, you’ve got a husband who is still active duty, and you’re trying to figure out how to do it, and you realize at one point, the only way I can do this is if I’m an entrepreneur. So tell us about that.
Yeah. I don’t want to fight with anyone. If someone’s already got it in their head that my lifestyle, because the military isn’t a job and it’s a life. If someone, an employer or whatever, a manager, a company already has it in their mind that I’m not going to succeed because I’m a wife, because I’m married to a Marine, because I’m a Reservist, because I’m a whatever. I’m not going to fight that. I can maybe test it to see if there’s any give, but if there’s no give, I’m not going to waste my time or my energy trying to smash into that wall. After years of running into walls and doing all the right things and saying all the right things and realizing there’s just some notions in people’s mind about what my life should be like, and I don’t fit that. I think Phebe from General Dynamics called herself Iconoclastic, and I was like, I resonate with that.
The CEO of General Dynamics, we heard from yesterday. Yes.
Yeah, the chairman is CEO. I was like, I get that. You’re just doing unconventional things, and I’m not fitting into anybody’s paradigm of what I should be or do based off of the way I look. I just had to, instead of shouting into the wind, just actions speak way louder than words. I created a company where I could work and do the work I wanted to do with the customers I wanted to do it with and then hire people who had similar interests and goals and alignment and wanted that same, maybe had the same lifestyle, military spouses, Veterans. I think our Veteran hire rates were in the 66%, 70% of our employees are military Veterans, and we still want to keep serving in some way. I just needed a, you might resonate with this as an attorney, I needed an entity where we could have that agility and do it our own way. I know I’m rambling on a little bit, but I think I got the idea from the Army Signal Company, where you shoot, move, communicate, and you’re not fixed in one brick and mortar solution. You move with your battalion or your regiment or whatever, because we do IT, so it’s communication.
It’s like you got to keep the coms up through the battle, and you just can’t get too comfortable. That’s how we operate and still do today.
Powder River Industries, are you solely an IT company or do you have other services?
No, that’s it. The demand for IT is huge. AI, data center, cloud, everything is tech-enabled. Everything has an IP address. There’s just not enough. We stay as busy as we can. Our backlog is huge with IT work and IT enablement of mission. That’s where we focus, and that’s what we’re good at.
I want to bring up a topic that I’ve never brought up before this podcast, but I think it’s important. How did you know how to name your company? How did we choose? Sometimes it’s our name, but you chose Powder River. Why?
Okay, sure. Well, I grew up in Wyoming, and I had just finished my MBA program, and I didn’t really know exactly what we were going to do, where we’re going to do it. My husband is still active duty in the Marine Corps. He just retired in October, but we’re still PCSing really, really fast, every year, moving somewhere else. The MBA program and the marketing classes, they talked about transparency and authenticity and how that was important. The only thing I could really anchor on was home. If you really get down to who you are and what makes you who you are. It’s how I was raised, where I grew up, the people around me. I wanted it to be rooted in home somehow, some way. I think when you join the military, you have this notion one day you will go back home, of course, obviously.
You don’t believe that Thomas Wolf, you can never go home again?
No.
You can always go home.
Just after this next set of orders, we’ll go home. We’ll go home. And you never do.
And you never go home.
But I was like, okay, if I put my company in Wyoming and I have this, I stay rooted in who I am and I don’t get caught up in all the craziness of business and government contracting and missions and operations and all that, then it’ll always remind me to stay grounded, remind me of where I came from, remind me why I’m doing what I’m doing. It’s just worked. It’s a constant reminder when you hear your company’s name and it is literally your home, it forces some accountability and pride and a esprit de corps, don’t screw this up because you’re representing the home team here.
Well, what I love about that, Yolanda, is you didn’t even know what you were going to do.
No.
You knew the brand was important. I always believe that if you understand the brand, then you can build a culture on that. It seems to me that you knew, this is what I want this company to be. I want it to feel like this. This is the values I want to attach to it. Now, what we do, I don’t know yet, but I really like this brand. I thought that was absolutely brilliant. Now, as you start your journey, you realized that this is not all sunshine and rainbows. In fact, that not all people are good people. This is why I love working with Veterans, because there are some scary psychos out there that you never want to work with. We’ve all been there as entrepreneurs and as business owners. We’ve had clients, we’ve had people we’ve worked with, we’ve even had employees where it’s like, oh my gosh, this is not sane. I’d love for you to take us on that journey where you almost had the big contract and the huge lesson that you learned.
I know it’s painful, but it’s a cheap lesson for our listeners when they can hear it from someone else who lived it. And paid the price.
I had to run through my list of which scary story should I tell right now, but I think I know the one you’re talking about. It was early on and just playing by the good guy rules. I’m a good guy, you’re a good guy, we’ll do good guy things. No, that it was not the case. I think why it was so painful as I was really raw at that moment. My husband had just come back from a deployment. He was active-duty Marine, so they deploy every year or do something equivalent to a deployment, like some major commitment with the Marine Corps around the world somewhere. Then I had recently, not that long, not too far from, it had come off a 400-day deployment as an army reservist, and our child was under two. Home time is sacred. That is our most precious thing. I was teamed with a company, a very large company, and their capture team for a proposal had fallen apart. They had committed; we’re going to add you to our team. We’re going to give you a big work share, percentages of work share on this around $600 million deal that hadn’t planned 97% growth through the life of that contract.
It was work that I understood well, customer I understood well. I have those skills. I can write that story. I can write volumes on that story. I jumped in and I was working East Coast hours. We were stationed on the West Coast. I’m up 2, 3, 4 in the morning working with the East Coast guys to get it done and probably wrote about 75% of the content. Fast forward, we should be dancing, we should be negotiating. There’s a pace and a cadence and a rhythm to proposal development, and one of those is negotiate cost and pricing. We hadn’t done that yet, and I was like, We didn’t do this? Hey, I know we’re good guys. You’re being a good guy. I’m being a good guy, but how was my pricing? Was that anywhere near? Because I hadn’t actually done that part with this customer. It was a totally different experience for me. I was hoping for feedback, and the feedback I got was unexpected. The capture manager was like, Oh, nobody told you? I’m like, Who’s supposed to tell me? That’s you. You are the boss of this. Oh, well, we decided not to bid you.
Okay. If you’re not in government contracting, what that means is I did all this work, worked nights and weekends, sacrificed my time away from my family, went all in with this large business to help them win this work that I knew very well. Then at the last minute, I am not on the team. I will not be getting any work share. Do not pass go. I got totally, totally hung out to dry on that one.
You didn’t even get paid?
No.
You worked for about 45 days on that?
Yeah, 30 days, 45 days. I don’t remember the exact timeline, but it was around that.
You were just wondering, is my price within the ballpark? How do we figure this out?
They wouldn’t have told me otherwise. Then, oh, by the way, they did win. That insult to injury. I’m just watching this slow nightmare train wreck happen. Meanwhile, in parallel, someone asked me recently about that story. This was years and years ago, but you don’t forget. You learn from those things you don’t forget.
Forgive, but never forget.
I don’t know if I’m at forgiveness.
Okay, well, maybe you’ll get there someday.
Too soon. It’s too soon. It was eight years ago, but whatever. Who’s counting? In parallel, so someone asked me, Didn’t you have any clues? Weren’t there any clues that things weren’t going right? Yeah, I guess. In parallel, they’re a business development guy, twice, who I had a consulting agreement with outside of this proposal. I was doing other work for the company, consulting, doing other things, and he called me on two separate occasions, demanding equity in my company. Equity is ownership. He wanted to be part owner of a company that he was paying the bill for. Now, I’m not an attorney. I’m a computer science undergrad, but I believe that would be a conflict of interest, right?
Absolutely.
Yeah. The first time I was like, I’m in the twilight zone here. This isn’t happening. This cannot be real. Okay, calm down. Let’s revisit. Let’s have an agenda. Let’s schedule a meeting with a focused agenda. Let’s stick to the agenda. We can do this. We can work together. The second time, we go through the agenda, and then he breaks into it again. I want to be part owner of your company, and he’s crying.
He’s cussing at me. I put him on speaker and I was like, my husband, come in here. You hear this, right? It’s not in my head. Are you kidding me? So, yeah, that might have been a clue, but I didn’t connect it with that-
With the other company?
Because I was working with a totally different team. But you don’t know what relationships exist within those companies.
Same company, but you were working with a different team. This guy’s obviously out of his mind. He’s crying like a little girl. He’s out of control and begging for ownership and yelling at you and cussing at you.
Yeah, I wouldn’t disrespect the little girls that way. This guy was like a soup sandwich. It was embarrassing. I was embarrassed for him. I was hurt and I was sad because I thought we had a professional relationship. I was like, How did I just totally misread this whole thing? How did I… And so who knows? Who knows? If I thought our relationship was professional and on the up and up the whole time, and I was clearly wrong. Who knows what the behind the scenes, behind the door at that company, what conversations were happening? I don’t know.
Is the company still around or did it fall apart?
No, it’s still there.
Oh, wow. That level of dysfunction is still… I mean, cautionary lesson. You don’t have to be great to be around. If you want to work with people, don’t assume they’re great. Do your homework.
Yeah.
Let’s talk about the after-action review. The examples of great leadership you learned either in the military or the civilian world, and the examples of horrible leadership. I asked for three of each. You don’t have to name names, but those lessons that you’ve learned about leadership that you carry with you, that aspire to be. That’s the great.
I worked with a commander in RC East in Afghanistan. He was relentless. We were op-con to them. We were operationally controlled by them. All my troops were enabling and supporting them in the intel space. Then they were the action element of that. We were intelligence preparation of the battlefield, essentially. It was OEF. It was kinetic. It was every day, boom. It was happening every day. He pushed everybody so hard. He pushed all of us so hard all the time, and it was relentless. He would get really mad at my team because we were the trigger for his action team to go out and risk their lives in the middle of the night and go out on objective. Many, many times, they would go out on objective and the target wasn’t there. And he’d get really, really, really mad. And he’d come back and he’d shout at me and, All I need is a bunch of motivated nerds. What are you doing? Where are my motivated nerds? Okay. And then, I’ll take this as a compliment, and he just pushed us so hard. We went on an objective that night and it was a bust.
And the next morning, the target came to the gate. So the guys that they were going to go roll up that night actually came to our FOB gate because stuff was broken or something wasn’t right. They knew that the U.S. Forces had been there, and they were mad, and they were like, Hey, you broke my stuff. We get the call from the gate, and we’re in our talk, getting ready, waking up, drinking coffee from the night mission, and like, Well, what new ways are you going to shout at me today? He was super smug but super proud at the same time. I’ve never seen such a combination. He’s drinking his coffee and he’s like, Well, I guess when you plan a mission, it finishes itself. Like, literally, the target walked onto our base as opposed to, let’s go out, let’s get in a fight, let’s roll these guys up. People might get hurt. People might die. No, none of that happened. They literally walked onto our base. That was the best leadership moment I’ve ever had where you’ve got really purposeful work, you’ve got really hard work, dangerous existential high stakes work.
You’re pushing your people really hard, but it’s very clear what you have to do. So he set very clear expectations all the time. And that planning of when you plan the mission well, it actually does finish itself. He wasn’t wrong. And so the planning piece of that and the fact that we planned, we trained, we worked for these outcomes so much so that nobody even had to pull a trigger. And this was combat. That was beautiful. Then he thanked us in such a way that was sincere, but not over the top. It didn’t go to anybody’s head. The expectations didn’t change. We got to do it again tonight. Let’s go. It was awesome. I would follow that guy anywhere. I’d work for him any day. Where else? You said in civilian world?
Civilian world.
You know what? I think I had the same exact experience in the civilian world, too. Working at Lockheed, and I had a business development manager, and I was brand new to it, and I didn’t know what that even meant. It was the same thing. I had to bring business targets to him, and I didn’t know exactly how to do that.
He set a really ridiculous goal of qualifying $10, $50 million above deals a week. I had to brief him, there’s just not that many deals in the world a week. It’s impossible, but it really… He set the expectation. He forced me to do things that were so far outside my comfort zone. I had to turn over every rock on the planet, get really creative, and he beat the crap out of me when I came in. He’s like, That’s a stupid deal. That’s not even what we do. You don’t understand our company. That doesn’t align with our past performance. We don’t have those capabilities, which is the same thing that did, too, of, No, that’s not the right intel. That’s not the right intel. That was the right intel. Eventually, I did that long enough. It’s just burned into my DNA, I know how to qualify a business target now in my market space. Eventually, I got it, and eventually, I got it right. And eventually, we started getting traction and eventually started winning the work that I was finding. And that was really satisfying, too. Then he let me drive the golf cart.
I see the connection here is that you like tough bosses to push you, make you better.
I don’t know if I’ve really known… The best outcomes, the biggest impacts have come from the hardest bosses. And maybe it’s a little bit like… I don’t remember the Syracuse coach’s his name.
Jim Boeheim.
Jim Boeheim. He was saying, If you’re going to go soft on them, you’re not going to get anywhere. You got to get the good people on the team and people who are focused on the same outcomes, whatever that is, your KPIs, your metrics, your business goals, whatever it is. Then you have to push them further. That’s what a coach does. You have to push them further than they would push themselves. You have see what they’re capable of, and you have to help coach them. Maybe not shout at them, but you have to coach them into their full potential. The high performers come in, and they expect that. They want that. They’re not going to work for you if they don’t see you as a high performer. I think that’s how we achieve great things is getting the right people in the room and then challenging each other to be better than we were yesterday. To do something different.
Outstanding. Now for the bad examples.
Wow. Okay. Well, we’ll stay in the Veteran genre, and I’m not going to cry. I’m not crying. You’re crying. The worst example is I had a… He was actually my commander for a time, deployed. He stayed in his room all the time, and he played Minecraft, and he didn’t get out, and he didn’t participate, and he didn’t know what the work was. He didn’t know how the work got done. He didn’t participate at all. He wasn’t engaged at all. We had to create CONOPS, concepts of operations for our missions, and then we had to get them approved, and then we would go execute the mission. This CONOP came across, and we had teams all over the country, a couple of different command areas within the regional commands of Afghanistan, RC South, RC East. Our teams were going out on mission. They had to send us CONOPS for their missions. We had to approve them, supply them, all of that. This CONOP came in and it was not good. It was not good. All of the intel around that day, that time, that location, the objectives, not good. The outcomes, it was bad. My first sergeant and I both called it out and we were like, This is not good.
All of our soldiers who knew about that… Our job is to know what’s going on. We had all been studying all the activities of this region, and we knew this was a terrible idea. The soldiers were coming to me, the XO at the time, and our first sergeant and saying, This is a bad idea. Let me tell you why. You don’t know this. You don’t know this. Let me tell you. Let me tell you. Let me tell you. We’re like, I hear you. I hear you. I agree with you. Well, let’s go to the commander and let’s hope that he doesn’t approve the mission. Not hope, but we’ll tell him we don’t agree with the mission. We did. He’s like, No, we’re going to do it. Okay, let’s try again. All night, we were up all night trying to get more reasons why this is, just please say no. You don’t have to do this. We don’t have to do this. We do not have to. Yes, we do. This is what we’re here for. We also have to manage the risk, right? At what cost if there’s this celebration or this event or this holiday that’s going on and everybody in the town is going to be keyed up or they’re going to be…
It’s just we’re walking into a really hostile, volatile situation. We do not need to do it. If we waited till the morning or if we wait till the next day, that holiday will pass and we won’t interrupt the people and whatever the conditions were. I don’t remember. He approved it anyway. That team hit an IED and we lost our first soldier, and it was the worst.
The commander that won’t listen. Wow.
Where the objective is more valuable than the people. I’m not crying. You’re crying.
Mission first, people always. Unfortunately, they are the commanders that don’t… They’re just not good leaders. They don’t have the GWC get it, want it, have the capacity to do it, and they don’t get it. Some of them don’t want it, and then some of them just don’t have the capacity. We’ve all seen that in leaders. That’s a really tough example because you see the train wreck coming and you’re trying to stop it.
Well, and it was just continuous. It was like the whole deployment. It was just like, and how do you overcome that? And you just get exhausted by it. Another example, a team, one of the tier teams was on objective and unexpectedly found hostages. They rolled up some bad guys, and the bad guys had hostages who were innocent, just regular everyday citizens. What do we do with you guys? They weren’t front. They were like, these guys, they found in this region or this province, but they are from this province. What do we do with you? They were coming through our FOB and they asked us, Hey, do you guys want them? We’re just like, We don’t know what to do with hostages. Hostages? That’s not our jam. That’s not our mission. What are we supposed to do with? We don’t have the skills, the training, the resources to do anything with this. Again, my first agent and I were like, Say no. We don’t have to say yes to this. There’s nothing in our op order that says this is what we do. We don’t know what to do with this. He said yes. Oh, my God.
Then we have these hostages on our FOB who aren’t from the region where we are. We can’t just let them walk out. Then we go to the camp commander and the camp commander, we’re like, Hey, we have these hostages now. What do you think we should do? Or, you should know that we have these people on your camp. We’re like, We think you should… We’re not trained on this. We don’t have the skills for this. But what makes sense is maybe you find some people who know what to do with hostages. And maybe get some advice about that. And they were like, No, we’re going to drop them back off. We’ll take them back where they’re from. Well, that seems like a good idea. Except if you think about it from the bad guy’s perspective, that’s where we caught you the first time. We know where you live. I’m briefing, I think it was the G3, the Ops Commander for the base. I’m like, That’s probably a high-risk solution, sir, because the bad guys know where they’re from. Now, those guys know a lot about us. They know our names, they know our faces, they know what our roles, they know what our no responsibilities are, they know our ranks, they know the FOB layout, they know where the defect is, they know where the medical facility is, they know where the fuel facility is, they know where our landing zone is.
They can really just draw out a whole map of our entire FOB and every operation on it. That’s really high-value intelligence data for the other side. We highly recommend you not do that. They did it anyway. And do you know? It was within two weeks, we were getting reports, intel reports from our sources out in the different areas that those guys had been recaptured, they had been tortured, and they had been killed.
And they probably got your information about your base.
And they did. Of course, they did. They did. And the uptick in our conflict on our base, on our FOB, our forward operating base, was exponential for three months after that because they had all new ways and ideas for how to attack us. On the business side, clearly not as high stakes, right? Bad leadership. I mean, personally that I’ve experienced, I guess, as a female working in all male-dominated industries and workforces. Not because I was literally seeking it out. It’s just the work I’m interested in. I was raised that, you can do anything you want. You can be what anything you want. You just have to do the work. But it does come with some perils. I have certainly experienced my fair share of, I guess, tag-worthy, title-worthy, click-bate-worthy experiences as a woman in all-male workplaces, but I’ve reported being harassed. I certainly experienced retaliation from that. That made my job really, really, really freaking hard. Just not being able to move in the workplace anymore. Kind of being blacklisted and not persona non grata, can’t be here anymore because now I made it weird. No, no, you made it weird. I still have that cell phone. I won’t even…
That’s super old, but I just have it, evidence. It was not me. I did not ask for this. Look at this. That’s bad leadership. So don’t have those programs if you’re not going to use them and if you’re not going to follow through with them. Bad leadership in terms of just not providing clarity. I came back from a reserve training, a long training cycle. My business organization had reorganized. So the boss I had went somewhere else, I had a new boss, and she didn’t pick me, and she just got me dumped in her lab, and she didn’t want… She didn’t choose me. She’s like, I don’t know what to do with you. She just let me hang out there with no guidance about what her expectations were. Even just tell me what you want. What does success look like for you? So I can figure it out. She just really didn’t communicate with me at all. That was a tough one coming back from a reserve training experience. I’m rambling. I’ve given you a couple.
That’s quite a few. That’s always tough when it’s someone who you’re under their command or their responsibility, and they just don’t take charge of it. They act like they don’t even want you there.
Well, and in the civilian world, there’s no requirement for them to do that. In a command, if I’m the commander and you are my soldier, I know the inherent responsibility and relationship that we have. In the civilian world, you don’t get that.
Great point, except where there’s usually a profit and loss statement, and you’re wondering, Why am I paying for this person to be here if they’re not doing anything?
Yeah, that’s true.
When you look at the cost of labor, and you say, Okay, one of the great ways to determine the success of your organization is like, what is revenue per employee? If the revenue is…You’re like, Wait a minute, this employee is generating no revenue. Wait a minute, so why is payroll at this level? We don’t see any more production here. What’s going on?
But not all companies do that. In fact, I’d say most companies don’t do it. I love that you highlighted that example because it’s super important to do that in business, and especially in services. Most service companies don’t do that, actually. It’s just measured at the point of delivery. Depending on your frequency of measurement, if you’re not in that particular company, it would have taken many, many, and it did take many, many, many months before the trend of data showed this is maybe not working. When you’re thinking about those measurements and metrics for success, what is the right metric? How often do I need to measure it and collect on it? Then what am I going to do with that data? If you think about it before you’re in the situation and you have all this personal stuff around it, it’s a lot easier to make the decision when you get there. It creates, I think, psychological safety for your workplace because you put that information out front. Everybody knows what the expectation is. I know what I have to do to succeed, and now I get to choose if I’m going to do that or not.
Is this my employer? Is this my work home? Right.
Outstanding. Obviously, you have learned and you have built a great environment for your team. I suppose sometimes that’s how it works. We have a bad experience and we say, You know what? I am not going to be that leader. Certainly, you’ve learned your lessons. Some of them have been expensive lessons where you’ve had to take the pain to learn the lesson. But I think that’s what it’s all about. I appreciate your courage in sharing those lessons because we don’t need people to come, brag about their failures and their successes. We’re get to learn from the failures. We don’t always learn from the successes. It’s great to hear about the successes, to know those things are possible, but where we learn is the failure. So I greatly appreciate that. Where can Veterans learn more about Yolanda Clarke, and where can they learn more about Powder River Industries?
Social media, obviously. LinkedIn is the best place for me. Then our company, also, we do have LinkedIn, Instagram, and then our website, powderriverindustries.com.
It’s Yolanda Clark, C-L-A-R-K-E.
Yeah, just keep it interesting.
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