Joining us is Eric Isham, Army Veteran turned fintech trailblazer, who shares powerful leadership lessons forged in the military and honed in the boardroom. From his days as a combat medic to becoming the CEO of OMNICOMMANDER, Eric reveals how military discipline transforms into business acumen.
Through candid reflection, Eric discusses the challenges of transitioning from soldier to entrepreneur and the unexpected ways his Army experience prepared him for the cutthroat world of startups. He offers invaluable insights on scaling a business, the importance of hiring Veterans, and how to apply military strategies to overcome corporate obstacles.
With a unique perspective shaped by his journey from the Army to credit unions, Eric illuminates the often-overlooked strengths Veterans bring to the business world. He also shares practical advice on maintaining work-life balance and fostering innovation in high-pressure environments.
This episode is a must-listen for aspiring entrepreneurs, business leaders, and anyone seeking to harness the power of military leadership in their professional life. Prepare to be inspired and equipped with battle-tested strategies for success!
Connect with Eric on LinkedIn and explore OMNICOMMANDER at omnicommander.com. Discover how Eric’s company is revolutionizing digital services for credit unions while championing Veteran employment.
Eric Isham: And that’s why companies like Tesla, Starbucks, McDonald’s–they’re great at this, right. If you’re going into an Apple Store in San Francisco, if you’re going into Apple Store in Miami or Beijing or New York, they all look the same: the packaging feels the same, they smell the same, the experience is the same. And that is what we are bringing to our clients.
John Berry: Welcome to the Veteran Led podcast, where we talk with leaders who use their military experiences to develop great organizations and continue to serve their communities. Today’s guest is former Army combat medic turned armor officer and founder and CEO of OMNICOMMANDER. Welcome to the show, Eric Isham.
Eric Isham: Hey, thanks, John. I appreciate it, brother.
John Berry: I want to get down to what OMNICOMMANDER does and why you have such a diverse array of services.
Eric Isham: So, OMNICOMMANDER is the leader for website design, digital marketing for banks and credit unions in the United States. We really focus in on the credit union space. We’ve been doing this for about seven years, and I started this company when I recognized the gap for really gorgeous, mobile responsive websites in the credit union space. And so that’s where we started off with. That quickly led into digital marketing–from social media, SEO, email, custom video creation, paid ads–you name it, we do it on the marketing side as well as cybersecurity as well. Right. So, a lot of our small to mid-size financial institutions don’t have the bandwidth or the budgets to really come out and combat effectively cybersecurity services. So we bring all that together for our clients in an easy to understand, easy to deploy solution that’s been very, very effective.
John Berry: Yeah, cost effective cybersecurity is difficult, and for us as a law firm, cybersecurity is paramount. We have to protect our client information and our client data, and I know the banking industry is very strict on their standards as well. So how do you manage both sides of the house? Are they run almost as separate companies or is it just another vertical, or do you usually integrate all three with most of your customers?
Eric Isham: It’s a great question. So, I hired one of my old armor officer buddies, Roy Ross. He’s our Chief Information Security Officer. So, we’ve got a CISO at OMNICOMMANDER that handles all of our security. So, if we’re using any kind of third-party software, if we’re looking at a new relationship, Roy comes and checks the validity of that third party and really makes sure that it’s good to hook for us as an organization. His second role is as a division within OMNICOMMANDER and that’s cybersecurity, we call it Cyber Commander. So, he puts together functional cybersecurity tools, vishing, phishing, educational resources for our banks and credit unions so that they can know what to be on the lookout for. Right. There’s a lot of text messages that aren’t really from UPS or from Amazon, and people get caught with that stuff all the time. So, on the cybersecurity side, there’s two sides of the house on that: ours OMNICOMMANDER cybersecurity ensuring that we are protecting our data and our client’s data, but then also helping the education side for those banks and credit unions as well.
John Berry: When we first met, you had almost your entire C-suite was military officers, is that still true today?
Eric Isham: Yeah, we’re very heavy military. So, we’re a Veteran founded, Veteran led organization. My early employees, my first employee, he was an Air Force guy. We definitely give him a lot of s*** about that. But I’ve got Navy guys. I got Coast Guard guys. Those guys really get a lot of s*** from us. But we’ve even had Marines along the way and we set out their box of crowns for those guys. But no, I love it. I love hiring Veterans. I think it’s great. They certainly have a sense of duty. They certainly have a sense of purpose and mission. When they come into the organization, we do a lot of things that I learned and that my other leaders learned with their time in the military that we execute here at OMNICOMMANDER on an ongoing basis.
John Berry: And you’ve been recognized as a United States Department of Labor Gold Medallion recipient for hiring vets under their Hire Vets program. And so that speaks to your mission and what you’re doing. And as we’ve talked off the air over the last few months, hiring Veterans is crucial to having a great organization. We can have honest conversations, and we have people who know how to execute on our team and we have people who know how to delegate. And so there are a lot of leadership skills that we’ve learned in the military. Let me put it this way. If we didn’t have them on our team, it’d be game over. But because we’re hiring people who already have those skills, it makes it so much easier to scale. And I know you’ve scaled quickly. Right now, you’re in, what, three states and one foreign country?
Eric Isham: That’s right. Yeah. As far as offices go. So, I’m sitting right now at our flagship location in Nashville, Tennessee. Our headquarters is based in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida in the Panhandle. We’ve got our cybersecurity offices. We call it Cybertron. That’s in Salt Lake City. And then we have a fourth location. Our international location is in Bogota, Colombia. We call that Casa Morata. And we got commandos down there that are doing the thing on a daily basis.
John Berry: How did you decide to niche down to credit unions? You become a leader in the credit union industry. But how did you make that decision to go to go so narrow?
Eric Isham: I think that, well, first I got tricked into it like anybody else in an industry. So I was pre-med in college, so I was going to go to medical school. And when I graduated, you know, all those plans were in place. My wife was in pharmaceutical sales at the time, and I don’t think she really wanted to support me through all the additional school that was going to have to happen there. And my aunt, who was in financial technology at the time, she had the greatest line ever. She said, “You know, Eric, why don’t you come work for me and you can take a break from school?” And I was like, man, a break sounds good. And this was the closing line. This is the greatest closing line of all time. She’s like, “You know what? Come work for me for a year, and if you don’t like it you can always go to medical school. It’s not going anywhere.” And I was like, that sounds good, too. So, I jumped into that based on her company. And I’d actually worked for her previous to when I was in high school. So, I started in the ‘90s in a payments company doing stuffing checks in the basement of her company.
Eric Isham: So I’ve been doing this for–it’s crazy to say–almost 30 years in the space. And it’s one of those things that the people don’t really leave the space once you’re in here, you might change, you know, where you work at, but you typically stay in here because it’s a wonderful place to be at, specifically in the credit union land. It’s a small industry. There’s about 4,700 credit unions in the US today, and it’s a very tight community. So, if you are providing amazing service, incredible products, they will quickly go out of their way to promote you. And so I’ve always had a high level of integrity and repped companies and built products that really did mean something, right? Not vaporware, not sugar water. Uh, and it’s been a wonderful journey for me, right? As staying in this space for so long and being niche. So, when I founded OMNICOMMANDER, I made the conscious decision. I was like, you know, I want to build gorgeous websites. I can do that for anybody, right? I could do it for you, John. I could do it for the car lot down the street. I can do it for the movie theater. But I wanted to focus on the market I already knew.
Eric Isham: And they were way behind the majority, still way behind when it comes to absolute gorgeous design that’s mobile responsive, that’s ADA compliant, that has all the things that they need to drive their business. And trust me, it’s a tough thing. We’ve had several people over the years that come here and say, oh man, we should be doing this for car dealerships, or we should be doing this for funeral parlors, or you name it, right? It’s like it’s wide open. I’m like, yeah, it’s great, but we’ve got more business than we could probably ever handle right here in this space. Let’s just be the best for our banks and our credit unions and really understand and know this. So, we try to be really true to that. Every once in a while, we’ll do something that’s a one off for somebody that works at a credit. We did a free website for a hospital in Hawaii. Um, but it was it was something because the CEO of that credit union was like on the board for the hospital. I was like, yeah, we’ll do that. We’re not going to charge you a dime. We like doing those things. But as far as our core business: banks and credit unions.
John Berry: And what I found is you are very concerned about your reputation. You’re not going to take a project that you don’t think you can handle. I know we’ve had some discussions and you’ve helped me and other Veterans saying, hey, here’s what I think you need right now. But not being the guy, oh, I need your business because you don’t need our business. And I think that that takes a lot of maturity and discipline because it’s easy to say, well, here’s another opportunity for us to grow, to make more money, hire more employees. But at the end of the day, if we’re not serving our core customer, then we’re absolutely failing. And I’m sure you’ve been there. I’ve had looked at other verticals and I’ve launched some of them that were catastrophic failures. So now we like you, we only have three verticals. And that that has been the, I think, one of the most important things in our ability to scale, hire great people, and continue to grow. And so, you guys have great, like I said, great discipline there. And what I also like is you guys understand that, like the information isn’t what matters. What matters is the ability to execute. And I’ve watched some of your team’s YouTube videos and you guys get really tactical. You give away all the secret sauce. But at the end of the day, right, as I’ve learned from a lot of marketing companies strategies are pretty cheap. It’s the ability to execute on those strategies that makes all the difference.
Eric Isham: Yeah, I agree with you on that. We do a town hall every Friday. It’s an all hands town hall with all of our employees around the world. And we were showing a recent website that went live, and we’ve done a brand guide for them. And I know you’re big about your brand as well. And so, I was on a call yesterday and I was talking to a prospect in our space, and I said he was really wanting us to do a website for him. I was like, this is great, you know, but we really need to have a brand guide established first. And so, I said, let me show you a brand guide for a credit union we just recently did. And so, my senior vice president of marketing, you’ve met her, Christi. She shows him this brand guide that we built. It’s gorgeous. Right. And these are the fonts, and these are the colors, and this is the imagery we’re going to use, and these are the overlays that we’re going to use. And he was like wow, that’s really, really cool. Then we showed him the website and he’s like, it just snapped. He’s like, oh I get it. We were able to build a gorgeous website for this credit union taking the rules from the brand guide. And so, we were showing this because the site recently went live. Think it was earlier this week last week to the whole team. And I told everybody, I said, you know, it looks really easy.
Eric Isham: And what I’ve learned is the easier something looks when you’re presenting it, it’s actually the harder it is to pull off, right? To have something that has an omnipresent, a unique and continuous look and feel across all channels, if you’re on a website, if it’s physical, if it’s whatever, it’s an incredible amount of work to pull that together. And I think that’s something that a lot of people miss. And you’re right. So, strategy is fairly cheap, right? You know, you’ve got to spend some time on that and get that down. But the execution of it, getting everybody rowing in the same direction, all the arrows pointed in the same direction, that’s a daily effort, right? Because the second somebody starts answering the phone a little bit differently, or they’re sending emails with a different tone, or they’re sending out marketing materials that’s a little outdated, it completely destroys the brand. And that’s why companies like Tesla, Starbucks, McDonald’s–they’re great at this, right. If you’re going into an Apple Store in San Francisco, if you’re going into Apple Store in Miami or Beijing or New York, they all look the same: the packaging feels the same, they smell the same, the experience is the same. And that is what we are bringing to our clients. And it is a ton, it is a ton of f****** work to make that happen.
John Berry: Yeah, if you have a business and you haven’t, I don’t care what the size. If you haven’t yet established your brand guide, you’re gonna regret it down the road. And to keep everything in line, it’s very much like having a TACSOP, that Tactical Standard Operating Procedures that the team can flip through the TACSOP and understand what right looks like. You know, understand how to effectively run this battle drill. Right? I mean, it’s something that you do over and over again, but you continue to refine. And, you know, in working especially in the marketing space, just as from my vantage point, it’s like, you know, we got to do a lot of rehearsals. We got to make sure that we can do a soft launch of something, but we need to take it through the paces and look at it, evaluate it, and decide if it’s on brand. Is this really going to move the needle forward? Is this really what we’re trying to say or is this off brand? Is this something that is going to confuse the consumer?
Eric Isham: Yep. Yeah. We do it every day. It’s I meet with my SVP on the digital marketing side and we kind of go round and round, like, is this adding to our core messaging? Is this taking away? If somebody that’s not in our business all day long, can they look at that at a glance and know exactly what that is? Because sometimes we miss that, right? We start using jargon, we start making assumptions about the consumer like, oh yeah, they’re going to instantly know what that is. And sometimes you got to take a step back and be like, I don’t know if that’s as clear as we think it is to the outside world. And I know you guys have done an incredible job of really owning your market there, right? With your commercials and billboards and everything else you’re doing, you’ve got to capture that attention like this as I’m going down the road 85 miles an hour and, you know, see you up there. Like, okay, I know exactly what he does. Right? And it’s that repetition. But it’s that simple, straightforward, this is what we do. When I have this need, I know specifically I need to go talk to John Berry. Right. And again, it looks simple, but it’s very, very hard.
John Berry: Let’s talk about failures because, because we all have them. What’s your biggest failure that you’re afraid of, and what’s one of the biggest ones that you’ve had to overcome growing your business, especially at the rate you’ve been? Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in America, two years in a row? You can’t grow without breaking stuff. So let’s get into the failures for the Veterans listening who might be concerned about failing.
Eric Isham: Yeah. You know, I would tell anybody, the Veterans or anybody else that’s listening. You can’t be afraid of failure. Right. You can’t be thinking about, well, what if we do this and it doesn’t work? I mean, I guess you can, but it doesn’t. You don’t get any returns on that. And there’s a difference between not being afraid of failure and being reckless. I think the biggest failure that I’ve had, and this is more of a recent failure, is just growing too fast, right? Trying to throw bodies at problems instead of really solving for processes. Our back of the house, our development operations, which is led by our president, Kimberly, my wife–they’ve got incredible SOPs that they’ve built out over the past several years, seven years. Right. They’ve been building them since day one. And when we bring on a net new client for a website, like, they’ve got everything lined down, right, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it’s very structured and it works, right. They’ve got those rails greased up and they are moving. It’s not that same thing when we look at marketing because it’s a different type of creative. And you know, as we’re bringing on lots and lots of clients, my go-to is always like, just hire, hire until it hurts. Keep, keep hiring. There should be a line of people that were hiring continuously to throw with this and throw at this growth. And you know, the world changed 18 months ago when it kind of comes to what people are valuing and how they’re valuing companies. And it’s not all about just growth and top line revenue.
Eric Isham: You know, it’s getting to more of bottom line and looking at that. So that’s probably been the biggest, you know, failure that affects a lot of people is just with fast growth, just thinking you could throw bodies at people and not building out that more defined SOP. I tell my staff, I tell everybody I probably make more mistakes than most humans walking every morning before most people do all month long. Right? Because I’m making so many decisions and we are moving so fast. And I tell my staff, I’m like, guys, it’s okay if you’re making mistakes, if you break something, if you drop something, if something happens, what’s not okay is not to own it, right? If you make a mistake with a client and they come calling or they’re emailing you, you better answer that phone call in the first ring. You better respond to that email within five minutes, because making a mistake is fine, that’s not a problem. But trying to hide from it or run from it, that doesn’t work, right? So make mistakes, continue to move fast. Continue to grow. Learn from your mistakes. I don’t want you to keep doing the same thing. That’s insanity. But don’t be afraid of making mistakes. And I think we’ve got a culture here. We’ve built a culture here where people try things and they’re not afraid of, you know, making mistakes. Yes. I might use adult language and raise my voice when it’s happened multiple times, but, like, I don’t ever, you know, personally get upset with anybody about that.
John Berry: Yeah, sometimes we get upset about the situation, but not with the person. And as leaders, it’s really tough to make that distinction because then someone says, oh my gosh, he was so upset with me. No, no, no, I’m not upset with you. I don’t take this personally. You shouldn’t take it personally. We’re upset with the situation. We’re upset with the fact we’re frustrated. But but we’re going to fix it. But I think that’s going to happen with decisions and as leaders, it’s not what we decide, it’s that we decide. That we make a decision, we live with the consequences, and we learn from that. That’s always better than just waiting and waiting and waiting to make a decision until we have enough information, until the right time. Look, as a leader, if you can’t move the momentum forward, you’re not really leading. And if you lose momentum, man, it is tough to get it back. Now, you talked about the mistakes, but let’s talk about the unforgivable ones. I learned a lesson as a young lieutenant that there are mistakes of skill and there are mistakes of will. And mistakes of skill are fine that just means more training. But if it’s a mistake of will where someone is doing something that is intentional or reckless, that is that is harming the company, harming the customer, they got to go. You can’t fix that.
Eric Isham: That’s right. Yeah. We’ve got core values here that we check against. And, you know, one of them being integrity. We’ve got a zero tolerance, a one strike rule when it comes to stealing. Right now, we’re a tech company. We don’t have like a cash drawer somewhere where somebody can steal from you. But if they are cooking their numbers as far as their metrics for, you know, SEO views or, what’s another one would be–chat results. We had a situation last summer, actually, where we had some people that were fudging their rankings. They were logging in and they were ranking themselves on their chats, they were juicing their numbers so they could get paid, you know, higher spiffs for those things. And, you know, once, once the team was aware of it, it was immediate. It was like they got to go. That’s stealing. Right? We’ve got an employee ownership plan here, where it’s a one-year cliff, four-year vest. So I’ve got a lot of people within the organization. Actually, we’re doing a shareholder meeting after this. We’ve got a lot of folks here that are owners in the company, and damn it, they take that seriously, right? So when they find out somebody’s been stealing from them or they’ve been doing something to waste money, a will type of a thing, right? It’s a pretty immediate and swift decision on that. Like they got to go, right? We’re not going to tolerate that for a second because we’ve got big goals and we’ve got things that we need to accomplish because we’ve got a finite amount of time to do those things. And there’s just–and I’ve been big about this my whole life. I just have no tolerance for stealing whatsoever.
John Berry: Well, and I love the reference to stealing because I wasn’t articulate enough to put that word on it. But I had something similar where a leader was manipulating metrics to make it look like they were more productive than they were.
Eric Isham: It’s stealing.
John Berry: Yeah, that’s stealing. And for me, you know, that’s being deceptive. And it came down to when you have to have that conversation, it’s like, okay, you’ve read all the guidelines, you’re in a leadership position. Either you are intentionally doing this or stealing, or if I buy your explanation, you’re too dumb to be in a leadership position because there is no we’ve written these guidelines so clearly, we’ve clearly defined the KPI. And you come in and now you’re trying to manipulate it and then there’s a story behind it and we’re like, yeah, that story doesn’t make sense. And that’s such a tough position to be in because, you know, we entrusted this leader and now we as a senior leadership look like failures because we entrusted the wrong person. But I’ve learned that the team will forgive that so long as we don’t tolerate it, right?
John Berry: Sometimes we’re going to make bad decisions. We’re not going to be as discerning as we need to be as leaders, and we’re going to choose the wrong people to put in charge. But when we figure out this is the wrong person, justice must be swift. We can’t let things linger because the team sees it, the team feels it. And they knew about it long before we did, and maybe nobody said anything, but it’s just one of those things as a leader, we got to be transparent and say, yeah, this is not right. This is something that happened and this is an expensive lesson. But, you know, I love to share the lessons and sometimes it’s painful because if the person’s still on the team, I try not to call them out. But it’s like, look, we all have to learn from this lesson because this happened. This is not okay. And we want to make sure it never happens again. So, we’re going to tell you what happened, and we’re going to talk about why it’s such a problem and why it must never happen again.
Eric Isham: Yeah, I love that. This gets back to the military too, right? If you got to make on-the-spot corrections. Because if you don’t and it’s a known thing that just became the standard, right? So if Sally’s allowed to come in late 30 minutes a day, every single day and everybody’s looking at that, then it’s like, okay, once the leadership team is aware of that and they’re condoning it, they’re allowing it to happen, then everybody else is like, well, that’s the new standard. I can show up 30 minutes late. Maybe I can show up 35 minutes late. Maybe I don’t have to show up at all. Right? Just keep pushing and pushing and pushing. And it’s not fair to those folks that are here 30 minutes early, and they’re scrapping up and getting ready for the day because it just interrupts the rest of the flow. So, I agree with you 100%, and I encourage everyone, right? It doesn’t matter if you’re in leadership or not, but you got to make on the spot corrections like, hey, that’s not appropriate. That’s not the way we do things. That’s not it. Because we cannot, as leaders, let the rest of the organization or society say like, yep, that’s okay. You can’t walk past that and not check that if you know something’s not right.
John Berry: Yeah, the standard you allow is a standard you set. And where I have failed is I had a manager who liked to keep notes, and then every quarter would bring up all the negative stuff. So instead of making the on-the-spot correction, they would allow it to happen for 30, 60, 90 days. They’d allow it to continue to happen, and then they’d just have a whole list. So not only did the problem persist much longer than it needed to, but then that team member who didn’t, who maybe didn’t know that they were doing something wrong or felt they were getting away with it, they show up for their quarterly review and there’s a whole list on this date this happened on this date. I’m like, whoa, whoa, that’s not how we manage. And that certainly isn’t how we lead. If there’s a problem, we address it immediately. But we don’t keep a naughty list. We don’t keep. You know, this is Santa’s naughty list right here of everything you did wrong. Because that’s crushing to a team member especially if they didn’t know they were wrong. You got to make the on-the-spot corrections. This was like rule number one in the military. You learned this from the drill sergeant who dropped you for not squaring a corner from walking through the grass or whatever you did, talking in the chow hall. And so we learned that that on-the-spot correction is huge. And look, when we deploy on the spot corrections save lives.
Eric Isham: Yeah, I you know, what I’ve learned, John, is that management is something that is taught, right? That is trained. And most people don’t really want to lean into doing those types of corrections, right? I don’t think most people are afraid. It’s just very uncomfortable to tell somebody else that they’re doing something wrong.
John Berry: Unless it’s your spouse, right?
Eric Isham: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, she has no problem letting me know or the kids. So, yeah, but it’s it as a manager and that’s a training thing. Right. And you know, we do a lot of management training here. And again, it’s not because you’re correcting somebody or you’re making an edit or suggestion or whatever it is. It’s not a personal thing. Right. It gets back to that personal thing. It’s like, no, that’s you know, four plus four is eight, right? If you wrote down seven and you correcting that, it’s like, oh, he hates me. It’s like, no, that’s math. Right? Like this is this is not how that works. And um, but people are, like most people, I do think are a little bit shyer as far as like I’m going to try to let that slide, hope it doesn’t happen again. And, you know, I certainly I know come off as an asshole. It’s like, man, he’s always telling this or he’s doing that just because I just don’t have the time to circle around later. I certainly don’t have the time to make notes for a quarter and then come back and do it. It’s just easier to just say, hey, button your button or your zipper’s undone or whatever it is, right? You know, and like you said, basic training. It’s funny. I’m pretty sure I got gigged just for showing up, but, uh, yes, I mean, I did more push-ups, uh, in basic training than who knows how many. I mean, millions, millions of push-ups, right? Continuously. I probably earned every last one of them.
John Berry: How do you deal with the team member, especially the leader who argues with the reality, who comes in and tells you, no Eric, four plus four is not eight, four plus four is seven. And you’re like, well, that’s not reality. I’m trying to show you reality, but they just can’t see it. How do you handle that?
Eric Isham: Well, I make sure that we move them to the creative department. Then they can make those numbers whatever they want to. Uh, you know, that’s a great question. I like to have open conversations. And if if it’s something solid like that, if it’s four plus four, seven, then it’s like, okay, then you know, this just isn’t a good fit. Uh, which is very different than constructive criticism around an open topic. But yeah, we just move on from it. Right? If somebody just can’t get over our hours or that we’re working from the office or that we do whatever it is, it’s like, okay, it’s the wrong person in the right seat, and we move on from it. And the faster you can get to that, the faster that you can make those decisions, it’s just better. And it’s always it’s tough when you’re in the moment, but it’s always like 24 hours, 48 hours later. You get all kinds of people kind of saying, hey, I’m glad you guys did that. That dude was an asshole. And it’s like, well, why did you say that before? Or hey, that person was causing problems or that guy was scaring me and it’s like, what? How did I miss this stuff? Right. So I think it’s, you know, when you know, something’s not a good fit, you know it. You can tell anything you want in your head, but you know it.
John Berry: Yeah. And sometimes we think that, well, there’s an SOP. They need to be following the SOP. But then we as leaders have failed to train them on the SOP or worse, our SOP is no longer relevant and needs to be updated. So as a leader, how do you know when your standard operating procedures might be out of date, or need to be updated, or need to be improved to optimize your company?
Eric Isham: So I do. All my direct reports are very good about vocalizing those things, right? So if we’ve outgrown an SOP or if we’ve, you know, if we’ve moved on from something, then I’ll typically get a collective unison on that, like, hey, this just doesn’t work anymore. We need to change that, right? I’m very fortunate in that manner. Like we’ll have those open conversations around that. I don’t think that’s a problem that we experience too much or that, you know, that I see the bigger problem going a half step back, what you’re just talking about is when I’m giving directives and they’re clear in my head. But, a direct report isn’t pushing back to say, I don’t understand what you’re saying. Right. So, not being as clear in those directives and then them not stopping me and saying, hey, Eric, I know what’s coming out of your mouth makes all the sense in the world to you, but I don’t really know what you’re talking about. Right. And we’ve been spending a lot of time around that recently as well. It’s like if, you know, I’m trying to work back briefs from the folks. But it’s like, hey, if you’re not 100% on on what this guidance was or what I want done with this particular commercial or this image or this, that or the other, just say, hey, man, I don’t know what you’re talking about because what happens is they go away and then a week later I’m like, hey, where’s that thing? And they’re just kind of like, right. So it’s being clear as a leader, I think that’s one of the biggest things I tell anybody. It’s like, just make sure you’re getting that back brief from the person. Make sure they, you know, have them say, spit back to me. What those orders are or what those directives are.
John Berry: Yeah. I think as an officer, I wasted way too much time on the operations order trying to make it perfect and not spending enough time on the back briefs to make sure that the team understood, the leaders understood the plan and the rehearsals. And it seems back briefs are almost as important as the rehearsals, because it really gets you to have that meeting of the minds. Do we understand each other? If is anything unclear, and I have failed at that time and time again. And look, that’s one of the first things you learn as a young officer is troop leading procedures, how to give that operations order, how to do the back brief, how to do many rehearsals. And yet in the business world, it’s tough to do because it’s tough to find the time.
Eric Isham: Yeah, well, you got to find the time though. But I agree with you. You know, it’s figuring that that piece out. So, you know, I don’t have a silver bullet on that. It’s something I’m working on. I’m working on it personally. Every day, right when I’m meeting with folks, just stopping at the end of those meetings, like, hey, I want to make sure that, hey, everybody’s got clear directives. What you’re going to go work on from this meeting, and are there anything that we’ve talked about in this that somebody said, like, I don’t really know what you mean by that, right? Because it’s going to come up right in a small organization like this, there’s no way you’re going to hide from those things. It’s going to come up. So I think taking the time to just make sure that we got clarity on mission is important.
John Berry: So how many direct reports do you have and what positions do they hold?
Eric Isham: I’ve got seven. So I’ve got a couple of folks that are directly reporting in on the market. I’ve got a digital marketing person and I’ve got a creative marketing person. I’ve got a client experience that she oversees. A large portion of the folks that are working with our clients. I’ve got a sales leader that’s overseeing all of our sales folks as well. We’ve got an operations person that’s overseeing the larger operations at the organization. We’ve got finance, and then I’ve got product as well. So that’s seven. And then the president reports in to me, which would be eight as well. But she oversees some of that back-end stuff too.
John Berry: The president the second in command?
Eric Isham: President’s first in command. Right. So that’s where I get my marching orders. We did not have a great sales month last month, and she’s like, well, I know what you’re going to be doing. You can put your CEO title right there for a second. You’re going to go be doing sales. And so the past few days I’ve jumped back in. I’ve only been energized by it as well because it’s natural. It’s a core talent of mine that I can get in there and work those things. So you know, you gotta sometimes do those things and, you know, step back into the gap and make sure that it’s being done the right way.
John Berry: So prior to founding OMNICOMMANDER, you worked in the consulting space for about ten years. Why’d you leave?
Eric Isham: I don’t know. It was a little less than ten years. I did consulting. I started a consulting company. I was working with fintech providers on how to spin up sales teams, business development. I did some mergers and acquisitions for a company. I enjoyed that, but at the end of the day, I realized that I can’t scale myself in an effective way that I want to for the success I was looking for without having products and services. Right. So I certainly could have hired additional consultants and, you know, could have got to some level of success with that. But I really always wanted to have a product. I always wanted to have a service that I could scale on. And that’s what we’ve done here at OMNICOMMANDER. So again, when I was doing a lot of public speaking at that time, too, and one of the questions I kept getting, I’d say, hey, you know, you’re an expert on payments, who do you like for this? Or you, you know, you know, all the cause or the internet banking providers. You know what? Who do you go to for websites? And I was always like, oh, I’m sure you got somebody local that can handle that, or your core processor can handle that or whoever. And, you know, eventually I was like, I need to go and see what’s going on with this. What are these people talking about? And I started looking at it and I was like, oh s***, here’s my product. Here it is. Right? Slap me right in the face. I was like, I know good design. I can do this.
Eric Isham: And so I taught myself some rudimentary coding. Right? So I don’t want any of my developers to hear me say that because they make fun of the early websites that I built, but I taught myself how to do it. I called some of the credit unions. I was like, hey, listen, your website looks like s***. Why don’t you let me build you a new one? And they’re like, okay, cool, let’s do it. And so I did that for a while, and I really fell in love with it. I fell in love with having a product that lived out there in the world. And so that’s why, you know, I kept the consulting business for a while. I had that probably six months in at OMNICOMMANDER, and I was working with some other fintechs. And the day finally came where I was like, I’m going to have to fire everybody, my clients so I can 100% focus on OMNICOMMANDER so we can really get the attention and oxygen it needs. And that’s a tough day. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to do that or not where you’ve had multiple different things, but I made that decision. I discussed that with my wife, and I said, okay, I’m going to close down the consulting business. And I had to make those calls to the clients. And they were kind of like, wait a minute, I don’t understand. I was like, yeah, we’re not going to do business together anymore because I’ve got I’ve got this other entity that I really need to focus on.
John Berry: Well, and at the end of the day, you got to do what’s right for you. And so often we’re stuck somewhere, and we just want to stay there because it’s more comfortable to stay. But you had the courage to step out and it’s gone extremely well for you. Now I want to take you back to that. But this wasn’t you know, OMNICOMMANDER was not your first entrepreneurial experience. In fact, this goes back to elementary school. So tell us about your first experience. Yeah.
Eric Isham: I’ve always, I mean, since I can remember, very early on been an entrepreneur. So, I don’t know if you remember the game where you take the pencils and you’re, like, flicking them and you’re trying to break the other guy’s pencil. Oh, yeah?
John Berry: Yeah, you hold it. Yeah, yeah.
Eric Isham: Yeah, you hold it and you’re doing the thing. Yeah. So that was big at my elementary school, so I got my grandmother to take me to the store, and I bought a box of pencils. Right. So this probably was like $0.50 back then. And you got ten in there or whatever. And then I would sell them for a quarter per pencil in the bathroom. Right. So boys bathroom. That’s where we were in there doing that thing at. And so that was my first business where I was starting to bring in boxes and boxes of pencils, and I would be selling them for a quarter because people had changed, because it’s like quarter for milk and lunch. And so we had that, you know, I had a market there. We had a, you know, a desire people were wanting to play this game all the time and they had the cash. So I did that for a while. I probably did that for a couple of years where I was selling pencils, and I started making some bracelets. I was doing like these beaded bracelets, things that I was selling as well at school. And I mean, I probably, started over a dozen businesses since then, right? I’ve done all kinds of things, from little machines, like a vending machine business that I did, and I realized I didn’t like going around picking up, you know, that money.
Eric Isham: And even it was good. It just wasn’t really scalable in the way that I wanted it to, doing other types of businesses as well over the years. And I’ve just always, it’s always excited me. I’ve always looked at how can I create value and how can I you know, make more money as a young entrepreneur. And it was always like, okay, I can do this. You know, I think I had three jobs in high school. So I was bagging groceries. I was also doing the groceries at the commissary. I don’t know if you remember that, but I go out there, work for tips, and then I’d go to McDonald’s and work in the off hours from that. So I’ve just always had that kind of work mentality and then filling in the gaps with other little businesses and hobbies that I had along the way.
John Berry: And you’ve also been involved in a non-profit. Tell us about that.
Eric Isham: Yeah, so I started a non-profit a million years ago. My grandmother passed away, who raised me, from diabetes, and then my younger cousin, who I’m very close to. He got diagnosed with diabetes, too, and it’s really prevalent, my family. So I was like, you know, I’d like to do something about this. And so we created The 216 Foundation. We raised money for diabetes research. And so we would have these black tie galas in Cincinnati, and we would have other events to where we would raise money, and then we would take that. And we were purchasing equipment for islet cell research. And it was a lot of fun. You know, that’s a lot of personal enjoyment and satisfaction out of that. But running a non-profit is a lot of time, right? That was the one thing I didn’t realize. You know, talking about failures. I didn’t realize how much running a non-profit because I had a full-time job at the time, how much time and energy that was. But I think it was personally gratifying for everyone that was involved. I had a great volunteer staff for years and years and years that we would get together and we would throw those events, and we raised quite a good bit of money for diabetes research during the time that we ran that.
John Berry: This takes us to the after-action review. The three examples of great leadership, and the three examples of horrible leadership that you learned, either as a military officer, as an enlisted soldier, or as a business owner.
Eric Isham: You know, one of the examples of great leadership is it’s always by example, right? So, like you, I was in combat arms. You get a lot of alpha type people. They’re very straightforward, very forceful. And, you know, I’ve always had confidence growing up, but it didn’t really unlock until I got into the military, and I had a drill instructor that, you know, really instilled in me that I could do more physically than I ever thought I could prior to the military. And he did that by example. He had hurt his leg or something like that. But we were going out for like a ten miler or something. He was there. He was leading from the front and he’s like, hey, we can do that. And I just, I learned through those experiences multiple, multiple times that I was physically able to do a lot more than I ever would have thought that I could have prior to that. Which, you know, obviously that instills some confidence. I’ll tell you a quick story, a great story about again, back into confidence and being bold. I was competing for junior NCO of the year–soldier of the year–and I had a platoon sergeant. And one of the things that you have to do is you got to knock on the door to go in and report to the, I think, it was the command sergeant major at the time.
Eric Isham: And he says, all right, I was a specialist. All right, specialist. I show him. He’s like, now when you knock on that door, I want you to knock on that f****** door. Right? I was like, okay, you know, you get up there, I boom, I hammer that door. Command Sergeant Majors come in. He’s just looking at me. He’s like. I’m like, specialist eyes. Show him, you know, reporting. He’s looking at me. He’s like, okay. And I won that, right? I won junior NCO of the year. But I always remember that knocking. And it was just so important to me. And I’ve taken that with me. Right. Being very confident, being bold, being loud. So again, even if you’re wrong, you know, people still know that you were there. And I’ve always carried that with me. And I think the third example of leadership, great leadership that I learned. And this is all I’m using military for all this stuff. It’s kind of where my head’s at right now is courage. And that is doing the things that I think if we were sitting here calmly talking about it, John, especially today, we probably like I’m not doing that. But, you know, seeing the guys doing things and you’re like, Holy s***, we’re doing this right. And just having that courage to stand up and to lean into tough situations, that I think if I had never joined the military, I wouldn’t have the courage to do some of the things.
Eric Isham: And that’s led into the entrepreneurial side. Right? Because, you know, we all know what the ultimate failure is. And as long as that doesn’t happen, you’re still moving, then you can you can live to fight again. So I think having those three leadership things that I took from the military have encouraged being bold and really having the motivation, the understanding what I can do physically that I didn’t know before that that means a lot to me. I can remember multiple leaders in the Army, both as enlisted and as an officer, that really drove that in me. And again, I was blessed to be in combat arms, both sides as a combat medic and as an armor officer. So I was around a lot of strong NCOs and commanders that I mean, it was, you know, that type of thing. And just like, okay, right. You know, three examples of failure, I would say all mine. Right. You know, I think, like, as I said earlier, trying to throw bodies at problems and not sitting down and solving them in a more logical way. It’s a costly problem and it’s unsustainable. So I would caution anybody listening before you make a hire to fix something, see if there’s another way that you can fix that through software or through better processes.
Eric Isham: I think another big failure for me, again, touch on this earlier is just not communicating as clearly as I think that I am, and taking the time to make sure that a somebody that I’m giving some directives to or talking about an idea really understands what it is that I mean, when I’m talking about that. And then the third one and this is the biggest one, and I still struggle with this to some degree, and that is not letting go of people fast enough. If you identify somebody is not the right fit for the organization anymore, if the organization has outgrown that person. There’s the old adage that the people that got you here won’t get you there if there’s not another place for them in the organization that makes fit, you need to offload them from the organization. And every time I’ve done that, eventually I drag my feet on those. I’ll self-admit that they’ve been relieved and we’ve been relieved. Right? So those are the three failures that I’ve had that I’m working on communication and, you know, over hiring and then that last one, right. Knowing when it’s not a good fit for the organization anymore and making that, you know, making that move.
John Berry: Yeah. That’s one of the toughest ones, because usually, usually this is a loyal team member who gives it their all every day. And you simply have outgrown their capabilities. And I always say, if you’re not growing with us, you’re not going with us. And most people get it. But it’s just like the military. You can’t stay a captain forever if you don’t make major, you know, after, what was it, six, eight years? You’re out. And that’s just the way it is in a growing organization. Now. There are big corporate organizations and big bureaucratic organizations where you can maintain the same skill level and hold that position for 25, 30 years. But it just doesn’t work that way in a rapidly growing company. And I’ve had discussions with team members who said, well, why did you wait so long to terminate me? You knew I was failing, and I’ve been miserable and I’ve been failing you, and I feel bad about how I’m failing the team. Why did you wait three months to do this? And, you know, look, when it happens, I always like to help that person find another place where they can be successful. I like to give them a good reference. I you know, I usually pay severance. I’m trying to when we’ve outgrown someone and they’re, you know, they just don’t meet the needs of the team anymore. I don’t want it to be a bad experience. I want them to be a happy alum who’s going to refer clients to us, to cases, to us, who says, you know what, that was a great two, three, five, ten years of my life that I really enjoyed.
John Berry: I love the team. And for some of them, too, it’s, you know, yeah, they have a skill set that is valuable in the market. Help us help you. And I encourage my team to go interview other places. If you think there’s a better opportunity for you or a better fit, go find it. Look, I’m here to help you on this journey. As a leader. I want you to succeed. That is my moral obligation. And if I can’t give you the success you want here, then let’s find a place. Because sometimes we have people that outgrow our organization. They get their PhD, they have a major accomplishment. And they realize, like, they want to pivot. They want to do something else and sometimes something bigger and better. And, you know, I really want them to leave on the right terms. And unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen. But if both parties are adults about it saying, hey, look, it’s been a great run. Uh, it’s done. Let’s talk about how we can move forward and how you’re going to move forward and what we can do to help you. I think that’s, you know, that that’s an easier way to do it than to let it die on the vine. But I’ve been in the same position where I have let team members stay on too long, and it’s been a disservice to the organization, and it’s been a disservice to them. And as a leader, that’s where you absolutely fail. So yeah, I think you I think you nailed it with that one, Eric.
Eric Isham: That last one–real quick on that last one though, when you’ve got somebody and they’ve potentially outgrown their position here or the organization, I’m always so proud. And I’ve got lots and lots of people that I’ve worked with over the years, and to watch them flourish and grow and do great things out there in society, at new companies and really be successful. It’s one of the special treats for me when I see people that are leading other organizations that I’ve managed before, that I hire or that I coached or that I mentored, and they go out there and do that, it really is an incredible thing. And you said it doesn’t always end that way. We’re often not, it really doesn’t. It’s just a tough thing. But when it does, that’s a fun thing. It really is. It’s an exciting thing to see people out there go out and crush it.
John Berry: Yeah. It’s no different than having those junior soldiers that long after your military career is over. You see them surpass everything that you’ve ever done in the military. It’s the same way in business. And it’s such a great feeling. It’s why I like seeing your kids succeed. Right? It’s like seeing your kids score the winning touchdown. It’s like, wow. Like I got to be a part of this leader’s development. And that’s so fulfilling. So Eric, thank you so much for sharing your journey on Veteran Led. All of your information will be in the show notes. But where can Veterans learn more about OMNICOMMANDER or connect with Eric Isham?
Eric Isham: You know what, go to OMNICOMMANDER.com. You can learn more about OMNICOMMANDER. If there’s any Veterans out there that are working at banks or credit unions, definitely go to OMNICOMMANDER.com. I’d love for you to see the products and services that we’ve got. Love to learn more about your financial institutions. And I do a lot of stuff on LinkedIn. So if you just look up Eric Isham, there’s a few of us out there. None of them are as handsome as me. So look up Eric Isham. You’ll see the big smiling face at you there with the OMNICOMMANDER behind it. That’s me, but yeah, love to connect again. I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn, communicating and connecting with the greater community there. Spend a lot of time with Veterans. We do a lot of things with Veterans here in Nashville, Santa Rosa Beach. So if you want to reach out and learn more about that, check it out. And again, John, I really appreciate the time. This was fun. And, look forward to seeing you here in Nashville in a couple of months.
John Berry: Awesome. And just for our listeners that are listening to this on a podcast, Eric does kind of look like The Wolf of Wall Street when I met him. Same hair.
Eric Isham: Get with me offline. I’ll tell you some fun DiCaprio stories, when we’re not being filmed.
John 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 earn. 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.
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