There are no victories without setbacks. In this episode of Veteran Led, John Berry reflects on the standout mistakes he has made during the development of his professional career. He emphasizes the importance of discussing failures and shares valuable lessons learned from each mistake. From not investing enough in team development to being too present, John provides insights that can help listeners avoid similar pitfalls in their own endeavors.
John Berry
Welcome fellow veterans. From the tip of the spear to in the rear with the gear, I went from active-duty Infantry to reserve-component logistician. I’m your host, CEO, entrepreneur, trial lawyer, and Lieutenant Colonel Retired, John Berry. The military lessons that I learned helped me grow an eight-figure business that has maintained consistent annual double-digit growth, landing on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies in America every year for the past seven years and has allowed me to continue to serve America’s heroes.
Welcome back to Veteran Led. In this episode, we’re going to talk about the 10 best decisions that my team made that helped us reach the Inc. 5,000 list of fastest-growing companies in America seven years in a row. Now, if you listened to the last episode, you’ll find out pretty quickly that hindsight being 2020, many of our worst mistakes and worst decisions helped us find our best decisions.
Number one, intentionally sequence key hires. When we as a team decided that we were going to grow as an organization, we knew that we didn’t need an executive assistant to handle the smaller tasks. We needed someone to come from a larger organization to take care of the big tasks, to show us how to grow up and become a larger organization, not just to handle the day-to-day problems, but to show us what the future looks like. After we made that hire, then we hired the executive assistant, and that put us in a position to hire the COO to run the organization. And finally, once we had all the pieces in place and we had an entire C-suite, we were able to hire top talent to run each section.
Number two, systematizing the organization. We were one team, one fight, and we needed one system. We started off using EOS or traction which gave us an operating system that everyone could use. And then as we found that it didn’t meet all of our needs, we stopped running it pure and figured out that we could add a vivid vision to that. And then we could add a three-hag, which is a twelve-quarter plan where you can do your backwards planning for three years.
Number three, reduce the number of services provided. At the time, we had six different lines of service, and we were losing money on three of them. We had to decide where we could be great, and we determined that we could be great in three areas, and the rest, we were mediocre. We didn’t want mediocrity, so we cut them.
Number four, investing in my coaching and leadership development. Look, your growth as a leader controls the pace of the organizational growth, and your judgment as a leader is your most important asset. And the way you develop that judgment is through making mistakes, but also through learning through the mistakes of others and through mentorship. So, I had to deliberately grow as a leader.
Number five, invest in training the team and investing in their coaching. Look, if a team member is a cultural fit and they have potential, you have a moral obligation to help them get to the next level so that your company can get to the next level. The company can only grow if the leaders grow and you, as a head of the company, must grow your leaders.
Number six, the decision to expand during COVID. When everyone else got scared, we continued the mission.
Number seven, reinvesting in the company. Every year, we increase our technology spend because we want to invest in productivity. We increase our marketing spend because we believe in investing in our brand. And we invest in every single section of the company, and we increase that investment every single year.
Number eight, develop a leadership track for your team members. Everybody says they want to be a leader, but the truth is not everybody wants to be a leader after they get the opportunity. And so we set up a leadership track that allowed leaders to step down from time to time. I also had a rule that if you were in a key position and we promoted you because we saw leadership potential, leadership became an extracurricular activity. Think about this. It’s just like the kid who wants to go out for the sports team or wants to be on show choir. And their grades start dropping because they’re doing the extracurricular activity. Well, it’s the same way. If you can’t perform and be a leader, then you shouldn’t be in the leader position. You have to first perform and lead by example, and then we will give you the opportunity to lead. But what we found is some people can’t lead. Just because someone is a great technician doesn’t mean they’re going to be a great leader. But also some people who thought they wanted to lead because they wanted the benefits of leading, learned that the juice wasn’t worse than the squeeze for them, and they did not really want to be leaders.
And so we allowed a system where they fearlessly tackle a leadership opportunity, but then gracefully exit it without exiting the organization. And for some of our team members, they found that they could live much more fulfilling, financially successful lives not being on the leadership team or not being in a leadership position.
Number nine, deliberately building a culture of winning. Not only did we keep score on scorecards that we sent to our team members every week, but we had public-facing scoreboards, so everyone knew what the score was and who was winning. We also had section goals set for every single team so that they could win as a team. And we celebrated individual wins every single Friday. We did it quarterly and we did annually as well. Now, to do this, I had to fight off a lot of misconceptions that meritocracies create burnout. But the reality is, burnout is created by a lack of progress and recognition. When our teams feel like they’re progressing, they can do more and they feel fulfilled. When you feel like you’re not making progress and you’re just grinding, that’s when you burn out.
Number 10, new buddy teams. I had to make personal changes, which meant I had to change some of my personal relationships and cut some people out of my life and bring in many like-minded, positive people who are pursuing the same things I was pursuing.
The takeaway is this, is that the best decisions came from the pain and consequences of some of my worst decisions. As we conclude, I want to stress that these were the decisions that worked for me in my organization, and they don’t work for everybody. But the one thing that we can all take away is that the best decisions come from the pain and consequences of our worst decisions. Decisiveness is key. It’s not what we decide, it is that we continually decide. And while not all the actions we take will always be better than taking no action, sometimes we do go backwards. Over time, the more actions we take, the better decisions we make.
After Action Review, let’s quickly recap the 10 best decisions. Number one, deliberately sequence key hires. Number two, systematize the organization. Number three, reduce the number of services the organization provided and be excellent at the ones we provide. Number four, invest in leader coaching. Number five, invest in your team’s coaching. Number six, expand during times of adversity. Don’t stop the mission. Number seven, reinvest in your company. Number eight, develop a leadership track for team members that they can get on and that they can leave gracefully. Number nine, deliberately build a culture of winning. Number 10, develop new buddy teams.
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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