In this special episode, the tables are turned as John Berry, your regular host and Veteran leadership authority, takes the guest seat to discuss his new book, Veteran Led. But this isn’t just any book launch – it’s a return to the very roots of our podcast, setting us on a year-long mission to explore and share military leadership lessons and Veteran success stories. John reveals the inspiration behind his book and shares his philosophy on personal growth and mission-driven leadership, emphasizing the vital role of hiring Veterans and harnessing their proven leadership skills to cultivate a strong, resilient organizational culture. Reflecting on his military career, John introduces the “survive, thrive, and dominate” concept, inspired by the Army’s “crawl, walk, run” methodology, emphasizing the importance of preparedness, teamwork, and self-determination. He reminds us that while we may not control life’s events, we always control who we become.
Veteran Led is now available on Amazon or contact John directly at John.Berry@BerryLaw.com for a signed copy.
John Berry
I don’t want to do that. And so I quit and I said, this isn’t what I want. And I quit on my dream. And after that, quitting became so painful that I never wanted to quit again.
Brandon Aksamit
Welcome to Veteran Led. I am your guest host, Brandon Aksamit, joined by your normal host, which is John Berry. John joining us as he has recently written a book that will be released on Veterans Day. And he’s been your host for the past nearly 100 episodes of the podcast. So, John, first off, how are you feeling being on the other side of the podcast? Not in the host, but in the guest role as we’re about to talk about your book.
John Berry
I think for anyone that starts anything like the podcast, the first few episodes were bad and you get better, but you have to be willing to suck. And that is the genesis of the book. I started the book three years ago. It was bad. I didn’t like it. We rewrote it and rewrote it. I worked with all sorts of different editors and ghost writers and all these different people, and I didn’t like the product, so I just scrapped the whole thing, started over, rewrote it, found some great editors, and here we are today.
Brandon Aksamit
And I think a lot of people who maybe don’t know you closely, they see you on the billboards, the lawyer, the Veteran who served for two decades. But you’re a pretty interesting person and I think that speaks to your personality when you say, hey, I’m going to write a book about my experiences in the military and how that translates to success in business.
Brandon Aksamit
So, do you remember when that moment was where it’s like, I think I’ll write a book?
John Berry
Well, it was three years ago, and I remember thinking I needed to capture the leadership lessons to develop a leadership manual for Berry Law. So I was excited to do it. And as I started to write the book, it morphed into several different things. And I was at one point I was like, do I really want to do this?
John Berry
Because we have a great eighth figure business, right? But there are nine figure businesses. There are billion dollar businesses. Our business is not that significant. And my military experience, while it was important to my development, I have a lot of friends who served a lot more, did a lot more exciting things. And I thought, is this the book I write?
John Berry
And luckily through, JP Morgan Chase’s, CEO Circle program, through Bunker Labs, I met with a guy, a Special Forces Sergeant Major, and he’s like, man, you’ve got more experiences than most people that write books, he’s like, write it. And so, through that cohort, that group, they inspired me to publish it and to move forward with it.
John Berry
But initially this was just going to be an internal document, our leadership manual. But the more people I talked to, they said, John, would you coach me? Do you coach on this stuff? And I thought, man, I’ve wasted so much money on coaches that were absolutely worthless. Like, I don’t want to be in that position. Plus I owe it to my team to be fully present, to give my energy and my coaching to my senior executives, to my best lawyers, to make my best people even better.
John Berry
So I didn’t want to coach people, but I wanted to get the lessons out there. When I started sharing those lessons with some of my friends who were Veterans and high performers, we found that we had a lot in common, and a lot of those lessons really resonated with them. And the more I shared those lessons, which were mostly failures, the more they would share their failures.
John Berry
And we found that when you hang out with winners, it’s okay to talk about your losses and to talk about what you learn, and then to climb on the shoulders of giants and get to the next level.
Brandon Aksamit
You mentioned to it the process about three years starting, stopping, not sure if you should move forward. I believe there’s around 20 chapters in the book. What is that process like as you’re going through that editing process of determining what’s the most significant and what needs to be in the book?
John Berry
Well, I mean, to give you the big picture, right? I’m trying cases. I’m running a law firm, I’ve got a family. And I’m thinking, you know, this just isn’t a high priority. There’s not a high ROI on writing books. And so it just I didn’t want to take the time to do it, but it kept coming back and it kept coming back to me in a way that, like, I’m quitting this project and I think back to the, you know, the first time I ever quit anything, which was when I was playing football at college of
John Berry
William & Mary. Now that was my dream to play college football and I worked my ass off to get there. I walked on, I wasn’t good enough to start. I got injured my second year, and I was told that I would have to sit out a year, and I thought about sitting out a year, and back then you’d hold the coaches cord and the coaches have these cords.
John Berry
They’re on the sidelines. I don’t want to do that. And so I quit and I said, this isn’t what I want. And I quit on my dream. Right. And after that, quitting became so painful that I never wanted to quit again. So yeah, as you learn in the book, I failed out my first time I went to Ranger school and I got injured.
John Berry
It took me six months to recover, but there was no question I was going back because that pain of quitting is just so intense. So I was not going to let some book, right? This thing. Like this. I’m not going to let that beat me. Right. Like I’m not going to let this book beat me. So I decided I would write the book and it would be, for some people, a gift. And for some people, probably a great way to relax and maybe even laugh with me or laugh at me.
Brandon Aksamit
Well, and you hit on so many personal experiences to the one about quitting you just shared, I think, one that a lot of people could use in everyday life. But is there a specific chapter or topic when you look back at the book and you say that that’s the one that I’m most proud of. That is what epitomizes me to my core as I shared that information in the book.
John Berry
Nothing specific, but when I talk about the Grim Reapers Alpha Company, one five Cav first Cavalry Division, that was my first platoon and I can remember as a platoon leader showing up and being so proud to be part of that organization. Most of my noncommissioned officers were combat Veterans from Desert Storm, and they showed up every day, fired up with, you know, a cup of coffee in hand, getting ready to do PT.
John Berry
And I never cared whether I was going to let my company commander down, whether I was going to get a bad OER. What I cared about was letting down those noncommissioned officers who invested their time in training me, but also those junior soldiers who were looking up to me to say, this is what an officer is. So, you know, for me, that was really, I think when I talk about those moments in the book, those take me back to where I want to go. As I look at my entire legal career, my entire business career, where I seek to go back every single time, is to be that second lieutenant showing up at that new infantry unit and being part of that championship team where everybody cared about the success of the team and we knew that our mission mattered.
Brandon Aksamit
Well, if you haven’t picked up on it yet, John is a passionate, mission based person, and I wanted to ask you about your missioned focus leadership within the book. How does that approach apply to Berry Law within the business as well when you take that from the military?
John Berry
Well, I took the shortcut. I hire Veterans. Veterans come with leadership ability, proven leadership ability when you hire them. So I knew that brand is the foundation for a culture. And so if I could build a brand based on the military experience, based on what every Veteran knows, then I could build the culture I wanted on top of that.
John Berry
And so it starts off with that simple brand understanding of the Veteran, America’s greatest resource. And then on top of that, we build by building a leadership team with, you know, at one point, my general counsel was a former Marine infantry guy who did the funded law program. My CIO is a former Army colonel. Right now, our chief operating officer was a major general in the Air Force, fighter pilot.
John Berry
And so we’ve taken all that leadership together, along with some phenomenal attorneys, and built something great and built something where everybody strives for excellence, where we hold a high standard and we try to raise it even higher. And we’ve got the right team, the right culture, and it is a blessing every day to be able to serve with my team members.
Brandon Aksamit
And I think one of those examples you talked about in your book, carrying over the military leadership to here in Berry Law, the scoreboards, accountability. Can you give us some insight, which is talked about in the book, about how that is translated to further success within your business?
John Berry
So anybody that’s served in the military knows about go no go. They know about the time when you’re challenged and you have to qualify, you have to meet a standard. And if you don’t meet that standard, then you’re a failure. And you usually retrain until you achieve the standard. Right. And so for me, it was all about setting high standards and achieving them.
John Berry
And those scoreboards that we have let people know what the score is. I cannot imagine going through life day after day and not knowing whether I made a difference, whether that day I won or lost. And look, some days I lose. Some days the organization would be better off if I didn’t show up and I get that.
John Berry
But when we have a scoreboard that is public facing, what I mean public facing, not client facing, but back in the areas of the office, the 80 inch screens that are flashing the top metrics, the leaderboards, people know who’s number one. And winners they got to know whether they’re number one and they can’t stand it when they’re not.
John Berry
And so what happens is that becomes infectious. The right people stay and they want to be at the top of the leaderboard. And the wrong people who are not competitive don’t want to be here. And that’s okay, right? This isn’t for everyone. But the way I see it is, you know, when I was a commander, I was told by, you know, my second deployment as a company commander, you’re charged with protecting America’s sons and daughters. You know, as a business leader, we are responsible for America’s sons and daughters to give them a bigger, better future. And if we fail and they don’t achieve their objectives, or worse, they can’t feed their families because we as a leader fail. That’s on us. So those leaderboards matter because people need to know whether they’re winning or losing.
John Berry
And if they’re losing, it shouldn’t be a surprise at the end of the quarter or the end of the year when they say you’re not performing. In the military we knew whether we passed the physical fitness test, we knew whether we passed land nav, that we knew whether we had made the hit the target or whether we had missed.
John Berry
And for me, it’s just cruel not to do that. I can’t imagine being in an environment or an organization where that doesn’t exist. People talk about toxic leadership all the time. Oh, it’s so toxic. Let me tell you something. For me, toxic leadership is being around someone who is so passive, who doesn’t care about the team enough to hold people to the standard. To me, that’s toxic leadership.
Brandon Aksamit
And I think that’s very interesting you hit on that, the whole being offended in today’s society and you talk about in the book that really you caring enough to hold a person to a certain standard is, is actually a form of tough love. Because if you didn’t, you know, what’s it matter if you’re just allowing someone to fail? And I think that’s something that a lot of people need to maybe have a better understanding and grasp of.
John Berry
Yeah, look, if you want to take care of people, I learned this. You don’t coddle soldiers, you challenge them if you really want to take care of them. That’s how you take care of them. You challenge them. You don’t call them. You don’t put your arm around. You don’t have sleeping rooms. You take them to the higher level that you know that they can achieve
John Berry
and they’re not there yet and, you know, you can get there. And as a leader, that is the most rewarding thing. It’s just like watching your son score a touchdown or your or your daughter win the spelling bee or whatever it is, seeing that leader develop and seeing that potential, morph into what you knew it could be, there is nothing greater.
John Berry
So when I look at yes, we are hard, we push our team to be the best, and we hire people who are either the best or have the potential to be the best and once again, the best in our organization. Right? That believe in the metrics because we’ve hired a lot of people that give lip service to it.
John Berry
It’s kind of like the people that almost join the military, right? Oh, I was going to join the military but and this kind of thing. Well we really love, this whole concept but I actually don’t want to do all these things. I don’t like the metrics. I don’t like that I’m not in the leaderboard. Oh, you don’t not like that you’re on the leaderboard. Then why don’t you do the things that you need to do to be on that leaderboard? And, you know, not a lot of people will do it.
Brandon Aksamit
We haven’t even hit on this yet on the book. But sort of the motto throughout is survive, thrive and then dominate. Walk us through the process of first surviving, then thriving, which allows you to then dominate.
John Berry
So I took that from the Army training methodology crawl, walk, run. Okay. And in life we need to survive, right? Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If we’re not able to have food, water, shelter and our basic needs aren’t met, then it’s really hard to thrive to get really good, right? And so I always say that you survive as an individual, right?
John Berry
You thrive as a team, a well-functioning team, and you dominate as an organization. And that’s the one thing that you know, I really got some great insights about in the business world. I always thought Big Army was so dumb. I hated Big Army. Everything was slow. It’s a big bureaucracy. And of course, bureaucracies hate heroism, right? I mean, they love it in the battlefield, but not when you’re in garrison.
John Berry
And so I really did not I just, I just couldn’t wrap my brain around that. And, you know, for me, domination as a large organization, you look at the United States military, the most powerful military in the history of the world. How is it so dominant? Right. And it’s really even though it’s big, it’s agile and there’s just brilliant things.
John Berry
And so I started picking this stuff apart, realizing this is amazing. And I go back to 2016 when I went to go visit my friend Daniel Alarik, the founder of Grunt Style. And we’re sitting down over lunch and he’s telling me like, and first of all, he was very generous at the time. So I’d love to meet you.
John Berry
I have a business. I’d love to talk. He said, yeah, come on, come on down. I’m happy to talk to you. And so Daniel are sitting there. I’m like, well, so how do you do this? And we were talking about like, HR issues. He’s like, oh, well I use the Army counseling form. And, you know, Daniel, a former drill sergeant, was basically doing everything by the numbers, all the forms, everything that he had learned in the military, all the thought processes he had incorporated into his company at the time, Grunt Style.
John Berry
And I thought, wow, that’s ingenious. And the more I thought about that, the more I realized that it works and how brilliant our military is, even though it is a large bureaucratic organization.
Brandon Aksamit
Looking at your leadership style, too, and having an understanding from reading this book, I think something that’s refreshing about it is, you know, you said it here today. You’re not afraid to admit when you’re wrong. And you even say in the book, hey, this may not have all of the answers, but this is what I know that this information will have and will provide for you.
Brandon Aksamit
So when you look at the military experience that led you to develop this sort of philosophy and understanding, how has that served you most throughout your career?
John Berry
Well, I think for all of us Veterans, our military experience is something that you take the good, you leave the bad. It wasn’t all great. We’ve all been through CIF, Central Issue Facility, where you wait in line to get your gear, half of it you’re never going to use, and then you got to clean it and turn it back in, and they won’t accept it.
John Berry
I mean, that’s there’s things like that that just drive you crazy. But it’s the people, the leaders, the mentors, the dog faced soldiers, the people that counted on you and the people that you counted on. I mean, that’s where I draw my energy from. Just those experiences were so amazing. It it’s not even things that I can really events that happened or things that I can describe.
John Berry
It’s the feeling I get when I see, you know, some of those, those old friends that I haven’t seen for 20 years and it’s exactly the same. And it’s just that closeness, that camaraderie that feeling that this is my tribe, you know, that these are my people and I’m one of them. And I’m so proud to be a part of this organization.
John Berry
I’m very proud to be a Veteran, probably more proud to be a Veteran than I was when I was in the military, where we were all kind of, you know, we all complain and the soldiers not complaining, something’s wrong. But getting out and then looking back and being able to see the amazing lessons that I learned, the amazing people I served with, and then going into the civilian world and realizing how much better Veterans are than most civilians.
00:15:20:23 – 00:15:34:05
Brandon Aksamit
As you were answering that question, had a thought for you. To those of you considering joining the military today with your understanding of where it’s at and what’s going on, on a global scale, what advice would you give someone considering enlisting?
John Berry
Whether you’re going to enlist or you want to become an officer, do it. Look, the military will always go through changes, and we know that the pendulum swings back and forth with budgets and certain, behavioral traits. And sometimes the military over corrects, but it’s the military that you make it and you get the opportunity to serve your country, to raise your hand and swear that solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and to give back, to do something that gives your life meaning,
John Berry
who would give up that opportunity? And so for me, I see it as a great opportunity, a great blessing. I, you know, you see the memes that say, oh, must be nice to get Veteran disability benefits. And the guy says, yeah, that recruiting office was open to everyone. And so it’s, you know, the benefits are great and the educational benefits are phenomenal.
John Berry
But I think of my best experiences, it was meeting with the leaders. Now some of it was traveling, you know, while on leave, being young and being able to travel and have some of those great experiences. But what it comes down to is I had the opportunity to serve, and I got to serve my country, and I got to meet other people who had the same
John Berry
like minded people who also wanted to serve, to give back, who wanted to have meaning in their lives and who wanted to be the best because they knew that in combat, second place is death. And the translation to running a law firm is second place in a jury trial is a loss. So, you know, we don’t accept second place trophies here.
John Berry
Yeah, I stole that from We Were Soldiers Once and Young, I know. Second place trophies don’t matter because if a client comes to us and I don’t care whether it’s a Veteran who’s been denied VA disability benefits and now they’re homeless, or they’re worried about bankruptcy, or it’s someone who’s been in a huge accident and the insurance company won’t pay, or someone’s been falsely accused of a crime, they come to us and say, please help me.
John Berry
And I noticed this when I came off active duty and former soldiers were, you know, Veterans that I served with were coming back to me. And because I was their commander or their platoon leader, I had a position of authority and they thought that I still knew everything. I didn’t know anything back then. I remember I’m in my early 20s, and I got a guy in his 30s asking me whether he should get a divorce.
John Berry
Hey, sir, should I get I don’t know, I didn’t even know how to date, really. I mean, you know, but that’s the thing is, when you’re in a leadership position, you know, you have a duty to take care of your team, and it never goes away. And people that see you in that position of authority will come back to you time and time again.
John Berry
So as a lawyer, yeah, I saw the great opportunity to represent Veterans because Veterans are the best clients. You know, they understand chain of command, they understand teamwork, and they understand trust. Right. Hey, I came to you. I’m going to trust you with this. And they understand that’s a burden to me. If you come to me and say this is an important case, everything in my life depends on it.
John Berry
John, will you take this case? It’s heavy, it’s heavy, and you feel it in your soul. But that’s the same feeling you have when you’re in charge of soldiers. It’s that heavy feeling that that glorious burden of command where you know that the decisions you make will affect someone’s life forever.
Brandon Aksamit
When you talk about affecting people’s lives, this book first off for Veterans, what do you hope a Veteran who reads this book will take away?
John Berry
I hope that every Veteran who reads this, reads this book is like, yeah, I knew that. I hope what they take away is we already know everything in this book. We already know these leadership lessons. We learned them, we lived them. We just need to apply them.
Brandon Aksamit
Flip side non Veterans when they read this book, what can they take away?
John Berry
Don’t be stupid. Hire Veterans. Your company is failing right now because you didn’t hire Veterans. You didn’t hire people who have the intestinal fortitude to complete the mission. You didn’t hire people who care enough about the team to go the extra mile to make them successful. So if you read the book and you’re not a Veteran, you might want to think about some of these principles because every Veteran knows these principles and knows how to apply them.
Brandon Aksamit
John, your favorite part relating to the after action review, and this one I took directly from your book, I believe it was the Hip Pocket Training chapter, but this is the quote you put in there. You only live one life. You have one opportunity to become the person you want to be, and you won’t become that person unless you deliberately and relentlessly train to become that person.
Brandon Aksamit
Just curious, the genesis from that and how you came to that understanding, because I think that really does speak a lot to what we’re seeing here on this episode today, in the personality and the energy that you bring each and every day.
John Berry
Well, first of all, I stole that quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson and made it worse, right? Made it longer and less concise and precise and but look, that is God’s gift to man is we’re here on this earth with the opportunity to do great things. But we get to decide who we become. We don’t get to decide what happens to us, but we always get to decide who we become.
John Berry
And we have to be intentional about it. From how we treat our bodies to how we treat our families, to how we treat our coworkers, to how we treat our soldiers, to how we defeat our enemies. We decide.
Brandon Aksamit
Book is coming out Veterans Day, November 11th. I’m sure there’s a long list. Anyone at top of mind he’d like to thank?
John Berry
First of all, I’d like to thank my father who made all of this possible, and he’s mentioned throughout the book a phenomenal leader and lawyer. Right. He was the one that that broke the mold, where a lot of times lawyers are technicians. They’re not leaders. He was both a lawyer and a leader. Had his famous case known as a Green Beret Affair, Vietnam, where he subpoenaed sitting President Richard Nixon, in an effort to deal with a in an effort to defend, successfully defend his clients who are members of the Fifth Special forces and who are heroes to him.
John Berry
And as we get older, I learned from another Veteran, his name is Dan Sullivan. As we get older, we get to choose who we will be a hero to. And so as I think about that quote, it’s really deciding who are heroes are and how we can be heroes to them, and how we can live the life that we choose to live.
Brandon Aksamit
Best lesson you learned, and perhaps the most personal growth you’ve seen throughout this process.
John Berry
It’s cliche, but never quit. Never quit. I didn’t want to. You know, I got bored of the book. I didn’t want to do the book, but. I knew that it could help some people, not everybody and some people will hate it. And, you know, look, for some people this will make a great place to put your, your coffee or your bourbon and it’ll stay there.
John Berry
But, you know, that’s really, you know, in the end, we all fail. We all find reasons to not do something right, and everything looks like failing until it’s not. And so, you know, as I wrote the book and there’s still I still do, you know, there’s still parts that I would improve upon if I could take five years or ten years, but at some point you have to pull the trigger.
John Berry
At some point you have to say, I have the momentum. I’ve written this book, I’m going to share it with the world. And you know what? Some people may not like it. They may come back and say bad things, but I don’t make my decisions based on the opinions of other people. I make my decisions based on the people that I want to be a hero to. And that is why the book is here and that’s why it’s done. Never quit.
Brandon Aksamit
Never quitting. The best lesson you learned? What was the hardest lesson you learned?
John Berry
Keep your mouth shut. You know, the hardest lesson is feedback is a gift. It took me till I was about 40 years old because my ego got in the way. I thought I was so smart, and I can remember when I went from being a line infantry platoon leader. My next job was, support platoon leader, and the Bravo company commander called me and said, John, I just want to let you know like you’re going to screw things up here because you know nothing about logistics.
John Berry
And he was right. But I’m like, oh, no, no, I’m not going to screw up. And it wasn’t till we’re at the National Training Center and I’m on a mission running log pack where I get no kidding, they change the LRP, the logistics rally point. So all of a sudden I’m off my map and I’m going to a different terrain feature, which we can’t name now because the names were kind of politically incorrect that they call it the National Training Center.
John Berry
And I’m up there and I’m on the wrong mountain and nobody’s going to get chow. Nobody’s going to get a resupply of ammo. We’re going to fail the mission, you know, because of me, right? And you know, he was right. That company commander’s right. You know, you’re going to fail, you’re not trained for this yet.
John Berry
And I think that’s the thing is, in life, we’re not trained for everything. We can’t be trained for everything. There’s going to be failures. And we just have to accept that that’s going to happen. Right. And then we have to get over that. And I love the, you know, from the Army strong commercial. It’s not just the strength to get over the obstacle.
John Berry
It’s the strength to get over ourselves. Do get over our own egos. Feedback is a gift and if it hurts, it’s even better.
Brandon Aksamit
Where can they get the book?
John Berry
Where can they get the book? Amazon or if you just want to reach out to me, I’d be happy to send you a signed copy. John.Berry@BerryLaw.com.
Brandon Aksamit
John Berry, Veteran Led, CEO of Berry Law, author of Veteran Led, which is coming out this Veterans Day.
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 earned. 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.
John Berry
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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