Why Listen:

It is always intimidating speaking with a flag officer. And that all said General Caslen made that so easy. He's such a gracious man. He served for over 43 years in the military, including being Superintendent at West Point. He was at the Pentagon on 911. He snuck back in to assist with fighting fires and ensuring that his colleagues were safe. He has no shortage of unbelievable experiences in the military. After the military, he went on to become the president at the University of South Carolina, so continued leading at the highest level in a civilian capacity. We cover a lot of ground. We talked about mistakes he made in his transition out of the army. You've heard them before, but it's reassuring to hear them from someone at his level. We talk about the differences and similarities between military leadership, academic leadership. We talked about what it was like leading the University of South Carolina through COVID-19, and I appreciate the General's candor. We talked about his recent resignation from the school and just learning about that situation. There are some great takeaways there for anyone aspiring to lead at a high level. Then we talk about comfort zone, and I appreciate, in contrast, a lot of things we talked about previously, this sense of really being out of your comfort zone and being willing to fail, make mistakes, and to recover. 

About Robert:

Robert Caslen is the former President of the University of South Carolina and the President of the University of South Carolina system, as well as the 59th Superintendent of the US Military Academy at West Point. He also serves as HigherEchelon Special Advisor on Executive Leadership and Character Development in his 43 years of military service in the United States Army. He has done far too much to ever encompass in a brief bio and we're going to touch on those things, including an unbelievable role in 911 and many other situations.

Why Listen:

My guest today is an entrepreneur, but not the type that you usually think about. We've had a couple of guests on the show who have done what is called a search fund, which is what I thought I was doing most of my time at Business School. Rather than coming up with an idea, which many people struggle to do and starting your own company, a search fund enables you to raise money, to go out and find a company, usually a mom and pop type shops, something that's doing well that could use a new owner, new management, you purchase that company, and then grow it from there, which is what my guest today did. He purchased a company with 20 employees, and he's grown it to many more than that 20 employees. We talk a lot about that, his advice on search funds and advice on entrepreneurship, what it's like managing outside of the military versus inside of the military. Just really a lot of great advice for those of you considering entrepreneurship. 

About Nic:

Daniel Reese is the CEO of IntellaTriage, the number one provider of tailored nurse triage solutions. After graduating from the Naval Academy, he served on nuclear submarines and then attended Harvard Business School. Daniel acquired IntellaTriage through an entrepreneurial vehicle called a search fund.

Why Listen:

This is a quick short episode in between our normal format of Beyond the Uniform, which is me interviewing military veterans about their civilian career, what they did, how they got there, and advice for how you can do the same. So today’s guest is someone who is not a military veteran, but I love this story. It's something that I did for my company Captivate.ai., and I wanted to share it here as well. I put together a three-minute video that's worth checking out if you like Paul's story. So here's the backstory. I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn, and my company Captivate.ai does a lot with marketing technology. Last week, when I was on LinkedIn, I saw a post by a man called Paul David, who had gotten 200,000 likes on his post, which roughly translates to at least 6 million people who saw this post. So immediately, it caught my eye, and I reached out to Paul. First, I did a little bit of digging to see what he had been doing on social media, and what led to this literally overnight success. He will talk about this in the interview; he posted this at night, went to bed, and woke up, and he had 1000s of people who had messaged him, so I wanted to also reach out to him and learn more about his story. I think this was a great story especially for those of you who are interested in marketing and promoting yourself, your business, your product, whatever it is. It's just interesting for me to hear the stories of how people have managed to get attention. But I also think it's a great reminder of the power of knowing who you are in being authentic and courageously vulnerable. And Paul exhibits all of those things. 

Why Listen:

This is one of the more energizing conversations I've had on the show. In addition to serving in the Air Force, working in the State Department, serving in the CIA, and now running two different companies - one of them designed to fight human trafficking - Nic is needless to say, an amazing human being. As a founder of two companies, his biggest advice to entrepreneurs is to not start a company. We talk about how success is opportunity meeting preparation, and how oftentimes we focus on motivation when we should be focused on preparedness and the reasons why we are doing things. We talk a lot about mission and some of the best tactical advice I've heard from a guest about how to specifically and tactically uncover your next mission. We talk about the choices that we make every single day and how we have limited opportunities and being precise in what we say yes to, and better and more important, what we say no to. We talk about not just having compassion and empathy lead the tears, but having that lead to motivation. We talk about so much on this show. And I think it's one of the few episodes I would say is worthy of three or four listens. 

About Nic:

Nic McKinley is the Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of VERAFĪ, a private intelligence and due diligence firm specializing in collecting, analyzing, and presenting intelligence so you can make confident decisions about key hires and investments. He is also the Founder and CEO of DeliverFund, a nonprofit private intelligence firm that disrupts human trafficking markets by providing intelligence and delivering specialized analytics about human trafficking activities to law enforcement authorities. He is a 10-year veteran of the US Air Force, where he served as both pararescuemen and as a pararescue instructor and a pararescue team leader. He has also worked for both the US Department of State as well as the Central Intelligence Agency.

Why Listen:

For those of you who smoke cigars, and you know the phrase knuckle burner - this is a knuckle burner of an episode. I went in trying to keep this to 30 minutes, but we used 58 minutes for this conversation. It's because Trier has so many great points about so many different topics. You'll learn about her career. She's the co-founder and CEO of a company called Just Work. She has a tremendous amount of experience at Goldman Sachs, Twitter, other great organizations around people management, and she has so much great advice about taking care of your people, which is something our audience knows well. But doing that outside of the military blind spots, you may have to talk about empathy in very tactical ways and share stories that I found compelling. She talked about language-specific language to use to create openers within the civilian workforce of getting to know your team and making it an inclusive environment. We talk about entrepreneurship. Despite starting two different organizations, Trier talks about how she doesn't consider herself an entrepreneur, how she's much more interested in scaling something than building it. We talk about how you may not be unique in the military, but you are a unicorn when you get out of the military - the concept of followership again.

About Trier:

Trier Bryant is the co-Founder and CEO of Just Work, which works with leaders and teams of all sizes across a range of industries creating more effective organizations where respect and collaboration combine to produce just workplaces yielding exceptional results. She started out at the Air Force Academy, served in the Air Force for 7 years, and has held roles at Goldman Sachs, Twitter, SigFig, Astra, and more.

Why Listen:

I think it's amazing this conversation I had with Josh because most of it is about adding value and - what he calls - leveraging generosity for marketing and sales. And what's crazy for me is that the way that I met Josh a couple of months ago was through a connection, and I even forget how I met him. I run a company Captivate.ai that works all in marketing, and Josh is such an expert in sales systems and marketing. I think that this is a little bit different from a typical episode. We don't talk a lot about career transition. But we talk about getting attention, using marketing and sales in a way that's authentic and genuine and doesn't feel icky, is probably the best word I can use. One thing you'll take away from this episode is just a lot of great ideas about an authentic way to get attention, to market, to do sales, to get your message across, whether that's personal or professional. Second of all, I think that Josh is an incredible entrepreneur, and I admire him. I've been doing podcasting for four years, and I often feel like an old hat at this. Josh has been doing it for 14 years, a full decade longer than I have. His thoughts on entrepreneurship, on media, PR, all of these different things; there's just a goldmine here.

About Josh:

Josh is the founder and CEO of Up My Influence, which provides step-by-step tools, coaching, and public relation hacks for entrepreneurs to dramatically increase their sales by attracting their perfect audience, all at a fraction of the cost of traditional PR services. Since serving in the Navy as a broadcast journalist, he has founded and led multiple companies including SavingsAngel, and the Josh Elledge Consulting Company. Josh has been podcasting for 14 years - most people don't even know that podcasting has been around for that long - and he has had over 2000 media appearances.