Veteran Influencer Podcast

Todd Crevier is the founder and President of New England Adventures, a not-for-profit organization which hosts all-expense-paid outdoor sporting and therapeutic outdoor activities for New England veterans, current service members, and their families. Todd is a retired Sergeant First Class with the US Army and a disabled combat veteran.

After being medically retired from the Army Todd wanted to reignite the sense of purpose and community he felt while he was on active duty. After a trip to Yellowstone national park with his family, he made the decision to dedicate himself fully to offering veterans a connection to the outdoors in order to help them recover mentally, physically, and spiritually from the trauma of their service, or from a rocky re-integration to civilian life. Todd's journey has involved a lot of self-guided research into how to found and fund a nonprofit organization, and ultimately led him to complete his master's degree in nonprofit management as way to turn his vision into a reality.

To learn more about how to begin your New England Adventure, check out Todd's website at New England Adventures or connect with Todd on LinkedIn.

Scott is a 2001 USNA Graduate who played on the Varsity Baseball team before earning his commission and becoming a Surface Warfare Officer in the US Navy. During and immediately after his transition he earned an MBA from the University of Rhode Island College of Business and began a career in Sales/Sales Management where he worked for about 10 years. In March of 2016 he founded StrengthsMugs.com as a way to garner exposure for his Gallup-Certified management coaching practice.

Scott's journey in entrepreneurship has led him to also found the Service Academy Business Mastermind Group, and like so many entrepreneurs he recognized that this "other project" was also creating a meaningful impact on the lives of veteran entrepreneurs, quickly becoming his main area of focus.

We talk about some of his a-ha moments and his process for defining and externalizing his dreams in order to turn those dreams into structured goals for the ideal lifestyle that he and his family have been able to cultivate over the 13 years since he hung up the uniform.

Remind yourself of your strengths and reflect on them each day while drinking coffee or tea - Strengths Mugs

Check out the SABM Group website

Connect on LinkedIn

Tweet at Scott (@SABMgroup)

This Employee Spotlight is on Anthony Ordway, Marine Aviation Crew Chief and Account Executive with RecruitMilitary.com.

Anthony left the service a few months ago, working with Bradley-Morris as a candidate when we approached him about considering joining the team.

In our conversation, we share some of his thoughts having recently become a civilian and what he's seen since coming to RecruitMiltiary to help other veterans find employment. He shares the story of one of his first placements, and his advice for those about to begin the military to civilian transition process.

My guest today has followed a bit of a unique path out of uniform, Michael Saukulak is the founder of Composure Fitness, a personal fitness and nutritional consulting practice which specializes in progressive overload programming and nutrition optimization.

Michael started his career in the Marine Corps as an intelligence officer after graduating from the Villanova ROTC program in 2012, he spent over three years stationed abroad in Japan supporting operations across seven Asian countries and various US states and territories.

In our conversation, we discuss how he set the personal goal of becoming debt free prior to reaching his first major career inflection point so that his decision to sign on to another set of orders or to separate wouldn't be influenced by financial concerns. He did ultimately make the decision to transition to private life right around the four year mark, taking a six month pause to regroup and truly understand what he wanted to do for a living before getting his personal fitness consulting practice off the ground.

Michael now operates his business from the tropical island of Bali, relying on online consultations with his clients to help them achieve their fitness and nutrition goals, while also enjoying an incredibly high quality of life in an affordable cost of living area. I'm glad we had a chance to speak, I think this interview offers a great alternative perspective compared to the more mainstream careers I've so far had the opportunity to profile on the podcast.

Today I had an opportunity to interview Jesse Grothaus, the Dreamforce 2018 Veteran Entrepreneur of the Year.

Jesse is the Founder and CEO of Cloud Pathfinder Consulting, a Salesforce consultancy dedicated to hiring veterans to solve clients' problems within their software and database infrastructure. He is also a graduate of the Vetforce program, a free self-paced learning environment designed to give veterans job skills and certifications to begin a career within the Salesforce ecosystem.

In today's episode, we discuss how his seven years in the Army Reserves gave him the necessary listening, consulting, and analytical skills to run his current company and how a traumatic brain injury from a major car accident led him down the path of self-paced online Salesforce training to develop his career but also as a unique and creative way to follow his doctors' orders to reprogram his brain and learn new things during the recovery process.

Jesse is passionate about Salesforce as well as being the bridge between the military and the technology industry, helping both direct vets to this free training as well as employ graduates of the program that are ready to embark on their first projects within the Salesforce ecosystem. Near the end of the conversation, we talk about his plans to engage with the Veteran's Administration to help upgrade and enhance their systems, bringing in veterans with Salesforce training to improve the healthcare picture for the patients that rely on the VA.

Justine and Jason are both former military officers, currently working within different teams at The McChrystal Group, an advisory services and leadership development firm with a unique and diverse group of professionals. Their networked "Team of Teams" approach enables clients to adapt to their complex operating environments.

In today's conversation, we discuss their service as officers within the United States Marine Corps, Justine in Logistics having graduated from the US Naval Academy and Jason as an Infantry Officer via OCS after earning his undergrad at Boston College. Their transitions from active duty took place at different times in their lives, Jason having separated and attended graduate school to pursue a career in policy and Justine coming straight to the practice to work with a large multinational Oil and Gas corporation.

We talk about working with retired four-star general, Stan McChrystal and how his team of civilians and veterans perform their mission in corporate America. The context for the discussion is the release of the book titled Leaders: Myth and Reality by Stan McChrystal, Jeff Eggers, and Jason Mangone.

Jason shares his perspective getting to know the general, working on his team to research the book, and the fundamental questions they wanted to answer in creating this profile of different leaders throughout history.

If you are curious about writing a book as a co-author, working in an elite management and strategy consulting practice, or wondering about how to transition some of your skills and perspective from what you're currently doing as an officer in the United States Marine Corps, don't miss this episode!

Today's guest is Nic Chang, 2011 VMI graduate and former Army medical officer. Nic spent a lot of his career in Korea and at Fort Bragg in North Carolina before being medically retired due to an injury in training. Nic's first experience with Bradley-Morris was as a candidate, attending our hiring conferences to network with employers to discover what role would be the best fit for his skills and interests. Nic is now a Consultant with the Bradley-Morris Recruit Military team, helping companies attract, screen, and hire the best veteran talent from our network of military-experienced job seekers.

Nic has a unique ability to understand a client's needs in their talent roadmap, how it affects the success of their business, and what solutions within the military veteran community will help them solve their problems.

In our conversation, Nic shares with me how coming to work for Bradley-Morris surprised him with how little he actually knew about the military, learning about the other service branches and subsections/specialties within different communities and how they intermingle with civilian business; which communities work best in different industries, settings, companies, etc.

We also talk about some best practices for career management and finding the right role as you leave the uniform behind.

This episode profiles the transition of Jon Ferrell. Jon is a Senior Product Manager with an RF technology company in Greensboro, North Carolina. He works in the mobile device space, dealing with manufacturing, design, and optimization issues for a lot of the technology we take for granted every day. We dive into the idea of stress, how he handled large projects with lots of moving pieces in the military, and how that experience brought value to his post-military career in high tech manufacturing and product design.

Jon is also pretty frank about his reasons for leaving the military, the commitments of the active duty didn't allow the kind of lifestyle he wanted when he and his wife started a family, and in this conversation he opened up about his thought process and the ultimate decision that led him to where he is right now.

Today's episode is a conversation with another podcast host, Justin Nassiri, host of the Beyond the Uniform podcast.

Justin is also a Naval Academy alum and spent 5 years on submarines before heading to business school on the west coast at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. After finishing his MBA, he started a company and joined the ranks of other bay area entrepreneurs, developing solutions that blend the disciplines of photography, digital marketing and ecommerce, and social media.

Justin has done over 188 interviews with veterans who have successfully become civilians and entrepreneurs, so it was a privilege for me to hear his story and pick his brain since he's so much further down the path in terms of developing a veteran-facing show.

We talked about what we've both encountered in our conversations, the lessons our guests have shared with us, and the process of transitioning not just as a job search but as a process of redefining identity and finding passion in a business environment that might be entirely new, or in some cases unexpected in its timing.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinnassiri/ https://www.beyondtheuniform.io/podcast/

This is my first guest who is also a veteran-oriented podcast host.

Robert Graves, host of The Year of the Vet and author of How to Grow A Beard: A Military Transition Guide Back Into Civilian Life, sat down to talk to me not only about his transition process while leaving the Marine Corps 8 years ago, but also his experience talking and interacting with veterans on his own journey through civilian life and his academic career.

Robert is currently completing an internship at West Point, focusing on facilitating training and workshops with the corps of cadets within the Center for Enhanced Performance, bringing comprehensive performance psychology and academic skills to help future Army leaders develop their full potential.

He also manages his own personal performance coaching business, offering to hold those looking to surpass the standard that they have set for themselves accountable for their mental behaviors, as well as working towards overcoming the hurdles holding his clients back from achieving peak performance, whether it's on the sports field, stage, court, or board room.

This episode is our longest yet, comment below if you like the longer format conversation or prefer shorter and more structured interviews.

Connect with Robert:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/YearOfTheVet/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yearofthevet/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/YearOfTheVet

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachgraves/

Email: [email protected]