Transforming Military Experience into Business Leadership

Hi, everyone. Welcome to your show E-coffee with experts. This is your host Ranmay here. Today we have Pete, who is the founder of Equilibrium Consulting with us. Hey, Pete.

Hey, how are you doing? Good to be here.

Lovely, Pete. Before we move forward, let’s go to get to know the human behind the mic. You have a journey that you have navigated through. Let’s hear it from you in terms of how you landed in the space. And then we take it from there.

As a young man, I started in in US Navy as an enlisted person in the Navy. And I worked in a lot of high tech, so high tech, missile systems, radar systems, gun systems, and platforms, but they were all electronic and computers. And as I migrated out, I began working in the private sector. I continued to grow into more technology-centric computers and networking, and back in the day when we had mainframes and vaxes and stuff you could only hook 16-20 people up at a time, not like we can now, where we’ve got the vast array of connectivity. So I grew over time and had the opportunity to step into different roles in the seats of business, to learn the different areas, sales, marketing, contracts, finance, and eventually becoming an executive. That put me in the place of running technology companies. I ran several, was part of some acquisitions, acquired some sold, and worked in some data centers, and large data centers with voice and telephony. I got a very well-rounded area, and then eventually I realized that there was a niche that was needed for marketing. And so I stepped in and started equilibrium consulting to help those IT companies and vendors, emerging vendors, get their marketing lifted and address what they’re all trying to do, which is generate a new business for themselves.

Lovely. And the Navy teaches you a lot. Pete, how has the experience at the Navy helped you overcome those challenges or got you going with this entrepreneurial journey of yours? How did the Navy help it that way?

The Navy had, just like you said, it’s got a lot of things, but there was a lot of discipline, and business is about discipline and process. The Navy takes the process very seriously and the discipline that goes with it. As a young man, I was able to have that instilled into me from growing up through life and then coming into the military, which provided additional discipline and process, and then stepping into the business where most small businesses are unorganized or undisciplined and lack process. By bringing that in and showing repeatable processes, I was able to go and look and scale. So they taught me unknowingly back in the day that it would help me drive forward to become a method of scaling business and bringing business forward growth.

Great. Transitioning from the military to the business world has its challenges and clearly, you have made it a success in terms of how you have gone about it. Really. Congratulations on that one, Pete. And initially, we all have our mentors we look up to. And when we are, when the chips are down, we take inspiration. In terms of how role models would have sailed through during those times, do you have any mentors or role models who played a significant role in your career journey? Pete?

I did as I got out of the Navy. Transitioning, as you would say, is not always easy. When you wear a stripe on your arm and somebody has one less stripe, you just tell them and they go and they have to do the work. It’s not negotiable. You don’t get to debate it, you don’t get to converse about it. Let’s go and do the job. And in the civilian sector, that’s not necessarily the case. So it’s very hard to make that transition of soft skills that are required to do that. I had a very good CEO who took an interest in me in my first organization out of the military, where I spent twelve years of my career. As I grew in the organization, he would continue to teach and mentor skill sets in each area of the business that I was working in, eventually putting me into a president of a division of the company. It became a stepping stone and only through mentorship that I was I able to learn and go. Along the way, he also exposed me to other people who mentored me in different areas where although he was very good, he wasn’t the strongest.

So he gave me some people who could put inflection into how I thought my thought processes and help me get stronger in those areas. And today, I can say that I started with one mentor and I probably finished with 15 or 20, but each one was very significant in every piece, whether it was a finance area or sales or because they have different strengths in those areas. And he was able to though be the overarching mentor to pull it all together and say, this is what you learned here, this is what you learned here. Now, how do you bundle it and put it all back into it is.

So relatable when one of your initial leaders becomes your mentor when you’re starting your journey in the corporate world. So that is when you get an opportunity to lead or become the CEO or the CXO level, there is an enormous amount of responsibility on your shoulders to, again, be the torchbearer for the next generation as well. Right.

And when you look at it, you take a lot of those attributes, and everybody says, how do you become a leader? You get that exposure and get the exposure to other skill sets and other ways that people lead. You formulate your style, your way. But also, he was very big on people. When in business, people are our product. Everybody says the deliverable to the client is the product. But if you don’t have people, you don’t have clients. And if you don’t have people that you treat well and you trust and allow them to shape your company and your organization, then you don’t have a good company. You have an okay company. And there’s that good-to-great kind of saying, how do you become a great company? The people drive that. Right. And allowing people to bubble up and do that is what makes your company great.

Absolutely. Talking about companies and organizations, let’s talk about the Bunker Hill Association. What inspired you, Pete, to create this nonprofit, and how does it support veterans and active duty members? Throw some light there.

So I was an original crew member of the Bunker Hill, and it was the very first vertical launch missile platform that you see in just about every ship these days. I was one of about ten total in the world that were trained on this system and putting the very first platform into construction and then to see and then sailing it into harm’s way into the gulf in the mid to late eighties. So I had an affinity for the ship. We had a very tight crew, and to this day, many of the men and women that I served with, I have very good relationships with 40 years later. But we saw a need, a bunch of us, and through reunions and getting together and keeping in touch, we saw a need to help people transition for the things that we did. What we were able to do was start something that provides mentorship, where we can bring out young sailors that are looking to transition out of the service and mentor them into the civilian world, help them with jobs, find jobs, help them get benefits that maybe they have an injury or they have something that is service-connected medically to help them get their veterans benefits.

And we open that up to everybody that’s ever served on that ship, the Bunker Hill. Anybody who served on it is welcome to become a member that doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t reach any veteran or any service member, but, he tried to go because there are probably close to 20,000 people, that 18 to 20,000 people that may have served on that ship over the 37 years that it was in service. Now, some of these sellers, after last year’s decommissioning, are out in the fleet in other places, and they have built needs. They want to go home for a holiday. They can’t afford it. We look to sponsor them and help them get home with bereavement or other things. It’s a 100% volunteer organization. Nobody’s paid. And we’re funded purely based on people giving, and then we can take that and give back. So that’s what we’re about. And that’s, I think one day when I retire from equilibrium, I might dive a little bit deeper into some of that.

I’m sure you would give any love to the Navy. Pete. Pete, coming from now, coming to the consulting side of yours, building a consulting, successful consulting firm requires a strong network. Right. So what advice would you want to give to aspiring consultants on building relationships and attracting clients for the audiences today?

You always have to go where your clients are going to be. Right. And you have to network with them. In try, we have a lot of events, and going to those events, you get to network on show floors and education sessions, and things of that nature. So networking with people at trade events and where they’re going to be is going to be critical. The second part is providing education. Doing webinars, it’s not always about selling. Sometimes it’s about educating, and that’s a way to build the relationship. So education is a key element to attraction. People buy from people they like or people they know. And if you’re educating and teaching, it gives an opportunity outside of the sales arena to build that relationship. And you never know. They may not be somebody who buys from you, but they may refer to you. Right. Because you became a subject matter expert. So, networking, education, and I think integrity, integrity goes a long way with trust and reputation. If you have integrity and you help people, and that’s one of the things that’s been our success, is that we help people, even if they’re not clients.

If you come and you ask a question, we’ll answer your question. You don’t have to be a client to ask or get some little things. We want to help. We want to help bring our industry and make it stronger, and that’s part of our reputation and thought process. So education community is building together instead of one by one.

Absolutely. And you have been in the space for quite some time now. Pete, what are some of the biggest pains that you see impacting channel strategy and go-to-market execution in the coming years?

I think it’s like anything else, competition is strong. I think we’re moving towards a regulated industry now, at least in the US. We’re seeing more around compliance and supply chain for the IT companies to be more compliant, with processes and cybersecurity. So I think that’s going to continue and as that continues, it’s going to weed out. There are a lot of people who say they do certain things, but there’s just no way, based on their size, that they can do the things that they say. Advice would be to focus on what you do best and partner with others thatwhothe things that they do well and pull that bond and that string together to make yourself a stronger company or platform in your go-to-market strategy. We see more and more of that as technology firms outsource their strategic operations centers, their network operation centers, their security operations, their disaster recovery, and other platforms. So they handle the day-to-day type of things and then they bring in partners that handle that. And I think that’s going to continue to do it, that it as a channel is going to change from being people that do the work to more of the consultants that say this is how your business is going to move forward.

They have to be more business strategically aligned with clients to help them grow. And the technology is the enablement they have to get more strategic and not be, I just need to sell you another widget or another software. Those things are costs, but they need to align business values for growth in both their customer and themselves.

I just love it. And you focus on getting value onto the table and not selling a product or a service right out of it. And it speaks volumes of the value system that you’d have at equilibrium consulting as well. Great. Here, Pete, it has been a lovely conversation, but before I let you go, what is that one piece of advice you would want to give our audiences today, especially to the ones who are trying to make a career? I mean, who’s trying to start their entrepreneurial journey or trying to start their setup? What did you advise to them?

It’s very scary to start right. Whether it’s starting a business or just getting out in your career, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes. And that’s good. That’s how you learn. So don’t be afraid to make mistakes. I always say fell fast, fell forward. Society says that we get a score of F. So you don’t get an F, you get a learning opportunity. And if you learn from that opportunity and you can change it and it makes you better or smarter or increases and changes your process, you become better and fail fast, fail forward, and just keep learning. Just don’t stop learning. Life is it’s a lifetime of learning that we have. And I can learn from somebody who’s coming right out of college because I don’t have that frame of reference. There’s new ideas, there’s new techniques, there’s new ways, and that’s what’s going to shape and grow your organization again. Take tomorrow’s youth bring them in and let them bubble up. Don’t be afraid to say this is the way we used to do it. This is how we’re going to do it. Change is good and if you’re changing in your organization, you’re going to grow.

And eventually, you should have some great success.

Lovely. Pete, thank you so much for those insightful words and the conversation we had today. I’m sure our audience would love what they heard from you and appreciate, you taking out time to do this with us. Pete, it has been an honor hosting you, and thank you so much once again.

Thank you for having me. I’ve enjoyed it very much.