Flying Combat Missions to Acquisitions: My Journey to Government Contracting (Podcast Transcript)

               [01:12] Richard C. Howard: Hey, guys, Richard here with the government sales momentum podcast. This week we're going to take a little bit of a different path. Normally we present the strategies and techniques to acquire government contracts, a little bit about troubleshooting once you're on contract with the government. But it did occur to me when I'm listening to podcasts or subject matter experts, I do like to understand where they came from, how they developed their expertise. And I thought I'd take this episode to walk you through my path. And although I've touched a little bit on some of the jobs I've had prior to starting a consulting company, prior to Government Sales Momentum, I'm going to walk you through a little bit of my history. So getting started. I grew up in Massachusetts, just north of Boston. I went to high school, went to a private high school up here and college as well. Went to Salem State College. And then during the last year or so of college, my senior year, I really felt a calling to join the military. So I really wanted to be a military officer. And so I investigated the different branches of service and really honed in on the Air Force. That was really where I wanted to be. So I spent some time preparing for the Officer Qualification Test, which is one of the prerequisites if you want to be a military officer. And by the way, if you're thinking about it or you have maybe a son or daughter thinking about Officer Ship and you have some questions, just feel free to shoot back to me, I'm very passionate about the military officer program. It completely changed my life, and it is really an amazing journey if you're considering that as a career or maybe even just for four to six years. But for me, it was the Air Force. And so I took the Air Force Office Qualification Test, and the other prerequisite to becoming an officer is you need a bachelor's degree. So I was inevitably accepted into the Air Force as an officer. So in 1999, I packed up my bags and went to Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, which is where our officer training school is. So there are three paths to becoming a military officer.

             There is officer training school, what they call us, the 1213 week wonders, where you just after college you meet the prerequisites. If you are accepted, you will go through that program. There's ROTC, which you've probably heard of, where you can be part of the ROTC program going through college, and then you would receive your commission after graduating. And then of course, there are the academies like the Air Force Academy, West Point, etc., where you would receive your commission after graduating. So for me it was officer training school. And at the end of that twelve to 13 weeks in Alabama, I received my commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Force, and the Air Force decided I was going to be a navigator. We actually called out a combat Systems officer as a profession. Now navigator would be doing a lot of the planning for air operations, flying with the pilots and whatever other air crew there for navigating, and there are a lot of aircraft that we still use navigators on for a variety of reasons. So after officer training school, I then went to flight school in San Antonio, Texas, and that was a really great year. I really enjoyed that. I was a brand new officer and made some great friendships there as I was going through the year plus of flight school with twelve plus individuals that were in my class. And we would do everything together from taking all our classes to flying. It was really intensive, but so was the bonds and the friendships we created there. And I really look back to my time at flight school fondly. And after graduating from flight school with my silver wings as a navigator, I went to survival school and I received my aircraft. So once you at some point during your flight training, as you're approaching the end, you're going to have a drop and you'll eventually get your aircraft. For me, that was the RC 135 Rivet Joint, and that is an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft, and they fly, at least for me, out of office, Air Force Base in Nebraska. That's where I was headed after San Antonio. Now at Offt Air Force Base in San Antonio so now I've lived in Massachusetts, Alabama, Texas and now I'm in Omaha. And that was all in under two years, kind of moving from place to place. So interesting culturally for me, just to live in different parts of the country and establish friendships. But the training was really amazing and changing for me, learning how to process a lot of information quickly, especially when you're flying and things are happening really fast and you have a lot of different things to keep track of and really enjoyed that. And as I was going through the training in Omaha, Nebraska had offered Air Force Base for the RC 135 911 happened. So as you could probably imagine, since I was flying ISR aircraft, which we fly, combat reconnaissance missions, reconnaissance operations worldwide, we were in extremely high demand. So I got checked out, and I feel like I spent the first ten years of this century deployed nonstop all over the place. So typically I would return to Omaha for maybe a month or two to get some more training or to just rest for a bit. But it was usually back out the door constantly back and forth, and that wears you down for a little bit. But I really enjoyed it, and I enjoyed my time there. And after about five or six years of doing that, I did a one-year remote to the island of Crete in Greece. So I was doing a lot of different things for the Air Force there. But I got to spend one year on the island of Crete. That was fantastic. I mean, talk about amazing food and the weather and everything else that you might think of. And then proximity to Europe, just being able to travel with my dad and some friends. That was another really great year in mission wise. Also amazing that's do a lot of interesting things, like working with other countries, military. So we have called joint operations, flying between services, navy, Air Force, army, etc. But then we also have our foreign nation partners that we will fly with. So I got to do a lot of that out there. And it was really interesting, and it really stuck with me from Greece.

            Now, at this point, I have been really traveling and deploying a lot and a lot of flying. And at this point, the Air Force asked me to come back to San Antonio and be an instructor at the flight school that I graduated from, which I really wanted to do because I had such, like, I mentioned such a good time there and the Camaraderie there with all the other instructors. It was really something I was looking forward to. And all of that happened when I got back to San Antonio is really amazing. Kind of now approaching that as a captain almost major, which is the kind of transition point between a company great officer and the military. So think second lieutenant, first lieutenant, captain, at least in the Air Force, and flying especially. These are your doers. These are the ones flying the planes and really mastering the profession that they came into. But at that point, you're also transitioning into leading people, right? So the military officers are the leaders, the managers of the military services. So now I was also transitioning into leading quite a few people in different organizations that I was being put in charge of. And all that was great. It was an amazing experience.

              [08:54] Richard C. Howard: But probably the best thing about San Antonio is where I met my wife, and we met probably the last year or so that I was instructing there in 2009 and had a really great time there. And we decided to get married towards the end of my tenure there in San Antonio, which we did. We flew out to St. John, we got married on the beach. It was amazing. And then we packed everything up and moved to Warner Robins, Georgia, to fly the JSTARS aircraft. And so JSTARS, which if you haven't heard of it, you may have heard of a Wax and a Wax. You've seen it in movies, I'm sure. It's a huge aircraft with a radar disk on the top of it. It's used for command and control. It's kind of like air traffic control, but only in the air. When we're flying missions, we have air battle managers in the back that can figure out where all the aircraft are, make sure that everyone's de-conflicted and everyone stays safe. Well, the JSTARS think of it as the a-wax, only there's a radar on the bottom of the aircraft. So now you're looking at ground targets and people on the ground, and there's some other things that it does, but that is really interesting aircraft. Another like the RJ, another high demand, operational high ups tempo aircraft. And, yeah, during our term there, newly married, we had my daughter just a little over a year after we got married. I deployed two weeks after she was born. So flying missions out there and a little bit stressful for me and the wife just being a part like that with a newborn, I came back only to find we had my second son, who was born very soon after that. So they're about a year apart. So that was great. It was an amazing time. I was really busy doing jobs like wing executive officer and flying missions, but really loved it and learned a lot. And from there, kind of the reward for doing a lot of those different types of jobs, especially as you're now, I was a major, so a field grade officer, so company grade captain, second lieutenant, first lieutenant. But then when you hit major, lieutenant colonel, colonel, you become a field grader. So now your scope of responsibility increases. And part of that journey for a lot of us is they'll send you to a master's degree program for a year where you just go to school and you learn a little bit more about senior leadership and how to work with different services, different countries. And that was great. That was in Alabama, back to Alabama at the same base where I went through officer training school and an amazing one-year program. When you hear things like air command and staff college air War College. These are one year master's degree programs that have officers from not only all of the services, so even though it's Air Command and Staff college for me at this point, there were Navy, Marines, army officers there. There were officers from, I think, there's over 50 different countries that were going to this school, which really created an amazing classroom scenarios where, you know, as we're going through different operations and military strategy and getting to hear what was the perspective, for instance, for Operation Iraqi Freedom from colonels in different countries that were in the Middle East. And that's invaluable because it can broaden how you think, because it's easy to think one way if you listen to one particular news channel or you have one particular job and you're laser focused and you think things are the way they are, but then you hear the perspectives of all these other people that have had some amazing experiences, it's really broadening. And you also learn a little bit about acquisitions during that school and how the military buys things. So that's when I first started learning about the acquisitions process and funding and how we put companies on contract. Additionally, I had a special moniker going through there. I was being trained as a political and military affairs strategist. So that was to allow me to work with different countries in jobs to come. So jobs after that school, so I could work with them, whether it was for foreign military sales or diplomatic endeavors. That kind of prepares you for that.

              Now, as amazing as that year was, one thing happened at the end of that year which changed all of our lives forever. And that was I mentioned my second child was born in Georgia. That was my son. And at the end of my master's degree program, he was one year old, just a little bit over one, and he was diagnosed with a very rare form of cancer called Langer Hand Cell histeocytosis. And that really knocked the wind out of everybody's sales. And it became very clear we were laser focused on getting him healthy. And so although we had orders going to Pensacola, Florida, after that, and at this point, you usually go on to command different squadrons and units, which is where I was headed. We are now very much focused on getting Mac healthy. And who is my son's name now? Looking at the hospitals in Alabama, they were great, but every day we were at the children's hospital there, we would get a notification saying, hey, we just talked to Dana Fiber in Boston, and this is what they're directing us to do. And it became very evident that Dana Fiber and Boston Children's Hospital are one of the premier hospitals in the world for treating what my son had. And so we decided that for us, we needed to be in Boston at Dana Fiber. That's where we wanted him to be treated in the Air Force did a great job. Everyone I've worked with, they changed my orders and changed my entire career at that point. So that's when I switched from flying to acquisitions, because Hanscom Air Force Base, which is the big Air Force base in Massachusetts, they don't have a flying mission. They are an acquisitions based, meaning the Professional put companies on contract for the government. So now I had to change careers, which really for me, was secondary to getting my son healthy, which he is. Dana Fiber did an amazing job. He's been cancer free now for years, and I can't thank them and the doctors there enough. They did such an amazing job. By the way, if you know anyone that has been diagnosed with LCH, we saw Dr. De Gar at Dana Faber, and I credit her with saving my son's life, like, hands down. So Mac was on the road to recovery. Everyone was really happy. In the meantime, I was learning all about acquisitions, because not only was I jumping into acquisitions as a program manager for the first time in my career, but I was also as a field grade officer and also a lieutenant Colonel. At this point, I was being put in charge of people doing that job. So I had to really learn the job of acquisitions. And if you think about what a military officer does, the ultimate, if you stay in for Long enough and you do well enough, you become a general officer, right? And so the General officer really needs to be able to go into any situation and lead. That's why it's general. So not just flying, not just battle on the ground, but you get thrown into so many different realms that you really need to be able to adapt to a leadership style. And so this was a big challenge for me. With all the flying and operational experience I had, I now had to learn the acquisitions, all of the rules and the Federal Acquisitions regulations, and how we worked with finance and engineering and the different companies that we were putting on contract. So it was really an amazing time for me as far as expanding what I was doing. And we really had an interesting angle there, too. The branch I went into had just some of the work. The contracts they were managing had gone away before I got there. And I still remember the senior Leader there said, hey, look, Rick and some of the guys I was working with, here you have a branch with about 50, 60 people in it, but not a lot of work, and goes, hey, and there's no funding. So we'll talk about things like PES and other episodes, but there was no contract and there was no real funding there's like, look, you guys can make this into what you want it to be. So he was pretty hands off, which let us really create an amazing unit. So I'll tell you, watching that go from a bunch of guys kind of looking for things to do? Not really sure from my perspective.

                One thing I did understand was the operational need, right? And I knew what it felt like to be an aviator and Airman out there in the field, needing a technology or having something that didn't quite work and then wondering where the guys are supposed to supply me with the new thing or the technology that we need to defeat the enemy or to save lives. And so I wanted to help solve that problem. I want to expedite that. So we focused almost exclusively on rapid acquisitions. We were rapidly acquiring things and getting them out to the war-fighter. In fact, this is very nonstandard, but we were deploying our engineers. We were doing some really great things as far as quickly developing technology and putting it in the hands of somebody that needed it. We went from zero to a billion dollars in funding, and there are ways to find funding for things. So this is something that I talk to some of my clients about, especially if you're in tech development and you're trying to sell to the government, and they talk about funding their ways to shake some money loose from the trees in the government. We were really good at that. So that's probably a conversation for a different episode. But it really sparked my passion for acquisition, seeing how we could do things pretty quickly and really make an impact. And one of the things I noticed during this is, I don't know, I ran a cell called Material Solutions Analysis at one point where all I did was met with companies that had technologies I was potentially interested in. And I really got to see firsthand the struggle. Companies with great technologies, great products, great services have especially small businesses selling to the government when they don't understand the process or they have a minor understanding of the process. I also got to see there were a few small businesses that were really good at it, and they and the big OEMs, we got the big defense contractors, they really had a system down for business development, for marketing, for getting their technology in front of the right people, for targeting. And that's really what I based my entire strategy on with my clients, is, hey, we want to take you from maybe not knowing much or doing it in a way that's not going to give you the results that you're looking for, to, hey, let's mimic some of these companies and the way that I saw them really generating sales, and it's working. So that was really an eye opening and profound experience for me.

              After about four or five years of that, I did a one-year moved to Saudi Arabia. I worked in the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Defense for a year. I was the US. Government's representative there. So basically, I was managing their foreign military sales and they were, at the time, our biggest purchaser of foreign military goods or military goods from us. So all of the contracts, the negotiations between the two governments, a lot of the diplomatic things that were involved, there is really a chance for me to put together everything I learned in acquisitions, my operational background, and then the political and military affairs strategist piece I learned at air command and staff college. I got to really tie all of that together and really work at some high levels there. And that was really enjoyable. Now I was approaching the 20-year mark. I came back to Hanson, and one of the things in the military is, typically, if you volunteer for one of these one-year emotion, I could keep my family at Hanscom. I could return, and I had about a year left at that point. I worked on a large weapon system program for that last year, and then I retired. And once I retired, I decided that I wanted to help some of those small businesses provide those technology services, products to the government. And really, I wanted to keep making an impact. So I felt like this was the best way I could do that. And it became very apparent to me after consulting, I don't know, probably 50 to 100 companies that putting a podcast together with a repository of information that I could put out there to you would be beneficial, because it was the same. I found myself giving the same speech over and over again, like how acquisitions work or maybe how a company could tweak what they're doing to see better results. And that really led to this whole podcast and to the consulting piece. And it allows my family and I to stay in Boston, and then I can travel for clients and go to conferences and go to meetings as I need to. So it's really helped, and we're really enjoying it. I'm really passionate about especially the defense acquisitions process, but government procurement in general, it's an interesting skill set. It is complex, but it can be done properly with the right amount of effort and timeline. If you're listening to this in your company and you're looking to go on contract for the first time, it's just really getting that process down, being targeted in your approach, having some of the right techniques in place, developing those relationships. Glad to talk to you, and have a great week. Have a great 2022. All right, take care.

               [22:24] Richard C. Howard: Hey, guys, Ricky here. I hope you enjoyed this episode of government sales momentum. If you did enjoy the episode, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. It's very much appreciated. If you're interested in selling products and services to the department of defense, I have something for you that you're not going to find anywhere else in the world. The team and I created a program that takes everything you need to win defense contracts and put it into one place. Up until now, only large defense companies and a small amount of people in the know have had access to how products and services are really sold to the Department of Defense. I've taken all of that information and put it in a step-by-step training module that shows you how to consistently sell to the US. Military. If you join our membership, not only do you get the model, but you get weekly sessions with former DOD acquisitions officers for training and guidance to answer your questions. In a community of like-minded business owners that want to partner on different opportunities to bid for subcontracting and teaming or just to discuss general strategy on how to sell to the DOD. You'll have access to every course I've created. Every coaching session I've ever recorded in every interview with an acquisition professional that I've ever conducted. And we cover topics that range from defense sales planning and competitor analysis to SBIR STTR foreign military sales. The list goes on. Go to Dodcontract.com if you are interested, and I would love to see you in the membership. Thanks.

               You can also check out our episode with Shelley Ware & Pursuit to Profits where she shares her in depth understanding of federal contracts and how to properly understand government funding.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us here and we will get back to you as soon as we can.