In this episode, we sit down with Swaney Group Capital’s Chief Operating Officer, Robert ‘Bo’ Plante III. Bo’s career spans from Virginia Tech to the State Department in Moscow, followed by distinguished service in both the Marine Corps and the Army Special Forces.
Bo shares his journey from military service to private equity, highlighting how his military leadership and strategic planning skills translate to the corporate world. He discusses the challenges and rewards of leading strategic initiatives and managing people in military and civilian settings.
Join us as Bo offers insights on adaptability, building high-performing teams, and overcoming challenges in transformation management. This episode is packed with actionable advice for military professionals transitioning to corporate roles and business leaders seeking to enhance their strategic planning skills.
Key Topics Covered:
- Transitioning from military to corporate leadership
- Strategic planning in military vs. civilian settings
- Managing people and preventing organizational resistance
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From Special Forces To COO: Leadership Lessons From The Frontlines With Robert ‘Bo’ Plante III [Season 1: Episode 11]
We’re sitting down with Swaney Group Capital‘s Chief Operating Officer, Robert ‘Bo’ Plante III. Can you do me a favor? Give me 30 seconds on your background. I would love to hear a little bit about your military, some startup stuff, and you come over to our firm.
My professional life, so to speak, started at Virginia Tech. I graduated from there back in around 2013 or so. At that point, I worked for the State Department for a few months in Moscow and served as a translator in the embassy over there. I took some classes, came back from that, and wanted to continue my service. I joined the Marine Corps where I was an officer for 9 years or 10 years. Everything started to blend together a little bit, especially since I joined the firm. Around that, it was a great experience in the Marine Corps.
I learned how to be a leader, cut my teeth professionally, decided I wanted something more, and pursued a chance to join the Army Special Forces. While still a Marine, I switched branches over to the Army. It was still a controversial decision. I was getting ribbed for that, even by my old Marine colleagues. I finished out my career in the Army and met a lot of great leaders. I learned a lot of great lessons there. I decided to move on for family and personal reasons. That’s at one point I linked up with you. I was one of the first guys on the team. I’ve been with Swaney Group ever since, trying to help build this firm. It’s been a great ride.
Leading Strategic Planning Initiatives
It’s super great to sit down with you. Let’s dive right in. One of the frequent topics we get is leadership and strategic planning. I’d love to hear a couple of your experiences talking about leading strategic planning initiatives, some in both the military, and then how that changes over to corporate in a civilian setting.
First off, I appreciate you having me on here. We’ve been trotting through such an esteemed guest list through the show. I’m not sure I’m meeting the bar but I do appreciate the nod. I’m excited to be here. One of the more fungible skills between the military and my experience within the private equity and advisory realm is strategic process planning. In the end, it’s process development, leadership, and human relations.
Within those three categories, those are all skills that you can easily develop as a leader in the military and then can translate over into the private sector or private business. If you’re given the right tools, you’re an out-of-the-box thinker, and you can apply process and deal with people, it’s something successful. You and I have worked through that problem. I’ve gotten a lot of mentorship from you. You threw me to the wolves and let me run the process, deal with that, and figure it out on my own at a couple of different companies. That has been successful. One of the most transferable assets from the military to private equity or advisory services is being able to develop processes and strategic plans.
Leading Military Teams Vs. Civilian Teams
We stuck you in where you were setting up a transformation management office. It’s partially the emergent model. Partially, it’s things you take from the military and your skills. What is the biggest difference you found in running that process with military teams and civilian teams?
I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the most high-powered military teams. One of the things I learned there is as much as you prepare for a scenario, whether it’s the week’s lead-up to the project or mission on behalf of the US government, you’re never going to know what’s going to happen when you hit the ground. You can plan for it all you want but you need to remain flexible. That TMO in particular, that you threw me out very early on in my career, was one of those where I was given the toolset. We talked through what the plan may be and what it may look like. I had to get on the ground and begin having those conversations with the key stakeholders like the Chief Supply Chain Officer and the executive team.
Also, some of the middle management and key personnel that would be influencing the various decisions that we’d be making down the road and start to get an idea of what the actual situation on the ground was at that company, what they were driving towards, and how the tools that I was given could apply to that scenario. You can prepare that as much as you want. The more experience you can draw on is great but in reality, you got to get there and talk to the people. Take the tools and adapt them to the organization to avoid any organ rejection. That is the first key. It’s something that a lot of people overlook.
What’s an example of a typical problem? It’s a problem day-to-day operating on the ground in the civilian world. We all know the problems from movies and television of what could happen in the military if something goes horribly wrong. Nothing’s usually going to go horribly wrong in a civilian world. What’s an example of a typical problem or roadblock that you have to unclog?
It’s that order rejection. It’s something I saw in the military. A lot of my military experience was working alongside international partner forces. Just like when you’re a consultant or a private equity expert coming in, especially if you’ve got a large background of experience in whatever the industry it is, the same assumption can be applied to a US military special operations member who’s going to work with partner forces. Assume that you are the subject matter expert just as a consultant is assumed to be a subject matter expert at that organization for the project they’re brought into.
Sometimes that can lend itself to complacency on behalf of the consultant because you begin to assume that the processes that you built out are the right way of doing things and you neglect the fact that the processing needs to be adapted to the human aspect of that organization. It was the same thing when I worked with partner forces. We had our tactics and a way to do things. It’s made America a successful military force. It doesn’t always apply to the culture or the personnel that are involved in that partner force military.
The common mistake that you see is that this is the right way to do things. You should do it the way I’m saying to do it because you brought me on board. When in reality, this is the way that I’ve seen it work the best. What are your systems like and people like? How can we mold this to prevent any type of organ rejection and achieve the shared end state that we laid out at the beginning of this project?
Whenever there’s a major change program, a transformation project, or whatever you want to call it, there’s an existing organizational culture and then it’s going to thaw a little bit because the executives, leadership, and board are trying to drive change. What I’m hearing you say is people’s issues become front and center. Can you give me an example of a person issue that you had to solve?
People issues are everything. In the end, organizations are groupings of people organized within systems and processes that those people have developed. If you boil down any issue that you may run into on the ground, in the end, it can be solved through the right use and facilitation of the people of that organization. A great example of that is, and it can be fairly negative, but there’s a company out in the Midwest and we established the TMO. They had a great strategic plan and initiatives but those weren’t being executed at some levels as quickly as the executive team would have liked.
People issues are everything. In the end, organizations are groupings of people organized within systems and processes that those people have developed. Share on XWe went in there to help drive those initiatives under differing levels of leadership that would drive accountability. Once we had that set up for the most part over the course of eight weeks, it was humming pretty well. We had a large pocket of value within their product optimization that was not moving as fast as it could have. In this world, a lot of people will tend to shy away from confrontation. My personal philosophy is there is a respectful way to confront an individual in regard to their performance or milestone accomplishment. That’s what I did with this individual.
“This is the plan we agreed upon when we chartered this project. These are the milestones. This is the timeline when we briefed the executive team. You’re not meeting those. I’m going to have to put red on the slide to the executive team member. What can I do to help you prevent that?” I tried to have that conversation 2 or 3 times in the lead-up to that meeting. That individual was very positive to my face but continued to not produce the outputs.
Eventually, after I exhausted all those means, we had to work with that TMO team leadership on the company side and put red. Unfortunately, that led to a change of project leadership but in the end, it was something that had to occur. We made positive progress after that. It boils down to getting comfortable with respectful confrontation within an accountability system that you develop.
The place or company we’re looking at was called a good-to-great story or doing-okay-to-a-better story. Some of the things that we’re looking at are lots of revenue leakage. It might be, let’s say, aggressively undermanaged. How do you think about change in that context versus change in the good-to-great story and your partnership? You can’t leave the relationship but what do you think about the difference between those two scenarios? We’re going to have team members at option A and option B. What advice would you give for either of those? What’s the difference? How do you pivot?
When you’re coming into a scenario that we typically look for, especially when there’s a lot of leakage and potential mismanagement at differing levels, it’s outside of the initial planning that you can do to identify value creation levers and all of that analysis that the team will come together for. You have a plan going into touching feet, boots on the ground, so to speak, on day one.
I saw this in the military a lot. Some of the leaders that I saw probably had the most room for growth, to put that politically, who wanted to hit the ground and immediately enact change on day one. That caused a lot of friction and pushback. That’s human nature. What I’ve found to be successful that I’ve seen from successful leaders and found to be fungible to this industry as well is getting on the ground, having a plan in the back of your mind or back pocket but also spending that initial time building rapport with the individuals that currently make up the leadership teams, middle management teams, and the bottom tier, the ground floor workers or the guys on the plant floor so to speak.
Build that rapport, spend that time, listen to them, and hear what they have to say because it will help build your situational awareness on the ground and give you better feedback as to how you can apply the value creation plan you developed so fastidiously leading up to that, how it will adapt and what personnel bottlenecks you may need to address.
Day One On The Job
Let’s go forward with the scenario. You’re headed to the keys to an asset. You weren’t on the diligence and you were dropped on day one. You’ve got a reconnoiter around and figure out your bearings. What’s the job on day one? What do the first 30 days look like for something a little more challenging?
Some of them were challenging. On day one, what I’m going to do is come in and bring a small team, 2 or 3 guys, and maybe some of my junior team members. What I would like to do is immediately sit down with the leadership. The conversation with the chief executive is going to be something that I’m going to have personally. That’s one that shouldn’t drop below my level as the team leader.
With some of the other members of the executive team, as well as middle management, I’d like to immediately have them sit down and interview some of my team members. Build that rapport with the team show. Not only they can have confidence in my team members who are competent individuals but also have my guys get a feel for what those people’s actual roles are in the organization. Not just officially but also where the soft power lies.
Also, give them the understanding that we are trying to understand the organization of how it works. We’re not going to come in and make that change on day one. Once we have done that, then we could begin looking at it over the next 24 hours from the first day. “I’m going to go down to the plant floor or line workers and begin talking to them, hearing their opinions. I’m going to take middle management individuals out to dinner.”
During those first 48 hours on the ground, I can have maybe 2 dinners, 1 with the exec team and 1 with the middle management team. With those interviews and interpersonal conversations occurring during the day, it’ll be able to give me the flexibility to begin planning out the next 28 days and how we’re going to start implementing this value creation plan. Most importantly, what is the governance and battle rhythm going to be for the following weeks?
If you got everything you wanted from an information and insights perspective, and then you set up a process and that governance you’re talking about that we’re all passionate about here, what does that look like? What information do you need to get the leadership team on board? Frankly, there’s going to be changes in the organization.
First off, it boils down to honest and open communication. Once I have an idea of who are the personnel bottlenecks, holders of soft power, and holders of authoritative power, I can identify those stakeholders and have open and honest communication as to what the plan is. The assumption has to be that with very glaring exceptions, people who are part of that organization want to see the organization succeed, whether it’s for personal benefit or dedication organization, which a lot of guys in our firm have, or a mix of both.
If I’m open and honest with the plan of how we’re going to make this better, there’s not going to be too much pushback if they understand at the outset what we’re trying to achieve and they feel heard in that discussion. After that, it’s honestly grabbing people’s time on their calendar as soon as you possibly can. The further out I can schedule recurring weekly and bi-weekly meetings, the less chance people have to wiggle out of those meetings, cancel last minute, or say that they have a conflict because that’s been the culture of the organization or whatever the case may be. That’s when the accountability engine kicks in and you can start to enact that plan.
One of the things that we teach a lot is setting the governance and the heartbeat for change. If you can get that heartbeat humming in the organization, you can inject any content into the business. You can’t do twenty things at once but once you take one off the list, you put another one back on the list. You had a lot of success at the org you were talking about earlier. You’re setting that heartbeat up. Walk me through the approach of setting that meeting up. You built the plane as you flew it. You had four levels of connectivity. Walk me through that process. People reading are junior finance professionals and some seasoned operators. I believe that’s the most important thing. I’d love to hear how you put that in place in a good example.
It’s funny because it’s one of the simplest things but for some reason, it’s also one of the hardest things to do right off the bat. This organization in particular was a great lesson for me and the importance of that. They had these initiatives already going. That was the analogy throughout the project. We’re building this plane in flight, which is fine. Listening to the key stakeholders and the key leaders within the organization about what they wanted this thing to achieve, helped me build out the process of what the project chartering looks like.
It took a couple of meetings of, “We’re going to do an up-down to Chicago and meet them in the airport for a three-hour workshop and fly back.” We had a couple of intense sessions like that. Once we got a general idea of what the structure of the TMO would look like and how the accountability process would work, I then switched to a train-the-trainer approach.
A critical aspect of these types of things is that unless we were to actively own the asset, I need to assume that we’re not going to be there forever. For anything that I’m setting up in the organization, I need to have a partner alongside me that’s watching how we’re building it and understanding the inner work so that I can hand it off eventually. We immediately adapted side-by-side roles within that TMO.
I utilize the person who was assigned to me as the TMO chief to use their unique access to everyone in the organization’s calendars to start placing things on the calendar and achieving that. In a lot of ways, you have to use the organization and the assets that it has, its software, culture, and processes to your favor to enact your tools. That was the direction I went to immediately set that heartbeat. It showed up on people’s schedules and they started attending because it was there. They built their understanding of the process after that.
From The Military To The Civilian World
Let’s pivot over a little bit. You transitioned out of the military relatively. You’re still in the reserves. What was it like transitioning out of the military and coming into the civilian world? You did some consulting first before you came and joined our team. Walk me through your experience there and how that helped you.
My first professional love was the military. I started as a Marine and ended up switching over to the Army, which was a very controversial decision, depending on who you talk to. Eventually, for family and personal reasons, I decided it was time to move on. I got my MBA at night. I wasn’t sure what my professional career would look like after the military but I knew whatever it was, I wanted to be on a high-powered engaging team. There were no repetitive days.
Swaney Group was very much in its idea infancy when you and I connected. We had our conversation, which put me through the wringer in regard to the case study. If you’re reading this and looking to apply, there is some prep required. I’ve sweated a lot of times during my military career and done some pretty difficult stuff. That one had me shaking too.
I knew I wanted to solve dynamic problems and be around people that I enjoyed solving those problems with. I needed to have purpose and some level of excitement. That’s something I found here. That’s a sentiment of a lot of military individuals, especially those who come from the high-performing aspects of the military. It’s less about the industry and more about the team you’re going to join. Luckily, I found a pretty good home in that here.
It's less about the industry and more about the team you'll be joining. Share on XLeading A Global Team
You’ve been dropped in and been with me for a good bit. You’ve got a local team of eight professionals to manage a pipeline through a skill bridge. We’ve got a semi-global team with support staff in India, some in Singapore, and some in Columbia. Your teams, I believe, tend to be pretty local when you’re in the military. What’s it like having a global team? How are you thinking about training them and developing the leaders so they can go run their assets without you being there every day?
It’s a challenge. You have to identify the roles that each of those people is going to fill. That’s first and foremost. We’ve done a good job of that. It needs to go further. You need to identify what the end state of a fully trained person within that role is. It’s one of the things we did early on for the director and the associate director positions. We’re doing this in stride for our investment and operations analyst position, which is one of our overseas roles.
Any planning I do, and this is a skill I picked up from the military, I do backward planning. I’m willing to set the objective. What do I want the battlefield to put in military terms to look like at the end of the day? If I’m not even here, someone understands the end state wasn’t able to accomplish that. What’s the end state? I get back playing off that. I do the same thing with the roles. From there, you can build what the training pipeline looks like for those individuals.
The easiest case to break out is our director roles. Many of those are former military and special operations guys. Typically, when you hear special operations or the type of guys that we bring on board at the director level, people think, “They’re high-performing problem solvers.” In this world, and I mean this in a positive way, they’re high-performing amateurs. It is what they are. They may have an MBA and or some minor business experience like myself. I have done a startup and some nonprofit consulting.
With the world of private equity and heavy cashflow industries, I was still new. These guys are high-performing amateurs. They have all the potential in the world. They need to be exposed to situations where they have the ability to be given a toolset, a playbook like procurement, TMO, or gross margin improvement, and be sent to the client site with oversight from me, you, or someone who has experience in that project.
Also, be allowed to make mistakes within a fairly controlled environment, understand left and right, and be able to execute. That’s what we look for guys. That helps achieve the end state in their training plan. At some point, as we say in the military, you have to get out in the range and fire your weapon. I can give them all the tools in the world but it’s part of that training plan for all of our aspects involved on-the-job training.
At some point, you have to get out in the range and fire your weapon. Share on XHigh-Performing Team
How would you describe a high-performing team? What does that mean to you in a pithy way?
A high-performing team understands what its objective and end state is. Any one member can be removed at any time. There are still enough overlapping responsibilities that the team can continue to move forward. I would say that I have failed in my role as the Chief Operating Officer. I’ve failed the firm and yourself if my absence causes any type of friction in the forward movement of the team. To avoid that, you set up systems and processes. What makes a high-performing team is good systems and processes manned by outside-the-box thinkers who can solve problems dynamically.
What makes a high-performing team is good systems and processes manned by outside-the-box thinkers who can solve problems dynamically. Share on XGive me an example of a process you’re putting in place or it’s in place already. What do you see future processes looking like? You’ve got people who are high-capability with lots of experience in leadership. They ran large teams or small teams. Trey ran lots of teams over the 12 to 14 years he was a SEAL. What are the processes that work for those team members?
At a macro level on our team, understanding macro means me and eight guys, it comes down to task organizing based on the projects and the deals we have coming through, as well as assigning ancillary duties for firm building. One of the major things is once we have an influx of these high-performing individuals, we need to build out firm processes and all that. We immediately set these ancillary builds of, “The senior advisor network is manned by Ray. The deal flow and cutting-edge software for our intent-based search are manned by Ben. He’s developing that. We have the talent pipeline. Trey is all over that.”
I give them the secondary billet and the end state that you and I would like for that firm-building initiative. They then come back to us with the plan. I get an update on that plan at the daily, 9:00 AM check-in with the team, and then you get the Friday weekly wrap-up and secondary billet process check-in. It’s exactly how we would run it at a company. You have to take your own medicine at some point and set up your heartbeat. That is how you set conditions to become a high-performing team or move in that direction.
I’ve heard some of the leadership gurus say, “Very highly capable people don’t like being managed.” How do you balance putting processes in place and structure with giving people freedom to work?
It’s less about being directive and more about setting an end state and then setting left and right lateral limits. I’m going to use an example. When I was with the Army Special Forces, I worked with a fantastic team Sergeant who had hit a point where he could read my mind. We had a great working relationship. What impressed me about him and what made him a fantastic leader of that team at the senior NCO level was that I could say, “This needs to occur. It ought to look like this at the end of the day.”
If you had feedback, he and I would adjust what we felt the end state was until we agreed. “This is the timeline. This is your left and right lateral limit. We got to stay in this lane.” That’s all I needed to give him. I knew within 48 hours or if not the same day, he was coming back with the plan or having already tasked the team in a way that I didn’t even need to check.
Over time, I did my trust but verified. It hit a point where I trusted him and it was consistent, positive results. That is the same approach that I try to take with this team here. I don’t want to tell Trey or Nick what to do exactly and how to accomplish the plan. I want to give them what the end state is and what restrictions are on them and then let them solve that problem and answer their questions as they arise.
What do you do if somebody comes to you with a plan and 90% of it is good but there’s one thing you passionately disagree with? What do you do in that situation to get feedback and make sure you’re heard? If you give them the end state and the method, what do you do to manage that situation? It’s had to have happened.
It certainly happened. There are a million examples but usually, when I see that, they’re expecting feedback. They know that positive or negative, I’m going to give them feedback every time they send something to me. Simply ignoring products that your people have put together to spend time on is a classic leadership shortfall. Even if you have nothing to say, there is a positive level of feedback. They know to expect feedback.
If I’m in that scenario, the first question that I’m asking is, “Walk me through your thought process on that topic.” When I was an instructor in Quantico with the Marine Corps prior to my switch to the Army, they very much preached at the instructor education program Socratic questioning. You may know what the answer is but question them to walk them on to the end so that they walk themselves on to the answer. It can variance inception.
It’s a great way. “Walk me through your thinking.” Based on that, I can continue to ask questions that either lead them to better understand or put them in the direction they want, where it comes out of their mouth, and they better retain that knowledge, or maybe I’ve overlooked something. Maybe there’s an aspect in their analysis situation that I missed and they have a good reasoning for that. I need to give that the opportunity to come to light as well.
That’s how it starts the conversation. It’s a matter of asking. There is a point for directive feedback, especially in high-octane situations. “I need to go with what Bo or Paul says.” That trust needs to be built prior. You cannot build that trust with that team member at the moment. They need to understand, “He’s the leader. I got to do what he says. I’ve got enough faith in him and his experience that that’s what’s best.”
Since a lot of people reading are in the finance industry, let’s walk through Ben’s collateral duty or ancillary duty for the tech stack and outbound outreach for investment sourcing. Can you walk through the process of getting him aligned on the goal and how that works with feedback, growth, and development?
That’s been an interesting one. With where the firm stands, it’s critical for us to iron out the friction points in our deal sourcing and analysis processes. That’s probably one of the most critical firm initiatives that we have. Ben’s been doing a great job. One thing we identified early is that we were able to access a large amount of data regarding, we’ll say, Florida regional manufacturing companies. It’s a large industry tag. It gave us a couple thousand thoughts.
We developed a cold call procedure and a vetting procedure. We had our teams that we had built a lot of data on and a deep dove into each one. We knew what type of companies we looked for but it was a time suck to not only whittle down this massive list but also cold call all of these companies. It wasn’t efficient. After the discussion with you that we gave to Ben and we took off and ran with, we have to find a way to make sourcing these calling targets more efficient. They have to go from cold to lukewarm leads at least. We simply don’t have the time with our advisory and the size of our firm.
That was a vestige from the military. When I was overseas, we didn’t go after cold targets. That’s an international list waiting to happen. At a minimum, they had to be microwave-ready. That made a lot of sense to me. Through his research and networking throughout the firm with our external senior advisors, we came across the intent-based search. This is very software-related so we found a program that would fit in that allowed us to work with Google searches and figure out who’s looking at private equity that fits within our already developing tech stack.
He found an economical option price-wise that fit exactly what we needed. We tested it out. It whittled 2,000 down to 150, which led to almost a 25% jump in positive reception to our calls based on that list. To me, that is a great example. All I asked him was to turn these cold leads into lukewarm leads. He went after a piece of software, developed a thesis on it, validated that thesis, and developed a plan forward, both financially and technology integration-wise. It’s then part of our tech stack.
We’ll continue to use that software and track the data to make sure that it’s as efficient as we’re hypothesizing it based on initial reports. It’s a great example of decent leadership, setting a good intent for your guys, and letting a high-performer and vigil figure it out. That’s one of my favorite examples. We’re using it every day.
We’ve got eight core team members that’s in the office. What’s the goal for each of those team members that you have?
In many ways within an industry that we understand, particularly manufacturing or industrials, I want them to be able to be dropped at an asset that hopefully, we own by that point, and be able to run a business unit at a minimum at that asset. That means I need to get them on the ground. They need to run some type of project and get exposed to some type of business processes within those specific industries and our eight teams. I can not fire and forget them but I don’t need to check on them on a daily basis once they are in the military down range.
I need them to understand how the firm and deal process works and what we’re looking for when we’re conducting a deal. At the time, with my training area on the advisory side, I need them to go on-site with a client. I need them to run a PMO, TMO, gross margin improvement, and recontracting war room, whatever the case may be. I need them to get out there and do at least one or preferably two of those so that I can trust that they’re fully trained to run the value creation plan we identify for an asset we purchase within twelve months.
Hiring Military People
I’ve been sold. I’ve hired military professionals for over a decade. I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. I’ve gotten some feedback on X to say, “It seems very aggressive to make someone standalone capable within 18 to 24 months.” What feedback would you give the people that have that mindset? Why is it a good thing to hire military people?
I’m going to lean toward the special operations guys here because it’s a bit more quantifiable. You can find this in any military member. I don’t want to exclude any jet military occupational specialty here but I’m going to focus on the special operations guys. The Army Special Forces qualification course in particular, and SEALs mirror this, is only a year and a half. If you’re a medic, two years long at most. Some guys, if they already speak a foreign language for the Green Berets, can get the whole course done in 1 year because those last 6 months are usually language school.
That means that the actual hard skills training to be a Green Beret in the Army Special Forces is only a year-long, plus or minus month. Those guys are expected to join a team that has varying levels of experience. Upon joining that team, on day one, they should be deployable overseas to represent the United States, whether that be kinetic, combat operations, or training a partner force that is an ally of the US or a country we’re looking to expand influence into.
If you’re telling me that someone can be entrusted with multimillions of dollars of equipment, mission, and the entire strategic initiatives of a country overseas after one year of training, I don’t see any reason why a person of that caliber can’t be dropped at a business within the continental US with a toolkit and not be able to make decisions and begin to create impacts on the ground. It’s a very myopic view if you think that pure experience is what drives success in any industry.
It’s a very myopic view if you think that pure experience is what drives success in any industry. Share on XThere are some people who would say, clearly not us, that it takes a while to get the hangover from the military off. What would you say to that when someone offers that objection? I don’t see it as much anymore in civilian employment but it does exist in some pockets.
The military hangover occurs because you’ll see it like you would in individuals that stick in a specific industry or very specific job like packaging manager for twenty years. It’s going to be hard for them to break the vernacular of that role. The military hangover occurs because guys stay in the military for 10, 15, or 20 years. They come out and work in private industry using the same vernacular they use in the military. It slipped through a couple of times for me in this show.
The truly high-performing individuals, the ones that we look for, understand that it’s like speaking a language. It’s a difference between English and Spanish. If I speak both languages, I’m liable to also be able to identify when is best to use one over the other. At this point in my career, what these guys are driving towards too, what we generally understand, and what your high-performing military members will understand is that they can use that military language and analogies to their benefit but also understand when it’s not being received well and they need to switch gears to a more accommodating way of speaking. That alleviates the military hangover very quickly.
It’s very binary the outcomes I’ve seen. I’ve seen very much success. Somebody comes in and nails it. It’s fizzles. Some can make the leap but some can’t. If you’ve done 30 years in the military, it’s a bit harder to make the jump.
This may get me canceled or whatever the case would be but let’s call a spade a spade. Not every person who joins the military is a high-octane performer or individual. What makes the US military so great is that those individuals, their negative impact if they have one, is mitigated because they’re such ingrained. There are doctrines and processes built. It’s hundreds of years of lessons.
There are so many safety nets within the US military, processes, and things to follow that you don’t need to be the best performer on earth to be good at your job. The closer you get to organizations in the military where there are fewer processes and safety nets, the more they beat the crap out of you to get there because they need to make sure that you’re someone who can function in that. That’s probably the reasoning behind that one.
Career Advice To Young Professionals
The naval forces have a procedure for everything. What advice would you give, let’s say, to young professionals looking to advance their careers? Think of somebody who’s coming out of college or middle of their first job, the first four years in their careers?
The first thing you have to do is listen. That applies not only to just individuals looking to advance their careers but also across the board. Senior executives stop listening and then they become less effective leaders. The reason I say listen is that the more talking you do or the more preconceived notions you come in from day one if this is your new career, the less you’re going to retain and adapt to the new environment that you’re in or better understand the environment you continue to be in.
Senior executives stop listening and then they become less effective leaders. Share on XListen because it’s going to inform your questions. Once you have good questions, you begin to approach the associate, VP, principal, and maybe even the MD at a social event. If you come armed with those good questions, it’ll make you stand out. That also applies to expanding your network outside of your current role. When I decided to get out of the military, I only found myself in my current position because I started getting on LinkedIn. I identified what I thought might be fields I was interested in.
I started to find people who worked in those and said, “Listen, I’m in the Army. I have my MBA. I want to transition out. I’m interested in your experience.” I legitimately meant I wanted to listen to their experience. If at the end they offered help, then I could ask, “Could you introduce someone else? Do you know any roles available?” I never went into it knowing I was going to ask for a favor. I went into it going to listen and learn first off. That genuineness helps you expand your network so much faster and leads to opportunities.
What was your hit rate for those emails? Out of every ten you sent, how many responses did you get?
This may be a benefit of the butt-kicking that the military gave me multiple times. What I was able to put as my experience in the military and where I was coming from, it was probably 4 to 6. I’d say probably around a 50% hit rate. That didn’t always lead to conversations but I would at least get a response back to the client, which was respectful.
There are a lot of junior professionals, I believe, who are very focused on hard skills, Excel and PowerPoint skills. The advice I tend to give is you have to get out there, network more, and meet people but there seems to be a roadblock between some of those team members or colleagues that they don’t want to do that. What advice would you give to them to help remove that roadblock and why it’s more important, or at least just as important, as the hard skills?
When you look at high-performing teams in the military, they don’t expect the guys who show up for the tryouts to already know all the skills necessary to be a functioning member of the teams that are the output of the training. They look for potential. If you go to Army Special Forces assessment selection, they teach you land navigation in selection and then you are tested on it by the end of the week. They look for the guys who are able to pick that up quickly, be introduced to a new topic, and then perform, not at a proficient but at an acceptable level as it demonstrates potential.
There are two sides of that coin. If you’re looking for a job that requires hard skills, you should spend time learning those hard skills as much as you can prior to that interview. At the same time, if I were looking for a specific role that had some hard skill requirement, I would lean more towards focusing on what is the potential of the individual sitting across from me to learn those skills while also providing something more dynamic to my organization than whether or not they had those hard skills coming in, depending on the role. The potential should always be first and hard skill second. Someone with potential can learn quickly.
Personal And Professional Goals
Given that, how do you set personal and professional goals for yourself? What’s the biggest thing you’re working on personally and professionally?
My professional goal is to develop a team that sits in this office every day and can operate 100% without me. That is my personal professional goal at the moment in the short-term, a 12 to 18-month term. As well as continue the firm-building initiatives that you and I are pursuing. When I’m setting my life goals, personal goals, and professional goals, it boils down to what I want in life.
My family life was one of the reasons I decided to put myself in recklessly dangerous scenarios on behalf of the US government, which was probably not the best decision anymore. That feeds over into at this point, I want to build the firm. Not only to set the team up for success but to set myself up for enough financial and professional success that by the time, my son is older and he’s in sports, I have the financial freedom to be able to attend those events. Anytime you’re setting goals personally and professionally, you need to figure out what’s driving you first.
Is he playing hockey or lacrosse?
He’s half finished. I left. He already had the hockey stick waving around.
Can he skate already?
I’ll be skating with him. Otherwise, his mom will disown him.
Lessons And Insights From Bo’s Career
What’s the best thing you ever did to advance your career and get you to where you are?
For both in the military and here, it was putting my fear of failure aside and taking the leap. When I wanted to join the Marine Corps or the Army, I wanted to join a high-performing team but the selection rate was exceptionally low. When you’re going into that, you’re not sure you’re going to make it. A lot of guys will self-select themselves off that alone. They will choose to stay where it’s comfortable because they’re afraid of failure and the embarrassment that comes with that.
It was the same thing here. When I decided to get out of the military, as wild as it is to say, it was my comfort zone. I was very comfortable in the military, despite how uncomfortable the job can be. That’s what I knew. Leaving that for something uncertain like private equity made me nervous. I was nervous that I wouldn’t pick up any traction. I would land a job I didn’t like or even worse, I wouldn’t be good at it and I would fail. I don’t have this comfort zone of what I know anymore. The best thing I ever did was to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, getting over that fear of failure and embarrassment, and getting myself comfortable taking that leap.
You’re signing up for the Q course. You’re pivoting services to go over to the Army and do a very hard job to qualify with a 15% to 20% pass rate if you’re lucky. If not, it’s 5% to 10%. You’re changing your whole branch of the service. You burnt your bridge a little bit using the Cortes’ metaphor. Was there ever a moment when you thought you weren’t going to make it?
Many times. You can’t say too much about selection. If you’re reading and interested, you’re more than welcome to find out. I’ll be happy to help you get there. If you didn’t fill your canteen up to the very top and one of the instructors would check it, you would be dropped for disobeying a direct instruction or not following a direct instruction.
Every day, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. Somehow I did. They took a risk on me. Certainly, that exists every day. To some extent, it exists here. As your Chief Operating Officer, you give me a title that requires some performance. I still have the days where I don’t always have the answer and I still need to be able to perform to the level the firm and team expects. I don’t always know if I have that capacity but I know I got to try. I will never stop trying. That’s what’s key.
What was the moment that you’ve been here, and I’m springing this on you, that you said, “I think we’ve got something here that’s going to work?” We’ve had a couple of, “There’s something special here.” Walk me through those examples.
To be honest with you, it was the very first project you put me on. Most of the team was committed elsewhere. You were committed elsewhere. We did not have the bandwidth for anyone else to attend my first day on-site. I went out to the Midwest by myself to meet my first client and run my first project. We were talking about potential. In a larger organization, that would cause absolute collapse.
I was very nervous going into that day. You would give me all the tools. We planned and had been in conversations prior but I was on-site by myself. There was no safety net that existed. There was none of Paul’s experience to step in and save me when I said something dumb. I listened and spoke to the key individuals. I met people across the board and leveraged my experience from the military to be able to tell stories, build that rapport, buy myself some time, and become proficient in the topic we’re discussing.
Walking out of the building that day when it went far better than I expected, I realized that I could get my feet under me as quickly as I expected. It was when I was like, “This job is doable. The trust that Paul put in me is extraordinary. We have something special here. If I can expose guys like myself to this over and over, we can build one hell of a team.” Walking out of that company that day in the Midwest was one of the times when I felt it because I had confidence in myself as well.
Here’s the last question we ask everybody. What’s your favorite book you’ve ever read?
This is going to be a very obscure one. It’s called Eastern Approaches. It’s the memoirs of Fitzroy Maclean. He was a founding member of the British SAS. Before that, he worked in the foreign service in Russia and snuck around pre-World War II Russia in a whole bunch. He got himself elected to parliament when the war broke out so he could get out of the foreign service. He got elected, left foreign service on a technicality, and gave up his seat. On the same day, he joined the Army. He went to North Africa, founded the SAS, and then jumped into Yugoslavia with Tito.
He did it all with humor, candor, and not a positive outlook but a very realistic outlook. Everything was sprinkled with some jokes to make the bad times easier for the team. He was a great leader. Honestly, it’s a 500-page book but it’s one of my favorite page-turners ever read. He’s my absolute hero. It shows a good example of how to lead through difficult times.
When was the SAS founded?
It was in Africa I believe in ‘41 and ‘42.
It was right around World War II.
It was right when the British and the Americans were fighting through North Africa against Rommel.
The British were always pretty positive. I panicked when they were getting bombed. It’s raining again.
It’s that British dry wit and this guy epitomizes it to a T. They did some wild stuff. It’s an incredible book. It’s a great example of leadership in an unconventional environment.
There are going to be 100 new downloads of a book that I’ve never even heard of before. I’m going to have to go on the list. Bo, it’s good sitting down with you. I’m very excited to have you on the team. You’ve done an incredible job since you’ve been on board. I’m looking forward to more growth to come.
Thanks for having me.
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About Robert ‘Bo’ Plante
Self-directed and highly driven former Marine/Army Officer with comprehensive accomplishments leading team-based strategic planning, military operations, logistics, staff training evolutions, and cross-functional leadership to ensure success and achieve the goals of my organization. Established reputation for innovative thinking, strong negotiation, collaboration, and risk management acumen.
I am a highly organized, creative problem solver who excels at leading teams through complex problem sets by identifying goals, advising on risk, and utilizing decisive action. Looking to drive impact, growth, and transformation among private equity portfolio companies!