Why Most Companies Fail at Scale (And How This CEO Is Fixing It)

What does it really take to step into a CEO role and lead when the stakes are high, and the answers aren’t clear? 

In this episode, Lt. Col. (Ret.) Mike Benitez, current CEO of Purple Rhombus, shares powerful insights from his first six weeks leading a venture-backed defense startup—revealing how to make critical decisions under pressure, build trust fast, and execute at scale in a rapidly evolving world. From fighter pilot discipline to redefining innovation in defense, this conversation will challenge how you think about leadership, risk, and action. If you want a real-world look at leading when it matters most, this is a must-listen—and be sure to check out Purple Rhombus to learn more about the mission and innovation behind the company.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Have you ever frozen in the key moment of making a critical decision? Whether it's in business or in life, it can cost you everything. Commander's Intent will teach and inspire you how to lead with clarity, courage, and purpose. So here's your host, retired Air Force Colonel, fighter pilot, and your leadership mentor, Derek Oaks.

SPEAKER_03 0:25

Good day and welcome to another episode of Commander's Intent. I'm Derek Oaks, your host, and I'm here with my co-host Rob and Mike Benitez, the CEO of Purple Rhombus. And we're going to talk to him about the first six weeks in his company, what it's been like, how he ended up where he is, what his background is a little bit, and where he wants to take the company, what his vision is going forward. And I want to kind of pick his brain on the decisions he's making and his team and how he's demonstrating trust for them and giving them trust so that he can get the most out of them. So I'm going to turn it over to you, Mike, and just kind of tell me about Purple Rhombus, how you ended up becoming the CEO, and a little bit about the company.

SPEAKER_02 1:04

Okay. I'll start off with an alibi. I don't have all the answers. And if anyone says they do, they're lying to you. So I'll just share my perspectives, take it or leave it. So Purple Rhombus is a venture back startup that is founded and formed on the first principles of affordable mass. And that means it has to be affordable and it has to be at scale. That's the mass, right? So the thing that really the company is founded on is a thing called DFM, designed for manufacture. So everything we're focused on group two, group three drones. So if I build a drone, and there's drones everywhere today, you could throw a rocket and hit a drone company. Most of those are made to show something off, right? You'll see them on LinkedIn videos, YouTube, they're styrofoam, they're plastic, 3D printed, some of them are composites. They look cool, right? And that's good for prototyping, experimentation, learning, hobbyists. If you're going to build a million of them, none of those processes are going to work, right? So design for manufacture is a principles in engineering where you're going to prototype as if you were going to go straight into mass production. And so everything that you do, you approach it from how can I build that faster, better, and cheaper. It's not just about, hey, that curve will look really cool in this video, and I can shoot it from this angle and it'll look really in a really good video, and we can win a prototype competition. You know, the drone industry, and really it's a I guess it's a little bit of a vignette of most of traditional Department of Defense. You know, it's a car show, it's a concept car competition, right? Do you people submit paper airplanes? You know, I say kind of flippantly, but I mean, you win billion-dollar contracts on pieces of paper and what you write, and you can dream up of a concept of an airplane and win a billion-dollar contract in the Pentagon. Like that's insane for anyone in the commercial industry. That used to be like the status quo for a generation, you know, the 80s and 90s, and up until just a few, maybe five years ago, that was kind of how it worked. And so you get what you incentivize. And so industry kind of calcified around that. They have concepts and prototypes, and they do that to get feedback and get buy-in to shape how they're actually going to build something. But with drones, like if you just build for scale and someone wants to buy it, they should be able to buy it. It sounds pretty simple, but in execution, it's much harder because you could build a drone and you go, here's my drone. Do you guys want it? They're like, Yes, I do want it. Like, okay, well, I gotta go build a factory, it's gonna take me at least two to three years, and then my you know, you can get in the backlog, the firing order, and then maybe you'll have a four, five, six-month lead time, and I can get you the first one or two. Like, man, the war is gonna be over by then. Come on, man. And the reason why I mentioned all this of kind of going off a tangent up front, you affordable mass, uh, and we'll talk about mass later if you want, but it sounds obvious, but you can't deter without credibility. So you have to have a credible means to deter. You can't deter with paper airplanes and proposals, you have to deter with a force that is has the capability, the capacity, the readiness, the willing and able to do that thing, which causes that deterrence, right? That's deterrence theory. It's gonna be so painful to do something that you have to change how you're thinking about the situation to deter and dissuade someone from acting in a way that would be detrimental. So, anyways, that's how I got started. That's where Proporambus is. I got started originally on the software side. I did 25 years of active duty, went to a venture-backed software company, and a part of that was putting software at other people's unmanned systems. And so I got to look over the about four years, I got to look at the entire industry from the group one quadcopters up to the group five collaborative combat aircraft. And you can kind of see, again, how the industry's incentivized and calcified. And I've seen, I don't know, I can't even count, 50, 100 different drone companies at this point. I came across a friend of mine, well, a guy who I knew who worked together in the Pentagon way back in the day, probably about 10, 12 years ago. I noticed that he had changed jobs and I was like, Oh, that's interesting. Saw him on LinkedIn. Said, hey, let's catch up. You know, it's been like four months or so since I talked to you. He's like, Yeah, sure. And he's like, Yeah, I've got uh working at a drone company. I'm like, Well, this is great. Like, and so we got on a call and he starts talking to me about this drone company that he just started out a couple months back. And I'm like, say no more. He got three minutes into the pitch. I said, You can just stop. I totally get what you're doing, totally understand it. If I was gonna do it from like build a drone company from zero, that's exactly how I would do it. And that company was Purple Rhombus, and so that's how interestingly got connected to the co-founders. And I knew another co-founder from about a year, year and a half ago. I met him, and it was kind of funny. We all have this interesting backstory that we all were connected, you know, not in a previous life, but in previous intersections in our, you know, professional journeys. And they were looking for someone to come over and and take the team and you know, lead them to the promised land. And I was looking for something fresh and some new challenges, and you know, it was the push-pull that I needed.

SPEAKER_03 5:48

That's fantastic. You know, it makes me think of you're coming about having it ready to go. I I think of the T7 and oh man, what a disaster that is. You know, they they roll out with all this fan ferret, and everybody gets so excited. I love it, I love the stadium seating and looks like a fighter and on and on and on. And it's only single engines, it'll cost us less to operate. And we, yeah, we can get it to in four years. And here we are, seven years later, just getting the first couple aircraft. They're way behind schedule. We've had that, it's killed us in T-38 maintenance, it's killed us in you know what Boeing has charged us for development cost on an aircraft that should have been ready to go. And even if there were other aircraft that are weren't as good, they were ready to go.

SPEAKER_02 6:32

Chasing perfection is the enemy of good enough. There's probably five really, really solid jet trainers on the market today that are not Chinese. And instead of like just pick one of them and replace the 1950s T-38 fleet, just start replacing them, right? And then we can figure it out later. It's uh they want the golden-plated solution. And I'll tell you one story about the T-7, the new ejection seat. This is uh a few years ago when they were trying to expand the number of people who had the opportunity to fly ejection seat aircraft. So the ACES V, ACES 6, whatever the newest seat is that's in the T7, it had a requirement to have a very, very, very low weight and a very, very, very high weight envelope, like a really, really big ejection seat envelope. And the thought was that that was going to open the amount of people who whether it's a small young lady or a really big, you know, football player in the academy team, but it gave them the opportunity to go through on that career path. And it wouldn't get stuck in like a you know uh mobility fleet or something with that in ejection seat. And so that like, you know, good intentions, right? But turns out like it is a wickedly hard engineering problem to have one seat to operate in all of those regimes. So you think of like not just like high fast, low and slow, but low and slow with lightweight, low and slow with big weight, and all those corner cases that you have to solve for. And so the program actually got delayed a long time because of the ejection seat. So not a Boeing thing, it was an ejection seat thing. But the amount of senior leaders to include like four stars that had to lean in, and finally the resolution was okay, so you know, this person who's at these edge cases and the seat that we're trying to qualify, let's say we fixed the seat, we spent a bajillion dollars another two years fixing the seat. They get it to T7, they crush the T7. When they graduate, what aircraft are they gonna go to? And they're like, Yeah, there is no ejection seat in any operational aircraft that they can fit in. And they're like, Okay, let's just move on with this program and we'll fix the seat as we go. Like, it took that kind of yeah, it took that kind of common sense. You're like, Oh, yeah, I guess that does make a lot of sense. We just wasted the amount of just thousands and thousands of hours, and really not just hours, but time. Time that T38 is gonna linger on. That just like lost track of the like, what are we doing here, guys? Like, first principle's problem solving. We're trying to get the seat expanded to get the trainer so they can get into the fleet. If there's no fleet seat, then what are we doing? Right? That's a great example.

SPEAKER_03 8:55

The another example that's similar to that is the F 35 HUD, F-35 no HUD HUD, you know, or the helmet. Some of my friends that were flying that at first, yeah, they said it was up to five degrees off. I'm like, well, how do I shoot a gun five degrees off? How do I shoot an ILS five degrees off? You know, so what value is that helmet when I had the you probably flew with your Hemix, or you know, at least the pilot flew with your Hemix and in the A10, we had the Scorpion helmet, and that thing literally, I could, it was interchangeable with my wingman. I'd strap it onto my helmet with two clips, plug it in, bore sighted on my HUD, and it was done. And it was good enough where I could see, I could, you know, visualize the aircraft from a long ways away because it just got me looking in the right direction. I couldn't shoot the gun with it, but I didn't need to because I had a heads-up display. So for a requirement that did not change the combat capability of the aircraft, we spent hundreds of millions of dollars. And now we have a helmet that's half a million dollars.

SPEAKER_02 9:51

Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of lessons learned in the F-35 program for sure. The the gun, the gun is a good one, and uh, you're an A10 guy, so you know what's the mill dispersion of an A10 gun of a GAW?

SPEAKER_03 10:01

Five mils at of 80% of the bullets and 13 mils for 100% of the bullets.

SPEAKER_02 10:06

There you go. Yeah, so then the strike eagle, I forgot what it was. I'm getting old. Six or eight mils. It was something they just do it in total, but it's like the gun, and the gun has to be bore sided to the HUD, and just all these systems. So when you point the jet at the right thing, and you know, each jet's bent a little bit differently, and so you make sure you bore sight the guns to the each one, right? Well, if you have no HUD to bore sight it to, like what are you bore sighting it? So you bore set it to you know the center line of the aircraft, and I can speak intelligently about how an F-35 gun is or is not bore sighted, but the mill dispersion of the gun system by itself had a very, very, very low mill dispersion requirement because there wasn't a whole lot of bullets. And so when you only have you know 140 bullets or whatever's in the gun these days, you know, there's a but you have no heads-up display or a way to bore sight the gun to the helmet, it's just uh you know, we lost the narrative here, right? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:54

What's the point of the gun? That's what they need to do is step back and say, why do I even have this on the aircraft?

SPEAKER_02 10:58

Yeah, well, that's a whole conversation about pulling guns out of fighters. That goes that's a Vietnam PTSD right there.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Yeah, it's interesting, but I think like in the space that you're in now, though, we're talking unmanned vehicles. I just had something at the same time in that space with unmanned vehicles, and that's because I went with SOP all the time. And so I watched the way the Air Force ran, and I watched the way the army ran. And they'll look very, very, very different. You know, they I watched this, you know, the Air Force if they're up in a late with some local and a unmanned aircraft submitted to the side. It's oh my gosh, everybody, you know, safety, safety, safety. And they uh white banker, hey, we gotta go back and look at the tapes, and the army's going, hey, you need to launch us another one. Air Force does nothing, it's too dangerous. The army doesn't look at them like airplanes, they look at them like jeeps. You know, when a media army UAV smacks the side of a mic, the command attempts to get was launched the next one and they launched the next one, and they keep doing that. And so to me, it's interesting because you're talking about affordable things. You're talking about this whole really matches more to the army's way of the abysmal stuff. The airports have gotten so you know tied into this idea of anything that flies is thrown by a pilot, anything sold by a pilot, we have to do these safety measures and want to grab it for the army and raise it, but yes, like I'm gonna launch this shot, but it's a tool. If it gets shot down, if it gets landing, uh who cares? We'll figure it out in the aftermath. And so to me, I think it's interesting because it's exactly what you guys are talking about. Because to me, the army approaches it through the lens of hey, let me try to do here, right? We're flying an aircraft, we have to fly it this particular way. So I think it would almost, in some ways, we almost need to have some army leadership step into the air force and talk about how to use things that don't have a person in the cockpit. And if you slam on the side of a mountain, who cares?

SPEAKER_02 12:44

Yeah, there's still the times are changing. I'll share a little bit about that. I when you're talking about the uh oh man, I said a flashback. I went through weapon school at Nellis in the 17th Weapons Squadron, that's the strike eagle division, and I was in class 12 Bravo. So the latter part of 2012, we're in like the the last couple weeks, it's all the graduation exercises, all these complicated things that have all these aircraft out there, and we're in one of the night balls, and right as an all the aircraft are up, all the blues in the east, all the reds in the west, and it was an interesting scenario. But the scenario was we were going to basically send an MQ9 alone or not afraid across the war, and then use them as kind of like the canary in the coal mine to kick off the war, and they were gonna go do a maneuver or something and do something interesting. But so we're all in the hold, it's at night, and we hear this something on the radio got clipped, and it was like lost links, lost link, and then it was something, and I can't remember what it was, and we're and it's at night, and we're turning hot in the cap. And you know, if we got MVGs on, and we just see this huge flash and this MQ9 crashes in the middle of the Nellis range at night, and there's probably like 60 aircraft airborne, all just sitting there going, like, Well, does anyone know what to do right now? And like, no one knew what to do. And like, I've never had an unmanned thing crash in the middle of an LFE. Okay, so and it, but the LFE hadn't started, so everyone's just still in the hold. They're like, I guess we'll sit here. And the they no one went all the way back to the White Force and the White Cell, and they had to call the wing commander at night, and like no one actually like, I don't know what to do. We've never actually lost an MQ9 and one of these things before. And it was just, you know, the times have changed, but back then it was pretty funny. We wasted all of our gas in the hold, came back and landed and had to go refly the mission the next day. But you know, now I'd say now it's a little bit different. Just you know, there's different groups of drones, group one through five, one small little quadcopters that you see. Five is like your you know, Andrew's fury, that kind of thing. When you get into group two and three, that's really where some of the interesting stuff starts to come in with that mentality. You know, back this summer, back in July of 2025, the uh Secretary of Defense put out a memo, all these acquisition reforms. One of the things that was in one of those memos was really, really, really important, and it was a really, really good signal. And most people missed it. And it was this it was group two, which are under 55 pound drones, are now categorized as ammunition. Like they are throwaway ammunition, and that changes culture and how you're gonna use these things. Hey, I don't have to sustain them, they're literally ammunition, right? Like we're gonna buy them, we're gonna use them, we're gonna buy more, we're gonna use them. And they're thinking that how is an extension of how a soldier would operate on the group two side. So huge, huge, huge change culturally. The Air Force, yeah, the Air Force generally doesn't live in the group two or group three space ground launch stuff, but they're getting into it too. Uh, can't too share too much about it, but they are. The group three gets really interesting back to your point, Rob. So group three starts to fall under a different part of the FAA regulations, and it has all of the same airworthiness stuff of like an MQ9, which is like insane. So if it weighs 56 pounds, it's now has to be treated like an MQ9. If it's 55 pounds, you're good to go. You can go kind of do whatever you want with it, and that's an FAA thing. So, and it kind of falls into the national airspace system, which is how the military integrates and all that stuff, too. So they're kind of related. But when you get into the group three space, especially something that gets above the coordination altitude, when you actually have to like fly around big aircraft, there's certain nuances that start to come into play. Like, you know, when the three of us used to fly all the time, yeah, you would get a radio call, you would change your altimeter settings, and you know, this and that, and that would ensure you're the right, you know, your air, your altitude is the right altitude. Well, some of these drones that can't change their altimeter, number one. Number two, their altimeter has you know a plus or minus thousand-foot variance because it's not aircraft certified. But you like so you have so many of these like nuanced deconfliction problems. Like, how do I deconflict something that has, you know, what if I have 10 of them all flying together? Even that, if I have a you know, uh swarm or team of 10 drones, just because the INUs and altermaters are so the tolerances are so high, you actually have to account for all of this deconfliction of the worst case scenarios so they don't run into each other, right? So you have like time, space, you know, deconfliction. So it becomes really, really interesting of how do you actually bring affordable mass and integrate it and use it and apply it on the battlefield. It gets a lot more nuanced than you think.

SPEAKER_03 17:03

That's interesting. I did not know that I missed because I've been reading all the executive orders that have come out, and I paid attention quite a bit to them, especially the ones that had to do with acquisition reform and then the ones from Secretary Hegseth about the use cases, but I missed that one. But that's pretty fascinating because it takes in a lot of use cases, and it means to your point, I don't have to sustain it. And that changes how well it's made, it changes what kind of materials I use, it changes uh the security levels that I'm gonna embed in that thing, you know, the type of equipment I'm gonna embed in that thing. So that you know, that makes a pretty big difference.

SPEAKER_02 17:43

Yeah, and you start competing against, you know, at real scale, you know, the these group two drones, you start competing with volume and massive fires like guided artillery, right? Or extended range like Gimlers, rockets. So that's the kind of volume we're looking at. So I mean, I'm so glad that happened. It's gonna take time for it to get implemented in a way that people actually do accept that risk and go, yeah, you know, I'm gonna shoot it. I'm gonna go crash it to something, I want to have another one, I'll pull it out of the armory, right? Now they have to have a way to have a some kind of working capital fund where they can continue to pull and use those, right? So if there's that they have to figure out still, but you know, culture takes time.

SPEAKER_03 18:18

Well, but if you treat it just like ammunition, you treat it like buying lots of 30 millimeter or buying in missiles, you know, we've got problems with those in terms of multi-year buys and how we manage our munitions overall, but at least it gives you a little bit of a path forward.

SPEAKER_02 18:33

Oh, yeah. When I worked in the Pentagon back when 20 2015, 2018 time frame, the plus or minus, uh, you know, we were using up all of our good munitions in the Middle East, the preferred munitions, and and you know, everyone's like, Well, where's all the munitions? Like, well, they're called bill payers. Like, every no no one wants to fund stockpiles, they want to fund the stuff that they can see on the flight lines, right? So spare parts and munitions are the two dull pairs every single budget cycle. That's just how the Pentagon works because no one can see you rob Peter to pay Paul, but no one's gonna see that manifest on your watch. All they're gonna see is the good things, and so it's you know, if you went and looked at the like really looked at the budget books and you know, the dirty secrets, we can talk Air Force stuff if you want. I mean, that's leadership and courage to go, hey, I'm actually gonna fund my weapon system sustainment accounts at 100. You know, the last time I think a and someone's gonna correct me here uh on the show, maybe General DePoule, he probably has the right number, but the last time a US Air Force operational platform, you know, F-16 or whatever, was actually funded at 100% weapon system sustainment, is probably 40 years ago. So they're all funded at like 60 to 80 percent. And then we put money in the flying hour program, and so you have this disconnect of like, well, the flying hours I can't execute because I don't have the spare parts to fix the jets, which is why my radius is low. And so it's it's a multifaceted problem that takes. I mean, part of it is just explaining it. It's people who don't live through it and understand all the nuances, it's hard to understand. But once you understand it, it's like, oh yeah, if I don't have parts, I can't fly the jets, so I don't care about what the flying hour program is. And this to that point, because of how we buy things, now I'm gonna get off on another tangent.

SPEAKER_03 20:10

Because of how we buy things and because of how we color money, we get to the end of the year and we start wasting money on things that yes, we kind of need, but not really. And yes, you can buy spare parts, and yes, you can buy consumables with those options and maintenance money, but you can't buy everything. You're not gonna buy munitions with that. You're not gonna buy those types, you're not gonna go into contractual obligations with that kind of money because it's the wrong color money. And so that you're limited in definitely in what you can do. When I was on the air staff, I remember they were trying to push us to shut down the white phosphorus, you know, Willie Pete production. Like, well, you can do that, but it's a bad idea, and this is why it's a bad idea. Thankfully, but it wasn't just Willy Pete, it was just rocket production for the Air Force. And luckily, the Army helped us keep that going, and then we get to you know the APKWS, where hey, you know, we can actually for this Buck 25 rocket, put us a cheap seeker on it, and it acts as good as an A9X, it acts as good as a lot of things, and it acts as good as a GB54 for some targets, and but it took a lot some thinking to get us to that point, definitely. So let's go back to your the purple Ramos. That was a great discussion. Let's go back to Purple Romus. So, what is your goal right now? Like, what is your target audience? I'm guessing you're exclusively selling to military right now, but I don't want to suppose us, assume that's correct. And you know, what is like what is your growth, your desired growth, and your uh pulling me right back on track, aren't you?

SPEAKER_02 21:36

Well, yeah, so answer your first questions first. The defense is what we're US defense is what we're focused on. I respect what the international community has to do, especially in the coming months and coming years, Europe Pacific. As a company, I'm not focused on that right now. There's plenty of other people to meet that demand. I'm focused on helping the U.S. right now. So that's the first thing. Uh purely defense. We're not trying to brand anything we're doing as delusional. What we're doing is we're saying that if you want affordable mass and you want it today using the industrial base that you have, then we're your people. And I say that because if you look at you know World War I, World War II, where you have to actually mobilize the industrial base to do something, you don't go to war with the industrial base you want, you go to war with the industrial base you have and you just figure it out, right? So like World War II, it took, you know, we the US started mobilizing the industrial base before we ever got involved in the war, like two and a half years before, and it still took us about two years into the war for all that stuff to finally, you know, start making dividends, right? Start making a dent and things. And you know, we're not gonna have that kind of time. You can look at all the, and you guys are probably seeing that all of the war games and simulations, and there's some really good public ones now, but even like 10 years ago, when we were all looking at it, like you know, like 45 days, like no conflict is going to last, it's going to end, and it ends in like three different ways. None of them are good. So when you go in 45 days, if the fight's gonna be over, what's the point of awarding contracts when someone has to go, you know, pour a foundation and build a factory? Like, that's just not gonna work, right? And so what we saw is we saw an opportunity between to be fair, we do need to build a better industrial base, we do need to make the investments in the factories. All of those things have to happen, but it's not an either-or, it's a yes. And so we have actually looked at the industrial base that exists, and using the process that and our approach that we're using, there is capacity everywhere to build drones at a way that's radically affordable at radical scale. And that's really what I've been passionate about now is there is a way this is not a physics problem, it's not a technological problem, it's just a pragmatic execution problem. And those are the easy problems to have.

SPEAKER_01 23:48

Well, I was gonna say, like that, you know, it brings up some stuff. One of the classes that I had at SaaS, we did this whole thing on the confluence of technology, culture, operations, all of these things. And so that brings to mind to me if you're talking about using our current industrial base to be able to build these, you know, UAVs at scale. The next piece though goes back to the previous discussion we had is okay, at least maybe it's not like some of the culture is changing to what we need it to change to to help us to get to the employment. But now I'll do the next one forward. And this is a discussion I had for at least a year sitting at the Air Force Research Institute about who employs those UAVs and the Air Force was so stuffed on this whole pilot thing. And what you're talking about is giving enough iron in the bank space, you can't produce operators at the same scale that it sounds like you are looking to be able to produce iron. So, do you in your vision board, do you put any green lights into working with the Air Force on how to solve that problem? Or do you just say, hey, I'm gonna give you the hardware and you figure that stuff out?

SPEAKER_02 24:55

Oh, what a great question. That's one of the first, you know. I spent, you know, as I've been on board about six, seven, maybe a little bit more weeks now. And I spent the first 30 days, you know, with the team and just looking, asking questions. And I'm a big fan of having there's two types of people you kind of run across in defense circles. You run across the ones that have strongly held, loosely informed opinions, and they stand out pretty well, and they don't typically age well. And you're like, God, you just you don't know what you're talking about. And then you have the people that are opposite, they're actually quiet, they're going to have strongly informed, loosely held opinions, and they're always looking to grab more evidence to shape and continually evolve the way they think about something. And so that's the kind of person I am. I like to ask a lot of questions. I like to sit and kind of think about stuff. And then I usually ask questions to kind of get me on a path or get someone else on a path to pull more information out of them to help, you know, contribute to that body of knowledge. So one of the things I did is uh kind of sat the team down and was like, okay, I see what you guys are doing. I came on board not as a co-founder. So we have the co-founders and a small, small engineering team. I said, totally get it. That's why I'm here. But now we gotta think about the whole thing, right? And so instead of trying to explain dot mil PFP uh to them, uh I said, hey, there's four buckets we're gonna break this whole thing down to, and this is kind of drilled into my team is fade, fabrication, assembly, deployment, deployment. And so if you have a million drones, there's one thing that you can fabricate all the pieces, then you have a I got to put them together, right? That's the assembly. Now I've got a million drones I've built and assembled in the United States. How do I get them to where they need to go? So think about like the logistics. Okay, now they're there. I've got a million drones sitting on the ground and you know at base X. How affordable mass doesn't matter if it's not in the air and doing something, like it's just stuff on the ground and storage, right? So you have to have a way to employ the mass, right? And some of it's through like how do I automate the launching process? Once I get you know 10 at a time, I don't I can't have 10 humans controlling 10 things, so you have to have that mission autonomy, that outer loop kind of control software to break the one to N. And so I can have one human controlling 10 or 20 uh things. And that was, you know, one I came from that software world where we were driving down that path really hard. So that world is coming and it's coming fast. And I'd say that, you know, four years ago, that was kind of like, eh, we'll see. And now there's at least a half dozen companies that can do that pretty well, just in the United States. So that's gonna be a big part of it. And then I think the other part of it, you kind of alluded to it, but just to like be crystal clear, a couple of weeks ago, I was actually out in the field at Fort Benning with the Rangers, and there's NCOs doing this stuff, right? You know, so as we work with Air Force special operations, I think there's a real opportunity to create some alignment between how the non-conventional forces are thinking about this, and I think that is probably gonna plant the seeds to you know big blue eventually.

SPEAKER_03 27:51

That's good news. You're right. I mean, when we were using the MQ1s, MQ9s, the Air Force was so averse to letting anybody but a pilot touch that aircraft. And in some ways, it made sense. It makes sense in FAA controlled airspace, it made sense when you're talking about large force employment because you need somebody who understands three-dimensional maneuvering and all of that, but simply operating a little, you know, especially a one-way drone, why am I gonna waste my time and training on something like that?

SPEAKER_02 28:19

I'll pull a thread on that real quick. The Globahawk, I mean, it's the biggest, most expensive drone in the entire arsenal, right? I mean, it's huge, it's like what 140 million dollars or something like that. But when Northrop had designed it, they had designed it to be like push a button. I mean, there's no joystick or anything, it's not like flying an aircraft like an MQ9 GCS is. It's a flat panel with like buttons, right? And so if you understand the procedures and you push the right buttons, like you don't have to be a pilot. So, like there was that pilot program, no pun intended, to have enlisted pilots operate the Global Hawk because it's like you just push the buttons, it's pre-programmed for better or for worse. And you know, that I think is that closed down too just uh recently. If I'm maybe I'm mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that lost a lot of steam as you know, leadership changed out. But again, culture takes time, right? Culture takes it's a risk aversion thing.

SPEAKER_03 29:08

You know, well, if I'm buying that bomb, I'm gonna be responsible for that bomb. And I yeah, I think we all have seen that too much in the Air Force and our risk aversion from acquisition to employment and maintenance and all of the above, there's a level of risk aversion that I can't have a bad event on my watch, so I'm gonna control it a little bit more. Constraints breeds creativity.

SPEAKER_02 29:32

I mean, I'm sitting here as like living proof. You know, I am a weapons systems officer that flew in the backseat of the F-15E strike eagle. Do you guys know why the Air Force has weapons systems officers? I'd like to hear your take on it. So, well, there's you know, there's the old, old, old days, you know, like World War I type stuff where spotters and things like that. But the modern history is that the Air Force had F-4s, and there's two seat F-4s, and there used to be where a pilot flew in the front and a pilot flew in the back. In the Vietnam War, they actually didn't have enough pilots. And so they started looking at different ways to bring in operators from other career fields that were in other aircraft that were navigators and teach them some radar skills to sit in the back of the F-4. So when you look at like some of the air-to-air kills in Vietnam, if you actually look at the board, like there's a lot of Air Force F fours where two pilots were flying that day that got those kills, and just as many, there was a pilot and a WISO because that was they were experimenting with bringing other people besides pilots because they didn't have enough pilots. So the constraint of manpower is what started that creative process of what else can we do? And so I always find it's interesting. Like, if you can artificially constrain something in an environment to get those creative, the license to be creative and try new things, powerful things happen.

SPEAKER_01 30:49

That brings me back to one of the points you made earlier because you talked a little bit about the war gauge stuff. That's a little near and dear to my heart for a couple of reasons. Number one was a I worked at the end of my career, I was in J37, sensitive activities. I was the chief of sensitive activities from J37 just and best part of that, I ended up getting riped into some future war games. So we were war gaming some future conflicts against America's enemies in the 2030 to 2035 time range, and so we're looking 15 to 20 years in the future, is what we're trying to look at. And so I was very excited about this. Thought this is gonna be great, right? And so I go over to the Navy's uh these war gaming gurus are running these war games, and we've got the CIA team that's playing the red cell, and we've got you know all the team from the Pentagon has come over there to represent our forces, and I was absolutely flabbergasted when I realized that we're doing these war games on hex grid paper and dice rolls, and I thought this is ridiculous. Like, I mean, I get it, we're trying to just try out some concepts here. I mean, and I'm a geek, so I can say this. I played Dungeons and Dragons as a kid, and I just waited we played Dungeons and Dragons. That's great, but then really we didn't expect at the very top end of the you know the Department of Defense to be running its war games in such a fashion because I think uh we weren't able uh to really learn the lessons that we need to. And it gets to your point of being able to push the envelope and constrain things, because I will guarantee you if we had the right software, and this is kind of again, it's right near dear my heart, this is a project I've been working on as a hobbyist for the last five years. But if we had a piece of software that could help uh teach not just our young uh airmen uh to think about air power and how to use it in battle space, but also other services and how difficult it was. Because actually, you've hit on three things here. One is uh the being creative and inventive, uh two is this idea that uh we can't do anything new. And then the last piece is well, I just do what I've seen because and any other way to test it okay, then but I don't create that environment that allows us to have uh, you know, like I would love to take uh you know a game environment and turn your massive AVs into it and see what it looks like because uh I don't think we have an idea. That's the next piece in your E, right? Your employment is okay, well, what's the TTPs gonna look like? What's our doctrine gonna look like when we're playing with the supportable mask? That changes the bound space. And if you if you continue to think about it from a traditional, you know, chaotic perspective, if you continue to look at it like, well, this is you know airspace and this is how we dole it out, and we will not operate that heak efficiency then.

SPEAKER_02 33:30

Yeah, that's a good point. There's a lot, I didn't give away too much, but there's a lot that you can do with things like this that are well beyond just take off, go fly one way and hit something. At some point, you have to honor the threat, right? Which is gonna create some kind of decision commitment calculus, right? So there's there's a lot of second and even third order effects that you can generate with this kind of capability. And so it's not just small cheap drones that are gonna go on a one-way mission, but there's a lot more. It's a really powerful tool, and there's a lot you can do with it.

SPEAKER_01 34:00

Well, we have the historical uh uh advantages that I think about is that they went back to the manager campaign in World War II, and they were they had German ships coming down from Greece and coming down to resupply what was going on with Romanist forces. And over time, the army aircra would devote some uh governing missions to go over and try to stray for bombs some of the ships, the cargo ships don't are trying to do some interdiction on that battle space. Some of the generals who were trying to look at it later and say, well, how effective was that? Because we didn't score very many hits, we didn't sink any ships, and we didn't score very many hits. But the second third order effects, where you say you have to respect the threat. Well, those ship captains sure as heck respected the threat. They didn't want to have any, so they changed their entire rally to go out of the way so that they would not be in you know the threat envelope of the Air Force, the Army Air Corps, and because of that, they weren't able to get the supplies there as fast as they had before, and that ultimately led to you know a US victory in North Africa, but it's not something that shows up in an easy tally that you can get to a general and say, see, General, we caused this. It's only in hindsight, 30 years after the fact, that they looked at it and went, Oh, yeah, this is why they didn't get resuppled.

SPEAKER_02 35:10

I give a really, really, really tactical war story, real quick. You know, I flew 250 combat missions in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan over the course of a few deployments, a few different types of aircraft, all that stuff. And most of those were in the strike eagle, and the strike eagle has a gun. The gun is optimized for air to air. It's got a an upkant in the gun for extra lead and all that stuff. And so when you shoot at the ground, it's a lot harder and it doesn't hit a whole lot of things, right? And so we used to teach our squadron. It's like, you know, there's it's none of this is in the books, right? It's all about you put the thing in the thing, and this is the procedure to hit something with this gun. And you're like, okay, and then people go practice it forever, practice it forever. And I remember us, you know, teaching the squadron as the website officers, like, you know, like yeah, it kind of doesn't matter. You guys know that, right? Like, you know, like I don't understand. Like, we're supposed to put the thing in the thing and you know, strafe strafe the fighting position, that kind of thing. It's like, listen, there's like five ways that you can use this gun in the strike eagle, you know, for air to ground. Actually, like hitting something is number five. So you go, and we have these scenarios that we would come up with to like challenge the people to think differently. Like, okay, and uh in one of these uh, and I've probably used it again, I don't know, nine, like nine different times, something like that in combat. And one of them I distinctly remember back to your story, it's like we had a troops pinned down, it was like was it like naughty all e like uh helmet area of like back when it was like block the block fighting with the British, and you know, they're pinned down and they're taking fire from all these different directions, and you know, they're going back and forth, yada yada yada, and then finally, like I could tell like the whole scenario, like they're getting wrapped around the axe in the scenario, and like you're still taking fire. The yellow and the radio, and finally, it's like, what is the commander's intent? It's like the commander's intent is to get the hell out of here. I'm like, okay, so you don't want to go to the objective. No, we want to like retrograde. I'm like, cool, I'm just gonna lay down fire between the red and the blue forces, and I'm gonna tell you when it's gonna happen, and they're gonna stop shooting, and now you can withdraw. Like, okay, so we just did like three straight passes and laid down a string of bullets, and we just a really banana pass. You know, we don't want a big tight grouping, we want to just put down suppressive fire, like a straight a line between the red and blue forces, and because the blue forces knew it was coming, they were prepared. The red were like, you know, so everyone stops. The blue are able to break contact. Commander's intent has met. I didn't have to do anything special with the gun, I just had to put bullets on the ground at the right place at the right time. So those kinds of things, like you get in creative of like what is the commander's intent? What is the effect you're trying to achieve? And do like effects-based outcomes is what you should be focused on.

SPEAKER_03 37:39

You know, let me uh piggyback on that. Something I was gonna say earlier, but it goes right in line with it is when you're in in an innovative environment, in an innovative company like you are right now, you want people thinking outside the box, you want them to expand their horizons and not get locked into, well, this is the way it's always done. That's why the Air Force and the DOD is where it is right now, is because people have been colouring within the lines forever on so many things. How do you convey trust to your team and convey the right level of trust to your team? You know, you talked about commander's intent. So, how do you give them your vision and how do you trust them with that in a way to where like I got this, I can run with scissors because Mike said I could. And what does that look like? To where they really get thinking, they really are not constrained by what used to be and what the way it's always done.

SPEAKER_02 38:28

Well, first of all, I'd say that I've and you can talk to people who have worked with me, even when I was on active duty, I'm wired a little different, I think. And I have a few things that I'm very passionate about. One of them is that to leave it better than you found it. And so I'm always big on making my replacement better than I ever was. So that like transfer of knowledge and then making them the next generation better than me, like that's always the one. I was never wanted to keep it a secret. I'm always big on that. So I'll start with that. And that leads me to different ways and good, bad, or ugly, but that's kind of where my heart's been. So start with that. If you're not learning, if you're not getting smarter, you're getting dumber at the end of the day, right? So you need to have a license to learn to stretch yourself, and that's not just developing the expertise, because that's part of it, but you also have to develop the experience. And experience comes with good, bad, and ugly things, right? And I think you guys could probably uh appreciate this. You learn a lot more from bad outcomes than you do from good outcomes because it gives you direction of what not to do, right? So failure is actually a good thing because it gives you clarity of like, okay, let's take that off the list. What else can we do? Right? If everything you try succeeds, I would argue you're not trying hard enough. And so that's the first thing. So, like you have a license to learn. I think the I put a lot of high trust in what I call two-way decisions. Have you ever heard the two-way versus one-way decisions? So I think about like a door, right? So most of the decisions you have or in life really are two-way decisions, and a lot of times people overcomplicate them. And it's a decision that, like, you know, you go through the door, you're like, ah, that was not the right decision. Cool. Turn around, walk back out, right? Those are the decisions that you want to delegate, empower people, like let them learn, right? Now it's very, very important. You need to know when you have a two-way decision and a one-way decision. And those one-way decisions are the ones that you want to make sure that you have all the evidence so you can make the best informed decision possible. The worst thing in the world you can do as a leader is to treat a two-way decision as a one-way decision, right? So I've got something that's so easy, it's like just delegate it. Like, you know, one of the worst things as a commander in the military could ever do is to give an order that should never have to be in order, right? Like, dude, you didn't have to even tell us that. Like, and you've probably seen examples of that in your careers. Like, as soon as that happens, everyone instantly knows, like, that shouldn't have happened. The commander should not be doing that. And so big on like delegating those two-way decisions and then coming back and like it worked, cool. What'd you learn? If it didn't work, great. What did you learn and what are you gonna do about it? Right. So big, big high trust in two ways. When you have one ways, I think there's an opportunity to mentor and lead people through decision making, right? Because it's not just about experience and expertise, it's how you have to wire and you train your brain of how you actually make decisions, and all that collectively ties into your judgment, right? So again, uh, an example in operational planning in the military. Like, how do you take something that is is such a wicked problem and get everyone aligned to do something besides just staring at it, like, hey, you got 12 hours in mission planning, like figure it out. We need to get the your tasking order out the door to get signed. Like, what do you do? Like, you look at all the data and then you start labeling it, right? So I'm a big fan of labeling it. It's like this is facts and assumptions, right? So I've got this piece of information. Is it a fact? Is it an assumption that we have to treat as a fact to unblock us, or is it a weak assumption? And it's like, great. So now my assumptions become homework and taskers. And if it's an assumption, I go, hey, go validate this assumption. And it's a fact, I need to when was the last time was that a fact? What's the timestamp on that? So as the conditions change, right? So I'm collecting my body of evidence to inform that one-way decision. And so helping people and just and honestly, just going along for the ride with them. Uh, they get the blocked, and you're kind of in the right seat. You know, hey, let me help you out. Here's what I would do, here's what I think. I'm a big fan of that. I'm also a big fan of transparency. You can ask most people I work with. I don't keep a secret, and I'll tell you what I'm thinking. To include, like, here's how I arrived at here is why I think about this this way. And it's like, oh, that's interesting. But I'm always trying to share that because at the end of the day, you know, the superpower any one of us has as leaders is to have an another one of us helping us, right? If we can somehow have a magic machine to replicate us, we don't, but that's what leadership is building other leaders.

SPEAKER_03 42:45

Uh, nothing. Yeah, you're training your replacement. You know, you want somebody, and I love what you said earlier about your goal is for the person after you be to be way better than you. And if you start them off where you started off, that makes it harder for them unless they're just inherently more talented than you. But if you set them up for success to where they walk in and things are already running well, you really well, and they have a team that feels trusted and loves the mission, already understands it, then they're just doing minor tweaks to it, or they can take the organization to the next level. But they don't, it doesn't happen if he's if that guy comes in or that girl comes in and they're stuck where you started. Or if you've made obviously if you've made the organization worse than how you started it. Yeah, and so that's a great goal and it's a great aspiration in organization.

SPEAKER_02 43:32

One of the things I thought about a lot, I really didn't think about too much until I retired and I was in uh one of my last jobs I had, and we had this someone at the company, leader at the company, would occasionally give these talks about special operations leadership, and it's and it's like, okay, okay, I got it, got it. Been around special operations guys a lot of my career, totally understand what you're saying. You know, I had you know the meeting after the meeting. One day I was sitting down with our team, I was like, hey guys, like you know that none of that works, right? Like, what do you mean? Like, well, I mean, it works, but just the circumstances are different, right? Like special operations leadership. There's those are hand picked, hand selected, vetted people that get put on an all-star team. And then after all that, this person's gonna tell you how to lead them. It's like, you know what the real secret of military leadership is? It's conventional leadership. You don't get to pick your team, you don't get to determine when they show up, you don't know who they are. You have to make magic happen with the team and the cards that you have. And that is a special kind of leadership that I think is really underappreciated in life. And so the non-special operations leadership, I think is so, so critical because those are the life skills that you're gonna have outside of the military, right? Or in everything you do in life. Turns out you don't get to control your own destiny. You just you're living in the world just like everyone else, right? And so those skills of how you can bring together a team, get them to align on something that's a mission, get the buy-in, the belief, and you know, you encourage them and you want to foster and grow that, and they become an actual team and not just a bunch of people that are in a group. But that is something really, really special. I agree with you.

SPEAKER_03 45:05

And it's like a fighter squadron. I mean, a fighter squadron may not be as high tier as a lot of soft teams, but it can be, you know, in general, that you graduate and you get a fighter from pilot training or nav training, you get a fighter, you're in the top of your class. And so you're highly motivated, you're type A, and you can have a fighter squadron, like in my case, a fighter squadron of 40 pilots that would literally do anything I asked them to do, and I just had to point them in a direction and get out of their way. That's a very simple leadership problem. You just have to be the one coming up with the vision. And even then, if your vision sucks, a lot of times like, well, I'm pretty sure we want to go this way. You know, I'm pretty sure the boss wants to go this way, and so that's where we're gonna go. And it would probably turn out better because I didn't have to talk and I didn't have to say anything. But you know, the regular managing of McDonald's is how I would say, you know, when you're managing a mix of high schoolers and you know, high school or you know, college dropouts and people that aren't sure where they want to go, and then a couple of you know, strong individuals, that's a tough problem. That's a tough leadership problem. It's much more difficult than writing, you know, leading a bunch of high performers.

SPEAKER_01 46:11

Derek and I talked about that a little bit just in when he was writing his book, because I said, you know, one of the unfortunate things that we have, because we all have a lot of experience and great stories and everything else, but every single one of us worked with a majority of our force, whether they were hand-picked or not handpicked, well getting motivated and wanted to be better. And then you get out in the civilian world. I started flying, you know, I started flying the jets after I was out on the Air Force. I started looking around and I realized, like, wow, you know, like not everybody really wants to come to work every day, and not everybody's trying to make things better. I mean, it was a bit of an eye-opener for me because I'm so used to working with now. I got lucky, I worked with just what you're talking about. My teams that I worked with later in my career were hand-tipped, and the guys that I worked with were hand-tipped. It wasn't always that way in my career, but I worked with some pretty high, high velocity folks. And then I get up and start realizing. So I told Derek, I said, that's the challenge for you and for all of us, is when we're trying to translate our leadership to other people. We have to recognize that some of our leadership experience was actually some of the cream of the crop of you know American society, and not you're you're not dealing with the lowest common denominator.

SPEAKER_02 47:18

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. You one of the things I'm not I would say I don't I'm not the smartest person in any room that I walk into. Generally, I am the dumbest person of any room I ever walk into, but I generally uh you know you can argue one way or the other, but there's one thing that I don't think anyone would argue with. I care more than anyone else in one of any room I ever walk into. I care, right? And so I've always treated myself as kind of a missionary, not a mercenary. And so, you know, what you're talking about, Rob, is like you run into people that are like not saying like a derogatory word, but like they're not missionaries, they're not mission-driven, they're mercenaries. Like, I get paid, I go do this, then I go home and you know, I have my I do whatever. Yeah, being surrounded by no one, by nothing but really missionaries on those high-performing teams, you get a little pampered because you don't have that challenge of managing a team that's a collective and has both. Or maybe you have a team that's like, I've got a bunch of mercenaries, but I have a mission to do. Like, this is gonna be a leadership challenge, right?

SPEAKER_03 48:14

Yeah, I had a kid I was supervising in a company I was working for a couple years ago, and he's a project analyst. And I started talking to him about progressing in his career, becoming a you know, project manager and managing large programs. He's like, I don't want to do that. He was content to be where he was. He was a good worker, you know, very competent, but he didn't have the kind of that was a uh kind of a shock to my system. What do you mean you don't want to be in charge? What do you mean you don't want to, you know, take on more responsibility? Like, and he was happy, and I was happy to have him working for us, but it it was a paradigm shift for me of there are actually people who have a different vision of the world than I do, and I have to learn how to deal with that.

SPEAKER_02 48:54

Yeah, I'll tell you when one of the things I did to start the year off with our team, again, they're getting to know me, I'm getting to know them. And so I try to overshare just to kind of let's accelerate this process to get to know me. So I have a one-page memo that I wrote the company called and it's just titled 2026 Vision. And it's just here's what I believe, here's what I think to be true, these are the goals. Here's the three goals this year. I won't share what they actually are, but here are the three goals. And then I bet to make those goals happen, you just have to do these three simple things do this, do this, and do this. And if you can do those three things in that order, we will hit all of our goals. And that like it's so stupid simple. And so when I talked to the team, was like, hey, if you find yourself and you're going, like, I don't know where I fit in or why I'm doing this, just go look at the memo on the wall. Does it fit into one of those three things? And if you say no, then go talk to your supervisor. Go like, I don't think we should be doing this. I'm like, great, you're right, stop doing that, right? Like, what am I doing? How does it contribute and why does it matter? Right. So we you try to create a you create a mission and you try to create that missionary type environment for people, and I'm not saying that you know mercenaries or not, but people that are trying to get aligned, right? Because like being so being mission focused, and we say things like that is a buzzword, but it really, really is a cultural difference. You know, I remember in a like in a fighter squadron, I was in a fighter squadron, you could work, I mean, you're technically limited by 12-hour crew days if you're flying all the time, but you know, you would work 14 hours a day, and but you wouldn't be like, man, I'm so tired, I can't wait to go home. You'd get kicked out of the squadron, be like, you're hitting crew ass, get out of here. You legally can't be here. And I was in a squadron, we had a really, really strong culture, and every Sunday at one o'clock, the entire like the vault would be full of people in regular clothes just studying and preparing. And every so Sunday from like one to five, it was like four hours or so of just everyone's in there and they're talking about tactics, and they're just there on a Sunday afternoon because like their heart's in it, and they go, Hey, I'm gonna put this time in because these four hours are I get so much return on investment to advance the mission and how I'm gonna help the mission, totally worth every minute. Now, I know you can people are probably listening to that, and like, why would you go to work on the weekend if you didn't have to? And those people don't understand.

SPEAKER_03 51:04

That's the difference between a missionary and a mercenary, and you got to balance all of your responsibilities, but that really is the difference between somebody who's totally who totally cares and somebody who is just earning a paycheck. So that I'm not trying to disparage anybody who tries not to work on Sunday, but you know what I mean.

SPEAKER_01 51:21

Well, I mean, you know, that was one of my biggest changes when I left the military. I realized when I left the military, and I told this to people, I said, look, I'm not looking for a second career. I had a great career, I don't need another one. I just I'd like a paycheck for a few years, and that's what I told myself. But then as I start going to work and I start realizing that like civilians in the aviation business don't mentor each other. It's crazy. Even the guys that are listed as your instructors and your evaluators stuff, they don't mentor, they're not there to teach and learn and whatever else. It was weird to me. And so very quickly I got you know bumped up and I became a fleet lead. So now I'm a guy that's in charge of 45 dudes. I was like, how did this happen? Like, I'm supposed to be a mercenary, you know, in your terminology. I'm just supposed to be a mercenary, and next thing I know, I'm you know, I'm this guy. And but I found it really hard because you check it's a cultural thing. I could not shut off the fact that I was just trying to make the job, the organization, the thing better for everybody to watch for the guys working with the all that kind of stuff. And ultimately, that's what led me to finally just retire and say, you know what? Yeah, I'm not cut out for this, you know, mercenary stuff. And you know, the company I work for didn't want to hear from a pilot because they looked at me as a pilot instead of realizing that like they've got a lot of other experience. And so I finally said, you know what? I'm done. I'm gonna walk away and you know hang out in Florida and do my own thing with my family. And then you know, Derek calls up and goes, Hey man, I got this podcast. Do you want to help me out? You know, but again, it's culture that runs deep, it's culture that runs deep, and it's very hard, I think, to change somebody across that line without very concerted effort, right? Like taking a mercenary and turn them into a missionary, you gotta have a spiritual experience to do that. Once you take a missionary, turn them into a mercenary. Boy, that those have a style.

SPEAKER_03 53:04

Well, Mike, I appreciate you being with us today. And I'd love to circle back a year from now to see how you're doing, to see how your vision to your team is working out, how you guys have been able to affect the market, affect the Department of War and the Air Force in particular, on how they view drones and how they view production and the industrial base. And hopefully you're able to knock some of the scales off of these long-held beliefs that we have in the Defense Department and make some progress with it. But I appreciate your time on the show. And for those of you who liked what we said or didn't like what we said, reach out on AstArtnow.com, ask us some questions, we'll share it with the team here, and then we can have a further conversation if it makes sense to us. If we have another episode, something that we said spurs more thought for another episode, just let us know, and we'll do that. If you haven't already subscribed, do so now. And thanks for joining us for Commanders Inten.

SPEAKER_00 53:58

So that's it for today's episode of Commander's inten podcast. Head on over to Apple Podcasts iTunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will be entered in a grand prize drawing to win a$25,000 private exclusive leadership coaching package with Derek Oakes himself. So head on over to Commanders Intent Podcast.com and pick up a free copy of Derek's Leadership Guide and join us on the next episode.