Leading Through Complexity: How Veterans Drive Alignment in Technology Teams

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Veterans Business Radio, brought to you by ATL vets, providing the tools and support that help veteran owned businesses thrive. For more information, go to atlvets.org. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here another episode of Veterans Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, ATL vets, inspiring veterans to build their foundation of success and empowering them to become the backbone of society after the uniform. For more information, go to atlvets.org. Today on the show, we have the owner of Form100 Consulting, Nate Amidon. Welcome.

Nate Amidon: Thanks, Lee. Happy to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Form100 Consulting. How you serving folks?

Nate Amidon: Yeah, absolutely. We are a premium staffing and execution partner. And what that really means is we hire former military officers and senior NCOs, people that have led teams and programs in the military. And then we support technology organizations, mainly enterprise, uh, in a contract basis. So we’ll come in as, uh, project managers, uh, scrum masters, product owners. And really what we do is help support, uh, and drive alignment in technology technology organizations.

Lee Kantor: So what was kind of the genesis of the idea? How did you kind of go from the military to this?

Nate Amidon: Yeah. So I got out of the active duty military in 2014 and I was a C-17 pilot. So that’s the it’s a huge cargo airplane. And I didn’t want to be an airline pilot, so I decided I’d just get a job. Which sounded easier back then than it was in in execution. And when I finally, I finally ended up landing as a contractor and realized that the skill set I had learned in the military was really valuable. I was doing doing really well in these in these highly complex technology organizations. And I tried to get other people hired in the same from the same background that I had. And I wasn’t able to I wasn’t able to get them into the consulting firm I was with. So I just started it myself.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you decided to start yourself, was training part of that? You were getting people that you thought had the right kind of qualities, and then you were going to train them up in the technology, or do they already have technology background?

Nate Amidon: No. And so really what the value that you bring is the leadership skill set and bringing that leadership skill set to technology organizations. So we don’t solve we don’t solve technology problems. We organize the programs and the projects and the teams so that they’re able to solve technology programs.

Lee Kantor: So when did you kind of what was kind of the aha moment where you were like, okay, I can deploy the people I know to solve this problem these businesses have and these businesses, it’s probably not even on their radar to go this route, but this is insight you have from kind of having a foot in both camps there.

Nate Amidon: Yeah. So I remember trying to, uh, trying to get this company started and, and I was working in the company myself as a, as a consultant, as, basically as a project manager with a team of software developers. And I, I had, uh, told a client what I was doing and, and how I had somebody else that could, you know, that could actually, uh, come in and do what I was doing. And they said, okay, well, we have two positions, so we’ll hire, you know, you’ll, we’ll hire your former officer that doesn’t have any, you know, air quotes experience in technology. And then we’ll hire someone with a bunch of experience in technology. And, uh, and so it was almost like an a B test in a way. And when after about 3 or 4 months, they had let go of the, you know, experienced technology person. And then we brought in somebody else. And that’s when I realized like, this model will, will definitely work. And the more I’ve been doing it, the more convinced I am with how valuable this model is.

Lee Kantor: So what was it like having that conversation with that person who was doing this, quote unquote, a B test? Like, did you sit down with them and say, okay, you know, what did what did you learn from this? Like, why? Why did my guy outperform your, your guy?

Nate Amidon: Yeah. And so what, what you because it sounds good, but there’s always hesitation to bring in somebody that maybe doesn’t have the experience in a very specific domain. And when you have those conversations with clients, you, you, you really need to, to, to, well, it really helps to talk about like what, what is it that this role actually you actually want from this role? And let’s say you’re doing a project, a project management position in a software development organization, you don’t really want someone that’s going to come in and try to solve the technical problems, because you’ve already hired a group of technical people to solve the technical problems. Uh, what you really want is someone who can, uh, make sure everybody is aligned on what the goal is, make sure everyone’s communicating on the status, and so we can lower the water level to see where the rocks are. And then you want somebody who can, uh, put in the right sets of processes so the team can start to function in a high performing way. And when you really think about what that role is, and then you think about what you do as the senior NCO or as a military officer, I mean, that is basically what you’re doing, right? You come in and you make sure everyone’s on the same page. You say, okay, what’s the plan? What’s everyone doing? How are we going to communicate status and how do we operate as a team? So when, when you think about it from that perspective, then your military leadership experience also becomes becomes valid experience.

Lee Kantor: Right? So when you say it, it makes perfect sense. I mean, I’m not debating the logic behind it. I just, you know, human beings being human beings, there’s a fear and that why aren’t more people doing this? If this is so effective and here I am, you know, you know, people don’t like to put their neck out for things. And this seems like a risk. I mean, a perceived risk. I understand your point where it it probably is not a risk at all. If anything, it it makes perfect sense. It just people, you know, tend to not want to be the person that tries a new thing.

Nate Amidon: Yeah. And, and so there’s a, there’s kind of a common saying in the IT world, which is you’ll never get fired for hiring Accenture.

Lee Kantor: Right? Yeah. There used to be IBM. That was the, the saying used to be IBM. You’re if you’re a stockbroker, you’re not getting fired for buying IBM. Like. So it was the same if you get the incumbent, uh, or whatever the most popular thing is in that space, that’s the safe move. But, um, do you do anything to kind of assuage the risk? Is there anything you can do to get them to try this and build the trust that needs. Or is it kind of have to be a leap of faith from their standpoint?

Nate Amidon: So at first it was more of a leap of faith. And as we’ve gotten more experience, more clients, it’s become a little bit easier. It still is a struggle to be because you need someone that gets it. Um, and then you need someone that’s willing, willing to, to, to take a bit of a risk in bringing someone on. And so, um, one thing that is nice about the contractor or the vendor model in the staffing world is, um, organizations use it because they don’t, they can quickly hire, but they can also quickly fire, right? You don’t have to put someone on a pip, for example. Um, and so that reduces the barrier of entry. Uh, and it’s great for veterans and for people that we’re bringing on because they’re able to get a foot in the door in a position they probably wouldn’t get through as a full time employee. But when it comes to reducing risk, what we do is everyone on our team, regardless of their experience level, gets paired up with a wingman. So another person on the team that’s more experienced. Uh, we, we also have an internal training program and we put people through certifications. So we do things to, to mitigate that risk. But ultimately it comes, this is a trust business and it comes down to, uh, clients giving us an opportunity to earn their trust.

Lee Kantor: And I would imagine the, the veterans you put in place in a short period of time, then they have the quote unquote experience. Like it doesn’t take long to get the experience that checks the box of, oh, they have technology experience.

Nate Amidon: Yep. And sometimes we’ll bring in people maybe at a lower rate. Um, you know, with the caveat that in six, in 6 or 12 months when you realize they’re, they’re your best Contractor. Uh, those rates may be may increase, but uh, yeah, do your to your point, they. One thing that’s great about the veteran community is the ability to, to always be learning and always be leaning in. We say things like, we like the challenging projects, we run towards the smoke and, uh, and so you’re able to, to, to, you’re able to get that experience very quickly, but more importantly, that the mindset that gets you to experience quickly also lets you just continue to learn and up level. And so, you know, I think that that’s one of the other real hidden values of what we, what we, what we deliver to organizations is that you’re just going to continually get a better service as we gain more experience and get more context, um, and learn their business better.

Lee Kantor: Now, is it like there’s a kind of a two sided marketplace where you need the clients or you need the veterans, the place.

Nate Amidon: Mhm. Yeah. So there’s, there’s finding opportunities and then going out and making sure we have a quality pipeline of, of potential candidates. And I’d say not every veteran or former military officer is going to be a right fit. So, you know, we have our own recruiting process to make sure we’re finding and targeting the right types of folks, making sure they have the right personality and that and that this is something that they actually want to do.

Lee Kantor: So what’s the bigger challenge is that the clients are getting kind of the right fit veterans.

Nate Amidon: It’s usually the clients. Uh, and, and because there’s every, you know, every year there’s thousands and thousands of people that are getting out of the service. Um, there’s also, there can be, we can get clients pretty much anywhere. We’re not geographically bound because we’re able to find a network with the right veterans pretty much anywhere in the country. So yeah, typically, typically the bottleneck has been clients. And, you know, it’s, it’s always better for business when the bottlenecks recruiting.

Lee Kantor: Now is the, um, work remote or is it in person usually?

Nate Amidon: Uh, it depends on the client. Uh, you know, during Covid, obviously everything was remote. That made it a lot easier. Uh, now we’re seeing a big push to get back in the office. So, uh, but yeah, a lot of times it’s, it’s in the office, you’re working side by side with full time employees that, you know, well-known brands and it’s in the office and you build relationships and, and veterans and people in our company also have the opportunity to convert to a full time employee if that’s something they want to do.

Lee Kantor: Now. Is your role in this business nowadays? Is it primarily sales or do you have somebody that’s in charge of selling.

Nate Amidon: It’s primarily sales and marketing and, uh, and then also making sure delivery is, um, you know, we have a, we have a high expectation of delivery and making sure that delivery is still, uh, up to that standard. But, but yeah, it’s, you know, it’s probably less sales and more marketing and networking, you know, it’s really trying to, to find, to find the right type of client that that gets it. And usually it’s clients that are frustrated with their current, uh, their current crop of vendors because they’re just looking for a company that they can trust and they know brings that really foundational skills that make a great, you know, make a great employee and make a great consultant.

Lee Kantor: So now when you’re going, um, out there, what is that first pain point that they have where they’re like, you know what, maybe I ought to call, Uh, Nate and his team.

Nate Amidon: So I like to say it’s a lot of times it’s when, uh, a leader, someone it’s like a, in a director or VP role and they’re, they just don’t know what’s going on in their organization, which sounds wild to say, but software development and technology, you can’t really walk the factory floor. You know, all the all the code is on someone’s computer or it’s in an environment somewhere. And, uh, and, and so it’s, it’s really easy to lose alignment because especially on these bigger programs where you have all these different teams running, it can, it can be really easy where, uh, dependencies that one team is dependent on another team. And if they’re not communicating and aligned, then you can set back a program, millions of dollars and six months in delivery. And so a lot of times it’s an uneasy feeling from clients that they, they don’t have tight alignment and or communication of what’s going on.

Lee Kantor: And but are they kind of connecting the dots that this might be a leadership issue, not a technology issue?

Nate Amidon: Yeah. Some at some point they, they can see that the well, there’s rarely technology issues actually to take a step back. Um, you know, their engineers are really smart generally and they can figure out those technical problems. Uh, usually the issues that are a technology problem stem at the core from a lack of communication and alignment and really process. And, and so I grew up in the flying world and flying in the Air Force. And when you, when you look back at Air Force incidents or crashes, there’s always a chain of events that stem really from human error, lack of communication. And the same thing is true in technology. So not all I mean, like I said, not not everyone gets what we do, but the ones that do, we can really add a ton of value.

Lee Kantor: Now, how has kind of all of the AI stuff impacted your business now? So many technology and software companies are just immersed in AI and are just trying to figure it out. And, and that’s caused an upheaval in a lot of people’s worlds. How, how have you kind of navigated this?

Nate Amidon: Yeah, AI is here, obviously. Uh, and every CEO goes to the same conference. Maybe it’s a Gartner conference. And, and they all feel like they’re, they’re behind on AI and they have AI, FOMO. And so everyone wants AI. And obviously in the software development realm, you know, AI can add a lot of accelerant to software software development. I mean, you can write, it can write the actual software now, but but I look at all of that as increased thrust and increased speed, and that can make things a lot worse. So, uh, from a client perspective, it’s more important that you’re aligned. Um, if you’re moving that fast and, and you have that much excess capacity, but, but the surrounding structure around your program can’t handle it. Then you can find yourself in a bad spot. And so internally, from our perspective, we’ve really leaned into it. We’ve leaned into being, being the company that can operationalize the rest of the stuff surrounding software development and technology. Uh, and so how you use AI and the process for how you build automation is really more important than, than what you’re actually building right now.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, I think a lot of people are, it’s kind of a blunt instrument in that it can do lots of specific things. And if you just give somebody AI and say, here, figure it out and do your own, you know, you have to have some strategic kind of plan and execute team by team. It just to me, there’s a lot of just waste and a lot of misunderstanding of what it can and cannot do.

Nate Amidon: Yeah, it’s a, I call it a chaos generator. And, and so I’m actually really optimistic for this model because back to our previous conversation experience with air quotes, right? Um, you can now gain that experience a lot faster because you have an expert that you can ask any question to. And, you know, and in some ways you can, you know, be like neo in the matrix, right? And just upload kung fu or, or how to fly a helicopter or whatever. Um, and so you can actually get, you can, you can gain experience quickly, But now there’s so many options and so many things it can do that it creates a bunch of noise and it turns it turns organizations a little bit chaotic because now there’s so much going on. And it, it actually looks a lot like operating and leading inside the military or inside of combat operations type of it there. There’s some very tight similarities now to how do you operate in complexity and ambiguity. And that skill set is not something you can read about to do. It’s something that you learn through experience and that you know is the type of experience we’re bringing to organizations, right?

Lee Kantor: And it’s a competitive advantage. I mean, you’ve lived through it in higher stakes situation than making software, and it is a similar kind of fog of war situation right now.

Nate Amidon: Is that absolutely is is the case. And, uh, you know, people would would panic because there’s not enough options of what to do. Um, but that is easier to handle than way too many options, right? So if, if you can now build, uh, ten different things really quickly, understanding which of those ten things to build and how to go about doing it. So you can pivot quickly if you’re wrong. That’s a, that’s a skill set that’s going to separate people in, in this new AI world.

Lee Kantor: And the speed of, of doing experiments and, and finding the right thing. Um, like you said, you got to be constantly iterating and now you can iterate super fast, but you have to have the communication and the clarity of what the objective is so that everybody’s on the same page and everybody’s kind of working in the same direction.

Nate Amidon: Yeah. In the Air Force, we had this, I don’t want to say it’s stupid, but it always used to say flexibility is the key to air power, right? And the idea was we need to be flexible in our implementation because things are changing all the time. And I had a commander tell me, flexibility doesn’t matter if you can’t communicate. And so if because you have these big operations and especially in these larger enterprises with lots of technology things running in parallel, uh, if every, if every individual team and, um, product is pivoting in a silo really quickly, uh, you’re eventually going to bump into each other.

Lee Kantor: Right? And if you’re not clear on at least being directionally correct, you could be off course dramatically in a short period of time because things happen so fast with AI.

Nate Amidon: Mhm. Yeah. And leadership is going to become really important. And when I say leadership, there’s obviously the importance of the C-suite and directors and and you know, what you would describe as organizational leaders. But one of the things the military does really well is pushes leadership down to every level of an organization. And so I think in these technology organizations, team and program leadership is going to become extremely important. Now, the other leadership’s also important, but you’re going to need to trust people at at the level closest to the work to make decisions.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of? How can we help?

Nate Amidon: Well, I’m always looking for more clients that get what we do. And so, uh, if, if any of this resonates and feels like, hey, my organization could use more of, you know what Nate and Lee are talking about here. Um, then I would, I’d suggest to reach out or check out our website and I’d love to chat.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there a story you can share that maybe illustrates how you work with an organization? Don’t name the name of the organization, but maybe share the challenge they came to you with and how you were able to help them get to a new level.

Nate Amidon: Yeah. So, uh, I worked with a client, an organization. I’ll give you maybe two quick, two quick ones. Um, because we’ll work with medium sized, smaller organizations that were, uh, more in a, in a high, high growth phase. So they’re doing like a merger and acquisition, let’s say. And they went from two software development teams to eight in about a six month period. And the things you can do when you have two software teams working together, you can get away with a lot. And when you go to eight, all those things can break down. So, uh, the, you know, the, the CTO in that organization was like, things are breaking down. And we went in and actually did, did an assessment, mapped out how, how their teams operate, how they’re structured, got massive visibility and, um, processes that enabled communication that ultimately drove alignment. Um, because they, it was so broken, they weren’t really delivering anything at that point. Right. So you would think more people, you can get more things done. And that’s not necessarily the case if you’re out of step. Mhm.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. You can see the impact is real.

Nate Amidon: Yeah. The impact is real. Um, and then there’s other organizations that are large that, you know, uh, let’s say they just weren’t all, all communicating. And while they were maybe getting things done, they didn’t realize there was another level of alignment and communication and, and just working together as a team. And so we came in and really took over program management for, for a pretty large organization. And, and actually what was crazy, what was great about it is that we started it. If we brought one person in, they did great. But now when we bring in 4 or 5 people that are all kind of leading different sections of a large program, now we’re all communicating, we’re all working together like we did in the military. Um, and communication becomes more seamless. And those incremental, those incremental efficiencies turn into exponential gains because we’re just knocking down the small miscommunications over and over again and things all of a sudden start to really rapidly increase. So, um, both in the midsize and in the enterprise, it, those are the, the types of areas where we can, like I said, add a lot of value.

Lee Kantor: Do you, uh, you talked a lot about working directly with those, um, organizations, but do you ever work with kind of private equity and VCs in order to, you know, after a merger or acquisition to help kind of, you know, get the teams on the right track quickly?

Nate Amidon: No, we haven’t. And I’ve always been interested in that vertical of of the market, because I think that there is a big opportunity for, you know, people putting capital to work to ensure that that capital actually delivers. And, you know, I think that that that space probably has a lot of failed, uh, failed investments because they’re operationally not aligned.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, I would think that this is a, I mean, something to consider, at least down the road on your roadmap, um, to pursue some of that work. Because when they’re, you know, when there’s a merger or an acquisition, that’s, you know, that can be very clunky and that could, it could take a long time to get things right. And it sounds like, you know, with your people and your methodology, you can really accelerate kind of getting, you know, one plus one equals three.

Nate Amidon: Yeah. I mean, Absolutely. And, you know, it’s just not a space that we’ve been in. But, you know, I mean, tangentially we have. But but I think yeah, I think there’s a huge opportunity there.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody, if somebody wants to learn more about, uh, your work or connect with you or somebody on the team, what is the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Nate Amidon: So you can find me on LinkedIn, just Nate Amidon. There’s not many of us out there. So, uh, LinkedIn is, yeah, I post pretty regularly there. And then our website’s, uh, just form100consulting.com.

Lee Kantor: And that’s FORM the number 100 consulting.com.

Nate Amidon: That’s correct.

Lee Kantor: Well, Nate, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Nate Amidon: Yeah. Thank you so much, Lee.

Lee Kantor: All right. This Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Veterans Business Radio.