Brad Johnson: Welcome back to Do Business. Do Life. Excited today. We have Carey Lohrenz here with us today. Welcome to the show, Carey.
Carey Lohrenz: Hey, glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Brad Johnson: Well, you have a very unique background, and we were just talking before we hit record here, it actually mirrors some of what I see happening in finance right now. You really blazed the trail as a female. You were the very first ever female F-14 Tomcat Fighter pilot in the history of the Navy, which is a pretty wild thing to say out loud, but you really blazed the trail for females, especially in aviation there. And I see a lot of that happening right now in finance with just more and more females getting into the industry. So, I think this will be a really fun one, but let’s go back in time. How did that even become a thing? How did you say, “Hey, I want to be the first female fighter pilot in the history of the Navy”?
Carey Lohrenz: Yeah. So, if we run it back, way back, I was really lucky. I grew up about an hour north of one of the world’s biggest air shows, and my dad, who had been a Marine Corps pilot, used to always bring my brother and I down to the air show. And when I was probably 10 or 11 years old, I was really fortunate that I was able to meet one of the first WASPs. So, they were the Women Air Force Service Pilots who, in World War II, actually flew every airplane in the military’s inventory. They flew over 2 million hours, and they did everything from training, instructing, doing maintenance flights, ferrying airplanes, everything except for deploying over in Europe.
So, somewhere with that early introduction, I knew that women could fly, but because after World War II was done, they were pretty much told just to pack up their gear, don’t speak of their experience, “Thank you very much for your service. Your time is done.” No one ever really heard about them. It’s almost like that whole chapter of history was hidden. So, I didn’t grow up with really having any role models or even seeing that it was possible. Obviously, this is the time before social media as well, but I have a brother who’s just a year older than me who has also spent 27 years as an active duty pilot. And he was also really interested in aviation.
So, it was always kind of in the back of my mind, as a possibility, but maybe not necessarily like that front runner, this is all I want to do, like that hyper fixation, simply because there was so little exposure to it. But I did, I was always interested in it, and I knew that I wanted to fly. Just wasn’t really sure about the path forward.
Brad Johnson: So, your dad kind of, so he obviously was in aviation, then your brother gets into it. You were exposed to it early. It’s wild. My wife’s grandma, I believe she was a WASP because it was basically ladies were recruited into the military to help in a number of different areas. But I had never heard that actually some of them flew airplanes, which is wild for that time period.
Carey Lohrenz: Oh, it’s a fascinating piece of our history that, like I said, very, very few people know about it, but because it was absolute silence, there weren’t any books really written about them. There weren’t big movies, kind of like Band of Brothers or something like that. So, it’s been, for most people, a really secret part of history. But had they not done all of that work, we would’ve probably been in extremis simply because we didn’t have enough pilots. So, their contribution was extraordinary.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. It was a time period in America where it was like all hands on deck. It doesn’t matter if you’re a guy, a girl, a child, in some cases. It was like, you got to pitch in. Okay. So, then let’s fast forward. You go to college. I believe you were a rower. Is that right?
Carey Lohrenz: I was.
Brad Johnson: So, you’re a rower. Now, what college did you go to?
Carey Lohrenz: I went to the University of Wisconsin, so I’m a Badger.
Brad Johnson: And you guys have lots of lakes and rivers up there, so I’m guessing that was pretty competitive. So, you’re a rower. Obviously, that takes a lot of discipline, college athletics, and then had you finish school, finish your major, and you’re like, “I’m going to go into the military now,” or how did that jump happen?
Carey Lohrenz: Yeah, pretty much. So, at that point in time, there were three pathways that you can take to become a naval pilot or even a Marine Corps pilot. You either go to the Naval Academy, and you earn a slot to flight school out of that. You go through an ROTC program, which I did not do. I wasn’t really interested in that when I was in college. And you can’t be in ROTC and row, or you could do what I did, where you’re just a regular college graduate, so maybe you’re that aerospace engineer, mechanical engineer, whatever the case may be. And you applied to Aviation Officer Candidate school. So, it’s this 16-week program down in Pensacola, Florida that takes college graduates through this program, and you earn your Naval officer commission out of that.
So, there’s a lot of aerospace, engineering, navigation, tons of physical training. It’s a pressure cooker to essentially see who are going to be those people who have this vast array of skill sets and we think are going to be able to be successful in aviation, and who maybe can’t think, fly, talk, be under a lot of pressure, and make decisions at the same time. So, it’s kind of that whole amalgamation of people and skill sets. And then you head off to flight school.
Brad Johnson: So, this is college graduates only are accepted, and it’s going specifically into the Navy, and it’s officer school, but not necessarily everybody going through that class went into training for a pilot. They dispersed into different roles in the military from there.
Carey Lohrenz: Only a couple. So, at different times, there were a couple of other paths to that, where maybe you had two years of college or three years of college that they would let just a couple of people in on that. And then we had, I think, a couple of Intel officers as well, just a couple, but no other designators. So, it’s for just aviators, so not supply or cybersecurity or these different branches. So, it was hyper, hyper specialized in aviation. But it was a really fascinating program because everything about that program, I know we’ve talked about this before a little bit, was essentially designed to break you. It was designed to break you physically, and it was designed to break you psychologically because they wanted to see when you were under extreme amounts of stress or duress or maybe threat to your physical safety, would you be able to be flexible? Could you adapt to any scenario that they threw you in?
And when they told you what success was supposed to look like and you started heading that direction very diligently and with a lot of enthusiasm, and then they essentially yanked the rug out from underneath you, would you still be able to overcome that? Would you have essentially a bias to continue to take action in this really challenging environment, which obviously a lot of people in this industry feel as well, right? Just when we think we have it figured out, all of the rules change, right? It feels like all of a sudden you wake up or you look at your phone or you open your laptop, and you’re like, “My entire plan is now no longer valid, so what do I do?” So, you had to figure out, you really develop, it tracks very quickly the people who either have a bias to act.
It identifies the folks who, when you’re under a lot of stress, will you be able to make a good judgment or a good decision that’s in the best interest of the team or the people you’re serving when that specific decision won’t actually be in your best interest because they’re looking to test your integrity as well. Because I know you run a business, and you’ve been in this industry for quite some period of time, that if people don’t trust you, if you don’t have a trusting relationship, they’re going to leave. They’re going to go find somebody who, even if the answer to the question is, “You know what? I don’t know right now, but let me check, and I’ll get back to you,” like I can work with that.
But if you try to BS me and now I’m over here in ChatGPT or I call a different friend for some of my financial advice, I’m not going to trust you anymore. So, how do you develop these relationships, and how are you going to make these decisions that when you’re under a lot of stress or under a lot of pressure, you make the best decision possible, and you’re able to keep moving forward?
Brad Johnson: Well, fun fact, and you shared this out at the table when we were all together in Baltimore a few months ago. So, the F-14 Tomcat is the same fighter pilot made famous by Top Gun and then Maverick, the more recent, right? And I feel like there’s the Hollywood version of being a fighter pilot. And so, you talked about how going through this, they were kind of trying to filter out those that broke under pressure. And I remember a scene from the original Top Gun where it was kind of like survival of the fittest, where it was very competitive, almost to the point where it was sometimes at the sake of the other pilots that were trying to get a certain amount of limited seats.
Was that just Hollywood’s version, or did some of that play out where it was pretty cutthroat, especially being, I’m guessing, one of the few females, if not the only female going through that? How did that pressure happen in real life?
Carey Lohrenz: Sure. Well, I think, of course, it’s competitive because at every single phase from day one of flight school, or first you start with ground school, where again, you’re learning your airplane, you’re learning meteorology stuff. You’re learning about navigation. Every single thing you do is graded, and it’s observed. So, first and foremost, you’re always in competition with yourself, right? So, you have to figure out how can I get better. And the foundational element, one of the ways that we learn more of the people who, maybe you were somebody who was an aerospace engineer. I was not. So, I did not have that advantage of already understanding aerodynamic flow and hydraulics, and all of this. A handful of people did.
But one of the things that became very apparent, there might be somebody who does have that academic skillset, and they’re exceptionally knowledgeable in that because they’ve had years of learning and study and graduated with that. But you get into this really dynamic, changing environment. If you are not coachable or if you are not inherently curious or able to be coached or able to, say, “I’ve made this mistake, and I can fix it,” that’s going to become a problem because you’re always going to be faced with this changing environment that if you are not constantly learning and sharpening those skills, essentially, you will get left behind.
So, first and foremost, you’re always in competition with yourself. But then you are always stack ranked, right? Whether it’s in who has the best grades in this class, who has the best grades in this segment of going through flight school. But it gets to a point that once you’re deployed, once you’re what we always called ‘haze gray and underway,’ it didn’t matter who I got into the cockpit with. It didn’t matter if it was somebody I really liked, maybe somebody I would prefer not to fly with. We were all aligned on the same thing, and that was winning. So, it’s kind of having that ability or capability to go back and forth between, again, being very much always competing against yourself and elevating your own skills, knowing where you are relative to other people.
Are you falling behind? Are you ahead? Is there somebody else that you need to be helping? And again, once you put on that flight suit or that patch, it’s one team, and you’re working together. And that’s not a skillset everybody has, but it’s a learnable skillset for most people. But you have to be willing to set your ego aside. And that’s the thing, going back to your Hollywood statement, I think you see in both of the movies definitely an elevated sense of ego. And it’s not that there’s none of that. There is a lot of that, but in all cases, if you follow the storyline, at some point, the ego-inflated superhero is going to have to set their ego aside for the team to win.
Brad Johnson: I think that’s one of the things I took away from the conversation we had out at the table was, I mean, I feel like you have to have like a healthy sense of ego to just have the confidence to get up there in a fighter pilot, a jet, but at the same time, it’s got to be checked all along the way because it’s for the greater good of the team. I’m assuming a lot of the military’s process is pretty good at checking your ego along the way. Like, if they start to see it get out of hand, I’m sure that doesn’t occur for very long. Is that fair? Like, it’s part of the process?
Carey Lohrenz: I definitely think that especially if you look at the really high-performing or the super, the different groups or specialties that go into a really threatening or super dynamic environment, or even, I mean, you can use cybersecurity as an example right now. That thread is so changing, and it’s so fast, but it’s also why we utilize and we leverage the learning processes so that we don’t leave success to chance. And that’s the biggest danger that I see, even with the folks that I work with, and that can happen with really, really successful people, that once you have started reaching a certain level of success, it tends to be kind of a 50/50, whether the threat to your success or survival is going to be task saturation, where it’s just going to squash your execution because you’re getting pulled in so many different directions or complacency.
Because as soon as you feel like you have it all figured out and everything’s fine, and you can handle anything, the hair on the back of your neck should be standing up, because right about then is when you are going to get throat-chopped by something you did not see coming. So, I think that’s where we have some guardrails in our really straightforward processes that allow us to always navigate and clarify the complex, really, really quickly, so that we’re constantly learning. And as importantly, I would say, sharing those lessons learned. Because if you’re not sharing your lessons learned, if you’re not doing what I call putting the ladder down for the people who come after you, then what are you doing? Then you’re a team of one, right? That’s not even the team. You’re just a solo operator, and good luck. It’s going to catch up with you eventually.
Brad Johnson: Well, let’s go there. That’s a really big topic I want to hit on. So, if I kind of compare the role of fighter pilot versus the role of financial advisor, a lot of people will be like, “How are you going to make this jump?” Here’s kind of where I draw the analogy. Very high stakes, literally, lives on the line at the fighter pilot level. And if I play this out in finance, the financial advisors that are sitting down with retirees or hopefully soon-to-be retirees, the stakes on the line are their retirement, which. I mean, for some people, they fear running out of money more than they fear death. And so, the stakes are also high when it comes to preparing for that retirement and hopefully living out that dream retirement where you can’t really redo it if you mess it up over here.
So, if I go back to fighter pilot, you mentioned flight school, which I’m guessing is a lot of classroom work, but then also real-world application. And I don’t know how simulators were back in the day, if the simulator was like an arcade game back in the day, or if a simulation was literally, I’m riding in the cockpit with the more seasoned pilot. Like, how did it go from classroom application to real-world application without, “Oh, shoot, we crashed a jet. My bad,” like how did that jump happen? Because I think there are probably some applications that apply to finance training the next advisor in line.
Carey Lohrenz: Right. You know what, that is actually a great question, and I think what’s kind of fascinating about that, I think there’s only been one other industry or area that somebody has actually asked me specifically about that, and it was actually the simulation training part of it was a critical part. So, people oftentimes think, “Gosh, I could never do that,” or, “That seems too hard,” and yes, it is risky, but you don’t walk in, get your leather jacket, a cool scarf, and a great call sign, and they’re like, “Here are the keys to your car.” You start off at the very, very bottom.
Brad Johnson: Out of curiosity, what’s the price point of an F-14?
Carey Lohrenz: Well, they’re retired now, but back in the day, probably about $45 million.
Brad Johnson: 45 million. That would be an expensive car to mess up.
Carey Lohrenz: Yes. And the crazy part about that is I think I started flying it when I was like 22. So, my son is 22 years old right now, and I’m just like, “Oh gosh, I can’t imagine him doing that,” but I mean, I’m sure he could. So, when you go to the simulation training, though, so first we start off with academics, and everything gets a little more challenging, and every step of the way, it is drinking information from a fire hose. I remember my very first day of flight school went into a room. They had a big stack of books in there. We had a Marine Corps captain who was the one giving us that brief, and he just said, “Everything you’re going to get tested on in the next six weeks is in those books. If you think you can’t learn it by then, you’re free to leave.”
And we had a couple of guys who were like, “Yeah, I don’t think that’s for me.” And I’m kind of sitting over there, maybe I was too naive to consider what drinking from that fire hose was going to be in actuality, but I was like, “You know what, if there are a lot of pictures in there, right? Like, don’t leave, don’t take yourself out of the game before you’ve even like given it a shot.” But you have that foundational knowledge level. And then, I can’t remember, maybe we had like 10 simulators. I’d have to go back and actually look where all of a sudden they start going through, okay, here’s the cockpit setup. They test you on this. Here’s the taxi, here’s the start, here’s your first flight.
So, you’ve done simulation work before you actually get into the airplane, and that holds true for every airplane you then go through in training and in the fleet because you don’t want the first time you’ve run across a scenario that that is a likely scenario or you don’t want to be the first time you’re exercising your basic skillsets, you know, let’s just call it a live fire situation, right? Like, think from a simulation perspective. With training, even if it’s computer training or going through scenario training, if you were able to do quite a bit of that, how much more confident and adept you would be when you’re actually talking live to a person? Because you’ve seen maybe 75% or 80% of that before, so now you have a reservoir of information and experience to pull from.
So, the simulation training piece was a very big piece of it, and never is it skipped. So, every phase with the exception of maybe one or two phases, you would have a block of simulators that you would go through before you actually did that phase in the airplane.
Brad Johnson: Wow. So, if you can think back to flight school, did it start in the classroom and then once you’d kind of got the base knowledge, then it was to the simulator, once you had that, then it was to the real. Like, if you were to kind of time section off, “Hey, here’s how long we were in the classroom before we even got to the simulator. Here’s how long we were in the simulator before we actually got to the real jet.” What did that look like?
Carey Lohrenz: Well, and again, that was different for every single… The length of that phase would be different for every airplane that you were flying. So, at the very ground floor, starting flight school, I can’t like this was a bit ago. It feels like maybe it was probably six weeks of nonstop academics and testing before you got into that first simulator, but they’re already expecting you to have crawled into the airplane, done cockpit stuff. You have to know pretty much every screw, every fuel system, the hydraulic system, all of that before you actually ever get into the airplane. And then it’s integrated with every phase, so you don’t do…
Brad Johnson: Got it. So, learn in the classroom, then jump to the simulator. Back to the classroom. And did you start with an F-14, or did you start with like a base plane and had to build up to an F-14?
Carey Lohrenz: Oh gosh, yeah. So, it was probably two years of nonstop training and flight school, and I flew three different airplanes. So, your flight training was broken down into three phases. So, you had your primary training, and that was maybe nine months, 10 months. And then only the people with the top grades coming out of primary flight school were the ones that went into the jet pipeline.
Brad Johnson: So, they basically take the top of the class. Those are the ones that are building up to eventually be a fighter jet pilot?
Carey Lohrenz: Yes.
Brad Johnson: How many times did you have to get skimmed off the top? Was it every plane along the way?
Carey Lohrenz: Oh, weekly. People will be dropping weekly, or you go through different phases, and maybe somebody has really strong grades here, and your grades aren’t quite as strong, and then it goes like this. But it’s at the end of primary that they’re all of your academic grades, your flight grades, every single flight, every maneuver that you did was graded and scored. And then, of course, it is balanced with what we always call the needs of the Navy. So, maybe one week you had 12 people that were graduating, and there were three jet slots. Well, only three people would get them. The next week maybe there were 10 people graduating, and there would be one slot, or there might be four slots, but it always was only the top people out of that first phase that then were able to go onto the next phase.
But then you go through the intermediate phase and a totally different airplane at a different base. And that funnel gets narrower too. Everybody doesn’t make it through that because it keeps getting harder and harder and harder and more complex and faster because every airplane that you go into is a more high-performing airplane. So, some people just don’t make decisions or process information in the dynamic environment that’s going to be required for the seat that eventually they’re thinking you would end up in. So, it’s a pretty significant winnowing process, as well as it’s very pressure-filled because your performance is always being evaluated. Always.
So, again, that’s where that skillset, what we were talking about even earlier about, if you don’t learn the skills or you’re not coachable and you’re not able to respond to that coaching and that feedback, even if it’s negative feedback or maybe it’s more abrasive than you would prefer, then you’re probably not going to be long for the system because you have to be coachable.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. So, I want to tie this to the application of being a financial advisor because what I’ve seen happen a lot where things go off track, it’s a founder that oftentimes it’s kind of graduated through the school of hard knocks. They were thrown in the deep end of sales early on, and they were like the one out of 50 that didn’t drown. So, kind of that skimming of the top has naturally happened in finance too, where those that couldn’t cut it didn’t make it. But then the frustrating part for a lot of founders that I see is when they are ready to build the team and add multiple advisors to the team. All of this knowledge that’s been gained the hard way over 20, 30 years of experience, it’s really hard and oftentimes frustrating to download that into your 22, 23, 24-year-old that’s young, hungry, has the will to learn. It’s just like, “Where’s the playbook?”
So, if we were to take kind of your path through flight school and you were to give advice to an advisor, how long did you actually train before you literally stepped in an F-14 for the first time? How long was that path?
Carey Lohrenz: Oh, two years.
Brad Johnson: Two years. And the end goal the whole time was, “I want to be a fighter pilot.” That was your goal at the beginning?
Carey Lohrenz: Correct.
Brad Johnson: So, you do two years of training before you even step into the real version of what you’re trying to do. Where I see that play out in finance, oftentimes it’s like you hire a salesperson and then, boom, the next week they’re running sales appointments. They’re not ready at all. They’ve had no simulation hours, right? So, if you were to apply kind of how it works in the military and give advice to those maybe trying to train the next generation of advisors, what non-negotiables would you put in place in that training regimen?
Carey Lohrenz: Well, first of all, that’s part of the reason why they’re working with you, right? Because you have some of those frameworks and you have some of the tools. And I think that you see this all the time and across industry that you might have people who have been really high performing in one area or they’re really good at one thing, and then they get put in this leadership position that they don’t actually have through no fault of their own, that ability or that skillset yet to do that. So, I think one of the things when and if people pay attention, in the military, regardless of what segment of the population you’re working in, again, whether you work in supply chain or you work in aviation, and again, I’ll say cybersecurity, maybe you’re in the financial admin space of it, the people that you tend to lean on really heavily are the senior chiefs.
So, they’re the ones who have a lot of experience. They’ve seen everything possible that can go wrong, that will go wrong, and the good ones are very, very committed to teaching you a process and a way to work to try to risk manage, right? Because they’ve been there. They’ve learned that. So, it almost becomes endemic in the culture that you’re building. And if you’re new or you’re just starting to build a team, you have to put some thought into this. One of the big things I say in that, I think people, again, to your point of what do you do when you’ve got a 20, 22, 23, 24-year-old, and maybe you have somebody who’s 35 or 45 who has a great body of experience doing something else and is new to the industry?
My number one answer is take the time to at least grab two to four books, right? Because there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel completely. And the biggest thing you can go wrong with is not taking the time to learn from somebody else or thinking you know enough to just get up to speed faster than anybody else. I was going to say better, but I think it’s actually faster than anybody else. So, if you have experience and now you find yourself leading shop, leading a team, maybe you’re launching a brand new business, take some time to look at what has worked for other people. Figure out what’s worked for other people and then figure out what is the, or what are the straightforward processes that I think people that have worked for me or that I think people are going to need to be successful.
Because it’s about having, you have to have that roadmap for success or a flight plan for success, or you’re just opening up your laptop or going into your office every day hoping for success or hoping for the best. And that simply is not going to work. So, it’s figuring out, and it actually is, I think, taking time to put pen to paper or opening up that Word doc or leveraging the tools and solutions that you have to put a framework so that you have something to deviate from and debrief to. Otherwise, again, you’re just showing up every day, hoping for the best and hoping for success. And you’re probably not going to stay in business very long doing that.
You might be okay for a little while, but as soon as the environment changes or you get that handful of people that you think are going to be high performers on board, they’re going to look at this and probably within six to 12 months, go, “I’m tapping out. Like, I don’t even see where I fit here. Like, how am I going to be successful?”
Brad Johnson: Well, as I’m listening to you share it, something came to mind. It’s the higher the stakes, the more important the process is documented very intentionally. Like, when there are lives on the line, I don’t know when a flight plan was invented, but I’m assuming somebody forgot to fuel up a plane one time, and they take off, and it crashes. They’re like, “Can’t let that happen again. Check fuel, right?” Like, all of the checklists that you have to prepare before you actually take off. And if I look at the version of that in finance, I was just having this conversation last week, one of our members had a fairly high net worth individual, I think 11 million, walk in. He’d never dealt with 11 million before.
And I said, “Hey, there are seven steps on the agenda of how to properly run a first.” I said, “Did you follow them?” He’s like, “No, I got all flustered in like the first five minutes.” I appreciated the honesty, but I’m like, “Hey, just follow the process.” Like, yeah, they may have an extra comment in the account, yeah, they may have a few issues that people with less money don’t have, but they’re just a human that needs help with their retirement, that has some pain points that you need to uncover so you can figure out if you can help them build a plan to fix them, right? Or keep them on track. And it was almost like when you have that flight checklist to fall back on, it’s like you can actually execute with confidence.
Like, did you feel that? Like, once you got certain on the checklist, and you understood all the steps, and where the dials and gauges were, then it’s kind of like, “Okay, it’s harder to mess up along the way.” Is that fair?
Carey Lohrenz: Absolutely. And all of our checklists were designed by or something was incorporated because somebody forgot something or a critical piece, because really smart people forget things. And really smart people who are under a lot of pressure tend to forget even more things. So, we hadn’t…
Brad Johnson: So, I want to just repeat that because back to ego and checking ego, really smart, really successful people, I’ve heard them, “Oh man, that worked so well. I stopped using it,” and it’s like, “Wait, you used it for these five appointments, and then you stopped? Why? You didn’t have a process, right?” to your point.
Carey Lohrenz: Yeah. So, we had two different kinds of checklists. We had the type of checklist that we call boldface, because they were written in bold font, were pretty complicated, and what we do in these sophisticated environments. But we have boldface, which were items that had to be memorized. So, if you weren’t in an emergency, if you had a fire on take off, maybe it would be five steps or seven steps, or maybe something happened really bad in flight, there was a boldface, an immediate action procedure for that. Everything else is a checklist item that you look up.
Brad Johnson: And was this in like how was it actually? Because I’m picturing an F-14. You’re doing flips. You’re flying upside down. Is this like a manual that’s on like a cord that’s like if you’re in flight and you have to go back to a checklist, is any of that in-flight adjustments, or is all of this prior to taking off?
Carey Lohrenz: So, some of the checklists we would have on our kneeboards. So, a pre-flight checklist, which we didn’t walk around carrying that, that you had that memorized. But when you got in the cockpit, like your pre-takeoff checklist, like you’d referenced that, and go through stuff. But then the memorized items were things that you were tested on, you were drilled on at random times. Instructors would stop you. Like, you had to be able to juggle, walk backwards, have somebody trip you, and still spit out a single-engine procedure. Those bold-faced, those immediate emergency action ones were the things that you should be able to stop anybody in the middle of doing anything, I don’t care, on riding a bike.
Brad Johnson: So, back to operating under pressure, Carey, was this like you’re out doing physical activities, like training, and then like name the five? I mean, are they literally just randomly inserted through your training? Because that’s another thing I see missing in finance a lot is not doing enough reps in practice, so you do it well in the game, you know?
Carey Lohrenz: Yes.
Brad Johnson: And so, like where’s the stuff infused into just your normal day?
Carey Lohrenz: It could be usually during every brief, your instructor would say, all of a sudden they’d be like, “Single engine off the catapult checklist.” Like, they could be talking about something completely different, and you have to be able to spit it out. So, in briefs, in debriefs, they would ask you sometimes in general conversation. If you’re running around the squadron, somebody would ask you. But it was interesting because everybody learns those memorized items in a very different way. For most of us, people would make flashcards, and they wouldn’t type it out or print it out and tape it to something. Almost everybody, to a person, that I knew always took the time to handwrite it.
All the science shows is if you handwrite things, that kinesthetic connection, your brain actually will remember it. So, you have flashcards. I had a couple of friends who would juggle, and they would sit there, and they’d quiz each other. They may not have even been good jugglers. Oftentimes, a lot of us, you’d go for a jog with somebody, and you’d quiz each other on systems because it’s having that your body being physically under stress or some physical load while your, I don’t know, mental acuity or your memory is being tested because you’re going to have to recall this in a dynamic environment. When the chips are actually down in real life, it’s not going to be you sitting here with your arms crossed going, “What was that engine fire checklist again?”
So, we tried to put our bodies, even in a physiological state that would stress us a little bit to help with that memory recall. But yeah, the checklist piece of it again is because really smart people forget really important things. So, very, very much reliant on then when you’re airborne, if it’s not an immediate action thing, the first thing you do is haul out your pocket checklist and you say, “I’m looking up,” whatever it may be, X, Y, Z, fuel flow problem or whatever, and you flip to the page and you’d run the checklist. It’s interesting because in that as well, and this goes to when you’re navigating a lot of pressure, or you’re doing something really risky, one of the things that they would teach us for early on was it’s what we call hack the clock.
So, we all have in our airplane, and all airplanes still have it today, it’s an old school teeny clock that’s maybe an inch and a half across, and it’s down low on the engine panel or on your instrument panel, and it has a little push button that you can start a timer on because what do all of us do when we’re under extreme stress or pressure? We get super time compressed, and we lose track of time, and we think we need to respond immediately or make decisions immediately or something bad’s going to happen. So, we did what we would call hack the clock, where you physically hit the button as soon as the emergency is happening. You’re not going to do that if you’re getting shot off a catapult and something’s happening, right?
Brad Johnson: Right.
Carey Lohrenz: But airborne, because you don’t want to have an artificial time compression affect your decision making, because more often than not, even if it’s just a matter of taking five minutes or 10 minutes, if you take the time to go, “Just hold on a second. Hey, I don’t know the answer to that. Let me get back to you,” instead of trying to respond immediately, that time gives you time to, “Okay, do I have a checklist for that? Look at the checklist. Do I need to call somebody? Ask somebody for help,” setting your ego aside. But it’s about doing the most important things first.
Making sure your airplane doesn’t crash, getting it turned in the right direction. And then talking to somebody where too often, when we feel really pressured, what’s the first thing we do? We fill the space with words and the answer we think might be right. Instead of inverting that and going, okay, where is it that we need to go? What do I need to figure out? And now, who do I need to talk to, right? We get that flipped when we’re under stress. And you can see it all the time in conversations. And it kind of goes back to what we were saying earlier. If you start to BS somebody or tell somebody something because you feel like you need to fill the space really quickly, or they won’t think you’re credible, you’re actually hurting your credibility because now, you’re either going to have to walk it back or you’re going to have them in a problematic situation. So, it all kind of works in after…
Brad Johnson: So that, just so I get the term right, that’s called hacking, H-A-C-K, hack the clock.
Carey Lohrenz: Hack the clock, which is very different than a life hack. This is not a life hack.
Brad Johnson: Well, I’m soaking this in and the first thing that came to mind for me is like the famous situation. I think the pilot’s name was Sully, where he takes the commercial airline, I think it was LaGuardia, and they hit these geese, I think. It blows both engines and he ends up landing it in the Hudson. I remember the Tom Hanks version of that story in the movie. And they showed like he had this amount of time to make this decision that basically, with all these lives on the line, and fortunately, he made the right one. But to me, that hack-the-clock scenario is like, okay, I’m freaking out. Start the clock. It’s almost like a form of meditation in a little bit is kind of what I’m getting, where it’s like, okay, be calm, go through my processes. What are my options here, where it’s almost like flipping the clock back to your advantage? Like, is that how you would describe it in real life circumstance?
Carey Lohrenz: Absolutely. And because I think physically and you hit it spot on it, you are being very intentional and you are now getting back some semblance of control. And it forces you, you reach, you punch it, and now you go back and you are relying on your preparation and your training. So, it’s a very intentional move that then gets you grounded right back into, okay, I’ve trained for this, I have checklists. How am I going to respond instead of running wrong with your hair on fire and oh, my gosh, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? And it puts you back in a position of having as much agency and as much control as you can have in this situation. But that all is predicated on, and it goes back to you, you have to build this before you’re in the middle of the stuff, right? Because generally, first of all, people who are frantic, panicked people don’t make good decisions. You see it how people respond to the market. When has panic ever had somebody make a good financial decision?
Brad Johnson: Right. So, you’re almost like hacking yourself out of this panic situation.
Carey Lohrenz: Yes.
Brad Johnson: And when you saw this play out in the military in different simulations, did you find most humans think time is moving faster in those moments or slower? Like, what’s the natural default that happens?
Carey Lohrenz: Well, the natural default is everybody wants to solve everything right away and start taking action and ju ju ju and making super-fast decisions because you feel like you have much less time than you normally do. Now, where do you not have a lot of time? When you’re five seconds away from landing on the back of the ship, when you’re going at 100 feet or 200 feet at 350 miles an hour through the mountains, you don’t have a lot of time to make decisions. If you’re at 100 feet or 200 feet going 350 miles an hour, you’re not thinking very well.
Brad Johnson: Did you do that, by the way? Did you do that?
Carey Lohrenz: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Brad Johnson: That seems pretty wild.
Carey Lohrenz: That’s part of our training. But that is where you, because you have briefed all of this beforehand, because you’ve taken the time to train beforehand, you know how you are going to respond once you’re actually executing. So, this goes back to that framework discussion that if you are starting a business or you’re starting a shop or you currently have a group of people that you’re responsible for, what framework either are you planning to use or are you going to use to get everybody aligned to work in a similar fashion? Maybe not identically, that’s okay. So that, that in between space, your day-to-day execution is fairly predictable, not boring, but predictable.
And as we’ve talked about before, you always at the end of the day, or really quickly, after the end of a call or at the end of an event, we debrief, right? Maybe you’re debriefing with yourself, which you can’t, you just really quickly are writing down, okay, what worked, what didn’t, and why? And it’s so you can incorporate that. Maybe it’s into your next call into the next time. Somebody with an $11 million at hand who goes, I don’t know what to do with this. I need your help. You remember, and you’ve already figured out, and you’re integrating these lessons, how to do it better next time.
So, if you think about Top Gun, and I think there’s just one little scene in the very first movie, whenever people think, again, regardless of, we’ll just say your shop size or your team size, if they say, you know what? We don’t have time to debrief. You don’t understand. Everybody’s maxed out. We’re too busy, we’re too busy operating to take the time to look back. Number one reason I hear why people say they can’t debrief is they say they just don’t have the time without realizing, taking the time to debrief is what gives you that time back.
Brad Johnson: It’s what keeps you from making that same mistake over and over where you’re in this constant state of chaos, yeah.
Carey Lohrenz: That’s right.
Brad Johnson: I want to break down, I want to get to the debrief because that was a really cool part of our conversation, the table. Before we get off the training, I’ve got one last question because you said it was two years of training before you actually stepped foot into an F-14. And then I’m assuming, because just going back to my Top Gun memories, there’s two pilots in the cockpit, correct, of an F-14 or is there one?
Carey Lohrenz: There’s a pilot who sits in the front. And then the backseater was the RIO, the radar intercept officer.
Brad Johnson: What’s it called?
Carey Lohrenz: They did not have flight controls at all.
Brad Johnson: So, they can’t take over. They can’t fly the plane.
Carey Lohrenz: No.
Brad Johnson: So, when you stepped in to an F-14 the first time, were you in the pilot seat or were you in the backseat watching a seasoned pilot? Which one?
Carey Lohrenz: Nope. You’re in the front seat, it’s all you. So, it’s pretty back…
Brad Johnson: Because those are two very different jobs. Is that why?
Carey Lohrenz: Yes. So, specifically, even in the F-14 and just the way all of the electronics, essentially the avionics were, it was such a complicated airplane that it took one person. There were tons of circuit breakers and running the radar and all of that. And there are a couple of variants of the F-18 that also have a backseater. They call them weapon system operators.
Brad Johnson: Was the F-14 the first fighter jet that had two seats in it for that purpose? Or was there a predecessor before it that had multiple seats?
Carey Lohrenz: No, I think, I don’t want aviation enthusiasts to come after me on this, but I think F-4 was a two-seater as well or had a couple of variants of the two-seat. The F-16 has some two seaters, but I think that might be just for training. And the F-15, I think is…
Brad Johnson: So, they’re basically, I don’t know if wingman would be the proper word or wing woman, but I would assume the teamwork that has to happen between those two positions is, I mean, you guys have to be in lockstep, I would assume, especially if you’re in combat. How did that dance work? Because where I kind of apply that to finance, oftentimes we’ll coach, there’s a sales advisor or relationship advisor that’s kind of leading, and then there’s a service advisor. Oftentimes, we call it riding shotgun with them in the appointment that’s in charge of capturing the information, feeding that to the planning team. And so, it is very much a dual role where those two have to work hand in hand. And I see some similarities there, but I’m not sure how it works in an actual fighter jet cockpit.
Carey Lohrenz: No, that is a perfect analogy. And also, I would think similar to what we did. Sometimes you’re going to be partnered with or paired with somebody you don’t necessarily have the same work style as they do, right? Or maybe personality-wise, maybe you’re not, I don’t want to say super compatible, but let’s just go with that. Maybe you just kind of have two very different personalities. It doesn’t matter, right? You’re paired up, but it’s taking the time before you ever do anything customer facing or forward facing that no different than us. We would brief. And I’m a subject matter expert in what I do. You are a subject matter expert in what you do. And together, we’re going to work together to do something awesome.
So, if you were to fly with that person several times, and let’s just use a, I don’t want to go negative, but let’s just go with, say you are going to be paired up with this person for whatever reason, for two or three months, and you’re just like, oh, probably wouldn’t have been my first pick, but it is what it is. You figure out how are you going to work together the best so that you get the customer, the client outcome that you know you can. And the way you can best do that is after you have your brief beforehand, hey, this is what we’re expecting to do, this is what I’m going to do, this is what you think you’re going to do. And off we go is that as soon as you get done with every single client or customer engagement, you debrief that engagement because you very, very quickly, again, are you’re trying to figure out what worked and what didn’t, so you can be better next time? Because once you are operating shoulder to shoulder, it’s you to get the win to help support somebody in that.
So, it 100% relies on teamwork to do that and trusting each other. And the fastest bridge you can build, I think is, again, when you’re taking the time to debrief really quickly, is to be able to be the first one to say, hey, this is what I thought we were doing. This is what I kind of thought our plan was going to be as we were talking to this person or this couple. This is what I did or this is what I saw and this is the mistake I made and I think I can fix it. You after every– because none of us ever has the perfect, well, you might because you’ve got a lot of experience.
Brad Johnson: I haven’t, trust me. I feel like sales is probably the same as flying an airplane. There’s always something you could have done better or more efficiently.
Carey Lohrenz: And it’s rare. It’s kind of like hitting that great shot in golf where you’re like, that was magic. I’m a genius. Tiger should have me caddie for him. And then your next 165 shots are shaking all over the place, right? But it is just developing that habit, again, the habit of learning and the habit of humility because you can watch anything, even on the Blue Angels. They’re the first ones to admit, there’s never been a perfect Blue Angel flight show. There’s never been a perfect march to the airplanes, a perfect double Fortis or whatever. There’s always room for improvement. And if you can come back and go, hey, you did a really good job. This is what I thought we were doing, it kind of got off track. This was my mistake and I can fix it. We can all work with that, right?
Brad Johnson: Well, you hit on one other thing that I think is really key. We’ve talked a lot about processes, whether it’s flight plan or everything else that goes into being a successful pilot. The systems are so tight, I’m assuming, okay, so you got paired with this person that maybe you don’t connect with on a personal level, but the processes are built, they must connect. So, it’s like for them to do that role and you to do this role, we each have our boxes we need to check. And the best financial services firms I’ve seen, it’s like, this advisor ran a first visit. Oh, shoot, they’ve got to be out for an unforeseen circumstance. This next advisor can step right in and not miss a beat because the systems are so tight and the process is duplicated, it’s not freestyle. And so, I just think, that same thing that works in the military, it works at the best financial services firms I’ve seen where they really have dedicated themselves to training in a super tight process.
But I want to go to the other part of this learning that you hit on that I thought was really cool. in fact, you said, I think you’ve got 10 to 15 messages after the Triad experience of people like, hey, let’s talk through the after-action review or I believe, in the Navy, it’s called the debrief. You already hinted at one thing. It takes a humble leader to kind of step into that and say, hey, I might’ve been the pilot, but here’s what I messed up. And it then in turn kind of gives the rest of your team permission to kind of own their stuff. but can you walk us through what’s the framework of a debrief in the Navy? What purpose does it serve? How might that apply to financial services?
Carey Lohrenz: Yep. So, I’m going to go back again, just to really, really drop anchor on the process piece of this because I think, the danger in what I have seen sometimes, not just in the finance industry, but in other places, that people who have been really successful or who have a lot of tenure can start to tend to think, not everybody, but some people can think, well, that doesn’t apply to me. Like, I already know. Like, it almost becomes intuitive.
Brad Johnson: I’ve seen that a lot in finance.
Carey Lohrenz: Yep. But the reality is, whether you’re in the aviation space and you’re a Top Gun graduate or it’s your first day in flight school, which means there’s a whole lot in between, having that straightforward process on an individual level and culturally or systemically is really reassuring. And the reason that is, is because it gives everybody involved a greater opportunity to really identify opportunities and solutions in really unpredictable environments because when you’re using a process that people have a shared understanding with or we, as a team, have this shared process, people know what to do. So, somebody is suddenly out, they’re out on sick leave, they’re out on maternity leave, they’re out on parental care leave, whatever the case may be, whoever steps in has a confidence to move through these steps and get done what still needs to get done.
So, the same thing applies for you in the financial space. Folks know what is supposed to happen. They know what the steps are, so you can very quickly course correct when things maybe are not going the way you thought they were going to go or the environment changes. So, having a process doesn’t mean that you’re inflexible. It simply guides a way that you are going to behave and how you are going to react. So, it’s a really repeatable way to say, this is how we’re going to do it, which then allows everybody to take really purposeful action that then is going to provide more valuable learning, and that is all supported by the debrief. So, when you think about that…
Brad Johnson: Would you say on this, because a phrase comes to mind, I think Jocko is the one that first kind of put it on my radar, but discipline equals freedom. Like, I look at these processes and having discipline around them and documentation around them. Because of that discipline, once you get comfortable in that process, it almost allows you like this, a little bit of freestyle and flexibility within the guidelines.
Carey Lohrenz: Absolutely.
Brad Johnson: But you can actually be comfortable and be a better version of your individual self. You feel like that holds true?
Carey Lohrenz: 100%. I would almost liken it to, we had a very rigid process that allowed for really flexible thinking and adaptation, because early on in the process, what are you doing? You’re looking, you’re saying this is what you’re identifying. This is what success looks like. You’re saying here are the threats, here are the resources, here’s who is responsible for what, and we are going to take the time to debrief. What happens in this whole process because you’re taking the time and whether that’s a 30-minute section before the beginning of your day or at the beginning of the week, first of all, it’s going to build buy-in because everybody has seen, they know what success looks like. They have time to ask questions, they have time to kind of feed in. Maybe you see some threats that I don’t see. But now, because we’re running through this process really, really quickly, we now have a shared view of what the landscape looks like.
So, by sticking to a clear, not necessarily a ton of steps process, it allows you to fix all of these things or have awareness about all these things that eventually, what should happen is that there should be no truly big things because it’s always going to be the accumulation of little things that you can adapt and adjust to very quickly because you have this rhythm of the process. People, I think too often, when you think a process, you feel like, I even, like, it makes me a little itchy because I’ve worked in situations where you have a 125-step value stream mapping that makes my brain melt out of my ears, right? Like, unworkable. How are we going to do that?
So, how do you get just a really strong framework so that you have something to deviate from? I mean, we always said, you play like you practice in the Navy. So, we practice this, we practice responses to things. So, when we’re out actually executing, there shouldn’t be any surprises. You already pretty much know how you’re going to react. And then, you take the time in the front end of that to prepare your team, you’re briefing your team, you’ve got the middle phase is the execution, right, where you hopefully have briefed earlier when task saturation or task overload could probably hit your team because it’s always going to hit us. So, we want to know when we’re most likely to be affected by that. And then we get to that magical debrief, which is where we were going.
Brad Johnson: Let’s get to that. But the other thing that just came to mind as you were going through the process, I would also assume, okay, we’ve got 10 pilots all following the same process, flight plan, equivalent of in finance, we’ve got 10 financial advisors all using the same first appointment process, second appointment process. Now, I’m assuming if something breaks, oh, this didn’t work. How much quicker can you identify? Because it’s like, oh, went off track in step three. It’s like boom, instantaneous, and now you’ve got seven other pilots are like, oh, well, here was my adjustment. So just make this adjustment and you’re back on track where you also have shared wisdom across the group so you can fix it. You crowdsource the solutions that much quicker, where if you had 10 different processes, now it’s like, wait, your step three is way different. I don’t even do that step. And so, now the problem solving becomes a lot tougher too on the other side of it.
Carey Lohrenz: Sure, sure. Yeah. It’s like getting a bunch of spiderwebs all laying across each other and then you just end up with a little spiderweb ball and no probably really good solution. So, when you have a shared framework, again, you have something to deviate from. And that all comes from lessons learned, right? Why do we take the time to brief so that we hopefully have everybody land safely, right? Why do we take the time to address task saturation in what we know are going to be really high workload or high stress environments? Because people who have become really task saturated have flown perfectly good airplanes straight into the ground. Unfortunately, we call that dying relaxed, and it’s horrifying. If you’re in the business long enough, everybody knows somebody who that’s happened to, and it’s simply because they became so task saturated and fixated on something that they actually forgot to fly the airplane.
Brad Johnson: Looking at one dial when they should have been looking at the other one that was flashing red.
Carey Lohrenz: That’s right. Then you bring in, so you have these two big chunks, the preparation phase, the execution phase, and then what I call essentially the prevail phase. So, you’ve taken the time to perform or prepare, right? You’ve done your strategic planning, you’ve briefed your team, now you’re out executing, doing all the awesome. Now, you have to figure out, okay, how do I replicate that? Because if you had a couple of really great calls, were you lucky or was it because you were using the process and could adjust, right? Because we never want to leave success to chance.
So, the debrief phase for us or the prevail step, what I call the prevail step, I think was really our secret weapon to ensure a high performance consistently. And we started really debriefing really, really strongly, essentially, really after Vietnam, which then kind of was the genesis for Top Gun.
Brad Johnson: Really? So, was that recent? So, it was like World War II, World War I. There wasn’t a lot of debrief in the Navy. It kind of evolved after Vietnam.
Carey Lohrenz: They were doing some of it. It was not as dedicated or as precise or specific, simply because we didn’t understand all of the human factors involved in how do you generate more successful outcomes at scale. Not just individually, but at scale. So, that’s what our goal is going to be. So, when too often, and again, what we had talked about earlier that people say, oh, I don’t have time for that or it’s too complicated, sounds too scary, I just tell people, hey, just ask yourself at the end of a call or at the end of the day, just five really simple questions. So, this does not have to be complicated or take a ton of time. Ask yourself what was supposed to happen, right? So, you just write down, okay, what was supposed to happen? What actually happened? And this is where we do oftentimes have to set our ego aside, why were there differences? What can we learn? And then, how do we incorporate that lesson into execution next time? Because the debrief ends up being one of the fastest ways that you can build trust and drive continuous improvement in your work partnerships with your wingman, and even in the customers and the clients that you serve.
And what people tend to discover very quickly and what we learn over and over again, in the debrief, you’ll learn very, very quickly if at the beginning people actually understood (a) what success was supposed to look like. Who was responsible for what, because all of a sudden, you’re like, ooh, I thought he was doing that or I thought that sales person was handling that. You oftentimes learn that or you learn the gaps in understanding in the debrief. So, as leaders, it’s a great gut check because we all assume everybody on our team understands what they’re supposed to do and what success looks like. And yet, some of our research has actually uncovered the fact that 100% of C-suite respondents in our research all said their team had a plan and they knew what success looked like when you go below a director level, so I’m talking across all organizations. That number plummets to 54%. You know what people could have found out if that was the case or not, is if they took the time to debrief, because it goes back to the first question, it’s answering what was supposed to happen, right? Or what is success…
Brad Johnson: Well, and I think also, in business, the hack-the-clock analogy in business is here’s the fire of the day I didn’t expect. So, now, there’s this pressure that wasn’t baked into the calendar, so we’re kind of shooting from the hip, hey, emergency meeting, whatever. And the question that my team gets tired of me asking is, Covey’s 7 Habits start with the end in mind. It’s like, hey, what’s the purpose of this meeting? And I look at the first year or two of chaos at Triad. We’re now five years old. Hopefully, we’ve outgrown some of this. We would get in meetings, very expensive meetings with like high payroll represented in that room and people didn’t even know what the meeting was for. And it’s like, well, we’re already destined for failure, right? Because we’ve got too many cooks in the kitchen and they don’t know what the recipe is that we’re shooting for.
So, I love that, what was supposed to happen, step one. Because now, there’s alignment in the mission. What actually happened? Reality. How often in that step did you see multiple people that were all part of the same scenario with very different recollections of what actually happened, like blind spots, for lack of a better term? Did you see that happen a lot?
Carey Lohrenz: I don’t know that I would say a lot. I would say more often than you would think. but the further you get through training, through experience, the less often that would happen. And part of that, again, obviously with experience, is that people start to learn the skill set of being a much clearer communicator. So, I say even insofar as sending emails, right, I’m a big proponent of the BLUF method, Bottom Line Up Front. Don’t give me three paragraphs with three syllable words and all the things that sound really fancy, and then say, the median’s going to be about this or this is the thing I’m concerned about, right? Flip it and use as few words as possible.
And this is where we get, I think a lot of our stuff can get muddied up because everybody is inundated with so much information that we just are all suffering from information overload or the email chain that is 72 responders long trying to get to what was that meeting about again. So, it’s, hey, it’s even so much as in your meeting invites, right, right at the front. This is what we’re talking about or it’s in the subject line, it’s very specific, it’s clear, and I think it’s also about which you are really good about. It’s being cognizant of and recognizing, failures are going to occur in this, right? We’re going to make mistakes. You’ve grown really, really fast and have been hyper-successful. There will continue to be failures on this journey. It’s just you hope that they get to be a little bit smaller and that more learning is occurring every time that happens. So, you can incorporate it a lot more quickly.
And again, the way you do that is by debriefing because somebody in that meeting has seen what you’re experiencing. Oftentimes they’re not saying something or they haven’t said anything because nobody, usually the leader or whoever’s, I’m not saying it’s you, whoever’s in charge of that meeting simply hasn’t asked the question, has anybody seen this before? Because somebody’s little hand on their Zoom call is going to go beep, right? But they haven’t been asked the question. So, when we acknowledge and we realize, hey, we’re going to have some setbacks, we’re going to have some failures, that’s going to happen. The best thing we can do when we’re the one in charge or we’re the one leading that is, hey, here’s what I thought was going to happen because you’re the one who briefed it. Here’s what I thought was going to happen. This is what I saw, right? And you might’ve seen something different. This is what I saw. These are the mistakes I made and I can fix it.
And then you go around the room and this person’s going to say, yeah, that’s what I thought. But this is what I saw because I’ll give you a really quick example. We used to, when we would go out and do our practice, air combat maneuvers, at the end of every single engagement on our knee board cards, we write down what we thought happened. Like, we’d use little arrows and diagram. And because if you do three, four, or five of those, your chances, you think you’re going to remember what happened in that third engagement. By the time you fly back, debrief maintenance, go to the bathroom, get a cup of coffee, wipe the sweat off, sit down. The chances of you actually remembering that, even though it was just an hour and 15 minutes ago, probably not going to remember with clarity all five of them.
So, you reflect back to your notes. You compare your notes to then get that shared understanding of, oh, their perspective actually was a little different than mine. I was actually looking at this. Maybe I was task saturated and hyper-focused on something and I actually missed all of this. I would never know that because, again, mine is the only perspective I can have when it’s happening. The only way I would know that is if I actually took the time to debrief. So, it’s all about just not leaving success to chance. And you always just show up to your debrief with the cultural shared understanding that, hey, just remember we’re doing this. It’s not about who’s right, it’s about what’s right. We’re just trying to get to the best end solution so we can serve the people who are counting on us the best we can.
Brad Johnson: Yeah. It’s setting the ego aside for the best outcome for the team. And I’ll just repeat those steps real quick because I love it. What was supposed to happen, what actually happened? What are the differences between those two? What did we learn from that? And now, how do we incorporate that the next time? And I look at some of the most successful advisor training tracks. It’s that kind of service advisor shadowing the more seasoned advisor, where oftentimes, they can grow into the next advisor. But those after-action reviews, you follow, yeah, what was supposed to happen in this? Okay, what actually happened? Oh, well, the client went off track. Okay, well, yeah, they did. Did you see me try to pull them back? Okay, what were the differences? What’d we learn? And one, it’s great for the person that’s actually in the role to do their role better, but also, the student that is trying to learn, you’re helping them avoid all these landmines along the way. Like, yeah, don’t do that there. I made that mistake three years ago. So, you’re accelerating their growth too in that after-action review and you’re creating space for the learning, which is just, I’ve seen that work really, really well for firms that do it religiously. So, I love how much that applies to the world of finance.
Carey Lohrenz: Absolutely. And it’s the fastest way in a firm to transfer knowledge. It’s the fastest way. I’m not going to say it’s easy, but it’s the easiest way to mentor somebody as well, because you have something to debrief back to. Now, obviously, that doesn’t mean you’re in the middle of a meeting with a client and they’re like, so what are we supposed to be doing here? You’re not doing it in the middle of it. But in the debrief is where you’re able to have these different conversations where if you’ve been in the industry for a while and you have some seniority and you’re really successful at it, you have probably internalized some of these practices that, again, you wouldn’t even realize you’ve done that until you have the conversation and now you have to articulate it because it’s just become a part of your habit pattern.
And having a new set of eyes and a fresh set of questions also can poke holes in what some of your assumptions may be as well. We always used to take the time to, if we were doing something that was fairly sophisticated on our planning, take the time with what we would call red-teaming, something, where if you are going to roll out maybe a new training solution and you think it’s really good and the top seven people that you’ve brought in to help architect maybe this simulation scenario, and you’re like, well, this is awesome, right? Bring in three people who had nothing to do with the creation of it. And all you do is say, I want you to poke holes in this and find every failure point, and I promise you they’re going to find something because you think you have the best plan. You think you have the best strategy because you’re good at what you do. You have experience. But a fresh set of eyes who hasn’t had a chance to look at that, we’ll bring a whole different perspective to it.
And again, part of this is developing, whether it’s overall your broad organizational umbrella or your small teams that you’re working with, it’s how are you going to develop a microclimate of success and one that encourages two-way feedback for the sake of getting to a place that’s more valuable than where we are today. It’s got to be on that shared foundation that we’re in it together to get to a place that’s more valuable than where we are today.
Brad Johnson: I love that. Well, I know the clock has ticked by very quickly. I don’t think I hacked the clock very well in this interview because it went fast. But I would love to, obviously, you had some time, Carey, to– you were at a Triad experience, the table where we kind of did strategic planning for 2026 as we look forward here in just over a month. But I also know you’re a wife, you’re a mom, and that’s really important to you. We had a chance to talk about that a bit when we caught up in person. And one of the things that is Triad’s mission, Do Business, Do Life, it’s to build businesses that bless our members’ lives. They don’t become them. And that integration versus the tug of war a lot of entrepreneurs are faced where they feel like they can’t win at work, they can’t win at home. So, I would love to hear your version of what’s your definition of Do Business, Do Life? What’s that look like for Carey?
Carey Lohrenz: Oh, gosh. You know what? I think it’s– I tell my kids this, I think all the time, at the end of the day, just be a good person. And I think that when you operate from a place of what we were just talking about before, how can we get to a place that’s more valuable than where we are today, I am a big, big believer and I am constantly trying to do my best to put the ladder down. I’m trying to put the ladder down to bring people with me or help them get to where they want to go. And when you do that, when you figure out a way to put the ladder down, I think it lets you kind of harness that power of possibility and it attracts like-minded people, so.
Brad Johnson: I love that.
Carey Lohrenz: That probably was not very succinct.
Brad Johnson: Well, and putting the ladder down, I believe in the world of a pilot is like the actual ladder that comes down out of the cockpit, right?
Carey Lohrenz: Yeah.
Brad Johnson: Because somebody put it down for you, right, to help you get up in there. So, I love that. And I’m 45 now, so the older I get, I realize I’m kind of going to that side where I can help others up, based on learning from some of the mistakes I’ve made or from what I’ve done well. So, that is, I think, one of the most enjoyable parts of this journey of life is being able to do that when you have that knowledge base and you’ve been there before, so.
Carey Lohrenz: You know what? And those are the people that I want to be standing shoulder to shoulder with because I think all of us, if we were pressed, could probably really quickly name a couple of really successful people who yanked the ladder up and they got theirs. And those aren’t really the people I want to do business with or hang out with.
Brad Johnson: Well, I feel like the trail that you blazed, because I remember you telling a story about maybe a leader in the military that was kind of not going to let you be the first woman that made it. And I’m guessing, you had to kind of yank the ladder down for yourself a couple of times along the way. So, thank you so much, Carey, for sharing your story and some of the lessons. So much of this applies to finance and just, I’ve enjoyed every conversation we’ve had. So, hope you and your family have an awesome Thanksgiving here right around the corner.
Carey Lohrenz: Likewise. And same to you. And thanks for trusting me to spend some time with you and your audience as well. I’m glad to be here.
Brad Johnson: Okay. Till next time.
Carey Lohrenz: Till next time.
Brad Johnson: Thanks, Carey.
[END]
