IAM1277 – CEO Creates Innovative Solutions for the Army and the Community

Brad Halsey is a modern-day MacGyver. He works to empower people from all places and backgrounds to solve the hardest, most important, and time-critical technical problems.

As CEO and Co-Founder of Building Momentum, Brad leads a team of Ph. D.s, engineers, scientists, innovators, trainers, makers, educators, artists, and thinkers to solve for impact in their community. Making Alexandria, the armed forces, and the region a better place – ready to solve the hard problems ahead.

• CEO Story: Brad was in the Navy when he had the opportunity to join the Think Tank (researchers), solving problems for the military. Went on to be a consultant for the army in Baghdad solving problems, and building solutions in the lab. Brad invented a 7-day training program for techs. And so he built his company Building Momentum.
• Business Service: Problem-solving for the armed forces and the community, training them with technology.
• Secret Sauce: Asking the why. Looking at the problem and what is really going on.
• CEO Hack: Having time for self (time to think & quiet time), family, and work.
• CEO Nugget: Diverse staff in education, in global views, and give them a voice.
• CEO Defined: Constantly change and critique yourself. Keeps on cultivating.

Website: www.buildmo.com

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Transcription

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00:16 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:43 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today at Brad Halsey of building momentum. Brad, super excited to have you on the show.

00:52 – Brad Halsey

Yeah, this is awesome. Super excited to be here.

00:55 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, this is definitely fun. And before we jump to the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Brad so you can hear about some of the awesome things that he's working on. And Brad is a modern-day MacGyver. He works to empower people from all places and backgrounds to solve the hardest, most important, and time-critical technical problems. As the CEO and co-founder of Building Momentum, Brad leads a team of PhDs, engineers, scientists, innovators, trainers, makers, educators, artists, and thinkers.

Their goal is to make Alexandria, the armed forces, and the region better equipped to solve complex problems and have a positive impact on the community. Brad, Super excited to have you on and hear about all the MacGyver stuff that you're working on. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:36 – Brad Halsey

Let's do it.

01:37 – Gresham Harkless

Let's make it happen. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit. Here is a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:45 – Brad Halsey

Yeah, it actually starts way early on. I had to join ROTC to pay for college and was in the Navy for 4 years, got a disabled veteran out after a shoulder injury, and went to a think tank at Stanford Research Institute. And it was great. It was grassroots R&D solving really hard problems largely for the DOD. But the frustrating thing about all that was that technology wasn't filtering to the front lines where a lot of my friends were getting chewed up by at the time, Iraq was like full in force. And I just needed to understand why we were making like X-wing fighters and time machines on this side, and then there they're getting beat up by people using very simple microcontrollers and electronics.

So unfortunately for myself at the time and the think tank, which I love, I left them and found a contract with the army with a consulting firm. And basically just as a consultant, went to Iraq in 2008 for about a year. And it was just like the embedded geek for the army. So I just ran around kind of doing what I needed to do. I had, I'd really had very few rules that I needed to follow so I could jump on a mission. I could go watch what people are doing. And I could get shot at and rocketed all the same and then build solutions there. I had a little lab in Baghdad. And that is where like the entire course of my life turned because I fell in love with that building under duress, these problem solving under duress, incredibly addictive.

It's just, I can't even, it's hard to describe. But when the stakes are highest, everything slows down. And I love it so much. And so when I came back from that experience, it had gone really well. And the Army was like, I want more, more, more. And so I started training nerds to go to war like me. But just because you're number one in your class at MIT does not mean that you know anything about building real solutions dealing with people or getting rocketed and shot at. So I started at this consulting firm, weeding people out with this training program I invented. It was like a seven-day hell week of tech. And then as I got refined and started really enjoying doing the teaching, I realized I could start a company doing both.

I could have a place where I could go do the work myself or I could train people to do that work. So I started building momentum with that in mind. It was like I like to use the words that you were saying, I like to do the MacGyvering, but I also like to teach them. And that's the Genesis story of how we got started. And then it turns out that we eventually moved into this place that we're in now, this large maker space facility. And then people wanted to start having events here. I'm like, Oh, this is cool.

You have this really interesting place. Can we have our wedding here? We have our bar mitzvah here. So now it's like morphed into 3 pillars at our company. We build stuff, we teach people to build stuff, and then we have these experiences and these events, and all of those things are intertwined. Right. So the experience might involve tech and the building of things might be a piece of art that goes somewhere. So it's kind of a crazy, crazy nexus of all 3 parts of my life coming together here.

05:07 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I absolutely love that. And I appreciate you, you know, helping so many people to understand that as well, too. And I think, you know, it just becomes saying I was actually gonna ask that and it sounds like that's probably part of the case too, where even if they're using the tech, they might be underutilizing the tech, not understanding that, okay, they have this other tool that they can use on their back and they maybe understand maybe 5% or 10% of what it could potentially do.

But when you have that full understanding, not only do you, as you said, get to redefine so many different aspects, but I imagine you get to blaze your own trails and create an entirely new world and new thinking. It just creates this, it sounds like a domino effect where you start to really see the world in an entirely different place.

05:51 – Brad Halsey

Yeah, we, we actually did this. And in a real-life scenario during COVID, where the Marine Corps called us because I have a pretty strong background in thermal imaging, they said, Brad, what thermal imager should we buy so that when people come into the bases, we can do a temperature check and see if they have COVID. And so my 2 responses were that doesn't really work the way you think it does, because that's not how the human body and thermal imagers interplay. You'll get close to some information. But 2, you shouldn't do that anyway, because you guys have a thermal imager that is called the PAS 13.

And it is, you know, wide throughout the armed services, but it's really underused because it sits on a 50 cal a lot of times and you have to push your eye against it to turn it on. And it's just they have them all over the place, but they don't get used that much. And so we said, don't buy one. You already have a really good thermal imager. Why don't we take a little raspberry pie and figure out how to wire it such that you can see people coming in and get data off of that? So we actually took 3D printers, removed the build plate, and would heat one up to like 80 degrees and we'd heat another one up to like 110 degrees and then stick, put the thermal imager in the middle and you can interpolate through those things what a human's temperature was.

And it was free. They had all of this with them. They had the 3D printers. They could just pop the plate off, they had the thermal imagers, we wrote a little code for them and Raspberry Pi is $30. So instead of spending thousands and thousands of dollars per thermal imager across some Marine Corps, we gave them a chance to re-purpose something that they already had in a way that maybe they hadn't thought they could do. And so we're like, here's your code. Here's what you do. Here's your document. Go for it.

07:38 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I love that. And so it might be part of what I was going to ask you for, which is your secret sauce. It could be for yourself personally, the organization, or a combination of both. But do you think it's your ability to not just see like, hey, these are the tools, but also here's the strategy behind it? This is even imagining how they can work in interplay in a completely different way. Do you think that is what really kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

08:01 – Brad Halsey

I think I just am annoying and I asked why. For instance, when we flew into Kuwait to do a training session there, we really wanted to fly drones. And as soon as we got to the base in Al Jaber, they were like, no, can't fly drones. And I said, why? They're like, well, this guy says we can't. So I went to the guy's door. Why can't we fly drones? Oh, no one's ever asked me. I don't know. But I don't think we can because of this other guy. So we keep doing that. Knock, knock, knock. Why can't we do it? Oh, the Pentagon. So then we call the Pentagon. Pentagon, can I fly drones? Yeah, all they need to do is do this. But this guy controlled it.

And so we just kept peeling the onion, peeling the onion. Finally, it was just a piece of paper we had to fill out and it was the lack of knowing just people it's easier to say no than to spend the energy to find out how to say yes. And so we now have a robust drone flying program, but the secret sauce is that we just sort of say, why, 1, 2? Yeah, that you have to go see the problem, I think, to have a stake in that discussion. You have to go to the front lines and see it.

And that's one of the things I think that we do bring is that at any given point, I will get on an airplane and go somewhere and go and look at the problem itself and just see what, what is actually happening. Because then that's how you can keep teasing the Y away of, oh, now I get why this is going on. You guys actually, you don't have anyone here looking at the problem. So you're just supposing the problem is back in the lab. So that's a part of it too. We tend to travel wherever we need to travel to.

09:27 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And that traveling sounds like the extra mile where they say the extra mile is never crowded because no one ever goes there. So whether we go that proverbial mile, you're actually going there to see because no one else is going there to actually see the problem, as you said. So I love that tremendously. And so I wanted to switch gears a little bit. And I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

09:54 – Brad Halsey

I mean, maybe one of them is my schedule. I come in later in the morning, probably one of the latest people to the company because my wife is a photographer and this is her crazy busy season. You know, we have 3 young kids. I try to get them off to school, take care of things I need to do around the house and exercise if I can. And sometimes just think like sometimes I just need 10 minutes of silence just to let my brain marinate on stuff because you come into the office, there's a line out the door of people wanting to talk to you and problems and things. So it's just that morning time is mine.

And then, and then in the evening, you know, I will work after I get the kids down. Sometimes the same, I'll just have a couple of hours, you know, maybe up to midnight or 01:00 in the morning where I can just like to think and write some things down. And so it's just shifting my schedule. I think it's been my hack. It's been out of necessity during the pandemic. We had to our kids are getting schooled at home. It was insane trying to get everyone on Zooms and trying to upgrade the internet.

So they don't drop sync all the time and like all of those things. So I was already shifted that and then I've kind of stuck with that. I have most of my meetings in the afternoon and I like this podcast where I can just be more focused on what's going on here because I took care of the things that I needed to take care of at home.

11:14 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, I love that hack. And I think so many times we forget that sometimes taking a step and I'm going to use air quotes away is actually going to allow you to be more present and be able to provide more value as a result of doing that. I want to ask you now for what I call CEO nugget and you might have already touched on this, but this is a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. It might be something if you were to happen to a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

11:37 – Brad Halsey

I think the thing that has made us unique is I talk about it as like this triangle of things to solve for impact. So we never solve for profits. That is not something that I actually hate when money gets into the equation. It money is just the fuel we need to keep the machine going. But if you have the 3 things, which are you have a diverse staff that is diverse ethnically, that is diverse in education, that is diverse in global views. If you have a diverse staff and you hire those people such that they all share the same passion to want to do things, make the world better, teach people to make the world better, you know, with their hands or with their education.

They share that. And then lastly, if they have those 2 things and you give them a voice in your company, that's where greatness happens. And when you give diverse people who are passionate about a voice, you're going to have conflict, it's by design, People are going to argue. I think one of the things I would tell myself if I went back in time is to learn more quickly how to design that conflict such that instead of smacking against each other, they eventually start smacking against the problem.

It's something I've had to learn, and I'm still learning all the time. People who think differently, care the same and have an equal platform to have an opinion. It's great. It just creates a lot of rugby, creative rugby, as we call it. And it's just, you know, leadership really means taking that creative rugby and turning it towards, you know, the right problem set.

13:07 – Gresham Harkless

I definitely appreciate that. And so would you consider that to be what I like to call the definition of what it means to be a CEO? And our goal is to really have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show.

13:17 – Brad Halsey

I think being a CEO means you have to constantly change and you constantly have to critique yourself and ask if you're doing the right thing. So right now, this moment in the company, you're exactly right. To me, I am more trying to set the stage for people to be creative and sort of basically take over. Like I can't, you know, it is dangerous to a company if I am the single point failure to all of that stuff, right? Like if I get hit by a train tomorrow, this company needs to thrive, and actually not just survive, but thrive and do better.

Like, do better than me. So to do that, basically, if you're constantly thinking about how you replace yourself and go do something else, which I have a lot of thoughts of doing something else too, how do you set the stage? How do you grow them the right way? How do you give them the resources and the training and the empathy and the understanding to be that? Early on, when we started the company, I was a very different CEO.

I had to, you spend a lot of time inventing things. You think of new creative ideas and things to build and it's a little bit more just digging it out of the dirt, right? But now that we have things growing, now I'm playing more farmer and just like cultivating that. I'm trying to think that this metaphor actually holds up. I'll just keep going with it. So, and then, you know, eventually I'll get out of the farming and we'll play a guitar at a speed metal band somewhere.

14:38 – Gresham Harkless

Brad, truly appreciate that definition. And I of course appreciate your time even more. What I want to do now, which is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course how best they can get a hold of you find about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

14:53 – Brad Halsey 

Yeah, I think the best way to probably get ahold of us is to go through our website at buildmo.com. One of the really cool things that we are going to be kicking off in 2022 is with 2 of them we're taking our innovation boot camp, which has been largely for the DoD who trained like 5000 people all the way across the DoD in this space. We're going to make that open to everybody. In that same vein, there's Another thing that we're really hard launching in 2022 called Innovation Elevated.

This is corporate training, but with the bent of building. So if you think about design thinking, you think about those sticky note sessions where people really sort of open the aperture and open their minds up and they figure out what they're doing. And then they go off to their businesses and they try to enact process change. And so that's what I'm really excited to let those things, you know, unleash themselves in 2022 and see where that goes. But, you know, look for innovation elevated and then our innovation boot camp opening up to the civilian sector.

15:52 – Gresham Harkless

I truly appreciate that, Brad. We will have the links and information the show knows as well too, so that everybody can hear about all the awesome things that you're working on. I truly appreciate that my friend, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest day.

16:01 – Brad Halsey

Yeah, thanks so much. This has been great. I can't wait to do this again.

16:05 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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