General(‘s) Reinvention – Part One

By Sam Westbrook
What does the rather strange title of this piece mean? Those of you who’ve dealt with 9g Enterprises know that periodic reinvention is one of the processes we preach. What many of you may not know is that I retired from the Air Force in 1991 after having attained the rank of major general (two stars). My transition into the business-suit brigade was very much a series of reinventions for me. My struggles with and acceptance of the need to change are some of the reasons why I am such a believer in the process today.

I’m going to tell you about my experiences in going from wearing a light blue shirt and dark blue tie every day to having to decide what to wear each morning—and I’ll point out the lessons I learned along the way.

My last assignment in the Air Force was about as good as it gets: I was in charge of all of the Air Force’s undergraduate pilot, navigator, and survival training. I had thirteen bases and almost fourteen hundred airplanes in my constellation—and I could fly any of the training airplanes while traveling back and forth on visits. In addition, the Air Force and the Navy were in the process of replacing the primary training airplanes each service used with a single new trainer, and I got to fly all of the contenders.

After two years at the headquarters in San Antonio I was told one morning that my next assignment would be in Europe. Desert Shield/Desert Storm had just happened; I knew that the Air Force was in good hands, and that we’d probably be downsizing in the foreseeable future. Since I’d just been in a job as good as any I was likely to have in the Air Force, I decided to make the leap to the commercial sector and see how the other half lived.

I acted precipitously, advising my boss that morning that I wanted to retire from the Air Force rather than take my next assignment, and then I went home for lunch and told my wife what I’d done. I quickly learned Lesson One about Reinvention: think through who you want to tell about your plans, and be sure your spouse is at the top of your list if you are married.

In Lesson Two, I learned that one must consider carefully how he is going to get from where he is to where he wants to be, given that it will probably take longer than he expects by a factor of about three or four. I hadn’t done anything about finding a job on the “outside” or figuring out how much it was going to cost to meet my family’s necessities. With children in college, I knew I’d need more than what I’d get from my Air Force retirement, but I didn’t know how much more. The Air Force was willing to put my household goods in storage for a year, so we packed some clothes and let the movers take everything else.

Lesson Three follows directly from Lesson Two: living out of suitcases and paying for hotels gets prohibitively expensive very quickly. My wife and I had been invited to go on a re-positioning cruise on a private yacht up the Inside Passage from Seattle to Alaska, so we made our way to Seattle and camped out in our daughter’s shared house until the trip started. My wife grew up in Alaska, so after the twelve days on the boat we spent several weeks talking to people in Alaska about jobs.

Lesson Four is that people are much more interested in what you can do for their organization or business than they are in the fact that you are a retired general. I had to start thinking about how I could become an asset someone wanted rather than someone with a resume that included flying Air Force aircraft.

Alaska, by the way, was in a post-oil boom recession, and there were no jobs to be had. I went to Upstate New York to talk to a man about running the side of his company that did government contract work, but he decided he wanted someone with more experience in the contracting world than I had. We rented a little house in Seattle and furnished it with things we bought at yard sales.

I bought a book, researched aerospace-related companies, and learned how to do a mail merge on a computer. I sent out hundreds of resumes, and one of them went to one of my classmates from the Air Force Academy without my realizing who he was—and I got a gentle scolding from him in a reply. I got two job interviews through friends in Seattle and flunked them both. None of the hundreds of letters I sent out generated even the smallest interest. Another friend from my Air Force days called to ask if I’d be interested in talking to a man in the Boston area about a short consulting job. Boy, would I.

In retrospect, I was learning Lesson Five: networking beats cold calling every time if you’re trying to break into a new field. The man in Boston had recently bought a metals recycling business that was tanking, and he wanted me to write him a business plan with options about what to do. I did a quick study that included a complete analysis of the financials of the business from scratch—something that had been recommended to me by another classmate with lots of commercial experience.

My analysis indicated it would be nearly impossible to sell the business and that the only way to stop the bleeding was to reduce staff and concentrate on the few money makers among the many lines of business being pursued, but there was a big caveat: the previous owner and general manager were long gone, and there was no one at Kramer Scrap who could run it. So, here comes Lesson Six: businesses that are in trouble are much more likely to offer you a job than those that are humming along. I ended up running Kramer Scrap for six months. I learned a lot and put the company back in the black. For the story of how I did it, tune in for Part 2 of “General(‘s) Reinvention” in our next newsletter.