Ken
Director of Product & Innovation
Use of Military Resources for Transition
Biggest Challenge Leaving the Military & Adapting to Work in the Private Sector
Difficulties Transitioning to Civilian Private Sector
Advice for people transitioning out of the military
Benefits to Transitioning Military Vets Coming to work at Royce Geo
Overview
Ken is the Director of Product & Innovation. He supports the business development team writing and crafting proposals. Additionally he leads the execution of delivery order 10 on the EIM contract. Ken was a commissioned Engineer Officer in the United States Army, serving for 8 years, including deployments to Iraq During Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Key takeaways from his interview include:
- Ken highlighted Royce Geo’s innovative, entrepreneurial business culture and how the company fundamentally understands the relationship between effectively serving the customer’s mission and its own success.
- Ken in his own words, was “lucky” to get his first job as a contractor directly out of the military based on his personal network and proactive outreach on his part.
- He feels particularly fortunate since the military was downsizing at that time, resulting in a lot of active duty personnel transitioning out and straining resources.
- In terms of his transition, Ken highlights the importance of his first position post-transition providing a lot of on-the-job training and patience. It provided the right environment for him to bridge the gap from doing some similar work in the military to the expertise he needed to execute in his role at the private company.
- As a former officer, Ken felt more prepared for the transition to civilian work than others he saw transitioning at that time. His positions prepared him with the written and oral communication skills he needed.
- For veterans transitioning, he recommends avoiding any sense of entitlement to the position or success in that role. He highlighted the importance of being results oriented and executing everyday to ensure the organization is successful.
Role at Royce Geo
“I am the Director of Product and Innovation, which basically means I do whatever they tell me to do. When I say they I mean, mainly, mainly Lee and Dave.
So I support the business development team writing and crafting proposals, especially for the more technical work that we do on EIM and other programs. Currently, I’m leading the execution of one of the EIM delivery orders called delivery 10. It’s a very large scale global monitoring program, where we persistently image static targets and then we use our computer vision technology to automate the process of studying what’s happening inside the image.
And then we have a human in the loop process for reviewing the output of the computer vision. Ultimately, we deliver products to the customer on a continual basis and we also continually retrain and improve the quality of our computer vision capabilities. So this is part of our advanced analytics portfolio here.
It’s not only a large program unto itself, but it’s also a lot of the future of the organization. It’s a lot of the future of the programs that we expect to see as we continue to pursue contracting with NGA and other organizations like Space Force for our services.”
Military Experience & Role
“I served three active years. I was what was known as a college option officer. I graduated from college in 2002. And then I enlisted in the Army and when you enlisted in the Army and you’ve already graduated from college, you have the opportunity to apply to be an officer and to go to Officer Candidate School. And so long as you graduate from Officer Candidate School, you’re commissioned as a second lieutenant.
From that point, you serve for three years as an active duty officer. And then I did end up serving the remainder of my total eight year commitment as a reserve officer, and I was commissioned as an engineer officer throughout but the role that I served as a reserve officer was as an intelligence officer working for Nga.
Role in the Military
I was commissioned as an engineer officer. I served in two companies within the Army. One was the 100th Engineer Company, and then the other was the 175th Engineer Company.
So I was a platoon leader in the 100th and I led a platoon of land surveyors. We surveyed and made charts. One of the larger missions that we had was to chart out the airspace around airports. So we would chart all of the equipment and all of the ground facilities on an airport. And then we would also go locate any of the potential obstructions to navigation around the airport using either our brown instruments or using a photogrammetric survey.
When I joined the 175th, I was their executive officer which is kind of like the ringleader of the platoon leaders in the company. And we were deployed for pretty much my entire time as the executive officer. So I served as an administrator within the company. So I ran the operations section, but then I also led this survey of Iraq and it’s kind of cool that NOAA still keeps this page up today. So this was our little gaggle of coalition surveyors, tooling around Iraq in 2005 and installing survey monuments and surveying them with our GPS instruments.”
I was into, like charting, precise positioning, things like that. Within what we call the topographic engineering company at the time, we had land surveying. And then we also had a GIS geographic information systems unit. That was 100% composed of geospatial intelligence analysts who would produce GEOINT products and as a deployed unit, we had our GEOINT cells deployed all over the theater. And yeah, they would, they would produce all of the Geospatial Intelligence products for the coalition effort.
And then the third thing we ran was a lithography unit. We actually operated a Heidelberg printing press and could print maps. We printed the initial ballots that were used for the Iraqi elections post the Baathist government. We had a whole bunch of high speed plotters and then the skills and expertise within our soldiers to operate those and keep them all running. So a big surveying, mapping, charting, printing unit.”
Transition Process
“I think I got really lucky. The Army has its own little kind of FAA type of group that manages all of their airfields and all of their airspace and all their regulations and everything. One of their programs is to manage these surveys and these charts that need to be made of all of the air bases. When we came back from Iraq, I was nearing the end of my three year commitment. And I went up to see the two guys within this group that ran the charting program. We had become friends just from when I was a platoon leader and we were scrambling around making charts for him and we’d stayed in contact when I was deployed. I went to see them at Fort Belvoir in the DC area. And I said, Well, you know, I’m getting out. What should I do?
They said, Well, you know, it’s funny, because with all of the units on these really heavy duty deployment cycles, we’ve needed to hire contractors to do some of these surveys that we have in the continental US. So handed me the business card of a guy and this folder that had information about the company.
And I literally, I went out to my rental car, and I sat in the rental car and called this guy, Larry Truman, super neat guy and in Riverside, California, and he said, we would love to talk to you and they ended up flying me out and a few weeks later, I had a job in Riverside, California. I got really lucky. I got to really be a surveyor and work within a survey company for two years. We did some army surveys. We actually did quite a bit of work with the early commercial satellite imaging companies in order to take satellite images, pictures that are scanned off of a satellite and make those into maps. The process involves having these photo identifiable points within the photos that have been positioned very, very precisely. So the kind of traditional way that we would do that when we would fly aircraft and take pictures is we would paint these big white x’s on the ground and we positioned the very, very center of it. With the satellites, what we try to do is bind things that you could see in the satellite image so you can imagine where the corner of a very white concrete driveway meets grass at a point and we would position the center of that because he could see it, you know, even did like the sub pixel level in a satellite image.
So, we would you know, this is before the time when Google cars were driving around with their scanners and all this shit. You know, this old school was like us in our pickup truck and our little survey instrument out there. But we actually ended up doing a lot of those surveys for GeoEye before they were acquired by Digital Globe. But we oordinated surveys all across Canada, US Mexico and some other international locations. So I got somewhat familiar with photo rectification for satellite images and became more familiar with you know what, what imagery looks like. But yeah, I was working as a consultant filling out a timecard and working on programs and filling out proposals.”
Use of Military Resources for Transition
“I did not. And I think it was partially because I got lucky early in the process that I didn’t really seek out a lot of resources that I imagined were available. Yeah. It was a little bit of a tough time. So you’re talking about late 2005, early 2006. You know, in the end of a lot of the stop loss program, there were a lot of transitions at the time, right? resources were probably somewhat stretched. I didn’t even attempt to use them, but I imagine that it would have been, you know, pretty tough at that point to get a lot of help, just given the number of active duty transitions that were going on.”
Biggest Challenge Leaving the Military & Adapting to Work in the Private Sector
“You know, as I say, I got really lucky with finding the job. I think I got really lucky as well that I kind of landed in a position that provided a lot of a lot of training. This will come from the perspective of an officer, right, because I really didn’t have much army training. I mean, it was, you know, basic training is what it is. Officer Candidate School is really just like a rougher basic training. And then in your school it’s like a survey course,you get a week of road construction and a week of mapmaking. You don’t really know how to do anything and you show up at your unit and you know, I learned some of the surveying stuff, so I knew how to run some of the software and some of the equipment, but I had a pretty big gap between where I was and where anybody with any sort of college education in surveying and geomatics would be at the time was far beyond where I was. And so I was lucky that I landed a job that provided some training and some patience.”
Difficulties Transitioning to Civilian Private Sector
“I would say not as much as being an officer. As an officer you are expected to speak well. You do write quite a bit, you know, you write evaluations and you write reports that need to be pretty well polished. You stand in front of senior officers and need to provide very understandable reports.
I’ve certainly witnessed that and I think a lot of it comes, you know, for enlisted soldiers for noncommissioned officers. There’s a lot more of that regimentation that gets grounded in and I think that can be a challenge leaving the military and because it’s, it’s kind of like all consuming.
For example, I went to Airborne School. There’s kind of an army thing where you come out of the back of a C 130 with this parachute that then you just mash into the ground, this thing, and you go for three weeks and as an officer, it’s great. It’s kind of fun. You get a great workout every morning. You go hang out with the soldiers and learn how to do the parachute thing. And then at night, you go hang out with your friends at the bar and you basically live in a hotel for the officers. It’s a totally different experience. The airborne barracks and Fort Benning are rough. Like it is 24/7 screaming, banging on trash cans. All this shit going on. And, you know, then we like the officers who show up in the morning and we’re like, why is everybody you know, was ever so glum?
In a lot of ways, we had a different cultural experience, for better or for worse. I mean, you know, certainly I didn’t make any of these rules, but I think when you get out it’s, it’s different, you know, to this day, and maybe everybody faces this but like, I have a lot of nervousness around in any way Skipping the chain of command is big thing, right? Like, should I ever write an email to Dave, you know, without letting Adam and J and Lee know what’s going on first and I found that, you know, in the, in the professional culture a lot of times it’s just more efficient is just to say, Yeah, well, you know, Ken, you’re the one working on this. Let me know what’s going on. Whereas in the military, we would never ever do that. Like oh my gosh, then your world would come to an end if you went around your superior officer and it came back around to them.”
Advice for people transitioning out of the military
“One of the largest challenges that I see with, not everybody who’s transitioning, but when I see Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, airmen who are transitioning, and they’re having a tough time with it.
The way I would usually frame it is there is difficulty with adopting the business culture. And then the business culture. The idea is, you know, there is no free lunch. For instance, you know, if Royce GEO for example, if we aren’t writing great proposals, winning awards, and doing an excellent job of executing that work so that we can use it as the as our experience on the next generation of proposals, then there is no work, meaning this whole thing rides on all of our shoulders, working really hard, making this stuff happen every day. So that the company either thrives on what we do, or it dies on when we don’t and it really sucks when things go badly.
So I got to see a lot of this, Riverside, California 2006 2007. All of a sudden, we’re driving into work. You know, we’re hearing about countrywide mortgages. Why didn’t people go to jail like what was going on here? All of a sudden a lot of the projects are being closed up. All of a sudden, people are being laid off. And we’re going, Oh, my gosh, this is something that’s very new, because people don’t get laid off from the army.
You know, it’s like there’s always the army. Officers who are coming in, but this idea that the success of the business, just the existence of the business really relies on every single member run with their responsibilities every single day, and there is no, there is no entitlement there. We are not entitled to win any of these projects. We’re not entitled to our paychecks, because it really all can go to shit.
But there’s the other bright side of it, like wanting the company to be great, wanting to grow.
What I would describe it is, is this inability to recognize that they are not entitled to anything they’ve got, that their job simply may not exist tomorrow. If we don’t all make that effort every single day. Yeah. I I know there’s like a different thing that can communicate and maybe it’s not really a part of like what is a great marketing campaign for a company, but as kind of my honest assessment of the line that I would draw between the transitioning military members who tend to do really well and really understand business is tough, and there’s no thing there’s no such thing as a free lunch and you’re not entitled to shit here.
From military culture where it’s like you know, it’s a pretty socialized system, frankly. Business like culture over there, you know, the money shows up from Congress and they spend the shit out of it, frankly, you know, and do we get our value out of it now, but whatever you know, we still see it’s a great thing. That’s kind of where I’ve started to find the line. And I think that for some transitioning members, you know, it would actually help to recognize that and understand why they’re not having a good time in their transition.
Because it’s, it’s not just about getting the job. It is when you get that job, how do you show up? If you’re not going to show up every day in an extremely businesslike manner, then, you know, there are other career paths that might be better that aren’t in business per se.”
Benefits to Transitioning Military Vets Coming to work at Royce Geo
“Certainly the opportunity to take the skills that you’ve learned within your tradecraft as a soldier, sailor, airman Marine, that can really set you far ahead of the pack just based on your training and your experience. I know that we also like to talk a lot about the mission oriented culture.
This is something that I think is unique. Not only does Royce Geo have a very innovative entrepreneurial business like culture, but also very mission focused. That understanding that the better we can serve our customers’ mission, the better our business will thrive.
So I think that a lot of times we find that with the transitioning service members, it’s not just a head nod when we say we love serving the national defense mission. It’s like, yeah, that’s a good thing. But to feel it in your heart and be like I used to live that life, right. Now I’ve I’ve transitioned, I’ve moved on. I’m now a professional, you know, in my field, but I continue to serve that mission and maintain that identity.”