No Fun Without Boring First — Interview with Aaron Reddell (Part 1)

Kale:?Today is my honor to welcome my special guest, Aaron Reddell. He is the Chief Operating Officer of ARMR Solutions based out of the DC area.

Hey Aaron, thank you so much for joining me. I can not tell you how excited I am to be talking to you today.

Aaron:?Well, thanks for having me, Kale. I appreciate it.

Kale:?For my readers, there’s a little bit of background. Aaron and I have actually known each other for many years, since we were kids really. As with most friendships that start as children, we have gone our separate ways throughout our adult lives, and we have recently reconnected.

Hearing about each other’s stories and what we have gone through has been fantastic. We actually found out we have tread a lot of similar grounds, especially over in Afghanistan.

So Aaron, one of the things I wanted to ask you about is ARMR solutions.

Tell me about what it is that you are doing.

Aaron:?A couple of years ago, I left the police department as a robbery-homicide detective. I was recruited into ARMR Solutions.

It was a very small company, with a very niche specialization in digital operations, open source intelligence and deep/dark web exploitation, mostly serving the federal government in the DC area.

I was asked to come aboard, because in my previous life before the police department, I had done a lot of government contracting work, business development projects and program management of everything counter-narcotics and counterterrorism programs overseas.

To the more mundane, I covered IT modernization programs, infrastructure and things of that nature.

I had a group reach out to me and ask if I could come aboard, and at the time I was already doing some consulting with some other companies that wanted to build their capabilities and their footprints.

Most of them were in technical areas that I had no expertise in. It was actually very surprising to me that people kept asking for my help.

Each one of them was very technically based, product or service offering. Every time my answer was: “I don’t know anything about this”. Their response to me was always: “But we know that you are really good about getting everybody rowing the boat in the same direction together”.

That I was good at dealing with difficult personalities, overcoming those challenges, and basically building cohesive teams. That was news to me, but I gave it a shot.

Thankfully, I managed to be successful at each one of those positions that I did. Then I started to really recognize that maybe these people aren’t crazy.

They are leading in multi-million and sometimes multi-billion dollar companies, and asking for my help in these areas. So I started to put a little bit more effort into trying to quantify, qualify and articulate what it was that they kept coming to me for help on.

That led to some other opportunities to help mentor and teach some executive management programs, leadership programs and even a guest lecture at a university. Then through all of that, the algorithms being what they are, leadership things continue to pop up in front of me.

One of them, lo and behold, was one of my childhood friends that I have known for almost three decades.

Kale:?That is incredible. As a background, for those of you who are trying to pay attention and keep up with Aaron’s background here, he’s jumped around to several different fields.

He’s not claiming to be a master of any, but you have shown yourself to be a proven leader in the sense of teamwork. In a sense of bringing people together, whether they are actually at odds with each other or just have different cultures or personalities.

People have recognized that in you, which is so fascinating. Before we go down that particular road, I want to also remind people, being a robbery-homicide detective, that takes a certain amount of skill.

You have talked about counter-narcotics, you have talked about cybersecurity, what would you say is your primary area and how has that evolved over the years?

Do you even have one? Or are you just open to anything at this point?

Aaron:?I don’t do free advertising for everybody else, but there’s an amazing Ted Talk about “multipotentialite” I believe is the term.

It’s sort of the quintessential jack of all trades and master of none. I would say what’s always sort of led my resume, my drive and been my passion has been what you would classify now as strategic infrastructure protection.

I always felt drawn to service to the military, to community service. I started at a young age, as soon as I was old enough to join Boy Scouts Civil Air Patrol and become a Red Cross instructor.

Whatever the minimum age was, I was doing that because I always felt this draw to public service and emergency services. I guess I always wanted to be the hero.

Then as I got into that world, and as I matured with it, I realized a lesson that was taught to me by someone much wiser than myself early on in my career. He taught me that in the military, there’s no such thing as high speed.

For those people that don’t have a military background, high speed refers to basically the coolest stuff. The stuff you see in the movies, the guys roping out of a helicopter, jumping out of airplanes, speed boats and all that.

All that stuff you see has to be maintained, and has to be performed. It’s got to be cleaned, it’s got to be stocked and reshelved.

There’s a hundred times more hours put into boring, mundane maintenance, preparation and recording of results than what goes into the actual fun.

That stuck with me and it resonated with me. I began to see the value in the work that has to be done behind the scenes.

I like having fun as much as any guy, but I’m also willing to put in the work of doing that mundane stuff and making sure that things are done right the first time, because there’s never enough time or money to do it right.

Strategic infrastructure protection, whether it’s at the micro level of protecting an individual or at a strategic level of protecting national resources, it’s always the same goal.

It’s the preservation of life. Protection is where I keep my focus.

Kale:?If I’m reading correctly, that leadership component of it is making all those things that are coming in from every different direction in order to come to that “high-speed moment”.

Aaron:?I didn’t realize it at the time, but one of the greatest lessons that I learned about leadership and building a culture was from the United States Air Force when I was 15 years old, as a civil air patrol cadet.

Kale:?What is civil air patrol for?

Aaron:?It actually has several missions. One part is aerospace education and a cadet program for the youth of the United States to help educate them and create almost a feeder for the US Air Force, for the US military and for the aerospace industry overall.

I found myself at Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington State. We were taking a tour of the base and we were being introduced to all these different airmen and job specialties.

I remember no matter how many specialties we were introduced to, everyone introduced themselves the same way. They would introduce themselves by their name and rank, and they would all say: “I have the best job in the Air Force”.

One of the specialists, his whole job in the Air Force was to remove the ejector seats from aircraft. As a 15-year-old kid obsessed with Navy Seals and all the cool stuff, I was like: “Man, what a boring job”.

However, just like everybody else I met, he said the same thing. He said: “I have the best job in the Air Force”. It wasn’t until later that I realized the value of creating a culture, instilling the value and the motivation in the team.

Especially within smaller components of large organizations that maybe don’t understand how they fit into the bigger picture and don’t understand how valuable their work is. There’s no such thing as high speed.

Kale:?Exactly, there is no “high speed” action if there is no fuel technician that fuels up the plane and all of those “unglamorous” types of jobs.

Aaron:?Unglamorous, but absolutely necessary. It doesn’t work without them.

Later in my life came up some different leadership positions that had incredible value. It created in me the goal to be able to try to do that task with every organization that I had a leadership or management role in.

That task is to try to make the people on my team the type of people that would say: “I have got the best job at this company or government office”.

Share with us if you believe there is also no such thing as “high speed” in your workplace. Are the looks also sometimes deceiving when it comes down to the work you do?

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