Cory Boatwright, MBA 21 – Finding Jobs That Matter For Our Vets 

(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)

[00:00:00] Sean Li: This episode of OneHaas is brought to you by the Haas Fund, fueling opportunities for our students, faculty, and strengthening our Haas community. Join us in making an impact today at haas.berkeley.edu/give. 

Welcome to the OneHaas Alumni podcast. I’m your host, Sean Li, and today we’re joined by Cory Boatwright. Cory is currently the Senior Advisor for Workforce Development Strategies and Programs at Hiring Our Heroes. We’d love to hear more about that, Cory. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. This podcast is in celebration of Veterans Month. So, first off, thank you for your service.

[00:00:50] Cory Boatwright: Thanks, Sean. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me here.

[00:00:54] Sean Li: Cory, we love to start these conversations hearing about your origin story. We’d love to hear how you grew up, where you grew up. If you like, even, you know, talking about your parents.

[00:01:02] Cory Boatwright: Yeah. So, I grew up just north of the Bay Area in Chico, California. Grew up from humble beginnings, first-generation college graduate. And so, when I always thought about going to school or who I was going to be in the world, Haas has always been a thing that has been like a recurring theme to me. Having parents that didn’t go to college, they didn’t really live like a professional business lifestyle.

And so, as I was growing up, I, kind of, would look around and be like, this just isn’t what I want. Like, I want to do more. I want to travel more. I want to see more. And so, there’s always been, kind of, this journey towards education. And for whatever reason, there is this, like, Berkeley to me, and Haas to me was like, it was the Oz, right? It’s the shiny thing on the hill that was the goal. And so, it’s just something that had come up throughout my life for a very long time.

[00:01:58] Sean Li: What did your parents do, if you don’t mind me asking?

[00:02:00] Cory Boatwright: My dad at the time in Chico was a… he sold copy machines, like, you know, copiers. He was a copy machine salesman. And my mom worked for, like, a rental car company where she would help people get into rental cars and stuff like that. And then my parents separated when I was… I must have been like eight years old or something like that. My dad moved to L.A., and then eventually my mom remarried, and we moved to the Portland, Oregon, area when I was just about to get into high school.

And so, this is living in Portland, went to high school there. And then after high school, I was wanting to go to school, like, go to college, but I just actually didn’t know really how to do that. I mean, it seems weird now, but there wasn’t really anybody in our family who had gone to college. So, I didn’t have the network or the knowledge of how that actually takes place. And so, I didn’t have the funds to go to college.

And so, one of the things that… this is right after 9/11. So, I was also inspired by the events of 9/11. I had friends that joined the military, and I was like, “Well, I can join the military, and not only to serve my country but also be part of something that’s bigger than myself, but also get the funds to go to school.” And so, that’s what I chose to do.

[00:03:18] Sean Li: And what military branch did you join?

[00:03:20] Cory Boatwright: So, I went into the Air Force. I always knew… it’s, kind of, a funny story of, like, the job that I took when I was in the military. I always knew that I wanted to be, like, a business person, right? And I, kind of, just made up this person, this fictitious person of who I wanted to be. And I took, like, characteristics of people from books and magazines and shows and stuff like that. I’m like who I wanted to be as a business person.

And so, one of the things that I thought was like, “Okay, well, you know, a business person has to be able to be a public speaker and speak in front of people. And, you know, I’m just making this stuff up as I go, right?

[00:03:52] Sean Li: Yeah.

[00:03:53] Cory Boatwright: And so, I was like, “Well, how do I do that? Like, I don’t have the skills to do that.” So, I joined the Air Force as a military broadcaster. I was like, I’m just going to throw myself into this. And so, I had to do, like, all these voice auditions and stuff like that because I was failing them miserably because I sucked at it. And eventually, they let me into the Air Force as a broadcaster. And then that’s where I trained.

And so, for the first two years, I lived in South Korea, where I ran the morning radio show Waking Up the Wolf Pack out of Kunsan, South Korea.

[00:04:27] Sean Li: Wow.

[00:04:28] Cory Boatwright: Yeah. It’s pretty fun. And so, that’s what I did… I was like, I’m going to throw myself into all this stuff. It’s like, I’m deathly afraid of speaking in front of people, but if I become a broadcaster in the Air Force, I’m not going to have any choice. And so, that’s what I did. And quite honestly, that strategy worked out beautifully. You know, now my roles at Hiring Our Heroes, which is part of the Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

And recently, I just left LinkedIn, where I was there for eight years, where I led military programs and other social impact programs, you know, often found myself speaking in front of very large groups. And I’m able to, kind of, fall back on that training that I got in the military so many years ago.

[00:05:07] Sean Li: That’s amazing. You know, we’ve spoken to a bunch of veterans on this podcast, and it always surprises me. I don’t know why, that there are just so many roles in the military, right? I definitely did not think journalism, you know, being a podcast person too, has such an important role in the military. If you don’t mind sharing, what is the purpose of that role in the military?

[00:05:33] Cory Boatwright: Yeah. It’s actually a really important role, especially for troops that are overseas. So, again, you know, being the morning radio show DJ in South Korea, I’m bringing, like, American music to the troops that are stationed in South Korea. We actually had a huge South Korean shadow audience. Like, South Koreans would listen to the radio station, the American music, because we’d be broadcasting it out broadly. But instead of commercials like you hear today on any, sort of, radio broadcast or anything like that, it would be filled with what we would call “command information.”

And it would be stuff like, make sure you’re staying hydrated, or, you know, the weather is going to be this, so make sure that you’re taking these precautions, or it’s starting to get cold outside. Make sure that you’ve got your cold-weather gear unpacked and ready to go. Or don’t put rugs on a hardwood floor underneath the stairway, or you’ll slip and fall. Like, you’re like, well, somebody must’ve done that, and now we’ve got to make a commercial about it.

So, it’d be really silly, kind of, stuff like that. Or just any, sort of, event that would be going on around the base. Like, we would send people out and they would do interviews. Maybe we would have, like, a visiting fighter wing or something, you know, aircraft coming to Korea for a little bit on a short deployment. We’d go and interview them and, you know, what a day in a life was for them, and then we would share that out on the radio and whatnot.

[00:06:53] Sean Li: Wow. And morale is obviously incredibly important for troops overseas. And that’s such an important role, to just, in many ways, make them feel at home, right? In some ways.

[00:07:06] Cory Boatwright: Yep. And we’d share news and stuff like that from home, and just a typical, like, news radio segment would be news, there’d be, you know, like I said, the commercials, music, weather, that type of stuff.

[00:07:18] Sean Li: So, tell us a little bit about… so you did a stint in combat correspondence as well. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

[00:07:23] Cory Boatwright: Yeah. So, I had what they call a special duty assignment where I went to Charleston, South Carolina, to join the First Combat Camera Squadron, which is a unit that basically does a lot of humanitarian and combat missions. And I was selected for, like, a special team of five that embedded with special operators to do combat documentation. And so, on a pretty regular basis, I would deploy and then go out with special operators on various missions where I would essentially my job was to capture the events of the day. Think of it that the Pentagon can’t be on the ground.

And this was before there was, like, people had, like, body cams and stuff like that. I was that person. Now I’m no longer on the radio, but now I’m using photographs and, you know, videographer mostly is what my training was in. And so, I would take video of the different missions and photographs while I was out there and stuff like that. And then, basically, come back off the mission and upload that information for decision makers to have, like, visibility on the ground. Like, obviously, that has wholly changed at this point, right? But at the time, that’s what my role was.

And I was able to get that role because, one, I was always an avid distance runner, so I could keep up with the very fit special operators. And then I was also able to obtain the security clearance that was required for that role. So, I was just right place, right time. And I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed those missions.

[00:08:54] Sean Li: If you don’t mind me asking, because you have to do the broadcast, right? In the mornings or whatnot, I mean, you still have to do all the usual Air Force training, like the combat training and weapons training, all that stuff. How do you fit that in?

[00:09:08] Cory Boatwright: So, when I was in Korea, mostly my training was around broadcasting. So, like, the radio training, doing news stories, and stuff like that. I would have to keep qualified with my weapon. So, that would just get scheduled in like a doctor’s appointment, essentially, is what it was like. Now, when I went to Charleston, I was no longer doing radio at all. I stopped doing radio entirely and was more focused on combat readiness. And so, I got flight qualified so I could get on, like, jump on aircraft, and I could do aerial videography and stuff like that as well.

And so, really, my days were filled with just staying… there’s like this point of readiness. So, a lot more weapons training, a lot more out-in-the-field training, doing videography, stuff like that. And then, as you’ve, kind of, you’ve been around for a little bit, then you actually start to get little teams underneath you, and then you’re helping train sub-teams. Just a lot more training on that front.

[00:10:00] Sean Li: Wow. And then later on, you moved into strategic communications as manager. What did you do there?

[00:10:06] Cory Boatwright: So, that was mostly just when I was back at home and not deployed or in any, sort of, humanitarian work. It was back home just basically managing the teams, helping with, again, doing like command information, doing, like, documentation, so, like, documentaries. So, we’d do a lot of local documentaries on what the base was doing. We’d build out those types of things. If there was any, sort of, disaster relief or anything that was local, we’d go and capture stories there.

I deployed to Haiti after the earthquake in 2009 and then also to Japan after the earthquake and tsunami there. So, there’s a lot of humanitarian stuff that we would deploy to and, you know, capture video and transmit that back as well.

[00:10:52] Sean Li: Wow. That’s amazing. And I noticed you came back and you went to UPenn, went to an Ivy League.

[00:10:59] Cory Boatwright: Yeah.

[00:11:01] Sean Li: I went far beyond fulfilling, you know, going to college.

[00:11:05] Cory Boatwright: Yeah. So, I was trying to go to school online in between, like, all these deployments and my service, and it just wasn’t working. I just didn’t have the time to do it, or the time difference would be really, really difficult. And so, I applied to UPenn. Basically, I created a LinkedIn account and I searched for veterans who had gone to UPenn or… and then just basically would talk to them and people about their experience, and built my application package, and then applied to that.

And so, because of the opportunity, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to get out of the Air Force and go to school.” There was a ROTC unit at Drexel, and Drexel University is, like, right across the street that basically, the two campuses touch each other. And so, I had every intention to actually go back into the military as an Army civil affairs officer. So, civil affairs is, like, the social impact professionals of the military. They’re the people on the ground that, when there was any damage done in villages or anything like that, they would go and they would build the relationships and make sure that that stuff was taken care of.

And I really liked that role. I really have this, like, deep sense of, like,  service. I really want the work that I do to have meaning and to make the world a better place in any way that it can. And so, I really was attracted to the civil affairs officer, to be a civil affairs team. And between my junior and senior year, I got medically disqualified from going back into the military. I was really, really tired in class, and, you know, students are generally tired. I wasn’t a person that went out and partied or anything like that, but I was just dying from exhaustion.

And I went and got a sleep study done, and they’re like, “Well, you have sleep apnea. You can’t go into the military because you can’t deploy anymore.” And I was like, “What?” And this was horrible for me because I was like, I haven’t even thought about what my career would be in a year, because this is what I do. And oh, by the way, I had also missed all the internship opportunities. So, I didn’t really have a network outside of the military. And I had to very quickly figure out what I was going to do with my life in my senior year.

[00:13:10] Sean Li: Wow. That’s crazy. So, what did you end up doing?

[00:13:14] Cory Boatwright: So, I ended up getting an internship with BlackRock, which is an investment management company.

[00:13:19] Sean Li: Yeah. It’s a small place.

[00:13:20] Cory Boatwright: Yeah. I leveraged the military network. I went to a nonprofit called American Corporate Partners that basically pairs military community members with corporate executives. And they paired me with this person over at BlackRock, and he was amazing. He basically took me under his wing and brought me into BlackRock, and helped me learn my way in the corporate environment, which was pretty funny. I mean, quick story, I remember my very first day, like, I walk into the building and, you know, now I’m wearing, like, a suit, and, like, I don’t wear suits, right? I just wear, like, military uniforms. So, I already feel awkward.

And I sit down, and they’re like, “Hey, your desk is here.” And I’m like, “Okay.” And then, I’d been there for a few minutes, and I’m just, kind of, waiting for, I don’t know, somebody to come over and tell me what to do. And my phone rings, and, like, it, kind of, startled me because in the military, like, there weren’t phones on our desks. That’s not an environment that we had. And so, the phone rang and I, kind of, jumped because I was, like, I don’t even know what to do, “Hello?” Like, I don’t even know how to answer the phone, right? Like I’d seen on movies, you’re like, “Hi, this is so-and-so.”

So, I’m like, “Hi, this is Cory from BlackRock. How can I help you?” And the person on the other line just started laughing their ass off because I sounded so stupid. And they’re like, “Cory, hey, this is so-and-so. You’ve got an onboarding thing in 15 minutes. Make sure you’re over in this room.” And they just hung up. And I was like, “Oh my God. This is so…” you know, I had to learn how to be a civilian. Because, you know, the military is very, very good at turning civilians into war fighters, but the military is terrible at turning war fighters into civilians.

So, I had to, like, figure it out. And it was little things like that that seemed just so ridiculous, but you’ve got to learn that somehow. And you do that just by failing all the time and learning.

[00:15:08] Sean Li: That’s a great story. So, you went into BlackRock. So, you went to Deloitte. You went to LinkedIn. Ultimately, you came back, kind of, full circle to still being involved with service members, right? With veterans and whatnot. Can you talk a little bit about that journey, I guess, the business corporate side, and then, kind of, coming back?

[00:15:28] Cory Boatwright: Yeah, I’m happy to. So, I shared with you that I didn’t have an internship and that I was able to get one through BlackRock. And so, I spent the summer at BlackRock and then ended up getting a full-time offer to go back to BlackRock after I graduated. And that role was in San Francisco, which was where I wanted to go. I wanted to go back to the West Coast, having grown up in California and Oregon.

And so, that’s where my friends and family were. And I wanted to get back to the West Coast. And so, I took this role with BlackRock in San Francisco. And after two years, they moved the team. They were moving the team back to the East Coast. And I just didn’t really want to find another role at BlackRock in San Francisco. And I didn’t want to move back to the East Coast. I liked the job. Like, it was a good fit for me because it was a, quote-unquote, “a stressful job,” but it didn’t feel stressful to me. It’s just because I had been deployed a lot, and I was like, “You know, there’s worse things I could be doing. This is pretty cool.”

And I like the dynamic nature, and I really liked, kind of, the roughness of working with traders and doing stuff like that because they’re very blunt and they work hard and work fast. And I really liked that environment. But I would say the thing that was missing for me is this connection to service. Making very wealthy people wealthier just doesn’t really get me out of bed in the morning. And so, I liked the day-to-day environment, but it didn’t really fill my cup. And so in my free time, I was helping vets get into school.

I was helping vets get jobs, helping with their resumes, or helping them with their application packages and stuff like that. And so there’s just something that really resonated with me. While I was at BlackRock, they moved the team to the East Coast, and so I was like, “Well, I really need to get some more business skills as quickly as possible.” And so, I networked again into being a banking consultant at Deloitte based out of San Francisco. But again, like, I just didn’t see myself doing that for an entire career. You know, long hours, lots of travel, never home. And I was gravitating towards doing this military stuff.

And very avid user of LinkedIn, there was a role that came open at LinkedIn to build out their military recruiting programs. And, like, I had zero days as a recruiter. I wasn’t a recruiter. But I was like, “I’d really like to work with the military community.” And so, I talked to a friend of mine who owned a nonprofit. And I asked him, he had a very colorful background too, military, worked in the CIA, did all this stuff, and then he ended up stopping all that and starting his own nonprofit.

And I was like, “Jake, tell me why you did that.” And he’s like, “Cory,” he’s like, “What do you do for free?” And I was like, “I help vets get jobs and get into school.” And he’s like, “You should figure out how to get paid to do that type of stuff.” And I was like, “Duh, that makes so much sense.” And so, I saw this role at LinkedIn. And so, I was all in. I’m like, “I’m going to get this job.” And I did all these little things to make myself more competitive than the next person.

And I ended up getting the job, and I was shocked that I actually got the job, having had no recruiting experience. And that, kind of, started my career in the military programming space professionally. And I was there for eight years doing that.

[00:18:42] Sean Li: And then in between, while you were there, I noticed timing-wise, that’s when you went to Haas, right?

[00:18:48] Cory Boatwright: Yeah.

[00:18:49] Sean Li: So, I guess two questions there, what made you want to go get a business degree, and why Haas, and how did you make that work?

[00:18:55] Cory Boatwright: Yeah, it’s an excellent question. So, you know, I was working at LinkedIn full-time. I wasn’t going to leave LinkedIn. I love the work that I was doing. And I also knew that I wasn’t going to be in corporate America forever. I want to build my own stuff. And I read this book one day on a flight from San Francisco to Philadelphia from the Harvard Business Review called “Buying a Small Business.”

And so, this book completely changed everything for me. Because I was in San Francisco. I was in the startup culture, right? There’s people that are doing all these startups. And I was like, “But startups don’t sound fun to me.” I want to buy a business, like, one that’s for sale and one that’s already generating revenue. And I want to be able to improve it and grow it, scale it.

And so, I got really big into this idea that I could buy a small business and do something with it. And so, I started looking at executive MBA programs because, again, I didn’t want to step out of my full-time role and then not generate money while I was going to school. I was like, I could do both, right?

[00:19:57] Sean Li: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:58] Cory Boatwright: And so, I looked at a bunch of different schools, the usual suspects in terms of executive MBA programs. I went, you know, to Wharton. I already had my experience at Penn, so I was like, “Yeah, I’ll check that out. Yale School of Management, University of Chicago, Berkeley.” But Berkeley, again, had this place in my heart from the beginning as I grew up as a kid. And so, I went to all those student visitation days, prospective student days.

I’d go to them. But before I would go, I would talk to the people and be like, “Hey, if you have any military students, I want to talk to them.” I want to talk to them because I know, one, I’m going to hit it off with them immediately because we have just that shared military experience, even if I don’t know them. And two, they’re going to be totally honest in whether the school sucks or not. And so, I’m talking to the vets of the other programs. And one of them, I remember one of the schools, the vet was like, “Absolutely do not come here.”

And I won’t name what school it was, but they’re like, it is horrible. Like, we’re miserable. And then he’s like, “Hey, talk to this other vet. And I talked to him.” He’s like, “No, don’t come here. Like, go to other places.” So, I go… my last visitation was actually with Berkeley. It just happened to be that way in terms of how the schedule worked out for the visitation. And so, I had said, “Hey, can you introduce me to a vet?” But it was the weirdest thing in that we had done the presentation. I’d walked out in the courtyard, and the vets already knew who I was because of my work in the military space.

Like, somehow they already knew, and they were just, like, literally waving from across the courtyard. And I was like, “I think those are the vets, because I could just tell.” And it was… Susan Petty was like, “That’s Daniel Kim. You got to go talk to that guy.” And I’m like, “I’m going to go talk to Daniel Kim.” And so, immediately, I was with my people, and I was like, “No doubt I’m coming here.” So, I tell you all that, huge sense of belonging. And I went there, and basically, I was able to, between, like, the core courses, which every one of them really resonated with me, I loved the curriculum of the program.

But also when it came to electives, I was able to build out a learning path for myself that was more geared towards buying a business than it was doing a startup. Like entrepreneurial classes, I took classes on turnarounds, mergers, and acquisitions. I took a business law class. So, all things that… I was like, “A financial analysis class, like, all of these courses that helped me basically evaluate buying a small business.”

And right before I graduated, I ended up buying… if you’re familiar with Ace Hardware, Ace Hardware has a home improvement division. And my wife and I, we bought an Ace Handyman franchise here in Portland, Oregon. That had been run for 10 years. And subsequently, we bought all the rest of them in the Portland area, and we own all Portland and Bend. And now we’re in the process of buying Vancouver, Washington, as well.

[00:22:46] Sean Li: That’s amazing. Wait, so I didn’t know this. This is not on your résumé.

[00:22:51] Cory Boatwright: [crosstalk 00:22:51].

[00:22:54] Sean Li: [crosstalk 00:22:54] You’re a business owner.

[00:22:56] Cory Boatwright: So, yeah, we do that. Essentially, my wife runs the organization now. I do the finances on the weekends, a couple hours a day. But essentially, yeah, we’ve got that. And then I still have my W-2 job now at the…

[00:23:09] Sean Li: Did you approach it from, like, a search fund perspective where you created a business plan and then found investors, or just invested yourself?

[00:23:16] Yeah. So, I explored search fund. That seemed too difficult for me. And one, I didn’t necessarily like the complexity. Like, a search fund was really cool to me in that you could get investors who can also be invested in a way that they’re going to help share knowledge, right? And you get a marketing expert, you get a turnaround expert. But we just opted to self-fund. We had saved for a long time, and we picked an opportunity that fit within our budget, and that we felt we could scale, and we felt that we could run well.

And so, the origin story to that is that we didn’t actually set out to buy a construction company at all. Neither of us have any construction background. But we just basically looked at the conditions that we felt that we could make a difference, and that was going to be the business. And so, we looked at a lot of financial statements, and this is the one that we found to have the most meat on it. And so, we jumped in. And now there’s 400 franchises across the nation, and our franchise is the second biggest in the nation.

Like, I’m pretty proud of that because we have no construction background. We basically bought this business, and our strategy… and literally this is our stated strategy, is that we’re going to take care of the employees. The employees will take care of the customers. And then the customers will take care of us. And so, we’re just really focused on bringing that servant leadership that we both learned in the military, because her and I met in Korea, she was in the Air Force as well, we’ve brought that military leadership to a construction business.

And we’re, like, we’re going to treat people really well. We’re going to give them benefits. We’re going to pay them above market. We’re going to take care of them. They’re going to be partners in how we do things. And we took that approach, and it’s… largely it’s worked.

[00:25:00] Sean Li: That’s amazing. What is the franchise? Is it the Ace Hardware stores, or is it another component of it?

[00:25:07] Cory Boatwright: Yeah, it’s called Ace Handyman Services. It’s a franchise. So, it is like a small project construction company. So, we do a lot of the jobs that big contractors, like, home builders, don’t want to do, and people can’t do themselves. So, think of our jobs as generally between two hours and two days. So, like, if you’ve got to replace an exterior door, like, your front door, you can pay a contractor to do that, but you’re going to pay a lot of money for somebody to come just replace a door, right?

[00:25:40] Sean Li: Right.

[00:25:41] Cory Boatwright: Where we can do that very quickly for somebody? We can come out and measure it, make sure you’ve got the right door. And then we can come install that, and then we’re gone.

[00:25:47] Sean Li: It has nothing to do with the Ace Hardware stores, right?

[00:25:48] Cory Boatwright: No, it’s part of the Ace Hardware brand, but it’s a completely different division. So, like, we don’t own any stores. We partner with the stores to get leads. They have customers that come in, and they’re like, “Hey, I’ve got this ceiling fan, but I don’t know how to change the ceiling.” And we’re like, all right, we’ll call Ace Handyman Services and they’ll come out and do it for you, and we’ll come out and do that. And there’s really like a million other things. Like, you’d be amazed at how many holes people have in their wall from kids playing or knocking things.

And they’re like, “Well, who do I get to do this professionally and not have to pay, like, a ridiculous amount of money to have it done? You need somebody like us to come in and just help out with that.” Or we do a lot of commercial work too. Like, there’s a lot of offices, like, you know, healthcare offices or dentist offices, where something happens and they’re like, “Well, I don’t need a full-blown contractor to come out here and fix this. I just need somebody that knows what they’re doing and they’re able to do it, and we can trust them.”

And that’s what I tell our team all the time, is that we’re in the business of trust. Sure, we do handyman services, but really, what we’re selling is trust to people. We show up when we say we’re going to show up. The price is going to be what we say the price is going to be. And we do what we say we’re going to do. And if we don’t, we’re going to fix it. We’re building that trust over time. And, you know, in this day and age, like, trust is a competitive advantage.

[00:27:07] Sean Li: Yeah, that’s so fascinating. I did not know that about your story. That’s beautiful. So, okay, we need to hear about Hiring Our Heroes. What is the organization? What do you do there?

[00:27:16] Cory Boatwright: Yeah. So, I recently left LinkedIn to join the team over at Hiring Our Heroes. So, Hiring Our Heroes is one of the nation’s largest workforce development nonprofits supporting military community members in getting meaningful employment. Like, working on a team where essentially we’re working towards workforce development programs and stuff like that that look like connecting military community members to the right resources at the right time.

So, military community members, depending on where they’re at on their transition journey, they could still be active duty, and they haven’t gotten out yet. They could be getting out, they could be transforming into a veteran now, or they could be a veteran for many years, and they’re still in… they’re looking for employment, and they could have various needs. So, essentially, they come into our ecosystem, and we’re making sure that we’re getting them to the places that they need to be. For instance, if somebody has, like, a housing issue, like, they don’t have housing or they’re about to lose their housing, or they can’t pay their utility bills.

That person’s going to be really difficult to help get a job because their basic needs aren’t being met at that moment. So, we make sure that they’re going to get to the right people to be able to help them fix that issue and then come back into our orbit so that we can help them connect to meaningful employment. Not just jobs, but, like, jobs that matter, jobs that are going to be sustainable, jobs that are going to have good wages and benefits and stuff like that.

And so, we partner with some of the best companies in the nation to pair folks up for these jobs. And so that, plus helping them become job-ready, résumés, you know, LinkedIn profiles, also on-the-job trainings, and stuff like that. So, all kinds of things in the employment sector.

[00:29:00] Sean Li: That’s amazing. That’s so important. And I’ve never even thought about that our vets, they have personal insecurity that then, you know, doesn’t allow them to actually go get a job or be prepared to get a job and all these things that happen before it. It’s so amazing that you guys are able to do that.

[00:29:16] Cory Boatwright: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of vets that are well adjusted, right? Like they… You just don’t hear about them because they basically separate from the military, and they’re off into the civilian world. And once they take the uniform off, it’s really hard to identify them, right?

[00:29:28] Sean Li: Yeah.

[00:29:30] Cory Boatwright: They look like everybody else, especially because the military is so diverse anyway. So, they just, kind of, assimilate very quickly into the civilian workforce. But there are some folks that need a little bit more support. And what we see is that there’s, kind of, like, three buckets that military community members need help with. It could be one or all three, but oftentimes they have a network gap. They just don’t have people that they know that are at the employers.

We know based on LinkedIn data that if you know somebody that works at a company and get a referral, you’re 10 times more likely to get a referral. We have no network. That’s really tough to do. You get out of the military and then you’re like, I don’t actually even know what job I’m going to think if you’re an infantry in the Army and all of a sudden now you’re out. You’re like, “Well, now what job am I going to get?” And then who do I go and talk to about this? They just don’t have that skill set. And so, they’ve got this network gap.

The other one is they have a knowledge gap. They don’t know how to do this environment. They don’t even know how to… generally don’t know how to interview, and interviewing is a very important skill to have that a lot of the military community members have. And then there’s the third thing is the skills gap is that they don’t have the right skills, or haven’t developed the skills, or honed the skills that they’re going to need in civilian employment. A lot of that probably looks like, you know, if they go to a civilian employer that’s focused on revenue and profits, that’s not a thing that people are worried about in the military.

So, like, they have to get this mindset shift and try to figure out what skills… does it involve their presentation skills or PowerPoints? It’s just skills that maybe they haven’t developed. They need to close that gap. And so, what we do is when they come in there, we help try to identify which the person needs help with, and then we get them to those resources. And like I said, oftentimes it could be all three.

And so, that’s why platforms like LinkedIn are so important to connect the military community to networks or LinkedIn Learning skills. But there’s all kinds of other skills providers like IVMF, we’re at Syracuse University. There’s a lot of nonprofits we can connect them to help them fill any one of those gaps.

[00:31:31] Sean Li: You know, that is… actually, thank you so much for sharing that first of all. And it’s so interesting, and something, you know, you, kind of, touched upon earlier, how the military doesn’t really prepare you to enter back into civilian life. But it just never occurred to me, especially that network gap, right? I guess for any listeners, it’s like us going off to college in a different state and spending four years there, and then coming back home, and just like, ″Well, yeah, I used to have friends here, but I don’t know where they went.”

You know, there’s definitely this big gap as to… even as a civilian, I can’t imagine, right? You’re in military community and then coming back and being dispersed, and what, kind of, disruption that causes just for an individual to not have that community. And so, what was it like for you? You know, you came back, right? You didn’t go back to Chico, California. You went to UPenn, to Pennsylvania, of all places. What was it like for you adjusting there? Was it OK?

[00:32:29] Cory Boatwright: I mean, I think it was… I had a better transition than, like, a smoother transition than most, or some, I guess, because I went to school first. So, I wasn’t really looking for a job. And I had the GI Bill, that helps pay for housing and school. So, that was very helpful.

[00:32:46] Sean Li: Oh, so you transitioned immediately from service to undergrad?

[00:32:50] Cory Boatwright: Yeah, literally-

[00:32:51] Sean Li: That’s amazing.

[00:32:52] Cory Boatwright: … I separated from the military on a Friday, and I was in school on Monday.

[00:32:55] Sean Li: Wow. That’s awesome.

[00:32:56] Cory Boatwright: Like, we moved that weekend from Charleston, South Carolina. We, like, drove up to Philadelphia, and we got an apartment, like, literally we found the apartment right then, and then we just moved into it. And that’s where we were at. And people move a lot in the military, and you just, kind of, adapt and overcome. And that was that. I would say, like, the challenge for me was getting into, like, student mode.

Because I hadn’t gone to school for a while. I was, like, older than the other students, and I was just in a different place in my life.

[00:33:26] Sean Li: And I imagine that that kind of connection, too, with the age gap, probably had its challenges [crosstalk 00:33:30].

[00:33:33] Cory Boatwright: Yeah. A little bit. You know, I lived off campus, not very far, a couple of blocks. And I lived with my fiancée, and I just had different problems.

[00:33:38] Sean Li: How old were you at the time, if you don’t mind me asking, when you started?

[00:33:40] Cory Boatwright: I was like 30 at that point.

[00:33:43] Sean Li: Freshman year, you were 30?

[00:33:45] Cory Boatwright: Yeah. Pretty much.

[00:33:46] Sean Li: Wow. And everybody else was 18?

[00:33:48] Cory Boatwright: Yeah, everybody else was like, you know… so I’m, like, a lot older than other folks. And, like, nobody cared. Like, I don’t…

[00:33:54] Sean Li: Yeah, of course.

[00:33:57] Cory Boatwright: They had their own issues, and I had mine. But there is this element, like, not a sense of belonging, right? I wanted to be around other military folks. And so, you know, this was just the thing that I sought out. And so, we ended up founding the military student org at Penn, me and a couple other guys, because we were just, kind of, latching arms, you know, together to stay close, which is cool. It was good to get around some folks. But that transition was more around belonging, like, just getting my feet underneath me.

But then the transition into the civilian world was fine, too. I would say that the parts that were difficult is that there’s a very clear sense of mission in the military. Like, everybody, kind of, knows in the unit what they’re supposed to be doing and what they’re going towards. And I missed that piece. Like, a lot of times in a corporate environment where the vision is not very clear because, like, there’s a lot of duds for leaders out there, and they can’t articulate or build a coherent strategy for people like me, that can be disorienting because I don’t know where we’re going.

And so, I don’t know how to build towards something where I don’t understand, or the goal keeps changing all the time. So, for me, that was probably the most disorienting piece.

[00:35:12] Sean Li: That’s something I think really important to hear, even for us MBAs and leaders.

[00:35:20] Cory Boatwright: I think, like, the civilian community and transitioning military people oftentimes have very similar experiences. Like, think of the people right now that are getting laid off from big tech or from federal jobs or government jobs and stuff like that. That transition can be very jarring, especially if somebody has been working for the government for a long time and all of a sudden they find themselves out of a job.

They’ve got to now do, like, oftentimes a multiple pivot, right? They’ve got to pivot industries, they’ve got to pivot companies, they’ve got to pivot probably roles. So, it’s like this multiple pivot, and then they’ve got to learn how to transition into that new role and lifestyle and all that other stuff. And so, that’s very similar to transitioning out of the military community in that there’s just a lot of change that happens all at once, and people have to adapt and be able to perform in an entirely new environment.

We had started the conversation around growing up in Chico from humble beginnings, and now I find myself in places that I never thought that I would have been in. I’m connected to resources, I’m connected to networks and skills, and resources through Haas or through my experience at different organizations, and now I am able to be a part of things that I had never envisioned that I would have been a part of. And that’s all really started. That journey started when I joined the military.

[00:36:37] Sean Li: That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much, Cory, for taking the time to come on the podcast today. It was a real pleasure talking to you and hearing your stories. Really enjoy these conversations. Thanks again for everything. Go Bears, and thank you for your service.

[00:36:50] Cory Boatwright: Yeah. I’m happy to be here. Thank you so much. Appreciate you.

[00:36:57] Sean Li: Thanks again for tuning in to this episode of the OneHaas Podcast. If you enjoyed our show today, please hit that subscribe or follow button on your favorite podcast player. We’d also really appreciate you giving us a five-star rating review. If you’re looking for more content, please check out our website at haas.fm. That’s spelled H-A-A-S.fm. And there you can subscribe to our monthly newsletter and check out some of our other Berkeley Haas podcasts.

The OneHaas Podcast is a production of the Haas School of Business and produced by University FM. Until next time, go Bears.

This episode of OneHaas is brought to you by the Haas Fund, fueling opportunities for our students, faculty, and strengthening our Haas community. Join us in making an impact today at haas.berkeley.edu/give.