Lessons - A Former CIA Agent's Insights on Business, Branding, and Decision | Mike Baker, Ex-CIA Agent

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upscale your personal and professional life. What do you think differentiated you when it came to building the business, building a personal brand, marketing yourself, because all this, and then I mean, you're on TV too. You've done some very strategic things that anybody else coming out of the agency, anybody else coming out of a military, FBI, even police force, they have a story to tell. Yeah, you know, it's a little bit sexy, but I mean FBI is sexy. You're up high enough in the military, you do some cool shit, that's sexy too. You can build a brand around that. What made you different? Yeah, I mean, I think, and some people have, and they've done it very well. Yeah. You know what? I kind of blundered into, if we just took it, the media appearances, if we just talk about doing talking head appearances for the news on national security issues or counterterrorism or whatever the topic may be. I kind of blundered into it. It was, I had moved from London to the East Coast to set up an office. We had just taken our first investors, and they, BGR, which is a fantastic lobbying firm in Washington, DC, and so part of the agreement for the investment was open in office there with them, co-locate. And at the time, we were starting to build up a presence in Iraq, and this was early, early 2003, so very beginning of our first incursion there. But we had been dealing with some of the infrastructure companies. And so the point of this story is, one day, Ed Rogers, great guy, terrific individual, part of BGR and the original founding partners, he came walking to my office, knocked on the door and said, hey, Fox News needs somebody to talk about Iraq, you know, head over there. It'll be fun. You got to be, so I made it on the walls, it's been short, you know, don't talk about anything stupid, but you can do it. And the agency's always been good with me that way. So I went over, did the appearance, and found out after the first couple that, you know, honestly, as long as you don't say anything stupid, you don't fall off your chair, right? You know, the news networks need to fill up a lot of time, and I just happened to have a lot of, you know, experience and background in certain areas and was willing to go on and talk about that. And so some of the outlets, including Fox, they were very good. They were very good to me and they were, and then I discovered that I wasn't getting paid for any of it, but what they would do is they would put the company name on the bottom, like, you know, with, with the company. And once I realized that, then we were off to the races, because like I said earlier, there was no way we could have, as a startup afforded that sort of marketing, it just wasn't going to happen. And so, you know, I, I was, I realized that, you know, that was an edge, right? We had an opportunity there. And then everything else just sort of kind of fell into place, I suppose. Yeah, I was going to say it's amazing how, you know, to, to have a good story, you just have to have a cool career, do something incredible, and then speak about it. But you'd be surprised at how many people just don't feel comfortable leading into that. And then you did, you know, I mean, I think games, again, because of what I was doing in operations, and, and, you know, you do have a, sometimes an overblown sense of, of confidence. And, you know, so I think that that part of it never, and I genuinely like talking about issues of the day, I, I spent a great deal of time focused on that. I have a lot of friends in a lot of different places, and we, we, we end up, you know, banging on about, you know, the current crises. There's never, there's never a shortage of them. There's never a shortage. And so it helps if you find it all interesting, right? You can't, you can't think that part of it. It's like, but I, you know, again, I think, you know, luck kind of fell into it again. And then, you know, once I realized that it was certainly beneficial, you know, it wasn't like I was going to turn down opportunities. Yeah, no, no, obviously, um, another one of the rules that you mentioned, which I thought was interesting, it just in terms of velocity and getting shit done. It's, it's number four, it's to get off the X. Yeah, what does that, what does that mean exactly? Where does that come from in an agency context, and then how does that translate into business start up entrepreneurship? Well, in an operational sense, you know, not just the agency with military and other organizations, the, the X means it is essentially an ambush site. So, I mean, hey, you don't want to be on the ambush site to begin. Yeah, fair enough. The idea is you spend a lot of time training to recognize indicators of a potential ambush. And, you know, but if you do get on the X, if you're unfortunate and for whatever reason, you land on that spot, then you have to be able to get off the X. You have to get out of there, right? And, and in operational terms, that's a tough thing because everything starts locking up, right? And you're, you know, you start getting blinders and, you know, you're hearing goes and, you know, in any, any difficult situation, right? You have to start relying on big muscle memory. And so that's again, why training is so important. Why, you know, it's not enough just to do, you know, some training. You have to constantly review it. But anyway, the point is in business, what it means is, I think anyway, in my opinion, this is what, again, you know, there's no hard and fast, I suppose to any of this. But, from my perspective, it simply means knowing how to make decisions quickly within perfect information, right? Because once you land in the, in the shed from an operational perspective, right? You just got to, you got to take action, right? You don't have time to sit around and hope that you get all the data, you know, where, you know, where are all the hostile elements? What the hell is happening? You, you have to start making decisions, right? And it's the same in business, right? If you wait for all the data sets to come in, if you wait for all the analysis to be done on whatever it may be, something bad's going to happen, right? Or the competition's going to have you lunch, or you're going to lose the opportunity, or your reputation's going to be damaged, whatever it might be. So it really comes down to how do you, you know, learn to, and also a lot of this is about how do you impart that ability to your, your, your personnel to all the folks that are working with you to make these decisions, again, within perfect information. And so when you're making these decisions within perfect information, as, as a CEO, is that just, is that just being a leader for a period of time, or is there, is there actual practice that you can do to make sure that when shit hits a fan, you don't screw it up? Yeah, there's, I mean, there's, there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot to this. It's a fairly, I mean, part of it is not that complicated part of it is, you know, knowing your risk appetite, which is another, you know, element, I was actually curious about that one too, only because I thought that business inherently comes with risk. So how do you not have a risk appetite if you're building something? Well, you'd be surprised. And even, I mean, it going back to, you know, the Intel community, Intel organizations, which, you know, by definition are risk-taking operations. They go through periods of time where they become risk averse, right? It's because, you know, they had blowback from, you know, some operation, or they've gotten their ass kicked up on Capitol Hill too many times. And so, you know, suddenly you've got a cycle where, you know, management is avoiding risks. And I've seen a couple of those cycles sweep through the A to Z over the years. And that's a, it's a bad thing. But, and so, and you have to understand what, and when you're understanding what your risk appetite is, it also means you have to understand what your shareholders or your investors or your board of advisors risk appetite is. You have to understand what the client's risk appetite is for sure when you're talking about, you know, working for them and providing, you know, strategic intelligence or guidance or due diligence or whatever it may be. And, you know, that's a, that's a key part of it. And that informs a lot of other decisions that you make, including how do you, you know, again, make decisions within perfect information.