When people find out I served as an officer in the Swiss Army, they always ask me two questions:
“Did they give you a Swiss Army Knife?” (Yes, although it’s not the same one you buy in shops.)
And, “Wait a minute, I thought Switzerland was neutral. Why do they even need an army?”
That requires a more complicated answer.
You see, neutrality does not mean defenselessness—at least not to the Swiss. Switzerland has long been considered the “crossroads of Europe.” Despite being known primarily for beautiful Alpine views, delicious chocolate, and luxury timepieces, its position in Europe is surprisingly strategic. Geographically, the country falls smack in the middle of the two primary axes running through the continent. If a belligerent force wants to go north-south or east-west, the fastest route is through Switzerland. For centuries, everyone has wanted to control those strategic crossroads, and for centuries we Swiss have focused on making that very difficult for them.
Long ago, Switzerland learned that being neutral on paper means nothing. Of the five countries that declared neutrality in World War II, for example, four were invaded. The only one that avoided this fate was the one that mobilized four hundred thousand soldiers along its border—the same country ready and able to blow up all its infrastructure should anyone think to cross into its territory.
Essentially, Switzerland is neutral in the same way a porcupine is harmless. It has no interest in attacking anyone, but just try and eat one.
Now, here’s the thing about a country maniacally focused on executing at an elite level for its very survival: there’s a lot you can learn from that approach. Whether it’s how you train people to perform, how you organize your operations so everyone knows what’s expected of them, or how you share the necessary intelligence in real time to enable decision making, the Swiss military has a lot to teach entrepreneurs and business leaders.
In fact, I’ve come to realize that most of the lessons I’ve learned in business I initially encountered during my time as a special forces officer in the Swiss Army. Those same lessons can allow you to execute in your own business: whatever your industry.
Swiss American
Perhaps I’ve been able to see these lessons so clearly because I’ve always been a bit of an outsider. I grew up in Switzerland. I served in the Swiss military. But I was born in Houston, Texas—to two parents from Texas. When I was a year old, my parents moved our family to Europe. Two years later, my father started his own company, and my parents decided to raise their family in Switzerland. We moved to a small farming village just outside of Fribourg with a population of six hundred. Needless to say, throughout my entire childhood, my sister, Melanie, and I were the only American kids in the area. I grew up speaking English at home and French at school.
After graduating from high school and after a year training to be a Mountain Grenadier—the elite Swiss Army special forces—I went back across the Atlantic for college. Since I was born in Texas, I applied to the three largest state universities and ended up at Texas A&M.
One of the great benefits of my time at A&M was the friendship I forged with David Jacobson. David and I enjoyed training for triathlons together and discussing our big plans to start a tech company someday. I didn’t jump into entrepreneurship right after college, though. Instead, I finished my military training in Switzerland and then flew back to America, where I landed my first job at Service Systems International (SSI), a small software company in Kansas City. Incredibly, the company hired me so they could send me across the Atlantic again, this time to London to help open their European sales and support office.
David, in the meantime, had started working as a programmer at Lockheed Martin in Austin. We met up a year later and decided if we were ever going to start that business we always talked about in college, we needed to live in the same place.
Austin just seemed the better fit for a new tech company, so off I moved again, with my two duffle bags carrying all of my worldly possessions. I initially found a job as a software developer with Dell Computer Corporation. Eighteen months later, we launched Catapult Systems, an IT services firm. The year was 1993, and we had $17,000 in the bank—the sum total of our collective savings.
Using many of the very lessons in this book, we bootstrapped Catapult and, over the next twenty years, turned it into the number one Microsoft systems integrator in the world. In 1996, with the addition of our third founding partner, Jim Martin, we branched into software product development, creating Inquisite, the leading online survey tool at that time.
Eventually, Inquisite grew large enough that we spun it off into its own company. After successfully selling Catapult to a public company in 2013, I retired for the first time and traveled around the world for a year with my family. When I returned home to Austin, I started looking for another company to scale. I evaluated over one hundred startups, and eventually, landed on FlashParking, a technology company in the parking industry. Over the next few years, we built the company up from twelve employees to an industry leader with over $100 million in revenue and a $1 billion valuation at our last round of funding.
Swiss Precision
Since then, I’ve stepped away again, enjoying my second temporary retirement. When I reflect back on my thirty-year career running three successful technology companies, I keep coming back to the same observation. Though I may not have realized it at the time, I first encountered almost every principle I used to run my businesses during my days in the Swiss military.
When it comes to executing a mission, the Swiss military understands all the principles to get it done. And it turns out, those are the same principles required to execute in a business.
Along the way, I’ve read hundreds of business books. I’ve read books on strategy, marketing, management, and sales. I’ve read inspirational and aspirational books that make you want to become a better leader. I’ve read books on innovation and customer experience, finance and corporate culture.
This book isn’t like any of those.
The truth is, when I pick up a business book of any kind, I always look for one idea—just one executable idea—that I can walk away with and implement in my own business. So I decided to put as many practical, executable ideas as I possibly could in one place.
That’s my natural wheelhouse anyway. Entrepreneurs and business leaders don’t call me in to refine their strategy. They call me in to help them execute. I’m very Swiss in that way. Growing up in the land of great timepieces and extreme punctuality, I’m naturally good at building companies and machines that run efficiently without me at the helm every day.
My goal in this book is to share with you the principles I’ve learned across my two careers: as a Swiss Army officer and tech entrepreneur. In each chapter, I’ll tell you a story from my time in the Swiss Army with one principle at its heart. I’ll then show you how each concept can be implemented in your business. Each chapter also contains a case study from another entrepreneur or CEO, showing how they implemented that same concept in their company.
While some of these principles may initially feel modest in scope, they build on one another, and their value compounds over time. Any one of these ideas may not radically transform your business overnight, but the more you implement and sustain them, the more profound the impact.
There’s no need to read this book in order. While there’s a loose organization to these chapters, the book is designed to allow you to jump in wherever and grab the lessons most relevant to you right now. To make it easier to dive in based on your current needs, I’ve included a reading guide in Appendix 4 outlining which chapters are most relevant for certain common business challenges.
Whether you read cover to cover or jump in as needed, you will gain the most from this book if your business is in the right place. This is a book for entrepreneurs who have done more than dream about running a company—they’re doing it. They have a product or service, they have a team, and they have established there’s value in their ideas. It’s also for leaders who run a business unit—those who have the authority, courage, and motivation to take big swings and try new ideas.