On June 14, 2015, The Havok Journal ran an article under Michael Penney’s byline: “BAMCIS: A Patrol Leader’s Take On ‘Vetrepreneurship.'” He was writing as a former infantry Marine. His audience was other grunts coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan and thinking about starting something of their own.
What the article covered
Penney opened with the state of things in 2015: a growing number of veterans coming home to a strained economy, and many of them choosing to build businesses rather than look for jobs. His argument was simple. The planning a squad leader does before a patrol is the same planning a founder needs, with a little translation.
The processes used to plan and execute a combat mission carry over to the business side of the house.
Michael Penney, The Havok Journal, June 2015
He walked through the six BAMCIS troop-leading steps and gave each one a business meaning:
- Begin the plan. Find a mission worth doing, a need worth filling, and build a team around it.
- Arrange the reconnaissance. Do market research. He called it a “Feedback Patrol”: go meet the people you want to serve, ask questions, and listen before you sell.
- Make the reconnaissance. Get out of the building and talk to customers, with every team member acting as an observer.
- Complete the plan. Write the business plan, financials in an appendix, executive summary last. He pointed to the military Five Paragraph Order as a model for breaking it into clear pieces.
- Issue the order. Pitch like you brief an operations order: who you are, the mission, the vision, backed by financial statements and projections.
- Supervise. Small-unit leadership wins. Give people the tools, then let them perform under pressure.
His working example was BloodStripes.com, which he described as a free professional-development toolkit built by a few Marines. He used it to show how talking to real users changed the product. The team first assumed Marines would not go looking for help. Feedback pushed the site toward a usable toolkit, a kind of “Life Hack” for Marines, instead of passive guidance.
He also named the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities (EBV) as the top resource he knew of for veterans putting a plan together.
Why it mattered then
In 2015 most transition advice told veterans to translate their skills for a civilian résumé. This piece went the other way. It told veterans their planning habits were already a business tool, and it used language any infantryman would recognize. It closed with a line meant for the men he served with:
Get a plan, get with your brother and, commit to changing the world once more.
Michael Penney, The Havok Journal
Looking back
The nod to the Five Paragraph Order in this article came before the framework he later built. By February 2016, the SuccessVets podcast described him as developing “the 5 paragraph business,” based on the Marine O-SMEAC planning format. That work became the 5 Paragraph Business Plan.
This post is part of the From the Archive series, which collects Michael’s past media appearances in one place. See the full media archive.
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Marine veteran, TEDx speaker and author of the 5 Paragraph Business Plan. Bring him to your stage, wear the gear, or catch him live.