Lee Kirby, Salute Co-Founder and retired Army Colonel, interviewed Andrew Mahon, a Military Veteran and current Business Development Lead, Mission Critical Division, Chemtec Energy Services and Volunteer Texas Chair, iMasons Armed Forces.
Before we dig in, our readers would love to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood "backstory"?
Both of my parents served, my mom in the Navy and my dad in the Marine Corps, but I did not grow up in a military household. My parents separated when I was young and my dad moved away, so it was my mom raising us and working administrative jobs most of her life. I grew up in Alvin, Texas and moved to Friendswood in junior high.
I would love to tell you I was the kid in the garage taking radios apart. I was not. I was into my friends, and that is about the whole list. The one thing that carried forward is that I have been social my entire life, which is probably why I ended up in a career that is mostly about people.
There was no dramatic moment where I decided on the Marine Corps either. I was seventeen, finishing my senior year through an at home program after some trouble at school, working at a body shop my cousin owned, with no plan for college and no real idea what I wanted. A friend of mine wanted to go talk to a recruiter, so I went with him. I ended up signing too. It was not a calling. It was the first thing anyone ever held me to a real standard on, and it changed the direction of my life.
And what are you doing today?
I lead the Mission Critical division at Chemtec Energy Services, a Texas company that has spent decades building measurement systems, custody transfer skids, and process piping for oil and gas. My job is to point that fabrication capability at data center construction, which turns out to be a shorter walk than most people expect. High spec pipe spools, manifolds, switchgear racks, and cable tray are the same discipline whether the end user is a midstream operator or a hyperscale campus. The tolerances are tight, the schedule is unforgiving, and the client cares about one thing above all else, which is whether it works when they energize it.
Outside of Chemtec, I serve as the volunteer Texas Chair for iMasons Armed Forces, where we connect veterans and transitioning service members with careers in digital infrastructure. We are building chapter activity across Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin, and this October we are hosting the inaugural Texas Data Center Summit at the National Medal of Honor Museum in Arlington. I also co-host a video podcast called The Digital Frontline, where we talk about the industry with the people actually building it.
Can you tell us a bit about your military background?
I served five years in the Marine Corps as an 0621, field radio operator, and separated in 2012. In Afghanistan I was attached to a personal security detachment, so most of our time was spent supporting infantry units, running security on convoys and sitting overwatch. After that deployment I moved over to FAST Company, stationed at Camp Allen in Norfolk, and deployed twice to Rota, Spain with Alpha Company. FAST is the element that reinforces embassy security when it is called for.
An 0621 is the person who makes sure the commander can talk to everyone he needs to talk to, under conditions that are actively working against that happening. You build the plan, you build the backup to the plan, you build the backup to the backup, and then you carry all of it on your back. When comms go down, nobody asks whose fault it is. They ask how long until it is up. You learn very quickly that your job is not to have an excuse ready, it is to have the answer ready.
There is a straight line from that to what I do now, even though it took me years to see it. I spent five years obsessing over uptime and redundancy for a network measured in a few hundred people. Now I work in an industry that does the same thing for a few billion.
Can you share the most interesting story that you experienced during your military career? What "takeaway" did you learn from that story?
I will give you two, because the lesson turned out to be the same one.
The first was a convoy in Afghanistan that got hit by an IED. My job in that moment was the radio, which meant getting the report back to base and getting an evacuation staged. The second was an overwatch on a local village where individuals were stopped and questioned, and I was managing the communications that the decision making ran through.
Neither one gave me time to think. There was no moment to step back, weigh the options, and build a plan. What I did instead was exactly what I had already been trained to do, hundreds of times over, in conditions where none of it mattered. Reports I had rehearsed until they were boring. Frequencies I could set without looking. Procedures I had complained about at the time.
The takeaways:
- Preparation is not something you do when the situation gets hard. It is something you do so that you are already ready when it does.
- The boring training is the training that saves you. Nobody performs above the level they prepared at.
That has held up in a job that has nothing to do with high stress environments. When I am sitting across from a client with a hard problem, my ability to solve it in the room comes almost entirely from how well I understood my own company’s capabilities, and my partners’ capabilities, before I ever walked in. Same principle. Different room.
Do you think your experience in the military helped prepare you for business or leadership? Can you explain?
Yes, though not in the ways I would have guessed at 23.
The most useful thing the Marine Corps gave me is the PACE plan. Primary, alternate, contingency, emergency. As a radio operator you never field one path for anything. You field four, you brief them, and you rehearse the handoff so that when the primary drops, the change is boring. That is the entire premise of a mission critical facility. N+1, 2N, concurrent maintainability, all of it is PACE with a different vocabulary. I did not learn redundancy in this industry. I learned it in a comm shop and then found out the industry had built a business around it.
A few others that have held up:
- Commander’s intent. The military tells you the objective and the constraints and then expects you to solve it without calling home. In business development that is the whole job. Nobody hands you the route.
- Debriefs without ego. After action reviews are normal in the military and strangely rare in business. When something goes sideways, the fastest thing you can do is name what happened out loud and fix the process.
- Comfort being the junior person in the room who has to speak up. An 0621 is often the youngest person present and the only one who knows why the link is down. You learn to give bad news to people who outrank you, clearly and without hedging. That skill is worth a lot in a sales role.
The honest counterweight is that the military gives you enormous structure and the civilian world often gives you none. Early on I wanted the order to come down before I moved. It does not come down. Learning to move on incomplete information, and to be accountable for that, was the harder half of the transition.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
Ricky Ford. He was my best friend’s step-dad when I was growing up, and he has had more influence on the direction of my life than anyone.
He mattered before he ever did a thing for my career. He was an example of what a working adult looked like at a point when I did not have many of those in front of me. Later, when I was finding my way into oil and gas, he mentored me and made introductions to friends of his who owned businesses. One of those introductions turned into my first sales role, which is the foundation everything I do today sits on.
If you asked me for the one piece of advice he gave me, I could not give it to you. I do not really remember lines. What I remember is that he gave me chances, and that when I got something wrong he told me how to do it better instead of writing me off. That is a rarer thing than good advice, and it is worth more.
You are a part of the Salute Veterans Community that shares a common passion of helping veterans get into this industry. This community is "veterans helping veterans." Why is this important to you?
Because the gap is not talent. The gap is translation.
When I separated in 2012 my resume said 0621, field radio operator. There is no hiring manager in America who reads that and thinks critical facilities. What it actually meant was that I had spent five years on redundant systems, preventive maintenance, cable management, generator power, physical security, and doing all of it at two in the morning while tired and being graded on it. Every one of those maps to a job on a data center floor. Nobody told me that, and I did not know to say it.
That is why a lot of my volunteer time goes into translation work. With iMasons Armed Forces Texas we built a guide that maps military occupational specialties to real roles in this industry, and a recruiting sheet so hiring managers know what they are looking at when a veteran resume crosses their desk. It is unglamorous work. It also removes the single biggest point of friction in the whole pipeline.
The reason it has to be veterans doing it is that we are the only ones who can translate in both directions. I can tell a twenty four year old sergeant what this industry actually is, in language he trusts, and I can tell a hiring manager what that sergeant is actually capable of. Neither side gets there alone. That is the entire value of a community like this, and it is why Salute and iMasons have both been worth my time.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Hire for the standard, not the specialty.
Almost every hiring process in this country screens for the last thing a person did. That is a poor predictor and it is especially unfair to veterans, because the last thing we did usually has a name that means nothing outside the gate. What actually predicts performance is the standard someone was held to. Did they operate a system where failure had consequences? Were they trained, evaluated, and expected to be right? Did anyone depend on their work?
I have a personal stake in this one. I was a seventeen year old with no plan and a bad start, and the thing that changed my trajectory was not somebody spotting talent in me. It was an institution that held me to a standard and then expected me to meet it. People rise to what they are held to, and most hiring processes never find that out because they stop at the job title.
If hiring managers across this industry moved even ten percent of their screening weight from “have you done this exact job” to “have you been held to this standard,” you would open the door to hundreds of thousands of veterans, military spouses, and frankly a lot of non veterans too, who are being filtered out by a keyword. And the industry needs them. We are short people at every level and we are building faster every year.
So the movement is simple. Stop reading the job title and start reading the standard.
How can our readers follow you online?
Readers can find me on LinkedIn.
They can also follow Infrastructure Masons on LinkedIn to stay up to date on future events.
We’re also starting a podcast called The Digital Frontline, about the people building digital infrastructure.
Follow my LinkedIn to stay up to date on launch dates and future episodes. If you are a veteran or a transitioning service member in Texas and you want to understand what a career in this industry actually looks like, reach out. That is what I am here for.