From war fighter to Wall Street p1 - Military Transition - Success Stories - Military Career - Civilian Job - Military Times Edge

The road to success, someone once quipped, is always under construction. Jason Leisey knows that better than most.

Just a few years ago he was an infantryman clinging to life after his world exploded in a roadside bomb blast. These days, Leisey is a corporate financial adviser with the investment firm Drexel Hamilton, the same outfit where former Joint Chiefs chairman Marine Gen. Peter Pace is now a partner.

Leisey’s journey from National Guard grunt to Wall Street guru has been no effortless cruise down Easy Street. Along the way, however, he’s learned how to leverage road blocks, build interest off the beaten path and tap into the hard-won street cred he’s earned among fellow ground pounders. Indeed, his story is proof that real networking is not searching for career shortcuts at drive-through meet-n-greets: It’s more about building relationships while working hard than working hard to meet people.

Here’s how Liesey has made it through the construction zone so far:

Painful detour

When Leisey woke from a coma at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas, the young staff sergeant knew there would be work ahead. The suicide bomber’s blast had charred his body and melted off most his left ear. All the fingers on his left hand had to be amputated.

“That was probably the longest year of my life,” he says, recalling the months of painful skin grafts, surgeries and rehabilitation. It was a terrible detour, for sure, but not a dead end. “I saw a lot of guys just let go, they didn’t care about anything anymore. I didn’t want to be that. I wanted to lead a productive life,” he said. “I realized I needed to focus and figure out what I was going to do. It was time to grow up and move on. All I knew is that I didn’t want to be known just as a disabled veteran for the rest of my life.”

He didn’t waste any time. Before Leisey volunteered for duty in Iraq with his Pennsylvania National Guard unit, he was six credit hours short of his associate’s degree at the community college in his hometown of Lancaster, Pa., about an hour outside of Philadelphia. He finished that up while he was in the hospital and started plotting his course. And like any good infantryman, he knew that to figure out the route ahead, sometimes the best thing you can do is look back from where you’ve come.

Taking stock

Leisey was in high school when his dad decided he wanted to invest in the stock market. Hoping it might provide some practical lessons in money management, he brought his son along to help with research.

“We would go over the financial data, look at income statements, balance sheets and financial ratios and try to determine if they were a worthy investment,” he says. “I hated it. At that age, the last thing you want to do is spend your weekends sitting in the library.”

But the work paid off. Eventually.

The first stock they targeted for purchase tanked. “My dad bought it at $60 [a share] and it went to $48.” But it was a valuable lesson in disciplined investing. He took the hit and sold the shares. When their pick started to turn around and show the financial health they were expecting, his dad bought back in, eventually doubling their investment. That kind of success got Leisey’s attention, but he was surprised to realize he enjoyed the number-crunching grunt work, as well.“It just kind of stuck with me, and I developed my own interest and started doing it on my own,” he says. That continued while he was in the Army, and by the time he was discharged from the hospital and medically retired in May 2006, the path ahead was clear.

Return on investment

Leisey decided to return to school and get a four-year degree in finance. He was accepted at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, threw himself into his studies, and stayed on the dean’s list and graduated with honors, garnering the school’s Outstanding Financial Student of the Year award for Millersville from a national industry group of top executives.

His performance also earned him an internship with a respected investment firm that gave him hands-on work to do.

“That was critical. I wasn’t running around getting coffee and making copies, but was actually putting together financial models,” he says.About the time he graduated last spring, an advocate from the Army’s Wounded Warrior Program who remembered Leisey’s focus called with a hot tip: A new foundation was rolling out a program for injured veterans interested in finance. He should check it out.

The Wall Street Warfighters Foundation sounded too good to be true. An offshoot of Drexel Hamilton, a service-disabled veteran-owned and -operated investment firm, the foundation offered a six-month full-ride education and mentorship program for wounded troops. Leisey was reluctant to attend the presentation, though. He wasn’t big on glad-handing.

“I was never the kind of person who went to big events just to get my name out there and pass out business cards to strangers,” he says. But he decided to go anyway.

Networking

At the presentation, he ran into Nick Miccarelli, an old buddy from his tour in Kosovo. Now a state legislator with connections, Miccarelli encouraged him to apply. Meanwhile, another twist of fate was about to reveal itself. He and his wife had met Maj. Gen. Jessica Wright, the chief of the Pennsylvania National Guard, while Leisey was recovering in Texas. In the years since, they had kept in touch.

So he asked Wright to write him a letter of recommendation for his application; she agreed. Little did he know that the Drexel Hamilton executive spearheading the foundation served on her personal staff in the Guard. He was accepted.

“My advice is, don’t be afraid to leverage the relationships you’ve built in the service,” Leisey says. “To me, good networking is being able to rely on people you know.”

But just being a veteran can provide instant common ground, too.

“The beautiful thing is that the military really is the largest network in the world. With a little bit of digging, you can find veterans everywhere who really want to help. Initially, I was very hesitant to even ask, but it’s not a sympathy kind of thing,” he says. Veterans, he explains, want to help other veterans because they know, like no one else can, what military people bring to the table in terms of discipline, loyalty and work ethics.

Under construction

Leisey completed the foundation’s program in December. It culminated in the grueling Securities and Exchange Commission “Series 7” exam required to be licensed as a broker. A third of hopefuls typically fail. Eighty percent is considered an excellent score. Leisey got an 89 percent.

“It was probably one of the hardest tests I’ve ever taken,” he says of the six-hour mental marathon. If you make it through everything, the foundation guarantees a job with Drexel Hamilton or another financial firm.

Now Leisey is a product manager for a hedge fund working with corporate clients looking to invest millions. But even as he builds his portfolio, he’s keeping his road to success under construction — he just registered to start the Chartered Financial Analyst exam, which usually takes about two years to complete, and even then most people don’t pass. It’s like the Special Forces tab among money managers.

“I’m drawn to this work because of the challenge, so I want to keep challenging myself.”