Veterans Day 2022: Making the move from military service to financial services

McKenna found the Army as a young man who was ready to take his next big step. Born and raised in Placerville, California, a small town in the foothills with a current population of around 10,000 people, he was readying himself to be the first person in his family to attend college when he enlisted.

McKenna said he always had a strong sense of service, even when he was in grade school. 

“Instead of wanting to be student body president, I was Key Club president,” he said. “And I loved a lot of things about the military, but I really was interested in the service side of it.” 

The son of a mother who worked as a mail carrier for more than 30 years, McKenna said he grew up having a very middle class experience — one supported by the hard work of his mom.

He wanted to make her, and everyone else who supported him, proud. So he dedicated himself to becoming the first one in his family to pursue higher education after graduating high school. 

“I was looking at different ways to get there, and the service academy really felt like a good fit for me. But I’m an only child, and my mom said to me, ‘you know. It’d be great if you can stay in California and stay closer to home,'” he said. “She and I started talking about (Army) ROTC, and when I looked into it, it actually seemed like such a great fit because I can fulfill that interest in military service and get a scholarship and go to college in California.”

That decision led to a full ride ROTC scholarship that landed him at the University of Southern California, close enough for his mom to drop in but far enough to establish his own independence. 

As an undergraduate, McKenna majored in accounting. He knew he wanted a skill that would allow him to always put food on the table, but also allow him to learn the language of business. 

His time at USC ended with him as a distinguished military graduate, a designation bestowed upon the top-ranking ROTC students. McKenna met that honor with great excitement because it meant he was more likely to be selected for active duty. 

With an interest in technology, he kept an extremely busy schedule over the next four years. He was a signal corps officer specializing in cyber command at Fort Gordon in Georgia. Then he went to airborne school to learn how to jump out of planes. Then he went to Alaska for warfare and survival training. Then he went to Korea to work in military intelligence as a signal corps officer handling technology operations for his intel group.

“From there, I went down to Panama. I went to language school to learn Spanish and eventually I ended up working for Gen. Barry McCaffrey who was the commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in South America. So I spent about a year and a half working on a four-star general staff as a very junior officer … an incredible experience,” McKenna said. That experience would grow into him working at a Cuban refugee camp in the early ’90s, helping Cubans trying to get to the United States.

“I ran this thing called the Family Support Center, which was one of the most heartfelt things I did in the military. It was reconnecting Cuban families from around the world with the Cubans who were escaping the tyranny of Castro’s Cuba,” he said.”It was this wonderful connection of service and humanity and people trying to do the best with their lives. So my four years in the military were just amazing.”

With so much pivoting and shifting responsibilities in just four years, McKenna relied on his military training to remain disciplined. He was handed responsibility beyond that of the average 20-something college graduate.

Now an Army lieutenant, McKenna followed his time in the service with graduate school at Georgetown University when he developed a strong interest in investment banking, and earned a formal entry to Wall Street by way of J.P Morgan. 

The years that came after were just as action-packed as his four years in the Army, and included co-founding four businesses, two investment funds and one nonprofit.

“There were definitely a lot of things that I was probably inexperienced in. But that’s another thing about military service. You’re adaptive and you have a natural entrepreneurial orientation. And you’ll just put the hours in to figure out how to achieve the goal,” McKenna said. “And then another cool thing was there were other veterans in my class and a few others around the bank, and we had a way of just finding each other. The military network is really strong, and people are willing to help each other. So I was able to jump into a very high level Wall Street job with my military experience and a couple years of graduate school.”

Today, as one of Facet’s leaders, McKenna maintains his military values and is quick to put others first. He said he hinks back to making his mother proud and wanting to provide opportunities to other small town kids who want to make an impact.

Sowhen he thinks of the term “financial services,” he focuses on the second word more than the first.

“My mom worked hard. It was a very good upbringing. But we certainly didn’t have somebody who was on our side when we were thinking about financial decisions,” McKenna said. “Everybody was a transaction. A mortgage. Or credit card. Or a bank loan. Everything’s a transaction, not a relationship. And as I learned more I said, ‘what would it take to get what I’m getting as a high net worth person and offer that in the same manner, but at the right cost, to a bigger market?’ And honestly, that is the foundation of Facet.”