Summary
Walter Spinrad did not plan to join the Army. He planned to study computer science. His father, a World War II veteran and physician, had other ideas. What started as an act of rebellion became eight years of service that shaped everything after it. Today Spinrad is a Managing Director and Salesforce Certified Technical Architect at Crowe LLP, one of fewer than 500 people in the world to hold that credential. He is the executive champion of Crowe’s Military, Veterans and Families Business Resource Group and a Salesforce Architect Community Group lead for Salesforce in Tampa. He talks about governance the way a platoon leader talks about a mission: have a plan, work the plan, and do not let anyone talk you out of both.
Fine. I’ll Join the Army.
Walter Spinrad grew up the youngest of nine children in a blended family. His mother had five children. His father had two. They had two together, making Spinrad the youngest in a household that ran on his father’s rules and expectations. His father was born in 1917, a World War II veteran and physician who had high expectations.
Spinrad had been pre-med in college. He came home one day and announced he was switching his major to computer science. His father’s response was immediate: “Computers, that’s just a fad. I’m not paying for your college unless you’re going to be a doctor.” Spinrad was his father’s last chance at a physician in the family. Nobody else in the sibling group had gone into medicine. His father was trying to strong-arm him, trying to close the only door left open. Spinrad walked through a different one.
“I said, well, fine. I’ll join the Army. They’ll pay for my college.” He laughs, telling it. He calls himself an absolute rebel, a man who grew up choosing to live life on his own terms. He scored high on the entrance exam. The recruiter told him he could have almost any MOS he wanted. Spinrad asked for combat arms and airborne. The Army gave him communications and jump school. He took it.
He had been a competitive downhill ski racer and a football player. Basic training in the mid-1980s did not trouble him physically. The part where drill sergeants attempt to break soldiers down before rebuilding them did not break him either. “I would laugh at them,” he says. “I could just see through it. The way my mind works, I just could see through it.”
“There is a brotherhood, a camaraderie. Finding that elsewhere is almost impossible.”
What stayed with him was not basic. It was what came after. His duty station was Ft Richardson, Alaska. He was there for three years. He taught his unit to ski, eventually earning a temporary duty assignment at the post ski area, Arctic Valley, where he ran the ski school and ski patrol. Senior NCOs who were married held weekend barbecues and pulled the young single soldiers in like extended family. He went through airborne school, pre-ranger coursework, and land navigation, all of it with the same people he was building a life alongside, and that continuity is what deepens the bond in ways that basic and AIT cannot replicate.
Patriotism came later than people might expect. It did not drive him through the door. It arrived when he was standing in the MEPS station with his right hand raised, listening to what he was actually swearing to. “I’m defending the Constitution against enemies, both foreign and domestic. I’m willing to give my life for these ideals. Absolutely. And I still, to this day, feel that way.” His Army decals are on his truck. His Army logo is on his laptop bag. He wears his veteran’s hat and flies his flag in front of his house every day. “I was always kind of driven to that because I listened to my dad,” he says. “He didn’t tell a lot of stories, but he talked about that. Looking at the greatest generation. Looking at him. Looking at my uncle who served.” His father taught him that their job was to take care of people who were less fortunate, to defend those who could not defend themselves. That lesson, Spinrad says, bled into his military career and bleeds into what he does now.
The Decision He Still Questions
At the end of his first enlistment, Spinrad asked for a consecutive overseas tour. Alaska counted as overseas even though it is part of the country. The Army’s answer was Korea, a hardship tour, one year, no family allowed. His wife was pregnant with their first child. “I’m going from one overseas to a hardship tour where I can’t bring my family, and I’m going to miss my son’s first year,” he says. “I said, I don’t think I want to do that.” He got out. His son is now a surgeon. The physician finally made it into the next generation.
He still had an enlistment obligation when he left active duty, so he joined the Army Reserve unit in Alaska. He says he questions every day whether leaving active service was the right call. He misses the retirement benefits. He misses the experience of more duty stations. The mistake he wishes he could take back is not rejoining a reserve unit when he later moved. He relocated from Alaska to Arizona, then to New York, then back to Arizona, then to Vermont, and never reestablished the connection. “I should have stayed affiliated with the reserves,” he says. “But when I moved from Alaska, I didn’t re-engage with the reserve unit at my next location.” He calls himself a nomad. He says it would have fit military life perfectly.
Fourteen Stores Before Thirty
The transition was not smooth, and it was not fast. He sold cars for a while. He sold life insurance. He was good at both because, he says, he likes to talk and selling came naturally. But it was not fulfilling, so he applied for a store manager position at a convenience store chain called MACO Express, a subsidiary of MidAmerica Pipeline, which ran an oil refinery in Alaska. He was 24 or 25. He opened two stores, modernized their employee training process, and before he was 30, he was an area manager overseeing 14 stores across Alaska. In the Army he had made soldier of the month and boarded well. At MACO it was manager of the quarter and manager of the year.
“The only reason I was able to get those accolades,” he says, “was because of the work ethic and the discipline I learned in the military.” What he carried out of uniform went beyond discipline. It was also the understanding that no one succeeds alone. “A person is only as strong as the people they surround themselves with,” he says. That belief shaped how he built every team that came after the Army, and it is the same reason he stepped back and let more junior colleagues lead the BRG instead of taking the role himself. The discipline he describes is not the kind people associate with obedience. It is the kind that shows up in follow-through, in ethics, in leadership, and in knowing the difference between a lawful order and one that is not. “A job worth doing, no matter what it was, if you’re going to do it, do it right. To perfection. You can’t be perfect, but you can be perfect in your attempt.”
He applied the same standard to his children. His son would come home with an A minus, and Spinrad would not push him to do better. He would ask one question: did you give it your full effort? “You can tell when somebody’s phoned it in,” he says. “And then you have the conversation on how doing better benefits all of us. That’s coaching.” He eventually moved into technology leadership, holding CIO-level and global CRM manager roles before joining Salesforce working his way to Senior Director. He finished his computer science degree on the GI Bill and completed his MBA at Norwich University, one of the oldest private ROTC schools in the country. He notes, with a smile, that Norwich and The Citadel are in strong competition for that distinction.
“You can’t be perfect, but you can be perfect in your attempt.”
One of Fewer Than 500
Spinrad spent seven years at Salesforce, rising to senior director. He helped build an internal training program to help people move toward the Certified Technical Architect credential, the highest certification in the Salesforce ecosystem. The program served people who wanted to pursue the full CTA path and those who simply wanted to grow as architects without going all the way to that level.
There are fewer than 500 Salesforce Certified Technical Architects in the world. The number shifts but has never climbed far beyond that. The certification is the highest the Salesforce ecosystem offers, and the path to it is long, difficult, and not guaranteed. Spinrad is one of them. When Crowe brought him in about four years ago, the firm had recently expanded its Salesforce services by welcoming personnel from a boutique delivery company called Spark Orange. Spark Orange had built a strong midmarket delivery. What Spinrad brought was enterprise-level architecture, the ability to connect Salesforce implementation to full business systems and tie that into genuine organizational transformation.
He was hired as managing director and walked into a team of junior resources who welcomed mentoring. He says he was in his element immediately. His certification matters to Crowe because it signals to clients that the person across the table has done the work, not just sold the product. He holds regular one-on-ones with his team, and about half of each conversation is about where they want to go, not just what they are doing right now. “Just because they’re doing a job for us doesn’t mean that’s where they really want their career to go,” he says. “I wouldn’t be here without the people below me on the org chart. I owe them the free access to experience and knowledge that I have. The mentoring, the nurturing, the helping them grow.”
Have a Plan. Work the Plan.
Spinrad sets expectations with clients before the engagement truly begins. He tells them plainly what they are getting. “If they want a yes person, they don’t want me on the project. I’m here to guide them if they’re going wrong and guide them when they’re going right.” His consulting philosophy is grounded in what he calls the customer’s intent, not the feature they want, not the tool they think they need, but the actual business outcome they are trying to reach and the honest path to getting there. “I have a philosophy that I don’t have to be right. But together, we have to get it right.”
Failed implementations, he says, almost always trace back to two things: no strategic plan or North Star vision, and bad data. The third critical element is a dedicated executive sponsor who is genuinely driving the change, not just lending their name to it. “We are not here to just implement the system. We are here trying to help them transform the way they do business. And that has to align to what we’re doing. If it doesn’t, then it’s going to fail.” He has a name for the most common failure pattern: the lift and shift. A client wants a new tool to do exactly what their old system did. Nothing actually changes. The money gets spent. The transformation does not happen.
“People don’t like to be told. But they certainly like to come to the decision themselves.”
One Crowe
Crowe operates across audit, tax, advisory, consulting, and technology. Spinrad landed in consulting for a reason that goes back further than Crowe. When he was holding CIO-level roles at a single company, he felt a pull toward something broader. “I was giving my knowledge, my experience, my best to one company. And I always said, I have so much more to offer, and I can help more than just one company.” Consulting was the answer, and being a consultant, he says, is fundamentally the same as being a mentor. He is not selling a product. He is helping someone grow.
Crowe’s internal culture reinforced that instinct. The firm has a philosophy it calls One Crowe: any employee in any practice can reach across practice lines for expertise. A Salesforce architect can call a tax partner or a data team or a risk group and find someone willing to collaborate. “Salesforce had the concept of Ohana,” he says. “Crowe doesn’t call it that, but it is a Crowe family.” He has been through personal losses in the four years he has been there, and team members have faced their own. The firm’s response in both cases told him more about its culture than any internal program could. “Work isn’t the destination,” he says. “It’s a means to the end. But family and personal time are just as important. Crowe gets that.”
The firm’s BRG structure reflects the same philosophy. In addition to the military, veterans and families group, Crowe has employee resource communities for LGBTQ+ employees, Latino professionals, Black professionals, and pan-Asian employees, among others. Spinrad says he is an ally to all of them and that their existence matters not just to the people inside them but to the culture of the whole firm. “These communities are a safe place for people to connect with people of like-minds and like-cultures. And it helps them feel like part of something within the whole.”
The Group That Did Not Exist Yet
When Spinrad arrived at Crowe four years ago, there was no Military, Veterans and Families Business Resource Group. There were veterans scattered through the firm. Within his own group there was a manager who served in Iraq and was, by Spinrad’s description, absolutely amazing. There was another colleague actively serving in the reserves, an officer who deployed to Africa for a full year while remaining at Crowe. They started finding each other, started counting, and realized there were more veterans than anyone had organized around. “We went to the BRG leadership team and said, look, we’d like to start this group.”
He did not want to lead it himself. His instinct was the same one he carries everywhere: step back, let the people closest to the work do the work, and be the most useful person in the room by clearing what is in their way. Over time the original leaders cycled through. One aged out. One left the company. A reorganization costs them others. The current leader stepped in and Spinrad worked to bring in a co-champion at the partner level, someone with more internal reach than a managing director can access. The group is currently looking for another co-leader. The work is not finished.
“The ones that are not telling the stories are the ones that actually have the stories.”
Spinrad is direct about why spaces like the BRG matter. While many veterans find connection through national organizations, he believes there’s unique value in building a workplace-based community – an environment inside a professional setting where veterans can find each other, be honest with each other, and not have to explain themselves.
What He Is Watching Right Now
The conversation turns, at one point, away from Crowe and career and toward the present moment. The world is not quiet. There are American troops deployed in harm’s way, and Spinrad does not need to be prompted to say where his mind goes when that is true. “If we could send care packages to our troops,” he says, “that would make a world of difference.” It is not a policy position. It is not a talking point. It is the voice of someone who remembers what it felt like to be far from home and to know, or not know, whether the people back there were thinking about you. Small things carry more weight than civilians tend to understand. A package. A letter. Proof that someone remembered you were out there.
The Bronze Star at Jump School
When Spinrad graduated from airborne school, his father was there. Someone discovered that the old man had earned a Bronze Star at Anzio Beach during World War II. They let him step forward and pin his son’s jump wings on himself. The rebel who had joined the Army to escape his father’s plans stood at attention while the man who had taught him that their job was to take care of people less fortunate pinned the wings on his chest. “That was actually pretty cool,” Spinrad says. He says it simply. There is no performance in it.
He is one of fewer than 500 people in the world with his certification. He is building something inside a major firm that did not exist before he arrived. He has mentored soldiers, store managers, Salesforce architects, and transitioning veterans who did not know what came next. And on the day that mattered, his father was there. Same nose. Same eyes. The small man in stature who turned out to be the biggest thing in the room.
Resources
Crowe LLP | www.crowe.com
Professional services firm where Spinrad serves as Managing Director and Salesforce Systems Architect.
Crowe’s Military, Veterans and Families BRG | crowe.com/about/diversity-equity-inclusion
Employee resource group for veterans, active service members, and military families at Crowe.
Salesforce Military | www.salesforce.com/company/military
Salesforce program supporting veterans transitioning into technology careers.
Operation Gratitude | www.operationgratitude.com
Sends care packages to deployed troops, veterans, and military families across the country.
American Corporate Partners | www.acp-usa.org
Mentoring network connecting veterans with business professionals during career transition.
Institute for Veterans and Military Families | ivmf.syracuse.edu
Research and program center at Syracuse University focused on veteran employment and entrepreneurship.
About Walter Spinrad
Walter Spinrad is a Managing Director and Salesforce Systems Architect at Crowe LLP and one of fewer than 500 Salesforce Certified Technical Architects in the world. He served eight years in the U.S. Army and Army Reserve, holds a degree in computer science, and completed his MBA at Norwich University. He is the executive champion of Crowe’s Military, Veterans and Families Business Resource Group and a Salesforce architect community lead in Tampa. He lives in Florida.
Learn More | veteranexcellence.org
Veterans Excellence Magazine profiles veterans in post-service leadership across industries.