Shelly Rood spent 16 years in military intelligence leading analysts, then moved into television and founded Mission Ambition, a consulting firm that trains military and civilian personnel on protocol and respect. She also launched Missilia to empower women in male-dominated fields, grounded in a philosophy of putting others over self.
Chapters
My name is Shelly Rood. I grew up in Macomb, Michigan. I went to Western Michigan University and served as the captain of the rifle team. That was a lot of fun. Go Broncos! I joined the ROTC department and graduated a distinguished military graduate in 2005. That meant that I got to choose the branch of service that I wanted to join in the military, and the branch that I chose in the Army Reserves was military intelligence. I grew up having these feelings that I was gonna be an FBI agent or a spy. I grew up just really admiring the strong women that did the intelligence work, and my degree actually is in journalism. And so there's a secretive investigative side to me that I genuinely enjoy, and it's carried me forward and shown in a lot of my life's work. My military career spanned across 16 years with some active duty time in there. I served as a military intelligence officer, 35 Delta, which means that I did a lot of stuff that I can't tell most people, but it's all great things. And I worked basically as a supervisor with a team of analysts, and each of those analysts has a specialized job. They work either with what we call human-to-human intelligence, cyber intelligence, imagery analysts, and all of the data in the work that they do gets compiled into a source collection or a pool. And I would typically be the person I was the person who would look at all the data that's collected, and it was my job to look for the gaps. Typically, when you're trying to solve a problem, it's really easy to get caught up in what you can see, and when you dig through all of it and you look at what's missing, that's how you know where the problem actually lies. During my service time, I also served in the civilian world, and I held a career in broadcast television for about 7 years, working in marketing and production, everything from operating the camera to editing, eventually making my way into management for branding and for marketing. And that world really taught me a lot about how to help make things beautiful because people don't necessarily want to hear what they need to hear. So if you can close that gap and help deliver a story in a way that makes it appealing to them and really speak to them on their level, then eventually they will hear what they need to hear and you'll get that point across. Health and fitness has always been an important part of my life. From a very young age, I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, and I grew up alongside my father. I worked for a construction company called Gale Company Incorporated, and my grandfather and his brothers started that company years ago. So when I was growing up, most 14-year-old girls, I don't know what they're doing for their jobs— waitressing probably— but I was out on the 3-story houses of Detroit swinging a hammer, laying shingles, and ripping out drywall. And I learned a lot. I'm so thankful for the opportunity to understand what hard manual labor means to someone. And my dad always said that your job's not done until you put your blood in it, and then your job's done. He said that after he smashed his hand with a hammer, so. One of the key values that I took away from my time in the military was that of attention to detail. In the military intelligence world, if you make a mistake, if you say left instead of right, these are actual lives that could be at stake. So that value is carried over into the civilian world in a thousand different ways, good and bad. I'm extremely meticulous, even in the emails that I send, and being a journalism degree holder, that doesn't help either. I think it takes me entirely too long to get a product out, but you can always know that when a product comes out of me and what I represent, that it's always going to be top-notch. It's always going to be a professional, excellent product. I was discharged in 2018 trying to transfer from the intelligence world into actually becoming a chaplain. My heart is with the spirituality of those who serve. I've seen the inside, and I know that what the strong people of our country need is genuinely a good heart and they need someone behind them to speak for the importance of their spirituality and for their mental health. Mission Ambition was formed as a consulting company. We train, educate, and supply both military and civilian personnel with intelligence and human resources training. We do this in person and we also do it online as well. Something that the community has really shown a need for in the Metro Detroit area is executive-level training. I bridge that gap for a lot of people between the military and the civilian world. I'm always shocked when I stand in a room of people who lead the defense industry and only a handful of them, if that, have ever actually served in the military. Most people don't realize that it's the supporters, it's the civilians that really make those missions possible. Those civilians can sometimes have a difficult time or misunderstandings when it comes to how to interact or how to deal with military personnel. If you've never been in the military, it can be a really hard thing to learn and to understand. So Mission Ambition has developed a series of classes that will actually help civilians prepare themselves, whether it's from the basics of learning the ranks and learning what respect looks like to a military person, all the way to if you're gonna walk into a room with a 4-star general, you need to know how to act. And it's not because we expect you to be of military dignity, but we do appreciate that respect, and what you give out is gonna go a long way coming back to you. Mission Ambition does have a product line. We launched the brand Missilia, M-I-S-S-I-L-I-A. Missilia is Latin. It stands for a group of missiles, and our brand is geared towards women who kick butt. We love the strong female lead. We love our female firefighters and first responders, our female military and veterans, just our doctors, our lawyers, any woman who works in a male-dominated field. There's something really unique and really special about her, and that's what we seek to empower and really celebrate. I'm Shelly Rood. I was born and raised in Metro Detroit. I have traveled the globe. I have served my country in the United States military, and now I'm back here by choice as an entrepreneur, a public speaker, as a business owner, as a mother, and as a wife. I choose to raise my family in Metro Detroit, and I choose to give back to the community that has helped to raise me.
