The Plan Before the Diploma

Cedric Nash learned in the military how to build structure where none exists. He has been following the same plan ever since, and by his own account it still isn't finished.

Cedric Nash. Photo courtesy of Cedric Nash.

Before the company, before the summit, before the book with the title people argue about before they open it, there was a piece of paper.

Cedric Nash wrote it shortly before he graduated from Cal Poly. On it he listed everything he wanted to do with his life, and underneath that, a timeline for when each of those things made sense to start and when to move on to the next. At the top sat a goal that would have sounded absurd coming from an engineering student weeks away from a diploma and a first job. He was going to become a millionaire. Seven years later, he was.

He never lost the paper. It sits today, photographed, inside the book he wrote about the framework it became. Most people who say they planned their success are speaking in metaphor. Nash means it literally. There is a document.

What matters about that document isn't the ambition on it. Plenty of twenty-two-year-olds want to be rich. What matters is that Nash treated the wanting like a mission with a schedule attached, and he learned to do that in uniform.

He didn't start out looking for discipline. He started out looking for a way into aviation. His father was a career Army man who spent about eleven years on active duty and another eighteen or nineteen in the reserves, and a college mentor, a retired colonel named Al Glover, had planted the idea of service early. So had a captain Nash met in a community college chemistry class, a man who took a liking to him and eventually talked him into joining the Navy Reserves before he had even finished his degree. Nash was studying electrical engineering at the time and thought he might want to fly. At nineteen, after a single year of community college, he shipped off to boot camp at the Naval Training Center in San Diego.

It was culture shock. He was nineteen and didn't fully know what he was walking into. What he found was something he had never been handed before and didn't yet know he was missing.

"I kind of liked the discipline," he said. "In fact, I didn't know that I needed it at that time. I laugh about it today, because even now I fold my clothes the way the Navy taught me. My underwear, my t-shirts. They instilled that discipline, and it carries on years beyond."

Nash in his Navy yearbook photo.
Photo courtesy of Cedric Nash.

From boot camp he went to aviation ordnance school in Millington, Tennessee, then rolled into the Navy Reserves and back toward his degree. He had wanted San Jose State. He got into Cal Poly instead, a better engineering school that happened not to have a Navy ROTC program, so he enrolled in Army ROTC, finished officer summer camp, and spent a stretch of cadet leadership training at Fort Richardson in Alaska. He was commissioned in 1986, four years before the engineering degree was actually done, because the coursework took far longer than the officer program did. Glover, the retired colonel who had helped put the idea of service in his head, drove all the way to campus to swear him in.

By the time Nash finished college around 1990, the Berlin Wall was coming down and the military was cutting troops and spending. He had the engineering training and the computer skills to land a job right away, so he went into the reserves, reported to the Army Transportation School at Fort Eustis, and was assigned to a transportation command in Los Angeles. The unit quickly figured out he could write software and moved him into computer work. In all he served about eight years, enough to carry veteran status for the rest of his life. And the thing he carried longest wasn't the transportation training or the ordnance school. It was a habit of mind. Every day in the military is planned, he points out, with a training schedule for each unit and each command and each company, and that discipline, he says, was maybe exactly what he needed and didn't know he needed.

That habit is the whole key to the man. "College provides us the structure," Nash says. "The military provides the discipline. But once we go out into the real world, there is no structure." Both hand you a schedule and tell you where to be. Then you walk out into a world that hands you neither, and most people flounder in the open air. The ones who make it, he says, are the ones who can build the scaffolding themselves and then actually stand on it.

"The military provides the discipline. But once we go out into the real world, there is no structure."

Cedric Nash

So when graduation approached and he felt the vertigo he watches other young people feel, that mix of pride in the degree and confusion about what comes next, he did the only thing that felt natural. He wrote himself a schedule. First the graduation itself, mapped course by course. Then the larger thing, the master plan he now reproduces as a photograph in his book, the full list of what he intended to do and the order he intended to do it in.

None of the jobs he took taught him what to put on that list. He's clear about that. The Army, JPL, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, all of them taught him how to earn. What went on the paper came from somewhere else, from four mentors he counts as his real teachers on money, two of them military. His father, born in 1932 to a sharecropper in North Carolina. Al Glover from the Army. A Navy man named Carl Wallace he knew in college. And later a mentor named Bruce he lived with his final year of school, who put finance books in his hands starting around 1988. Those men taught him a distinction the paychecks never did. "Income is what you earn for your time and your labor," he says. "Wealth is what you keep."

That distinction is the difference between his career and his plan. The career was about income, and he was very good at generating it. At Deloitte he learned a logistics software system called SAP, and more than three decades later he is still making money from that same knowledge, in part because SAP became the dominant logistics platform for the Army, the Navy, and the Defense Logistics Agency. The veteran who once got moved to a computer desk in a transportation command now counts the military among his clients. He didn't design that symmetry. He just followed the plan and let it close its own loop.

"Income is what you earn for your time and your labor. Wealth is what you keep."

Cedric Nash

The plan's hardest test came in 1997, when he was thirty-two. By then he had left his three well-known firms to work with a German startup called Card America, a company he had met on a project while he was still at Ernst & Young. The founders were brilliant with SAP and knew almost nothing about running a business as a business. So Nash did what the military had trained him to do. He wrote them a plan. Then he called in sick, took a red-eye to Germany, and pitched himself to the six partners overseas as a new partner and pitched them his roadmap for scaling the company.

They approved it. They accepted him. And when he finally read the partnership agreement, he saw they had written him inferior shares to the other partners even though he was the one bringing in the business. Something in his gut refused. He never signed it. That refusal turned out to be the smartest move of his young career, because the agreement he didn't sign came with a non-compete he was therefore never bound by. He walked away free.

He walked away into the most stressful stretch of his life. He was building a house in the Oakland Hills. His wife and kids were down in Southern California. He was starting over alone, with one secretary, out of a friend's apartment. What steadied him was a sentence from his father, who understood something most people around a six-figure salary do not.

"He told me, you're young, and if it doesn't work, you've got time to regroup," Nash said. "A lot of Black homes, the advice is, you've got a good-paying job, just ride it out. My dad had a different mindset, and he was the son of a sharecropper born in 1932."

The first client of Oakland Consulting Group arrived almost by accident. As Nash was leaving his German partners, they needed a specialized consultant, a placement that was supposed to run through IBM. IBM approved his candidate, then abruptly dropped the deal. Nash called IBM back and asked for one thing, the name of the company that had wanted his consultant in the first place. It was Lucent Technologies. He called Lucent directly, worked out the arrangement himself, and placed a specialist out of South Africa who ended up working for him for three years. It was the first business he ever landed on his own, and it felt, he says, amazing, because he already knew what the feeling on the other side of it was.

He describes the moment a person commits to something big and then watches self-doubt arrive, and watches doubt invite fear to the party. "Your confidence has to be bigger than the sum of your doubts and your fears," he says, "or else you'll never jump." It is the exact calculation he ran in a friend's apartment with one employee and a half-built house across the state.

"Your confidence has to be bigger than the sum of your doubts and your fears, or else you'll never jump."

Cedric Nash

Nearly three decades later, Oakland Consulting Group and its affiliates bring in more than a hundred million dollars a year and employ more than three hundred people. Nash built it the way an engineer builds anything, quietly and to spec. And the philosophy he built it on is deliberately, almost stubbornly, unglamorous.

He calls himself Your Millionaire Mentor, and the first thing he wants you to understand is that he isn't selling speed. The fastest way to millions, he says, is to be consistent. He has heard every version of the overnight-success fantasy and he dismantles it patiently. Kylie Jenner, the youngest billionaire he can name, still took more than five years, and she launched off her sister Kim Kardashian's fame, and Kim launched off Paris Hilton's. Even Mark Zuckerberg took a while. Roughly seventy percent of lottery winners, by his count, end up broke, and plenty of well-paid athletes, Black and white, end up the same way, Allen Iverson among the names he lands on, because the money arrived without the mindset to hold it. He compares handing wealth to an unprepared person to pouring gasoline on an open fire.

The place his philosophy gets genuinely contrarian is debt. Nash spends real energy trying to talk people out of the belief that they must clear every dollar of debt before they invest a single one. In his community especially, he says, being debt-free feels so good that people mistake it for progress and stay content with no wealth at all. Compounding takes time, and if you wait until the debt is gone, you miss the years that would have done the heavy lifting, and you slide back into debt anyway because the cycle was never really about the balance.

He puts it as a choice. Would you rather have a million dollars in assets and a million in debt, or zero and zero? He takes the debt every time, because the assets can double or triple and outrun what he owes, while zero and zero, in his words, is a place he can't create wealth from at all, just a nicer-looking version of having nothing. His own business profits, he says, now cover any debt he carries. He isn't guessing. He's describing his own balance sheet.

For everyone else, the instructions are boring on purpose. Live below your means. Invest consistently. Buy quality companies you already know, the Coca-Colas and Johnson and Johnsons and Cloroxes that have spent a century figuring out how to win, and let a market that has averaged better than nine percent a year over a century and a half do what it does. When a windfall shows up, don't move. Stop, think, make a plan. It is the same discipline that folded his t-shirts at nineteen, applied to a brokerage account.

He built all of that in relative quiet. Then, in 2017, on vacation in his own condo building in Miami, the quiet got interrupted.

The building was a new hotel-and-condo tower, one of the more popular addresses in South Beach, and someone had rented the entire property for a private event. Nash walked past the registration desk and asked, half-joking, why he hadn't been invited. He had a little money, he pointed out. Why not him? It's for our high-end specialized clients, he was told.

The event, he learned, was a JP Morgan Chase wealth summit. The speakers were Magic Johnson, Prince Harry and his wife, the baseball star Alex Rodriguez, and Robert Smith, at the time the richest Black man in America. It was a gathering built to make already-wealthy people wealthier, and it was happening inside his own building, and he had not been on the list.

He didn't take it as a personal slight so much as a piece of data. The very rich were being handed more knowledge to get richer, and no equivalent room existed for the people who most needed that knowledge to get started. So he built one. The Black Wealth Summit exists because of that registration desk, and Nash describes its difference from that JP Morgan event in a single word. Compassion. The corporate version delivers information as a matter of fact. His meets people where they actually stand, whether they're brand new to investing or working out of a hole.

Nash onstage at the Black Wealth Summit. Photo courtesy of Cedric Nash.

The book carries the same intent behind a more combative cover. He titled it Why Should White Guys Have All the Wealth?, a deliberate echo of Reginald Lewis's Why Should White Guys Have All the Fun?, which Nash had read and loved back in 1993. The title came out of a rant to a friend, out of his frustration that Black people too often act as though wealth belongs to someone else by right. "Why should white guys be the ones that are getting wealthy?" he kept asking, until the question became a book.

"Why should white guys be the ones that are getting wealthy?"

Cedric Nash

He backs the provocation with numbers. Eighty-four percent of the country's wealth sits in white households. Ninety percent of the stock market is owned by the richest ten percent of people. He is careful, though, about what the book is and isn't. It isn't a grievance. It's an instruction manual with an uncomfortable cover, written for his own community, and he insists the real subject is simpler than race. It is how anyone builds wealth despite the odds stacked in front of them.

Building it cost him, and he doesn't pretend otherwise. His clients were spread across the country, many on the East Coast, and the travel meant he wasn't home to raise his sons day to day. He got lucky, or worked hard enough, that the relationships survived. He put both sons through college and is close with them now. But he names the trade honestly, as a sacrifice anyone chasing a significant amount of money eventually has to make and live with.

That word, sacrifice, is the thread that ties the veteran to the wealth-builder to the man thinking about what he leaves behind. Legacy, for Nash, is not an abstraction. He can trace his own to a specific dollar figure. His grandmother owned her house outright in the Bronx and lived below her means her whole life. When she died she left about forty-three thousand dollars. Thirteen thousand went to her funeral. The remaining thirty thousand was split among her grandchildren, and Nash took his share, invested it, and turned it into millions. He is what happened when one generation's discipline met the next generation's knowledge of how to compound it.

He wants that to keep happening, which is why the older generation's money mindset both impresses and frustrates him. They knew how to live below their means and refused to perform a wealth they didn't have. What they mostly didn't know was investing, the thing that could have made their frugality last past a single funeral. He tells of a grandfather who leaves a house to each of five children, then watches the family wealth drain back to zero as the houses get sold off and the money spent. The discipline was there. The plan for what came after was not.

The Black Wealth Summit is his answer to that gap, and he built it as a nonprofit precisely so it wouldn't die with him. He is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, a fraternity built on uplift and service long before any of this, and the summit carries that same instinct into money. He is honest that succession is the hard part. Organizations run by older people tend to have no plan for who comes next, and he knows it will take a younger movement, his own sons or some younger believer, to carry the work forward for the long haul. He already has proof it's worth carrying. One couple found him at a conference after surviving bankruptcy, joined his mentorship group, kept saving and investing, moved into multifamily real estate, and as of last year crossed into what he calls the Black Millionaires Club. He won't share their names without permission. He points to them anyway, because they are the entire reason the thing exists.

Ask him what wealth actually means and he doesn't reach for a number. The Army, he's quick to say, never taught him this part. It taught him structure and planning and consistency, and the meaning he had to read his way toward on his own, in finance books a mentor handed him in the late 1980s. Wealth is freedom, he says. It's peace. He associates it with scripture: peace in your family and your health and your mind and your finances all at once. Financial peace is only one piece of it. But done right, he says, it becomes the catalyst that unlocks the others.

He isn't out of plans, either. More books are coming, each aimed at a different person trying to start. Before You Go, a roadmap for new college graduates on what to do with a first salary. It's Never Too Late, for the people at fifty or older who keep asking whether they've missed their window, his answer sitting right there in the title. One for single mothers, whose money is spoken for before it lands. One for people rebuilding after a divorce. What he wants to hand each of them, he says, is a strategy, a plan, and financial hope.

All of which brings him back to the piece of paper.

If the twenty-two-year-old who wrote that plan could see Oakland Consulting Group, the books, the summit, and the couple he pulled into the millionaires club, Nash figures the young man would mostly be struck that the whole improbable thing actually worked. But the young man would also notice something, and it's the same thing Nash notices every morning he still goes to work when he doesn't strictly have to. "I haven't completed the plan. I'm close," he says. "Two or three more years, I will complete the plan."

"I haven't completed the plan. I'm close. Two or three more years, I will complete the plan."

Cedric Nash

He has revamped the document over the decades and gotten sharper about what the real endgame is. He is close enough now that he could stop. He keeps going for one reason, and it's the reason the whole story circles back to a training schedule and a boot camp in San Diego and a habit he didn't know he needed. The plan isn't done. And a man who learned to build structure where none exists does not walk away from a schedule with two or three years still on it.

The paper is still here. So is he. Neither is finished.

Resources

Cedric Nash | https://cedricnash.com

Nash's official site, with his background, his books, and his work as a wealth-building educator.

Black Wealth Summit | https://blackwealthsummit.com

The 501(c)(3) nonprofit Nash founded to teach people how to build, grow, and keep wealth at every stage of life.

Oakland Consulting Group | https://ocg-inc.com

The IT consulting firm Nash founded in 1997, serving federal, state, and local government, utilities, and educational institutions.

SBA Office of Veterans Business Development | https://www.sba.gov/about-sba/sba-locations/headquarters/office-of-veterans-business-development

Training, counseling, access to capital, and contracting help for veterans, service members, and military families who want to start or grow a business.

Investor.gov Compound Interest Calculator | https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-basics/glossary/compound-interest-calculator

A free SEC tool that shows how much your money can grow over time when you invest consistently.

Military OneSource Financial Counseling | https://militaryonesource.mil/financial-legal/personal-finance/financial-counseling-services-for-a-secure-future

Free, confidential financial counseling on budgeting, money management, and debt for eligible service members, recently separated veterans, and their families.

VA Housing Assistance | https://www.va.gov/housing-assistance/

VA home loan benefits and other housing help for veterans, service members, and surviving spouses looking to buy, refinance, or keep a home.