Читать книгу Mission Entrepreneur - Jen E. Griswold - Страница 8

Silent Untapped Resource

As a distinguished graduate of the US Air Force Academy, a veteran, and an Air Force Reservist, I still shudder to think of how incredibly close I came to losing my identity and consequently my drive during the span of those three years. It was honestly one of the hardest times in my life, because I felt so out of place, unfulfilled, and generally unhappy.

Yet, my story is not unique to me. It is only one of thousands within the military spouse community that are similar in nature and belong to devoted spouses who silently grin and bear their hidden desires to find meaningful work.

In twenty years in the military, I have seen countless friends and colleagues make a valiant effort to keep a career going through their first few military relocations; however, after multiple attempts, qualifications that don’t transfer from state to state, and the addition of kids, many just give up. Sadly, they decide their efforts are futile. This is especially true for families who endure relocations as often as every year, depending on the specifics of their military member’s career field. With that kind of frequency, even if a spouse does land a great job, it is a major letdown to move to the next assignment and not find an equivalent position (or anything at all). After several rounds of this repeated scenario, confidence wanes and it’s easy to begin to question one’s self-worth.

As a business owner and problem solver, this employment dilemma perplexed me and left me wondering how to fix it. What’s hard is that there is no denying that the military community is full of talent. Having interacted with hundreds of military spouses, service members and families in my personal life over the years, it’s amazing to discover the hidden talents my military spouse sidekicks have picked up through their experiences. Here are just a few talents that could go on a resume for a large majority of them:

Quickly and smoothly relocates the family and kids to a new community at the drop of a hat…sometimes up to twenty times over the course of a career.

Endures long stretches of single parenting during deployments and job-related absences.

Organizes and leads large groups of other military spouses and family members with no formal training (and no pay).

Volunteers on base or post when needed.

Possesses ability to diagnose and complete household repairs (everything from fixing toilets to installing wood floors).

Yet even with all these amazing skills, jobs are still scarce.

Once I made the decision to pull myself out of the haze of my own unhappy situation, I started noticing just how few women in my military network were employed. At the time, most of us were in our early thirties, some with kids and some without. My friends said they wanted to work and some truly needed the income, but nobody had jobs. It was obvious that something was wrong.

As I educated myself, I learned that up to 90% of military spouses are under- or unemployed (underemployed means a person is working for less money than their education would normally earn them). Ninety percent! Having witnessed this unfortunate employment scenario firsthand, I kept thinking what a shame it was to waste such awesome talent.

My Journey

Thankfully, I didn’t allow the drab employment landscape as a military spouse to stop me from finding a better way. When I made the decision to return to the workforce, I naively wanted a job that only required part-time hours so I could be around for the kids, but that could still pay handsomely. Yet as I began my search, I quickly realized how difficult this was to find.

With my background and lack of recent work, it was nearly impossible to find an employer that would entertain a flexible arrangement upon entry. I wasn’t willing to put my kids in full-time daycare, endure the high cost, and bear many hours of lost opportunity with them. So I did what my hard-headed logic often tells me to do, and I resorted to taking matters into my own hands. I decided that come hell or high water, I’d create the “perfect job” by starting a business and make my magical-high-paying-part-time job come alive!

With two children under the age of three, a husband who was in a demanding job, and a California house losing value by the second from a recession, it was definitely not a picture-perfect scenario. But as much as my head knew the cards were stacked against me, my heart responded even stronger with the resolve to make it happen.

And I did.

Putting in one late night after another, learning through failures, pushing myself into uncomfortable places, and unapologetically applying everything I had learned through life in the military, I found a path to success. What’s more, it was like the whole world opened up to me. I learned. I stretched. I pushed. I fought. I grew. And through all of the haze of hard work, consistency, and dedication, I uncovered me again.

This stronger, more confident, and more determined “me” started dreaming again!

A Community with Skill

The beautiful thing with any hardship-to-success story is that you start to discover all of the stories in society that are just like yours and you begin to form your tribe. When I first started out in business, I hoped to find a mentor who was just like me. Someone with a similar background, someone who had already achieved success on their own, and someone who could guide me to do the same.

I was looking for military entrepreneurs.

In fact, I affectionately referred to them as “milpreneurs” (military + entrepreneur = milpreneur). But unfortunately, with a military spouse force that was chronically underemployed and contained very few business owners, there weren’t any milpreneurs running in my circles.

Therefore, my only choice was to put my head down and forge the way myself. My first venture was a self-grown home staging and decorating business. I made it a game to race the clock every day I worked, to make more money than I paid in babysitting. The company grew from a small idea in my head into an award-winning, locally-recognized establishment in Northern California, fueled mostly by my will not to fail.

After four years, we moved across the country, I sold that company and was fortunate to be offered a unique opportunity to join the sales end of a rising skincare company during its infancy. There was unlimited potential for growth within the company, but my success would hinge on my ability to develop, inspire, and lead a team of independent consultants whom I would have to search for and find. With no sales or consumer goods background, this seemed a little daunting, and it seemed way outside my comfort zone…but after a lot of thought it hit me why I had to do it!

I remembered back to my days as an active-duty military officer and to how many times I was impressed by a particular colleague or their family member because of their activity, dedication, and hard work. Each time I would say to myself, “If I could run a business surrounded with the talents of people like this, it would be so successful!” Then I would mentally make a note to keep track of that person over the years, in case I ever decided to act on that thought. As I pondered how I would succeed in a business I knew very little about, I realized the solution was to leverage the talent of the untapped resources of military spouses!

My military peers would be the perfect business partners, because they had the resilience of mind, the work ethic, and the belief in teamwork they had learned from their military experiences. And boy was I right! In just six years in business, despite many of us relocating, enduring deployments, and working around single parenthood, we put our team of eight thousand independent sales consultants (comprised of many military spouses) to the test and grew to the top .1% of the teams within our company. Our success story spread wide enough that we even earned a spot on the NBC’s Today Show!

Meanwhile, we weren’t the only ones realizing the power of milpreneurism.

Occasional success stories began popping up in military circles all over the map. A successful fashion blogger living on a base in England, an upcycled military uniform handbag company started by two moms in North Carolina, a chronically ill spouse in DC who turned her survival story into a set of Paleo cookbooks…the stories began to emerge. They were incredibly inspiring and motivating, and they fanned my flame of determination more than ever to create a movement!

But what was even more fascinating was the fact that, from what I could tell, these milpreneurs were gaining success that was not based on any novel technique, new-fangled business model, or fancy strategy. Most of them didn’t even have an MBA or business background. They were merely relying on what they knew best: the inherent skills and lessons they had learned through years of military life. These include skills like hard work, independent thought, resilient mindsets, the value of integrity, the importance of teamwork, leveraging the skills of those around them, and centering their work around a spirit of service.

I wanted to test my theory that the thread of commonality to their success was attributable to their military experience. So I dove into their stories and conducted interviews to find out what, specifically, about these secrets of military life was helping them pave their way to success. In doing so, my mind was opened to many more valuable lessons than I originally had imagined, especially surrounding milpreneurs’ ability to live, give, serve, and grow while on their journey to success.

As I regained my identity along the bumpy and winding journey of becoming a milpreneur, the benefits of putting these secrets to work were life-changing. Now I get to coach women and help them create flexible businesses around their own busy lives. Over the past several years, I discovered that by giving back to women and helping them realize their potential as business owners, I could change the world a little bit every day. Even better, the women I coached were inspired to do the same.

So, I’m on a mission…a mission to give back to our country’s amazingly talented military community by showing them the value of starting and owning their own business. Within these pages, I’ll share with you some tips and inspiration to help you decide why to begin. I’ll share some easy and low-cost options to get started. I’ll provide insight into what worked for me and for other successful milpreneurs I interviewed. And in the end, I hope this book will spark you to pursue that old business dream that might have gotten buried after years of living through the daily grind. Dust it off, give it life, and go share it with the world. Who knows? Your one little idea could have a ripple effect that affects the world in ways you’ve never dreamt of. So let’s get to it!

Here is a taste of what you’ll learn in the upcoming chapters:

LIVE: So much of success lies in the journey. Find out how military spouses are finding ways to overcome their employment odds.

GIVE: We are always better together. When you center your business around the idea of giving rather than receiving, you tap into a deep well of inspiration.

SERVE: If you know WHY you’re in business, you’ll get there faster! Milpreneurs have a clear internal compass for service that drives them to do what they do.

GROW: Hard work works…with a strong work ethic and belief, success is always possible.

This book is meant to share milpreneur stories, to bring light to their underdog journeys, and to point out why we should encourage more milpreneurism to benefit the entire country. There is a lot to be learned from a life of military service. Within these stories there is strategy and application for any industry or business model. If milpreneurs can succeed with these simple secrets from military life, you can too!