Welcome to the fourth edition of Shoots!, where I highlight examples of 21st century entrepreneurialism in unexpected places and / or demonstrating principles of increasing future importance. I hope this inspiring story finds you well amidst tremendous uncertainty. The business I am featuring today is an example of remote working, a reality many of us are experiencing now. In summary – the founders:
- Identified an undertapped, highly qualified labor pool – military spouses
- Conceived of a remote working business delivering superior labor solutions to employers and removing administrative burdens
- Built the business despite the CEO moving to Hawaii less than 2 years after founding
- Used the disruption to further differentiate their offering
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Liza Rodewald, CEO and founder of Instant Teams, is a female software engineer with four children. A few years ago, her husband wanted to shift to active duty in the US Army instead of serving in the reserves. With this decision, Liza became one of over 600 thousand people serving in parallel to their active duty military spouses. At one point, Liza and her family moved six times in seven years.
Identifying Untapped Supply
Throughout these moves, Liza observed a common pattern lurking behind spouses managing already-complicated logistics of frequent moves and repeatedly rebuilding their families’ and their own social connections, living hundreds or thousands of miles from home. Most spouses wanted to work, but nearly all had to compromise, defer or abandon their careers. Liza encountered many qualified people searching for direction – other software engineers as well as writers, accountants and Ph.Ds. She realized she was spending a lot of time counseling spouses one-on-one.
The statistics on military families are sobering. According to Blue Star Families, financial stress is the number one stressor among military spouses, even more frequently cited than deployment. Despite finances being a primary concern, military spouses struggle with finding fulfilling work:
- The incidence of military spouses not in the labor force is nearly twice that of civilian spouses
- Among those seeking work, the unemployment rate of military spouses is over 4 times that of a similar civilian demographic
- Among those who do work, over half say they overqualified for the position in which they are working
In “The Dismal Career Opportunities for Military Spouses,” Julie Bogen, Senior Associate Editor of The Atlantic notes, “I’ve lost track of how many fellow military spouses have told me they abandoned careers they loved and were proud of solely because of the obstacles the military life presented.”
Leveraging Disruptions to Build a Differentiated Solution
One of Liza’s seven moves was to Virginia, where she met Erica McMannes. At that time, Erica was working on a talent acquisition platform focused on employing veterans. Liza had already possessed pieces of a business idea for years; she originally purchased the instantteams.com domain in 2012. Together, Liza and Erica realized that they could link talent acquisition to the military spouse labor pool and co-founded Instant Teams in 2016.
Beyond the frequency of moving, moving to a distant time zone can impede careers of military spouses. “I myself don’t know what I’ll do if we ever get stationed in Japan or Hawaii, because the time difference makes being awake during continental US working hours essentially impossible” said the Atlantic’s Bogen, whose husband is in training to be a Navy doctor. In April 2018, when Instant Teams was less than two years old, Liza’s husband was reassigned to Hawaii. Depending on the time of year, Hawaii is five or six hours behind the Eastern Time Zone.
Rather than becoming an insurmountable roadblock, Liza’s move to Hawaii turned out to be fortuitous. Liza and Erica applied and were accepted to Cohort 11 of Blue Startups, a Hawaii-based accelerator. They also connected with the Hawaii Angels Network and found both communities to be extremely welcoming and supportive. Liza and Erica’s cohort peers pushed them to innovate further and doors opened to opportunities. The need for Liza and Erica to collaborate between their Hawaii and the East Coast locations reinforced their expertise with distributed teams. They deepened their ability to lead their organization without regular in-person contact and succeeded in developing new client business virtually. By February 2019 they had their business model nailed down.
Connecting to Employer Demand
Instant Teams builds tech support, customer success, marketing and administrative teams. In the tight US labor market, companies have struggled with applicant quality, finding time to screen and hire, and minimizing employee turnover. In addition, customer demand often requires 24/7 coverage. A conventional solution is to build these resources offshore, which adds cultural and logistical challenges. Instant Teams largely removes these issues for employers, not only screening and delivering educated and qualified US citizens capable of covering every time zone across the globe. Instant Teams also manages record-keeping and taxation, aspects of virtual teams that usually vex employers. Instant Teams’ workforce is distributed, allowing employers to reduce risk inherent in having teams located in large hubs of conventional offices and call centers. Given limited employment alternatives, Instant Teams’ remote workforce is proving to be more loyal.
Unlike employers in the domestic US labor market, Liza and Erica are not constrained by labor supply. Rather, they seek additional employers interested in building teams. Instant Teams already has 8000 remote workers with another 700 to 800 new applicants every month. If you are looking to build a tech support, customer success, marketing or administrative team, Instant Teams is an option worth investigating!
Kyle Okimoto is the founder of Market Junctions, which helps transform the power of disruption into a force of positive change. He is the creator of the Resiliency Map, a process anyone can use to increase their resilience by drawing from their own experience and that of others. He is an investor and advisor in startups ranging from Cadence (high yield short term alternative investments), AltoIRA (self-directed retirement accounts for alternative investments), Aris Technology (robotic quality control laser scanning). Kyle has no financial interest in Instant Teams.
