Jaime Chapman

Our guest today is Jaime Chapman, the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of the US Military Spouse Chamber of Commerce. 

Jaime served in the US Army Reserves for 6-years and is currently an active duty Army spouse who is stationed with her family in Texas. 

In this episode, you'll learn about the challenges serving military personnel are currently facing. How to create a diverse supply chain using military spouse and veteran-owned suppliers and what the benefits are if you employ them. 

This episode is a must-listen for anyone who has signed the Armed Forces Covenant—and looking for ways to create social value in the defence sector and support the military community.

We hope you enjoy it. 

We hope you enjoy this episode. If you have a topic you'd like us to discuss or you would like to be considered as a guest please get in touch at hello@samtaler.co.uk.

Transcript

Sarah Stone (00:12):

Hello, and welcome to Let's Talk Social Value podcast, where we explore what creating value for society means and the practical ways you can go about creating it. My name's Sarah, and my guests work in different areas of social value across public-private, and third sector organisations from the public sector, procurement to ESG and sustainability, social enterprise and impact measurement. I'll be asking them about their work and what they've learned, and they'll be sharing their tips and experience to help us all make our organisations better.

My guest today is Jamie Chapman, the Co-Founder and COO of the US Military Spouse Chamber of Commerce. Jamie served in the US Army reserves for six years and is currently an active duty Army spouse who is stationed with her family in Texas. Her professional background is in human resources and recruitment where she's placed over 1,600 job seekers in careers. She's a well-known advocate who actively works to reduce military spouse unemployment. And this episode is a must for anyone who signed the Armed Forces Covenant and is looking for ways to create social value in the defense sector and support the military community.

Jamie Chapman (01:16):

Our goal is to economically empower our members or the businesses that we serve. And so we launched proudly just over a year ago, January 1st, 2021. And we have over 670 members right now that we serve; those members report employing 9,800 people. So for some context, the work that we're doing directly impacts about 10,000 participants in our programming. So we provide networking events and social events for them, primarily virtually because our members are spread across 30 states in five countries. And then we also have tangible benefits and resources that we offer. This would include group discounts on retirement plans and insurance plans for their businesses and for their employees. We have education discounts to select universities on tuition for the business owner, their employees, and all of their eligible dependents. And then we have things like discounts on technology and software and office supplies and things like that that folks will use to run their business.

               So as a Chamber, what we're really doing is leveraging the power of our numbers to help maximise affordability of certain things for our members to help them network and get together to build sort of referral systems so that these military spouses find their tribe so to speak and have, you know, allies have friends. And the whole goal is to economically empower them to raise up the bottom line of their business so that they're successful and what they end up doing when they become successful is our military spouses turn around and hire more military spouses at their companies. And so it's a win-win for everyone.

Sarah Stone (02:55):

Is that something that's unique to military spouses is quite interesting that point you make, but do you think that our military spouse is more likely to hire other military spouses than say any other kind of entrepreneur?

Jamie Chapman (03:06):

Yes, I would say in general, like if you have a, an affinity group, a woman that owns a business is gonna turn around and hire more women. A veteran that owns a business is gonna turn around and hire other veterans. But we have data from our businesses that say 98% do or would turn around and hire other military spouses. So that is nearly every single business that we have.

Sarah Stone (03:31):

That's amazing. So in terms of the social value of that, if you are gonna buy from a military spouse owned business, the opportunity to have a positive impact is huge, right?

Jamie Chapman (03:40):

Yeah, absolutely. It's a domino effect in the United States for the past decade. Our unemployment rate for military spouses has been 22%, and that's absolutely abysmal right now. Like for example, our veterans are unemployed at a rate of 3%, right? So for context, 22% is just crisis level. But with the pandemic, we've seen unemployment projections as high as 40% for military spouses post-pandemic. And we're surely hoping that numbers going down, but the goal here, the social value, is if you're able to support a military spouse owned business, you help that immediate family, right? If you help the military spouse, you help the entire military family. And then it has the domino effect. If they turn around, become successful in higher other military spouses, it just grows the impact. If you support one business, you may be supporting 5, 10, 50, 500 other military families with your purchase or with your support.

Sarah Stone (04:44):

And do you think that, you know, you're obviously based in the US, I'm in the UK, do you think that that is true regardless of you know, which nation the military spouse belongs to. Do you think that it would be the same?

Jamie Chapman (04:54):

Absolutely. And this is knowledge I came upon this year, Sarah there was an international military spouse employment summit. That's one of the ways we met, right? Yep. Every country involved in that summit has employment problems with their military families and the military spouses. And the reason being is because in general, no matter what country you're from, military families are very transient. They're moving a lot. And if your career doesn't fit in a suitcase and you can't relocate with it globally, it's not gonna work out very well for you in the US. Obviously we're a super large military. And our unemployment rate is probably at a pretty big scale. And I don't know, compared to the numbers in the UK or other countries, what those numbers look like. But yes, absolutely. Every other military spouse that I've spoken from different countries do face pretty severe unemployment issues. And it is a focus that it affects the national military readiness of the country. If the military spouse is unemployed, it directly affects the financial security of that household. And it is not easy to hang on to service members and keep them in the military. If the spouse is unemployed and the family is financially struggling in any way.

Sarah Stone (06:09):

In the UK, we have an expression that we use in social value. You know, something called what are the barriers to employment and companies, especially supplies. The public sector often asked how they can help create employment opportunities or entrepreneurship opportunities to support new businesses for people with barriers to employment. And obviously it sounds like, well mean we both know this military spouses, do you face those barriers, but is it just unemployment that they have to struggle with? Can you talk a little bit about some of the other ways that military life might perhaps affect them?

Jamie Chapman (06:38):

Unemployment is a symptom of a bigger problem, right? So there's a lot of other issues that come along with military families in the career realm. Many people don't even count for unemployment rates because they're choosing because it's hard to maybe be a stay-at-home parent. So we have folks that say, oh, this is too hard. I don't wanna have a career at all. I wanna stay at home with my children and no matter what your choice is your choice, but if you had a different or an easier life, would you be a stay-at-home parent or would you choose to work? That's the question? Is it the chicken or the egg? We also have a lot of folks turning to business ownership, at least in the US. For example, we have data that says 48% of military spouses in the US turn to self-employment or entrepreneurship at some point in their career.

               And that's compared to about 15% of the national population in the US. We also have paid disparity, right? Still sticking under the umbrella of careers. I just heard some recent data from one of our largest employment assistance organisations in the US that when service members transition and use their programming, they make approximately $90,000 a year. But when the spouse uses their program, they make $60,000 a year. And that paid disparity is very stark and it's actually raised up some because it used to be 45 ish thousand dollars a year for the spouses. So there's a pay disparity. There is unemployment. There's a lot of people being forced to look at alternative career options, such as self-employment or freelancing or running their own business or choosing to opt out of the workforce entirely. But then it also bleeds over into things like your mental health, your financial security, when you relocate a lot, and you get ripped from your support system, and you don't have the infrastructure as a family in place for the spouse to work, it just bleeds over and affects a lot of tertiary areas in your life.

Sarah Stone (08:31):

Yeah. I mean, that makes you pretty miserable.

Jamie Chapman (08:33):

Yeah.

Sarah Stone (08:35):

Right. The thing I find quite fascinating about much spouses is, and we should probably admit at this point, that we are both military spouses. So we do know quite a lot about this, but the vast majority of people don't understand the challenges that the community face, you know, it just doesn't occur to them that this is a group of people in a population who, who might struggle. But I think for me, what I, I find really interesting is they are one of the few groups that I can think of with barriers to employment, for whom those barriers are not ability related. So they're not, not working because they're not good enough to get a job, you know, or because they don't have the skills, right. They have amazing things to offer. It's the barriers of military life, which get in the way and then, you know, maybe cause gaps in the city and they fall off the kind of conveyor belt about if you like of working life. And then it's very hard to get back on. As we all know, can you talk about that? Would you say that spouses do have, I often talk about them being like an untapped pool of resource and skill. So if you are a business and you're looking for talent, why should you look within the military community?

Jamie Chapman (09:34):

Military spouses in the US and probably in other countries as well, receive certain benefits, such as we get scholarships to pay for university, right? The service member can pass along their GI bill, which pays for college. We have a lot of certificate programs. And so what happens in the United States is military spouses tend to be highly educated. In fact, it's over 90% of military spouses have some college, and then something to the tune of 30% of military spouses have advanced level degrees, a master's JD or above, right? So we are a highly educated group of people and there's a wide range of military spouses. So you think of, like, I'm gonna pull from college students. Well, you get a specific age demographic when you pull from a college graduate for the most part, right? You get a majority of young professionals with no career experience or minimal career experience.

 And you're putting them into entry-level roles. When you look at military spouses, you get a lot of built-in diversity, you get a lot of built-in age range and levels of experience. And so you can source from one demographic being the military spouse, and you can get all kinds of diversity in talent level in diversity. And it's just a wonderful talent pool to pull from. And then, on top of it, social value-wise, what you know is happening. If you support a military spouse for traditional employment or for, you know, supporting their business, you're directly impacting the wellbeing of that entire military family, which I always say this, if it affects the veteran, it affects their spouse, and it affects their spouse. It affects the veteran and the entire military family. So in the us, there is a sea of Goodwill for veterans, right?

There are over 40,000 veteran service organizations in the United States. Many of those also serve the families, right? And so there's already a sea of Goodwill. There are already employment programs. There are already programs out there to educate and help provide resources to military families. But what the spouses are missing, no matter how many programs that you create, if you're still moving every few years, you're just facing an unprecedented amount of hardship. And so what we specifically need is flexible employment that gives us the ability to telework from home and also has progression because you don't wanna necessarily start a job where you're working from home at a low level and never be able to advance within your career. So, fortunately, one of the positive things about the pandemic has been this onslaught of new jobs where you can work from home. And there have been work-from-home jobs for a while, and many spouses are already doing them. But now it's opening up the floodgate and providing new opportunities, not just to get a job where you're happily employed in this one position, but to get a job at a great company where there's also advancement involved.

Sarah Stone (12:44):

You just said, then you know about the pandemic and the kind of increase in the work-from-home jobs. And I'm really excited about this because I know about you. But I used to say to companies, three, four years ago, you can do any job that you can do in an office. You can do it virtually, and people would laugh at me now. Everybody's like, yeah, of course, you can. And so it really is potentially game-changing for military spouses. But yet when you're talking about unemployment rates, you were saying about how the unemployment rate, you know, you've seen some figures as high as 40% in the US.

Jamie Chapman (13:13):

Initially in the pandemic that unemployment rate skyrocketed because the service member still has to get up and go to work. But now it's, the onus is on the spouse to stay home and suddenly have to figure out how to work and homeschool their children and do things that they've never had to do before. Right.

What happened at the peak of the pandemic is the primary caregiver is typically women and military spouses, at least in the states with a 90% female demographic. They're the ones that we're making less in the workforce. And if you have to choose, the service member has to go to work anyway. So the spouse is gonna be the one to quit their job, stay home and homeschool the kids. That was one of the primary drivers during the pandemic of unemployment. And then, since it's just been a slower crawl back into the workforce because there's a bunch of competition, suddenly we had a higher unemployment rate than usual and spouses are elbowing and clawing their way back into positions. Now that their kids are back in school in person. And it's just been a challenge. So whatever progress we've made in employment efforts over the last decade, we're very quickly reversed, and we're slowly working our way back to where we were at 22% unemployment. So, you know, just hoping it gets better and that these remote opportunities are a good fit for spouses. And it ends up being a long-term career path for them rather than just a bandaid, and companies eventually go back to their old habits and work in person.

Sarah Stone (14:44):

Cause I think actually that's a really good point. I think what a lot of people I hadn't thought about until you said it is by supporting military spouses in, in your business, not only are you gonna be helping agree with barriers to employment, but you're gonna help us support a community. That's been really hard hit by the pandemic. I mean, everyone's been hard hit by the pandemic, but your figures seem to show harder than most. What could an international defence company that wanted to support military spouses, whether it was in the US or the UK, do?

Jamie Chapman (15:12):

From my perspective, because I come from the military spouse employment and entrepreneurship lens and I come from a corporate background in human resources and in staffing, right? You can hire people in more than one way. You can hire them on one side for traditional jobs at your company. That's one solution. The other way that you can hire someone is as a business, as a vendor, you can procure their services, you know, business to business be if you're a private corporation, you do this. Or if you're in the government, you might source a vendor for whatever it is, a contract, right? What work we're doing in the US. That's unique. And I hope that it picks up in other countries as well. My organisation, The Military Spouse Chamber of Commerce, certifies military spouse-owned businesses. So if you think you can go out there and you can hire a woman-owned business, a minority-owned business, or a veteran-owned business for the first time in history, we are certifying a military spouse-owned business.

 What we do is vet them and make sure that they are indeed a military spouse. We vet them for majority business ownership, and we vet that they are legally formed in their state and local area; right in the US, corporations almost require a business to be certified in order to do business with them, right? In other countries, I believe this is different. As we're discussing here, we had talked about how businesses procure other businesses because of their social value element. I think a tip for the business, like the corporation that's doing the procuring, is maybe to help coach along some potential businesses that are owned by military spouses. So they're able to better communicate their social value and the impacts they're having on the community. And if you're a military spouse that owns a business, you have this unique ability to compete for larger opportunities.

               If you're able to utilize data and metrics, to communicate the value and impact you're having on the community that is everywhere, it doesn't matter what country you're in. If you utilize data and metrics to communicate your value and impact, you're gonna be able to better compete for business opportunities. So what I think of is establishing a, you know, military affairs or military centre of excellence, that includes the veterans in your country, as well as the military spouses, providing recruitment and talent pipelines for normal traditional jobs at your company with an emphasis on flexible and teleworking opportunities for the spouses. And then on the other side in your supplier, diversity pipelines establishing programming to recruit military family-owned businesses, be it veteran-owned businesses or military spouse owned businesses

Sarah Stone (18:00):

In the UK. We don't have the certifications sort of system that you do, but ES will tend to self-certify at the moment. But if you're in the US and you are listening to this, and you're a business who wants to try and diversify your supply chain, and you want more military spousing businesses in it, obviously you can get in touch with you, but how does it work? What can a company do?

Jamie Chapman (18:19):

We have many different types of businesses that we've certified when you line up our businesses; we've certified with what things that corporations typically look for. You know, we have anything and everything from IT and web design services to marketing people that provide physical, tangible products that you can put in your retail establishment. And they're all over the place because military spouses are as diverse as they are; not all of them own a marketing firm, and not all of them own a staffing firm. They all own businesses that are all over the page. And so you get diversity again, just as if you're procuring from a military spouse-owned business, you get diversity in products and services and diversity in the ownership of that business, you may get a military spouse who is also a veteran who is also a minority, right? Yeah. And you're checking off three or four of those blocks that corporations tend to look for. And then again, we're primarily female demographics. So it's almost like a 90% ratio of military spouses and women-owned. And then, of the businesses we've certified, 30% of them are owned by minorities. So we've got a wonderful amount of diversity and product services and people who own the businesses. Yeah.

Sarah Stone (19:32):

You can literally buy anything from a military spouse.

Jamie Chapman (19:35):

Pretty much. And I'm sure it's the same in the UK. I don't have your data in front of me, but I'm certain that if we looked it would be pretty similar.

Sarah Stone (19:42):

Yeah. We have military spouses who are everything from computer technicians to engineers, to software designers and graphic designers and everything in between. But I think one of the big challenges for companies is they dunno how to reach those businesses. So they don't know how to advertise their well; how do I get this company or this small business into my supply chain? And so, I suppose with your certification scheme, does that make it easier for businesses to buy, from people who've been certified by you?

Jamie Chapman (20:11):

So in the US, the advantage of certifications is for like a large corporation to source from our certified businesses. They just come to us and ask us who we have, right? So it's a unified place where you go searching for these businesses in the UK. Since that certification system isn't set up, if there is some sort of business directory or some other place where these businesses come together, naturally, it might be a good idea to self-organise some kind of a searchable database so that you're able to share it with these potential opportunities where folks are procuring businesses. Or if you just educate the spouses that own a business, here's how you pitch yourself as a potential vendor to these corporations; almost all corporations have their own page, where you go, and you sign up, and you register to become a vendor at their corporation. So you could go hunting if you will; if you're a military spouse owned business, you can go to that. Corporation's webpage looks for its supplier diversity page and basically creates a profile and an application there.

Sarah Stone (21:12):

That's a really good piece of advice. And actually, also, I suppose the one simple thing the companies themselves could do is to make sure that they have a box that you can tick that allows you to self-certify as a military spouse-owned business, because...

Jamie Chapman (21:24):

That's right.

Sarah Stone (21:25):

I mean, I know I have a client who, you know, they've signed the covenant really, really big embedded my business in their supply chain to help them with their social value and had no idea that I was military spouse own because I don't talk about it. And I think, yeah, to be able to, you know, when you fill in the profile on their page, if you could check military spouse owned, I think lots of people would do it. And it's such an easy thing to do.

Jamie Chapman (21:46):

So in the US, talking about checking that self-certification block, some really good case studies and examples include places that are super military friendly, like Hilton, Amazon, and Walmart, which use traditional recruiting pipelines and allow that box to self-certify as a military spouse. What we are working to advocate for is to create a box for suppliers, right? So that when you're checking off that you're a woman-owned business or a veteran-owned business, that same military spouse-owned business box is available. So you can self-certify, right? It's, again, a bifurcated effort. You're trying to recruit spouses for your traditional pipelines and for your supplier pipelines. It takes some discipline and some effort on behalf of the company to put a checkbox on a website and to create the infrastructure behind it so that you're counting and making sure these individuals are measured in your metrics. But once you set up the infrastructure it's there and you don't have to worry about it anymore.

Sarah Stone (22:50):

It's such a simple thing if they just did that and then also ran a communication campaign and made an effort to reach out to military spouses and own businesses via organisations in the US like you guys, and in the UK, we've got a group for spouses, which is an amazing social enterprise that if you're looking to employ military spouses in your business can help you do that. The military coworking network and mills spa business network both run business directories.

Jamie Chapman (23:13):

There's another thing that's important as well. Many of these corporations in the UK or wherever probably already employ military spouses, or in your case, they've hired you as a business. It's really important. If you want to properly track anybody that you employ, be it a veteran military spouse or woman, a minority, right? It's important to retroactively go back into your existing employees and your existing suppliers and make sure that folks can self-identify, even though they've already been doing business or working with you, for a while. So we have a company in the US for example called Oshkosh and they create defence things. I don't know, but they retroactively did a campaign to their existing employers to identify veterans and military family members that worked there and found over 16% of their corporation was already military affiliated.

Sarah Stone (24:06):

Oh, my goodness. I'd love to talk to them because I was talking to somebody at a really big company recently, who was saying, they would love to do exactly this. They have over 8,000 suppliers, and they don't have this kind of information, but they were struggling with how do we get them to self-satisfy retrospectively? And I said, well, why don't you just send them all the survey, you know, send them an email. And then they said, well, they might not reply. And you kind of laugh and say, no, no, no, you are a really, really big company. If you get an email from a really big company, that's a client, if yours just so gonna reply. And then you realise actually the email addresses that they have are probably all the accounting ones because you know, when they were onboarded, they filled in their accounts, email address. So they probably don't have, the CEO might reply, or the business development person might reply to an email, but the email will actually go to the finance department. So do you know, what is it Ashkar did you say? Do you know what they did that was so effective or how they managed to make that work?

Jamie Chapman (25:01):

So they are a very hands-on physical company, and they have manufacturing facilities. They did a special veteran day campaign. It was a number of years ago now, but they basically said, Hey, if you work here, we want our military families to wear a special, hard hat on veteran's day on the line, on the manufacturing line. And so they, they made little hard hats in a special colour or something and, and then they were able to retroactively track their employees after that.

Sarah Stone (25:28):

That is so clever.

Jamie Chapman (25:30):

Now for service-based companies, they're not necessarily wearing hard hats, but there may be something clever you can do like, Hey, if we, if you identify, we'll send you a special, you know, lapel pin or a challenge queen in the mail, you know, it doesn't have to be a heavy lift, but it can just be some small token of appreciation and people will love getting things in the mail, right?

Sarah Stone (25:51):

Yeah. Oh, my brain's going mad. If anyone's listening to this and you think of good stuff, let us know. Just wanna really quickly talk to you about the legislation that you're hoping to introduce in the US cuz I think it's really interesting, and I really hope it's successful. Can you tell me a bit about it? What is it, and what are you hoping to do with it? And if there's anyone listening who wants to help, what can they do?

Jamie Chapman (26:11):

So in the US in 2021, we had our hands on a lot of different policies and legislation that help military spouses. I won't rattle off the whole list, but they involve things like registering a business on base overseas status of the force agreement childcare. Our biggest piece of work was the military spouse entrepreneurs act, which officially would create a pilot program with the US government recognising military spouse-owned businesses as a disadvantaged set-aside category so that when the government is doing procurement, military spouse own businesses get a little bit of a preference, just like a woman-owned or a veteran-owned or minority-owned business with the government. And for example, how that matter is like in the US, the veteran's administration, for example, they have a goal every year to hire 15% veteran-owned businesses for their projects and services and things like that for the VA, which is a huge government agency.

               And so this allows places like the VA and other federal agencies to set a procurement goal, to hire military spouse-owned businesses for their various needs. And the VA alone spends over a billion dollars on veteran-owned businesses every year. So it's a massive floodgate of opportunity for these businesses to do business with the United States government. My work specifically at the Chamber, it targets the private sector, right? We aren't necessarily certifying businesses for the government, but we open up opportunities for corporations. In 2022, we are in the research phase of working on something super exciting. And it would be very impactful, which is basically it would be a bill so that every time a military spouse moves, they don't have to reregister their business in a different state. For example, like my husband, his home of record is at his parents' address. His permanent home of record is in, say, Illinois; my permanent home of record is in Oklahoma.

               This means if I own a business, all I have to do, no matter where I live, is keep my business legally registered in Oklahoma, and in my case, I had to register my business in Colorado. Then I moved overseas to Germany. I had to register it over there and concurrently have it registered at my home state of the record in Oklahoma. Then I relocated to Texas, and I had to reregister my business in Texas. Every time you do that, you incur costs and expenses. Because every state a government has little registration fees and things like that that you have to pay. And then you physically have to pick up and move your business as well. So this bill would specifically help alleviate a major headache for military spouses who are moving anyway and going through headaches. But at least they would just have to keep their business registered in one place and not have to worry about moving it every other year.

Sarah Stone (29:00):

Oh my God, that's insane. So you have to; you can't just leave your business registered in Oklahoma. If you're not living in Oklahoma?

Jamie Chapman (29:06):

You're not supposed to do that as it stands. And so what it ends up being is expensive to reregister your business everywhere you live. And also, you don't ever have your taxes. You're not paying your taxes in the same state.

Sarah Stone (29:19):

So that's quite unique to the Us. We just don't have that challenge here, but wow. So what do you need to make that happen?

Jamie Chapman (29:26):

Well, we're in, like I said, we're in the research phase now. So we're working with a Congressperson in the US on drafting the bill text. And then, over time, what'll happen is it'll get published. They'll ask for the original co-sponsor and additional original co-sponsors to come out together with it and publicise it. And then it's up to us to like what the military spouse chamber does is we draft letters of support and letters of endorsement for our membership. So we send this out to all 600 of our members and say, Hey, if you write your representatives,

Sarah Stone (29:58):

Public person,

Jamie Chapman (29:59):

Yeah. Then hopefully, they'll support the bill, and we can get the bill passed. So we very much so do advocacy work for policy and legislation. We leverage our numbers and our membership to help us with that.

Sarah Stone (30:11):

And so, if anybody is a law firm listening in the states, do you need help with drafting?

Jamie Chapman (30:17):

The Congressperson's team? Does the drafting, her legislative assistance and legislative directors do that? What we'll need assistance with is, again, once that bill text is done, and they publicize the bill, then it's about writing your Congress person, writing your representatives and saying, Hey, I'm a military spouse own business. This is what's up with me. Can you please support this bill?

Sarah Stone (30:38):

So maybe businesses could because they'll have listened to this podcast, and they'll have identified all the people in their workforce who are military spouses. And they can say to them, here you go, here's a bill. Wouldn't that be amazing?

Jamie Chapman (30:49):

It's within the realm of possibility, at least in the states, corporations always have a big, you know, policy and lobbying arm. It's definitely within the realm of possibility. So

Sarah Stone (30:59):

Right. So if you're listening and you want to get in touch with Jamie and help her, how can people connect with you online?

Jamie Chapman (31:06):

I'm on LinkedIn, Jamie Chapman. You can also email me. My email is J Chapman, CHAPMAN @millspouse, chamber.org.

Sarah Stone (31:17):

Amazing. Fabulous. I've just got a couple of super quick questions. Are there any useful resources that you use that you wanna share with people? Like, is there a particular tool or an app or a website or a blog that you sign up to that you just kind of couldn't live without?

Jamie Chapman (31:31):

I use an app called Calendly because scheduling meetings take so much email tag I just send people a link, and they pick a time, and it saves me so much time. There are other brands that aren't Calendly, but it's just a tool. It syncs my calendars up. I send a link to you. You pick your time, and it automatically generates calendar invitations and sends you my zoom link and reminders. And thank you notes. And it just saves so much time. I have been a religious Calendarly user for a number of years now, and I couldn't live without it. I don't know what would happen if it ever died, but I also just use like a personal CRM because I have so many contacts and I do so many networking engagements.

Sarah Stone (32:11):

Which one do you use?

Jamie Chapman (32:13):

I use HubSpot HubSpot's free, and it's got a really robust free version before you have to start paying for it. And even though at my company, we use Salesforce just for Jamie. I've always saved contacts and notes and things like that in HubSpot because I used to save it on my computer in a folder, in a Microsoft word document. And then what happens? Your computer dies, and you lose everything. So I was like, I've gotta get this stuff in the cloud. Somehow.

Sarah Stone (32:38):

I, I just use my phone. I put my notes in my contacts on my phone, but actually, HubSpot's a much better idea. 

Jamie Chapman (32:45):

Hubspot on your phone too, you know, you can just open the app on your phone, and it's there. And I like it because it keeps my professional contacts out of my iPhone contacts. So my children can't accidentally call people cause that happens sometimes <laugh>, but I love things to be automated. I love things to be systematized. And those two things specifically save me a lot of time and effort and headaches in my life. And just generally in the military community, in the United States, there is no shortage of resources, and there are international resources as well that I have no idea about, but just if you ever have questions and want specific resources for a specific reason in the US feel free to ask because there's an abundance of places I could send you for assistance.

Sarah Stone (33:28):

Oh, thank you so much for your time today. It's been absolutely brilliant.

Jamie Chapman (33:31):

Absolutely. And Sarah, you're wonderful, and we're here. Should anyone need assistance? We're making some efforts just in the US. We see like big picture wise. We have so many international military spouses that are transient and they come live with us for a little while and then they leave. And we're trying to, from the top down, make effort to become a more military spouse-friendly place to live. So if you're coming from other countries, you're able to seamlessly maintain employment and things like that when you come to the United States, and it'll be years in the making, but there is a conscious effort in the United States to sort of set the standard and be the example for everyone else to show here's what a military friendly country looks like to come and reside here and spend your time. So I'm definitely involved in those efforts for the military spouse, and I'm here. So should you ever have questions or need anything, please? Don't hesitate to come to me.