How a $16 Million Start Up Is Revolutionizing Remote Work For Military Spouses #154

What if you identified a most obvious underutilized asset and then you created the marketplace and you built a business around it, and now you employ over 500 professionals. Then you raised $16 million in venture capital and ended up number 13 on the Inc 5000. If that's you, then your name can only be Liza Rodewald. Welcome, Liza.

Hi, Jeff. Thanks. That was a great intro.

Was it? I just wrote it.

It was awesome.

Well, it's true. And I do have your name correct. Do I have your name correct?

You do.

You're spot on, Liza Rodewalt. All right, well, research complete. Welcome to the home front.

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Yeah. Liza, you are the co founder of Insta Teams, a company that we work with here at Homefront Brands. And as I dug into the story, I was just so impressed with your background, your journey, and then really, because we are focused on supporting military veterans, this supports military spouses. So I'm very excited to have you on today and I want to hear all about your journey building Insta Teams.

All right. Yes. Well, we are a proud partner of Homefront Brands, so our teams and our military spouses on the accounts love working with you guys too. So I'm excited to be here and talk all the things about the story and the background and everything that we want to dig into.

Well, let's go backwards. Before we go forwards, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Sure. I'm Liza Rodewald. I CEO and founder of Instant Teams, but also a entrepreneur myself. I have started four different businesses. I read your book, Jeff, and had a lot of similarities and stories of creating different companies and spawning different ideas and leading you to the next journey that you have. I live in North Carolina. My husband is still active duty, so we are still living the military lifestyle, although we've been able to stay in North Carolina for the last three years and hopefully until he's now on the retirement edge of the military. He serves in the US army, and I have four children of various ages, but still in elementary, all the way up to college.

Wow. And you're an engineer by trade?

I am. I'm a software engineer by trade, have a degree in computer science and started my career in tech in the very, very early days of remote work and when it was called telecommuting back then, when it wasn't as fancy of terms that we have today, I found an.

Article that summed it up and said that Insta Teams is the intersection of talent and technology. So your background in software engineering, computer science, and then you identified this niche of military spouses, how do those two things interplay to make insta teams such a success?

Sure. So really, my background in software engineering was always met with how do I solve problems for people? That's the part I loved about creating software, creating technology. Right. Technology is really powerful in being able to create solutions to people's problems. And I really loved that. And so I had my own software company when I became a military spouse. And that's how those worlds kind of collided. So I was working completely remotely. I was building software for secretary of state's offices. And then I met. I met my husband, we got married, and I became part of the military community. And then every single spouse I would meet would just ask me, hey, how are you working? Creating a career, having a business in this lifestyle where we move every two to three years. And really, that's kind of when my brain turned on for like, okay, there are companies that would love to have access to this type of talent. There is this type of talent who have no idea how to connect with companies that have these remote opportunities that they can keep. So from a people and a technology perspective, what can I create to bring these solution problems together and really solve the problem on both sides? Right. Business and community side.

Military spouses move, as you said, on an average of every 2.5 years. There's a massive underemployment or unemployment rate among these spouses, five times the national average. 85% of these spouses, though, have some college education, which is four times the national average. 28% of military spouses have owned or operated their own business, and 75% are confident in their ability to multitask. So you've got a diamond in the rough, you've got these people, but they can't. It's hard for them to get employment because they're going to be moving. They have other obligations. So working from home in a remote environment suits them very well. So super talented, very motivated people. But the opportunity was just not. Nobody had put together the right opportunity for these folks.

Yeah, I think in my own personal life, I moved six times in seven years when I became a military spouse. So if you're thinking of trying to go in, walk in corporate America and me get a job software engineering for a company even here in Raleigh, I would only be here less than a year. Right. And on that trajectory. And so it's not enough time to get your foot in the door, go through the process and really be able to build a career. So these spouses are finding themselves starting over, over and over and over and over again. And so go ahead.

No, go ahead.

Okay. I wanted to just say that the opportunity is like you said, the talent is vast, the experience is vast. The ability to connect to other people, other organizations, other global cultures is strong in the community because of the frequent moves. And so what we did was we went after it as how do I solve a problem in the business space that results in creating opportunities for this community versus how do I take this community and go to the corporate space and match them to job opportunities? And so that's how we're different in our approach and how we came up with it.

3 million active military people, 600,000 spouses. How many people do you employ today?

We have over 500. But we. That's who instanteams employs. But we also have a job board for companies to post and hire directly from our community too. So we've put thousands and thousands of military spouses in jobs since we started.

That's incredible. Talk a little bit about the roles. Typically this is a staffing business essentially and they usually have a focus. Technology, you know.

Yes.

Labor, machine. What's. What are some of the categories that you're most successful in? Placing people.

Yeah, so that was one of the things we started off to find. Right. Where's our fit, where's our niche in the market that makes sense for us to build from? And what we found is because we have U. S. Citizens located across the globe in every time zone, well spoken, able to connect with people really quickly. The CX space, the customer experience space was a gold mine for us on both the brand side, for the brands we work with. And the military spouses, they love being connected, feeling a part of something, being mission oriented. And so most of our roles go through the customer experience. So anything that's outward facing that touches a brand's customers, it could be in sales, could be in customer success, could be, you know, very high level roles all the way down to entry level roles. So we have everything in between there. But we really concentrate on building those teams so that we can make the experience of the brand even better and stronger. And these military spouses love being able to connect with other people.

Any specialties like bookkeeping, accounting, programming, things like that or is it mostly jobs that companies are going to be able to train capable person to do like cx?

Yeah, so both. We try to stay away from anything deeply technical because that's a hard entry from a remote perspective. Even though software engineering is obviously my love and one of my favorite things, getting into that as a remote engineer can be kind of tough. So we focus more on sales, any, any kind of back end office support that you might need. We don't do a lot of on the financial side but we do a lot in the insurance space. So we're claim support, AEP enrollments for companies. Anything where you need somebody that has a higher level of touch experience that can care for your customers and your clients coming in. We do data breach detection for cybersecurity companies. So any of those kind of higher levels roles that you're thinking about in the organization, those are the types of things that we, we partner really well with companies on.

And from a training and onboarding perspective, does the burden of that fall on the host company or do you do some skills development?

Yeah, so we do have our own skills development systems within instant teams. So we have partnerships with, grow with Google and other things for some hard skills that we send our community through. But we also like to really come at it as a strategic partnership. And so we work with the brands that we work with. They might have the training program already that they want to send everybody through and we partner with them and then we help them improve it. Right. Like here are some gaps or here are some things improvements that we've heard. So we do that feedback loop back and forth so it becomes more of a training partnership. We can train the trainer and we can run all the training cycles or if the company or the brand wants to hold the training then we send our spouses through. So we're really flexible in how we do that but we really approach it from that partnership angle so that we're getting the best product between both of us.

What can you share about success rates? Maybe turnover? You know, how long is a, is an average engagement with, with one of your people into a company?

Sure. So our attrition rate is really low, which is one of the things that really sets us apart in the business space. So typical turnover for this is 30, 40%. Our average last year was 8%, 8 and a half percent, which is extremely low.

What do you attribute that to?

A couple of things. One, the dedication of military spouses to the job. Once they get them, the last thing they want to do when they move is start over again in the job. And so once they have one, they have one they believe in. They have some a mission, mission centric company they're working for. They want to stay, they want to grow and then they want to help other military spouses get those same opportunities. And so that attrition Rate is really low for us because they're just mission oriented and dedicated to the work that they're doing. They don't want to start over.

So our military is deployed globally. What does your workforce look like when it comes to. When you. In terms of international. Where people live?

Yeah, so most of our workforce is in the US we do have some in what the military terms is oconus. So that means, you know, Italy, Germany, Japan, even Hawaii and Alaska are considered Oconus, because they're not right here in the continental U.S. so there are pockets of that. There are some rules and regulations that prevent some spouses from being able to work on the economy in those situations. And so that is something we are championing. It's called a SOFA agreement. And they're very old and antiquated and they don't. They're. They're not used to the remote work world. And so we're working to try to get some of those laws changed so that more spouses overseas can have these opportunities.

Okay, so the purpose would be, yes, we'll let you put a military base here. Yes, we'll let you bring spouses and families, but we don't want these people to take local jobs.

Right, right. And so. And there's no differentiation between remote. Working there for a company you were maybe working for here while you were in North Carolina. That's not taking away from someone's local opportunity there. But there's. The laws aren't written in that way.

Yeah, I have a solution for that. Close your blinds, right?

Yeah. Yeah. The taxation can be a little daunting. And some of the. So military spouses face the losing their benefits on base if they are in violation of this agreement. So there's some. Some scarcity around it, too.

Yeah. Well, certainly it's always better to follow the rules when you can.

Yeah.

I'd love to hear a little bit about your technology and maybe some of the things at a high level that you've done to really accelerate the growth of this. We're going to get into fundraising. You've raised, I think, a Series A and a Series B. I think you've raised over $16 million. You might have raised more by now. I'm not sure where that is. But people need to see promise, they need to see systems when they're going to invest that kind of money in a business. So from a technology perspective, when you started the business, what did you set out to do?

Yeah. So when the technology has ebbed and flowed throughout the years, obviously when you start A startup, it never starts exactly the way it ends from a technology perspective. But we knew we had a challenge of. So I'll get into a little bit of HR space here. There are applicant tracking systems called ATSs. Right. This is where when you're applying to a job, you feed your resume in and then it kind of does that first round of is this a good fit for us? And then moves you to a person who actually sees it. Well, the challenge with our community is if you've moved six times in seven years and you've remained employed, what does this ATS think when you go through it? Job hopper? Inconsistent.

That's right.

The military spouses are automatically kicked out from the very beginning.

Yeah. So they never, never get a look. They don't. They never get.

They never get a look. Yeah, they never get a look.

I candidly, when I'm looking through resumes, I do the same thing.

Right. It's natural. Right. Because it's kind of one of those just normal criteria, but for this community, it's a special case. And so that's what we started off from a technology perspective. Make it a skills based hiring platform to where the skills come first, not a chronological resume. And then feed it into systems that make. Where the military spouses get put to the top of the list. Right. They're not automatically disqualified. Some of that takes some time and education with the partners we work with. But the technology is set up to give them an advantage for their multiple types of experience and their skills to really be the forefront of the hiring process versus that traditional chronological resume reading.

Obvious. Painfully obvious.

Yeah. To those in the community. Right. But if you're not thinking about that or you haven't experienced it or lived it, you know, it's one of those things that's easily looked over.

Got it. Take us back to the beginning. You. You had a partnership with Erica McMahons. How did you guys meet?

So we actually met in an online fitness group when we were both in Virginia at the same time in the military career. And then we realized we were. We lived in the same neighborhood and so there was like a four month period there where I was running my software business and she was consulting with some Silicon Valley startups for user acquisition in the military space. And her and I just kind of swapped notes. We were both passionate about helping military spouses and their careers just loosely at the time. And so our path crossed there. But it was about two years later that we reconnected, reached out with this idea to get it. To get it started, to Actually do something a little bit bigger about it. Yeah.

What, what year was that?

2016.

What was the first year like?

The first year was like any startup idea was like, okay, what, how do we actually solve this problem? You know, and let's do some market research. So the very first thing we did was put up a landing page to the military spouse community and ask them, you know, we know that, we know unemployment's an issue. It's been talked about for years, for decades at this point. So we already knew that. But it's like, okay, what solutions can we bring to you? What are the things that you're interested to and would you be willing to sign up? And they came in thousands in the first couple of months. And so we're like, okay, obviously there's a, there's a need here. We see it, we have data. And then we went to California actually, so Silicon Valley, and we met with three or four people and we bounced our idea off what we wanted to do and we started refining from that, that very first data set we had.

How did you come up with the idea? I mean, whose idea was this? Who, who connected the dots?

So Erica reached out to me. I was actually about to launch another business. All of my businesses had been solo up until this point, so. So solo entrepreneur. I had another one that was about ready to go. I love creating businesses and opportunities. She reached out to me and she was like, I have this idea. I had actually bought the Instant teams domain about 15 years ago because when I was running my own tech teams, I had a hard time like spinning them up in these different areas for the consulting contracts that I was on. And I was like, there wasn't a good software solution for it. And so I'd had that idea and I'd put it kind of on the back burner. And I had this, I had the URL. And she came to me and she pitched a similar idea about spinning up spouses in these cohorts for this military acquisition like she'd done in Silicon Valley. And so I, we kind of talked through it and we're like, maybe these are the same thing. Let's put these two things together and just see where we, where we land. Right? And so that technology piece with that community building piece, those two ideas kind of came from two different places, but together became what Instant Teams is now.

What experience can you share with first time business owners and entrepreneurs about how to what, what's important in that scrum phase, that first year phase, when you're really trying to formulate Your idea, you've already really dropped one bomb here, which is don't spend a lot of money until you test your idea a little bit. If you remember Tim Ferriss, the four hour work week, he spent I think $100. He thought the other title he had for that book he liked better, but he did a Facebook campaign and it was like overwhelming. 90 plus percent were clicking on the four hour work week. Well, I guess that's the. It was his alternate. So you did a similar thing, which is very, very smart. I mean, some people have an idea and then they go out, start building stuff before they really test it and try to get it over the target. Other than that, which you've already shared, what other things, what other experiences can you share with people that are in that first year and they've got an idea and they're trying to get it to the marketplace?

Yeah, I think from my experience, having a co founder change the trajectory of what we did infinitely. So going at it by yourself is great. I've done that before. I've done it four other times. Right. But when you have somebody who really complements your skills early on, that is the right co founder. Right. Because these also go very awry very quickly. But when you find the right person, you can accelerate what you're doing in ways that you can't even imagine. Just for that example, like the Tim Ferriss idea of following a formula, building cheap, testing your mvp, when you have two people doing it together, that goes so much faster. And that feedback loop can just be phenomenal. And so what we did was kind of divide up. I went to the business side and I said, all right, I'm going to work with the customers and I'm going to figure out what the problem is we're solving here. You double down on the community side and you figure out, you make the relationships on the military side, on the military spouse side. And we'll put these two things together and see where they start to intersect. And so that's kind of how we still do that to this day. I still lead the business side, she still leads the community side. Because it's kind of our natural inclinations from just our personalities and what we are naturally drawn to. But having a co founder, I always recommend it if you can get the right one. It is, it is game changing. And I would not have been able to scale the business like we have to the size that we have and so fast if I was trying to do this by myself.

You knew each other for two years before you started the business, yes.

But we, we knew of each other. We weren't friends. We. Which is kind of one of those people just assume, oh, you guys must have been best friends and then you started this company together. We weren't actually. We knew each other for a four month period and then we both removed through the army and then we just reconnected online. I mean, now I will consider her one of my best friends forever. Right. But we started because we had these ideas, we had complimentary skill sets, and we decided to build something to really make an impact together.

It's very rare. And I, I had a business that I built in college. It was auto salon, our detailing place. I upfitted the building. I basically did a small staff position of a local guy that was detailing cars. He had a good reputation and moved into that. And at the end of the day, the guy was a cocaine addict and he took a, which was a hundred thousand dollar car. And this was back in, you know, 1990 something, 1992, it was a, probably a $300,000 car now. And he took it to a neighboring town to buy drugs and he got pulled out of it and that whole thing. And at that moment in my, you know, 20, 22 years old, I said, I'm never going to go into business with somebody else again that I haven't had daily interaction with for one year.

Yeah.

Until I know who they are. So the fact that you guys had a peripheral relationship, then you were apart, and then you came back together and the fact that this worked out as well as it has, however, you're in the talent and you're in the skills business. So if you were, you were probably objective and you said, well, I'm a professional successful in this area. This is part of the business. She is professional and successful in this area. So if we can just, if we can just not kill each other, this should, this should go well.

Yes, yes. Our skill sets were complementary, but also one thing, Erica's emotional intelligence is off the charts. And so our ability to have really hard conversations. When we started the company, she was actually the CEO.

Okay.

And I was the CTO because of the technology. But as we moved into it, we realized our skill sets. Like, even though I know the technology, my skill is the vision, the big picture, where the company's going. Her skill set is the execution. Right. So then we swapped. I became the CEO and she became the CEO, and that's when we really started scaling.

Did you, did you come to that collectively or did one of you raise the issue?

No, we actually got sort of conned into this one of these assessment things that this person invited us to, but we thought it was free. And anyway, it ended up being a sales pitch at the end. But we both took this assessment and it was like the stars were there. Like, whoa. Liza is supposed to be the CEO, Erica is the operator. Like it was very plain as day as we went through it. You know, I think she even came and said, we need a swap. We're in the wrong position to get the company where we want it to go. And that, that takes a lot for somebody to be able to do that.

Yeah. And I'm a big fan of assessments. We use culture, we use culture index, but there's others out there and I mean it's like cheating. It's like, it's, if, you know, if you know where somebody's goat's tied, then you can go get it anytime you want to. And I mean, I've got family members in the business and there are certain, you know, why, you know, why are they this way? You know, why can't they all just be like me and as well? Because they're not wired that way and they're never going to be. So regardless, I mean, you can have three kids, you can have four kids and they are all, and they can be, they can feed them the same, you can bring them up in the same house, you can all go to the same stuff, the same activities, the same parenting, but everybody's going to have dispositions, characteristics, traits that are unique to them and they could be vastly different than their sibling. And you know, and I mean, much less a bunch of disparate people put together in a business. So I think assessments are like turning the lights on, you're groping around in the dark, hoping you got it right. But if you use the right assessments and you actually learn how to, how to use those within an organization, like they don't do any good if you take it and you keep it to yourself. Because now, now nobody knows that you're not a detailed person, you're very high and that you probably didn't go deep enough on this, so you just made a recommendation. But if somebody else didn't do the details, it's a guess because you, you feel it's right.

Yeah.

So do you guys, as a follow up to that assessment, do you two do anything on a regular basis to make sure your relationship is healthy or what's your cadence of, you know, management check ins or do you do off sites or trips?

What do you do we do all of those things. We built the company completely remotely so we've never lived in the same area since we started it in 2016. So keeping that strong has always been really important to us. We of course have management check ins, we've been doing founder off sites. We do those once a year where we do our planning. We travel a lot for conferences together. So we make sure we carve out time to do that and then we bring our leadership team on site here in North Carolina every single quarter. So we definitely intentionally carve out time, try to have fun sometimes because you know, most of the time it's like business, business, business. And so we try to get together and do something that is not business related. Although it's very hard when you're entrepreneurially wired. It always comes back to that. But we do try to spend some time doing some other things too.

Why is there so much debate around remote work? Work from home?

It's been interesting. It's even a hotter topic now.

It is.

I think it's, it's because it has to be intentional, right? It has to be the right roles in an organization and the culture has to be extremely intentional when you're doing remote work and you have to put in a lot of work to that and some organizations just aren't built to do that. And when you have hybrid teams that can cause a lot of tension, that can make things a little harder and so you have to work even harder. So I think most of that is if I see you and on a daily basis I know that you're working. If you're off somewhere else working from home or remotely, maybe I don't have as much insights. And so instead of intentionally building systems to empower that, some of the knee jerk reaction is just bring everybody back so I can get eyes on everybody and then reassess kind of who's doing what and how it's working. So it does have to be intentional. It's something we have built and worked on for years pre pandemic, pre, before anybody else was doing this at a massive scale to make sure that we were optimized in every single way from the remote work perspective. And you know, it is nice to have people in person. And so we do intentionally have our on sites where we bring everyone together because I do think face to face is also important and valuable. So it's not one or the other, it's how do we make it work together.

Where the current trends, Many companies are saying that everybody comes back into the office. Where do you think this is going and where do you think the compromise may land?

Yeah, well, it's been happening for probably what, two, two years now where Amazon took the lead and some other big companies because they have all this real estate that they have paid for.

Yeah, that's one thing.

For sure, that's one thing. So it's a cost and getting rid of it now isn't the best because there's not a lot of companies building up infrastructure like that anymore. And so I think that's driving part of it is they have, they have the space, they want to be able to utilize it. I think as they do the call back to office, it's, unfortunately, it is hurting women in the workforce, which is one of my huge proponents in life and has been, I am a big advocate for working women. For us to be able to find the balance between having the career, having a family, you can do all of those things. But when you have to go into an office, that just makes the challenge even harder for dual income families.

Right.

And the fact is you need a dual income family to survive in the economy that we have. And so by putting those restrictions, you're not going to get the best of the workforce in your company.

There's 95 million dogs in the United States. There's about 80 million kids. Pets have exploded, you know, and a lot of people bought dogs during COVID because they're like, I'm going to be home. When's ever a better time to train a puppy? And you know, as an employer, you think about, you know, what, what happens is, is when you find a performance issue and you find out that people have been taking advantage and maybe they've been using a mouse mover or, you know, they show up in meeting, you know, it's just, you hear the joke, you know, like everybody, everybody thinks they're in the office television show, right? And everything's funny and they're doing all this stuff and you know, none of it's productive. But like the reality of it is you probably just have the wrong person, you have the wrong, you know, you, you haven't created autonomy with clear goals and clear outcomes that people are responsible for. You haven't invested in the technology to make sure that people can be productive and deliver on those things. And so as a default, the easy thing is, is just say, well, I mean, we're in a 22,000 square foot office here and well, it's office warehouse and we have very, very talented people. Our business is national. So I mean we're, we're a franchise business. So by default of that, all of our businesses in other places, because the franchise owners go forth and I don't know how many. We have 700 territories operating now, 700 unique geographies that are operated by 230 franchise owners or whatever it is. And so, you know, and as we have a sales organization, well, if you want the right talented salespeople that are in a specialty like franchise sales, franchise development, you get them wherever they are, you know, and they're just, they're in a team's environment with, and everybody's doing what they need to do and the deals are converting at a certain percentage there, there's a time based element to getting back to people and you know, you can see everything in the numbers. So why would you have this incredibly talented salesperson that lives in Boise, Idaho, but they're an industry leader in what they do and you know, say, well, I can't, I can't work with you because you've got to move to North Carolina and just not going to happen. So conversely to that, what I'll say is young people, I mean, I learned sitting at the corner of a desk of some very, very smart executives and the ability to walk down the hall and to overhear, to view their mannerisms as they were managing to learn negotiation from them, you know, with the interpersonal skills and the body language and the tonality of it, you lose a lot of that over zoom. So if I was a young person, it would be very important for me not to be sitting in my second bedroom. It would be very important for me to get around people, to learn what I needed to learn. So I don't know where the balance is. And by the way, if you say we're remote, so you're 24, 25 years old, you got out of college, maybe this is your second job, sit in your bedroom. You know, I don't, it's like, are they really going to get. I mean, they were going to have to be really internally motivated, intrinsically motivated to learn, to grow, to get. I mean, I mean, we're tribal, we're people people. So if I'm established in my career and the value that I deliver is very specific based on my knowledge base and my contacts, the way that I deliver what I do, and I've got a family and you know, I've been in the office for 25 years and I don't need to be in anymore and still create all of the value, the sales and everything, then, you know, that's great. For me. So I don't know. I don't like. I mean, so yeah, do it. Do you want to create the opportunity? Do you like what's really best for everybody?

Yeah. Well, I think that's the caveat. There is not a one size fits all.

Right.

For every, every demographic, age, role, all of that has to be taken in consideration. Right. And you. I don't think a blanket. We're all remote all the time or we're never going to be remote. Statements are really helpful in organizations. I think it's a case by case. It's a roll by roll. Some people love coming in the office.

Yeah.

They get fuel from that. I'm sitting in my office right now. I'm a fully remote company, but I put an office here in North Carolina for the same reason. I have four or five other people sitting right next to me. Network, for instance, teams that come in.

Okay.

Right. I pull them in to the office. So again we say we're remote first but not remote only.

Got it.

Right. And so we enable connections across the globe for our team members to connect with each other, meet up for coffees, have virtual and in person events across the globe that we do for the community for instant teams, employees. And so it's finding kind of that balance because the military spouse community needs the remote work so they keep their job. There are some locations they can come into if they're there a little bit longer. Right. But not all jobs is why we don't do technology. Because software engineers, to your point, a junior engineer needs to sit by a senior engineer.

Yes, yes.

It just, it just. They just have to. And if it's really hard to replicate that in a remote environment. Not impossible, but has to have so much intention behind it that it's. Companies aren't going to spend the money to do that. So that's why we don't do remote engineering. Although I'd love to. That entry level part is hard. To your point. Young professionals needing the guidance getting the things that they just grab by being in the same room.

Yeah. So as you look at this future, you're mostly domestic United States, but you've got people outside. You know, what do you see for instant teams in terms of the next two to three years from a growth perspective or a market perspective, Is there anything that you're worried about some headwinds or do you think it's all tailwinds? Companies are growing. Companies. AI is fueling a lot of agility inside of companies with respect to technology. That means that there's A lot of people that are going to have to adopt, adapt better said to new tools. What they did before moving this from here to there is now done by a tool. So it creates all of this churn and all of this swirl inside of everybody's business right now. So how does Instant Teams plan to take advantage of that and grow again?

Yeah, I am actually very excited about the adoption of AI personally, our position at InstantEams, our teams kind of sit on top of those layers. Right. We don't do very, very entry level call routing and things like that that a lot of These other bigger BPOs do that are going to get hit by the AI integration. Yes, but because we sit on top of that layer and we are the problem solvers, the escalation points, the people who can be trained in AI. So we have a partnership with Grow with Google training our individuals in AI. Right. So they can sit on top of that layer. And so to me that's a tailwind for us because we are US based resources. Hopefully there's some more tailwinds and using US brands and US products coming our way in the next few years. And so if that is happening that's, that's a tailwind for us as well. But the technology shift is a great place for us because those entry level jobs are going to be replaced by people that need to be able to understand, implement and operate the AI which is our layer. And so I'm very excited about being able to see that be adopted a little bit more. Right now it's in space. A lot of the retailers have really grabbed onto that quickly. The more traditional areas kind of where we operate in financial services and insurance, they're a little bit slower to adopt. But in the next few years you're going to see that start to catch up.

Yeah, that probably has to do with margins. People that have larger margins are feel less, less urgent in changing the way they do things.

Yeah. But eventually it comes together.

Yeah, 100%. You've used the term BPO a couple of times. Can you share with the audience exactly what a BPO is and maybe how it's different than a traditional staffing organization?

Sure. BPO is business process outsourcing. That's what it stands for. And so that's when you outsource an entire function to an organization versus you ask for four or five staff members that plug into your operations as a company. BPO is done in a lot of different ways, but the way Instant Teams does it is boutique. So we're considered a boutique BPO in that our resources will plug straight into your technology and your systems versus you being forced to use ours. And so that makes us more of an integrated partner, which can kind of blur the line a little bit staffing and bpo, but gives us an advantage to really work with our customers in really deep, detailed ways that if we used our own call routing software and our own metric tracking system, you wouldn't have as much visibility into. And so our goal is to have our military spouses plugged into your organization as tightly as can be, but still with all the benefits of outsourcing so they're not on your payroll. We're taking care of all of that, hiring and putting them on the teams for you. But we're working as partners there in that technology piece together.

Got it. Thank you for that. You started the company in 2016. When did it become apparent that you were going to need to raise money?

About a year in, once we started testing all the waters, we actually had named it something different to start with. About a year in, we like, okay, this is getting traction. There's the need here. We're finding the product market fit. That's when we decided to turn it into Instant Teams to put the technology behind it. So it was all hand done processes systems up until that point, just landing pages and shiny objects that I was able to create. And so at that point we knew we had something and we knew we wanted to scale it. I knew that I wanted to make this bigger than any other business that I'd done so far. And to do that I was going to have to raise money. And so we changed the name to Instant Teams. At that point I went through the Founder Institute program specifically to build a network in the investment side. And that's when we started the journey of really scaling the company. That's also when we switched roles. All that kind of happened at once. About a year in.

I want to double click on that. For people that are starting to build a business, they go out and they think they have a business that they want to build, so they start immediately working on the technology. But the right way to do it is people first, process second, and technology third. And you know, because if not so ultimately what happens, and I know this because I've done this like 8,000 times, is you start working on making a process efficient that doesn't need to exist in the first place. So unless you know when you, you can do a lot with spreadsheets and with paper and with people and then you go out and run your business A little bit. And yeah, it's going to take a little bit longer because you're on spreadsheets and you're on process maps and that you're doing in some little software or whatever. But that's where you optimize the business. That's, you know, you're, you're not searching for efficiency from day one. You're looking for effectiveness. Like what works, why does it work, why do these people use this? What's going to be getting in our way? So after you go out and you deploy the business for a year or 18 months and now it's like, okay, this is working. We've been doing it the same way. We've got a game plan, we got a playbook, whatever you want to call it. We understand who our customer is now, we understand how to articulate the problems that we solve, we understand how to implement, we understand how to do all this stuff. And it's killing us. It's absolutely crushing us. That's when you now you take your requirements of the business that you have just built and you say, okay, now you do exhaustive requirements and then you go out and you build a technology which is oftentimes small businesses stay small if they can't find a way to do that because that is their impediment to scale. And so you knew because of your background in computer science engineering that okay, I know how to do this, I see what it needs, I can write the requirements and it's going to cost. So that's where. So, so once you got to that point, tell us how you went about. What is the Founders Institute, by the way?

So the Founder Institute is a national program that helps entrepreneurs that want to build VC backed scalable companies. So they're very focused in technology, right? So if you're wanting to scale a large organization, you want to raise money, you go through their programs and they help build a network. So I went through the program in D.C. i drove up there every day for three months from Fort Lee, Virginia where we were stationed at the time, to basically start building the network. I already had the business. So it kind of helps you kind of build business at the beginning and then it has a second phase where they help you raise money. If you've like, you're at the top of the classes, right? You get invited to like the second.

Phase, like an incubator where they give you office space and they have executives roaming around and you can ask them questions and they have a coffee bar.

It's not. No, it's not Quite as formal as that. The Founder Institute is. Is more of a looser program. And they do, they do put. Have a warrant in the company. It's how they make their money in the end, from the exited individuals. But it's more of a network of support. There's a short program, but they really just teach you how to speak investor.

Okay.

Right. And from my perspective, I wasn't around any investors. I couldn't do a friends and family round because I didn't know anybody who had any money when I started Instant Teams. So I was like, I've got to figure out how to build a network here. And that's really kind of. I. We had an advisor who helps run some of their programs, and he was like, liza, if you go into the program, I can help open that network. But you got to be in the program for me to do that. And so that's kind of how I went. And then, interestingly enough, like every military spouse journey wouldn't. What makes this population so unique and such great employees is I was able to build that kind of a network everywhere I got moved while I was raising money.

So does the, does the Founder Institute have a network in every city or many cities?

Yeah, they're. They're. Yeah, many, many cities and countries. So they're an international organization. But every single network place that I would move to, it'd be kind of like a new network. So when I, as soon as I decided I was raising money, I got orders to Hawaii and I was like, how am I gonna raise money from Hawaii? Like, Hawaii sounds great, but not exactly the Mecca of venture capital. So I built a network there with the Hawaii Angels and Blue startups. And I just repeated that same process everywhere. I got planted, and that's how I've been able to be successful.

There's so many groups like that out there. I've gone to several of these things. And I mean, it's all people with money and experience and people that have sold businesses and, you know, whether it's tiger 21 or whatever, I mean, there was one I went over. I can't even think of. There's so many, and they're obscure, but, like, everybody's looking for that next big thing. Everybody wants to find smart entrepreneurs. They want to get in early. And it's a. I tell you, if you have money to put to work, wherever these things are happening in your local city, these are great places because sometimes these are companies that can really solve a problem. I mean, it's the obviousness of great businesses. After they're started is just like, why didn't I think of that? You know, but. But because. Because of the way that our economy and then our business environment changes, new niches are getting created every day, and it's just. You just have to be able to see it, you know. Oh, because this happened now. This happened. I mean, we have a brand that we're launching, I think is going to be the fastest brand in franchising, and it has to do. We have a proprietary product and there's a big industry that is. The insurance is pulling back their coverage of a certain event. So that's massive. You know, tens of billions of dollars of this type of service that the insurance company is no longer going to pay for, and they're going to make it very difficult to pay for. There's also been some changes in the product where the product doesn't last as long as it used to. So we have the. Just the. I saw it and I was just introduced to it and I saw it and it just. I knew these other data points and I'm like, this is a niche. This is. This is the most obvious thing in the world. But somebody has to have the courage, like, okay, I'm going to start writing checks and we're going to put this behind the curtain and we're going to put it into a little. A little shop and we're going to build this thing and hopefully before, you know, then we're going to launch it and we're going to start running before other people see it and that. So have there been other instant teams, fast followers and imitators out there?

Yeah, I mean, people have tried to copy what we've done along the way.

I feel good.

You know, at first it's kind of like really like. Because usually someone you've had somewhat of some interactions with, you know, and you're like, you're. You kind of personally. Kind of take it personally at first, but then you're. But then, you know, you know there's a market, right? If you have something that you're creating, somebody else trying to create it, you know, there's a market for it. So that's a good sign. Competition is good. And then I always say, you know, this journey has been hard. I won't. I won't sugarcoat it. Being an entrepreneur is not easy. You've built multiple companies. You know, it takes an amazing amount of grit, effort, time, heart, soul. Everything is poured into it. So most of the time, I'm just like, more power to you if you can make this happen. You go for it because it's not easy. And that just means there's more opportunity to create. So it's an interesting experience as a founder to watch and most of them kind of die off after a while. I don't know any of them that have made it too far in the process.

I think that's where I look back to and say, at the end of the day, if we had a good idea and we created a good business that other people want to copy, then I think that's an indicator we're on the right path. But at the end of the day, it's our execution and it's our personal and professional standards that are going to be what wins. So do you think that you're going to build a business that nobody else in the United States is going to actually, if it works, is going to copy. You're going to be copied by startups out of people's garages. You're going to be, you're going to have well funded private equity people that are going to start a fast follower to you. I mean, if you have a good idea, like, okay, maybe you've got six months, maybe you've got a year, people might look and see, is this going to work? Is it not going to work? But like they're coming for, for you, so you might as well not even worry about it. You know, you just like, like, right, put the blinders on, don't worry. I mean, I think what is it the hedgehog concept with good to great, you know, like worry about you like.

You like, right, yeah, you don't have time.

Force yourself into planned obsolescence. Challenge everything you do. Be like Elon Musk and just start stripping things away and see if it breaks it. And like, if you can get like, like, you know, I mean, that's a great thing. I think, I think Musk in a lot of things, he just leaves everything open source because he's like, if you can do it and you can chase us, God bless you.

Right, that's exactly how I feel.

I mean, let's go, it's on, right? And then, and then what happens is too, is so if, let's just say that some of these people were personally known to you. When they find out it's a little bit harder and a little bit longer and you're better at it, then you're like, okay, well, you've developed some customer base, you've developed a couple of things, I'll just go ahead and buy you. And now you Know, at the end of the day, the ones that win are the ones that just. I mean, if you look at the big tech companies or the fang today, it's like anything that gets any traction, here's $1 billion. Because we're not going to let you get any more traction. You know, we're going to. We're going to pay you 100 times what it's worth today, and then it's going to take somebody else three years to come behind. And that's, you know, that's another strategy. Right. So being. Being the leader, you're. You're a lion and you're eating. You are the you. If you want to be the leader, then you got to be the king of the hill, and you got to be able to eat any. Anything that challenges you for your dominance. Well, that got it. Got very aggressive.

Yep. You have to be aggressive if you're gonna win. You're in this game. You have to be aggressive.

Well, so. So you hadn't ra. You didn't have friends with money, family with money, and you needed to go raise money. Talk about that experience.

Yeah. Well, one thing that's very unique to my experience is as a military spouse who has four children, a traditional fundraising process was not going to be in the cards for me. So traditionally, you go on this, like, road showish thing, right? You try to raise money for four months. You know, I have four kids and a husband who's.

You could have just. You could have just brought me, dressed them in crappy clothes, had them stand up there behind you like, we need this money so bad.

Yeah. Somehow I don't think that put dirt.

Up, dirt on their face.

Not from a position of strength there. So. So I did it non traditionally pre Covid. So I raised every single round of funding that we raised for instantines completely virtual. So even before it was a thing, because I was in Hawaii and I have children, I couldn't go off. So I had to be very strategic about it. I will say I dug into relationships with everything. And one of the things, from the very first check that I've ever gotten, I get. I did monthly updates to all my investors until we did Series A. And at that point, I do quarterly notes to every single investor, every single check, no matter if it was $25,000 or $2 million, they still get communication from me and still get that kind of personal touch, and they know I'll take a call with any of them at any time if they want to dive into anything. But I started that very, very early on. And most of my early stage investors would say, you are the only portfolio company that has ever kept communicating with us and kept us in the loop of things. And so by the time I went to raise the next round, guess who was giving me all the warm intros? Yeah, all of those people I stayed in contact with. But I can trace my very first check to my tiger intro which closed my series a round they tie directly together and that's because there's a power in relationships and, and to be authentically building them along the journey. And I feel an obligation to our investors because in the beginning I had an idea, I had a little bit of money like customers coming in. But they, they, they believed in me and I want to give them a return. Right. I feel very obligated to them, but I want to make sure that I am being true to my relationships that I built. And I think that is the single thing besides having the good business idea, the good business plan, the metrics, all of those things I have. But that relationship building changed the way I think I was able to raise money and enabled me to do that successfully. Where other people may have struggled by not keeping those communication lines is open and consistent.

There's a team required of special skills when you're raising money. How did you put yours together and who was on it in terms of position wise, not names?

Well, I mean to be honest, I was the team.

Well, but you need, you need somebody putting, you need legal, you need somebody, you need finance, you need people understanding. You need to be able to put together a sim, you know, a prospectus. Like how is that? Is. Was that from the Founder Institute that you were able to. Is that something they do?

Yeah. So they don't put those things together, but they teach you how to have like a data.

Okay.

The things that you need, you know, for investors to look at as far as how to do performance, I did tons of those in Founder Institute. Right. It's my very first experience of putting one together free. You can contract that stuff out early stage. So I did contract out like people that had CFO experience to help me build the performer to make sure it's making sense from that perspective, any kind of mentor that I could kind of grab for a conversation. It's like valuation. What does this make sense? This is what I'm thinking. Some of those came from Founder Institute, some of those came from initial conversations at Blue Startups, which was in Hawaii. So just kind of building that network of support, having. We had very local lawyers to start off. With. But now we have, like, Goodwin Proctor, so one of the big legal firms in the United States. So you kind of grow small, figure it out, and then kind of mature those things as you go through and raise. Like, you don't have to start off in that mature state. They don't really expect you to. Investors at the early stage, but they expect you to know how to structure it and they expect you to know how to figure it out. Right. That's the main thing is this. Is this founder that I'm investing in going to figure it out? I don't expect her to know everything, but I need to look at her and say she's going to run through a brick wall if she needs to, to figure this problem out. That's the kind of person I'm putting my money in.

Any lessons learned going through the process, if you were going to do it again today?

I think the one piece of advice that I got the entire time was to raise more than you need. If I could go back, I would raise less.

Really? And less equity.

Yes. Yeah. At the stages. Right. And it's easy to say that after the fact. Right. Because it's like, would I have figured out these things without the money? I don't know. But I think I took on a little bit more than I needed at the stage stages that I was at. So if I could go back, I would probably do a little less. I think it's. As a founder, you have to. You will. You hear, they count. Call it mentor whiplash. You will get advice from everywhere, and it will all be different. And you have to. I think in your book, you have discernment. I mean, you have to, as the founder, discern what the right path is. Because ultimately you are the one that knows. You can get all the information in, you can collect it in. You need to sit with it, and you need to pull all of that data together. But at the end, your gut will tell you where you're supposed to go. And you need to listen to it. You need to listen to it, and you need to not lose it through the whole journey because it's easy to start to get. You built a big company, and now these people who have done these big things start to come in and you're like, wait a minute, that doesn't feel right. Anytime I felt that, it's always been wrong, I was always right. Like, I should have went with my gut feeling.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah. Anytime I defer, it's. That's. That statement right there has probably cost me more money. And more wasted time and more latency and than anything else is just saying, well, I hired this person, they're an expert, I'm going to defer to them. But, like, your spider sense is just tingling. They don't care as much as you care. And you really, you got to go all the way down and figure out if you're going to find out generally that your, your sense of it was correct. So does a board. Do you. Does a board sit between you and your investors?

Yes. So we have a formalized board. I just did my board meeting on Friday, last week for the year end. So have a great supportive board. I do send out after the board meetings, I send out investor updates to all the investors and then they can reach out to me if they want one on ones. Some investors do, some don't. They all ask, how can I help? So I always have that in all of my investor updates. Like, here's a way you can help. Here's something I'm looking for because they enjoy being part of the process too.

Fantastic. You have a set of values, and I'm interested to know, you know, to the extent that these have helped you in difficult times. I like to say values break the ties. Your values create a big fence around what's expected and what's tolerated in an organization. And, you know, being true to those values will help make tough decisions. It'll let people join you or not join you. And again, it breaks the ties and difficult because sometimes as business owners, it's not clear what the right thing to do is. And you've got these four, I think, and you correct me if I'm wrong, this could be old. I mean, I dug this out. But we take ownership, we build. We build. We team build to build teams, which I really like that one. We embrace change daily and we lead with intentional curiosity. I'm interested around this. This. We team build to build teams. What does that mean?

Yeah, so we actually added that core value probably almost two years ago now as the company started to scale. So instant teams. Obviously, we build teams for our brands that we work with. But what we were kind of seeing is like, we were so focused on the teams we were building for the brands that we were kind of losing that internal, like, feeling of building our teams within the organization. And so Erica and I sat down and we're like, okay, we need to embody this. Because the other thing we do is we give core value awards every month and every quarter to individuals in the company who are demonstrating that particular skill and they can be nominated or we can see them operating in it. But really focusing on our relationships with each other internally within the organization. Some people like to call it family, I like to call it our teams that we're building together. Making sure that that bond is strong and that we are in sync with each other so that we can then therefore do that for our customers is really important. And so we highlight that as one of our core values. And it was added, you know what, seven years in to the process because I think your values also, you see what you need as a company and you kind of see them evolve and you say, okay, this is an area that we would like to put a focus on and we'd like to improve. And so we added that one to the list.

If reality matches your vision for the company, in five years, what types of things are going to be going on at Instant Teams?

Well, obviously I'm a big dreamer. I have big goals. So we, we want to continue to be the largest employer of military spouses. That's our goal. I would say we're well on our way there from a optics perspective. And a lot of companies employ military spouses. So it's something that I'm very proud of. So in five years, you know, I, I want to continue to be the leader, but I want to be the leader in a way that is recognized on a global scale.

Awesome. Heading towards the barn. Before we do that, where can people get in touch with you if they're interested in contacting you or engaging your services?

Okay. Me personally, LinkedIn's the best way to get me. Liza rodewald is my LinkedIn name and handle, so I'm easy to find. If you can spell it out, contact me on LinkedIn. I'm on there. My EA is on there constantly. So I'll get your message if you reach out to me on there. Instant Teams. If you go to instantteams.com, contact us there. You can talk to our sales team, you can talk to individuals. And if you are a military spouse or a veteran that is looking for employment, you can also go to instantteams.com and begin your journey signing up with us on the career seeker side as well.

Awesome. Last question. If you had one sentence to make an impact in somebody's life based upon your journey, what would that be?

One sentence to make an impact. I would say stick to your principles and your values and to never give up. Don't quit.

Perfect. Perfectly said. This has been great. Thank you for being on.

Thank you.

I am Jeff Duden and we have been here with Liza Rodewald with Instant Teams, and we have been on the home front. Thanks for listening.