This dynamic duo’s prowess produces work-from-home careers for military spouses around the world.
Long before the COVID-19 pandemic produced a remote work revolution, Instant Teams co-founders Liza Rodewald and Erica McMannes were trailblazers for work-from-home careers, having set up shop in everything from a cobweb-infested basement to a bedroom closet.
“I’ve held meetings from a toilet,” says McMannes, who serves as Instant Teams’ chief people and community officer. “During a deployment, there were two locked doors between me and the children. The bathroom was the only way I could have that promise of no interruptions.”
But neither spiders, cramped military housing nor a combined eight PCS moves in six years has derailed the pairs’ goal of building Instant Teams into the world’s No. 1 employer of military spouses. Instant Teams taps the talent-rich military-connected community to deliver fully-integrated remote teams to companies seeking customer support, operational support, sales support and telehealth specialized workers. Clients range from small businesses to industry titans such as Amazon, Walmart, and Prudential.
“We have big, ambitious goals,” explains Rodewald, Instant Teams’ chief executive officer. “We want to capture the military spouse community and be able to take care of them along our way as we grow the company and take it public.”
While the pandemic took a toll on many startups, the past two years served as real world validation of Instant Teams’ business model and eliminated many companies’ No. 1 objection to hiring a remote workforce, which was a desire to occasionally have employees work in an office or live in a state with a corporate office.
“Now that objection is not even there,” Rodewald says. “Everyone’s pretty much onboard. I think it’s great for the military spouse community that needs these remote work options to be able to continue their careers and not have to start over [at each duty station].”
Joining Instant Teams begins with creating a digital profile called “My Story” that empowers spouses and veterans to highlight their skills, experience, and availability for remote work without worrying about employment gaps or other military-lifestyle-related resume red flags.
“We’ve created ‘My Story’ to allow you to bring the narrative of who you are and what you’ve done without the stigma of the things you would think traditional employers would be looking at,” McMannes explains. “It’s creating a story and a narrative of the skillsets you bring to be matched with the work we provide.”
Because crafting My Story can be challenging for some spouses, Instant Teams has a Readiness Team that will provide a free 20-minute mentoring session.
“If you’ve had 10 different jobs in 20 years and you don’t know how to compact all of that in a way that will make your My Story strong so we can find the type of work you’re looking for, our Readiness Team will work you through that,” McMannes adds.
Remote Readiness Skills Training, a virtual work-from-home boot camp, is part of Instant Teams’ holistic approach to supporting its employees, as are company-sponsored career-building, community-engagement, and culture-enhancing programs.
McMannes points out self-assessment is an important step when starting a remote career journey. She also suggests taking advantage of career development and training opportunities available to military spouses.
“Help us to help you. You have to know what you bring to the table. That’s the starting point, especially at Instant Teams,” she says. “We are really focused on our business solution. We are the employer.”
Having completed a successful $13 million round of venture capital financing in March, Instant Teams is on the fast track to continued growth. The startup has doubled its revenue every year and recently was named to Inc. Regionals’ list of fast-growing companies in the Mid-Atlantic Region.
“We’re excited that the bigger we grow as a company, the more we can use those dollars to invest back in our growth and in the community, and more military spouses will get jobs at the end of the day,” says Rodewald, who credits Founder Institute, a “pre-seed” accelerator, for teaching her the fundamentals of raising capital.
Instant Teams recently opened an office in Pinehurst, N.C., where Rodewald is located while her husband serves as an ROTC instructor at a nearby university. The company also is considering obtaining space at a coworking center near the Raleigh Research Triangle.
“What the pandemic has taught us is that while people want to be 100% remote, they also want an opportunity to engage in person,” McMannes explains. “We have a large base of team members in North Carolina so we decided to get an office space as a home base for our employees and a company event space.”
Instant Teams’ workforce has grown to over 600 team members in more than 40 states and overseas who enable 24/7 support to client companies. More than 90% of team members are women. Instant Teams offers medical, vision and dental coverage, paid time off after 61 days of employment, sick leave, an annual cost of living raise and other benefits.
A Facebook message from McMannes to Rodewald suggesting the power of the military spouse community as a remote workforce was the aha moment that became the genesis for Instant Teams founding in 2016, pairing Rodewald’s tech-platform building prowess and experience running remote teams with McMannes’ deep grasp of the military community’s need for portable careers.
Before becoming an Army spouse and co-founding Instant Teams, Rodewald owned a New York-based tech company that provided enterprise software solutions to governments and healthcare systems using a fully remote team. McMannes, meanwhile, graduated college and became an Army spouse before moving to a small town in Alabama, where she got rejected for the two available job openings. During the next decade, McMannes worked in military child development centers until two moves in three years and the birth of her second child left her unemployed. While living in California, she got introduced to a Silicon Valley startup that offered her an opportunity to build local brand ambassador communities, a job that leveraged her ties to the military spouse community.
While many programs aim to connect military spouses to job openings, Instant Teams takes the opposite approach. It solves talent-acquisition problems for businesses by connecting companies to a pipeline of skilled military-connected remote workers.
“Companies do [want to hire military], but they have to have a business case for why to do it,” Rodewald maintains. “And, that’s what we’ve created.”
As female business owners, military spouses and mothers, McMannes and Rodewald would be the first to admit their plates often are overflowing.
“Liza and I have always said it’s harmony, not balance. There is no balance. We all know that,” McMannes says. “But approaching it from a harmony mindset means all of those things can work together if you know how to communicate to the right players, and if you know how to prioritize and organize.”
But harmony wouldn’t be obtainable without a work-from-home job.
“If I had to go to a downtown office and do what I do from home, I either wouldn’t have a business or I wouldn’t have a family,” McMannes says. “Neither of those is a good situation. The remote work opportunity has been magic. That’s why we are energized about providing that for more spouses.”