Subscribe
During retirement ceremonies, the spouse is thanked for their sacrifice, their time spent raising the kids, and keeping the house running during the many TDY’s, PCS and deployments. Often at the expense of having a career themselves.
“Maintaining my career has been the biggest challenge of being a military spouse,” said Crystal Kingery. She has figured out how to not only have a successful career but to create a business that moves with her from PCS to PCS all while maintaining a stable house through two deployments and countless TDY’s.
“My pre-military spouse career path of location-based employment and working my way up the ladder of the same company was getting harder and harder to sustain,” Crystal continued. “With every move came at least six months of unemployment and the inevitable job hunt. Many times leading to taking a job for less than what I was making before or a step down in the role I was previously at. During one duty station, I decided to get on board with a previous co-worker who was creating a startup software company. We were in different states and therefore the agreement was mutual that I would be a remote employee regardless of where the military moved us.
Working remotely became the key to unlocking a whole new work style that suited the military way of life.
“This was such a relief for my career as I stayed with the company for three years and through three states. As with many startup companies they had their struggles and I ended up converting from an employee to an independent contractor,” Crystal said. “Now I was only working with them on specific projects, therefore leaving me with the extra time to devote to working with other clients.”
Crystal honed in on her passion for working with startups and small businesses. “Realizing all the skills I have gained over the years of employment and narrowing in on the work I truly loved to do- helping small businesses with their operations- I set out to find other clients. I built up a great client list from sites like Upwork and then just word of mouth. After a few years of working with great clients on implementing and running their operational systems, I realized my real passion was advising and consulting small businesses that wanted to grow their business into new markets.”
Hoping to help other spouses, Crystal said, “If you are job hunting and interested in a remote position, keep in mind that ‘remote’ is a location and not a title or position. Many spouses that I work with are interested in work-from-home jobs and may do a general search on this term. This will not yield quality results. But rather doing a search by the title or position you are seeking and then including remote at the end, will give you better results.”
Just like the Air Force, Crystal has a set of core values that she wants to follow: “I needed and thrived on my freedom. Freedom to take my business with me wherever I go, freedom to select the clients I am excited to work with and freedom to work with them within my boundaries of time.”
And just like in the military she is always ready to face the next challenge and face the next obstacle, whatever that may be.
| Date Taken: | 10.12.2021 |
| Date Posted: | 10.14.2021 10:45 |
| Story ID: | 407233 |
| Location: | MONTGOMERY, AL, US |
| Web Views: | 26 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Military spouse, mother, business owner, by TSgt Robert Kingery, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
LEAVE A COMMENT