Frontline Support Solutions
Frontline Support Solutions, Shortcut Blogging’s very first client, is a “Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned” general-contracting and facility-management firm based in San Antonio, Texas. Frontline provides good jobs for able and disabled veterans within the construction and services industries. Once those veterans are proficient in their trade of choice, Frontline aims to help those interested in entrepreneurship start their own businesses and take advantage of and compete for significant business opportunities in specific industries. Aside from its commitment to helping veterans get ahead, the firm is focused on construction projects and facility support with an emphasis on energy conservation and sustainable building practices. It was founded in 2010 by Joe Perez, an experienced businessman and entrepreneur with more than 27 years of combined military and civilian leadership and business management experience.
Note: You can also watch a video case study version of this content.
A Focus on Helping Veterans
“The reason I started my business was to hire veterans and service-disabled veterans to teach them how to be entrepreneurs, with the focus of doing work for the federal government. Because that’s what I know, and I’ve been doing it since I got out of the military,” says Frontline Support Solutions founder Joe Perez, who left active duty in 1998.
Perez knew that he had a lot of business experience and knowledge that he could share with other veterans, and he thought a blog would be a good way to get that information out. But blogging was something completely new for him.
“‘How do I blog?’” Perez recalls thinking. “I’d never blogged before. I’d read a bunch of blogs, but I’d never done it. I didn’t know how to manage that effort. And frankly, that’s not what I do.”
Perez did create a blog on his own, but he didn’t manage to do much with it. In two years, he recalls, “I think I had like three posts or something like that.”
It’s a very common experience in blogging: People put up a blog and then just stare at it without knowing what to do. So when Shortcut Blogging’s founders approached Perez with their idea of making blogging simple and easy, he was intrigued.
“If someone could do that for me or help take some of that burden off me, it would be helpful to me to get more information out and allow me to concentrate on something that I know and that I’m good at,” he remembers thinking.
“When you approached me with this idea, I said, ‘Well, hell, I think this will work, because I want to try to get my voice out there.’” Perez recalls. “I think the only way I can touch more people and the target folks that I want to help is to explain to them what I do.”
From Once in a Blue Moon to Once a Week
Now, thanks to Shortcut Blogging, he says, “We post once a week.”
“The folks that I’m trying to touch, just because of what I’m doing, are veterans who are getting out of the military now or have gotten out in the last few years,” he explains. “They’re relatively young—my age or younger. The ones I’m targeting are Gulf War I veterans and newer, because they’re of the age that they can go into the workforce. They’ve been involved in the most modern conflicts that we’ve been engaged in as a country.”
“They have a level of technical expertise that older generations don’t have,” he continues. “The Vietnam-era vets don’t have that. They don’t typically deal with a computer or blogs or podcasts, but the newer generation does, and those are the ones that I’m targeting. And, frankly, those are the folks that I’m trying to help become entrepreneurs. It’s just what I want to do.”
As a byproduct of his efforts to help veterans, Perez says, he has also had to run and grow Frontline Support Solutions into a profitable company—and that’s been a success.
“Last year, 2012, was absolutely our best year ever. And May 1, 2013 is going to be three years in business,” he says. “It’s actually better than when I was running my family’s business. I mean, my family’s business is 44 years old now, and my business is three—and I’ve already caught up in sales with them, which is freakin’ awesome!”
“But this year, unfortunately, within the last month, the sequestration that has happened within the federal government has really turned off the spigot for folks like me,” Perez acknowledges. “I’m a little guy compared to the monster defense contractors who can withstand this kind of pressure. For small guys like me, it’s tough.” One way of weathering the economic problems, he says, is looking beyond government, to commercial opportunities. “The commercial side is actually improving in my area of the country,” he notes. One of the things he stresses in his blog is being nimble and staying vigilant to see where the opportunities lie.
Podcasting is Easy and Sounds Great
Perez opted not only to create blog posts, but also podcasts as well. Perez works with Chris, one of Shortcut Blogging’s professional interviewers, who asks him questions as if he were a studio guest. “I actually commented about that specifically to Chris. I said, ‘Hey, you know, I feel like I’m being interviewed like on TV or something.’”
“He’s been great,” Perez says of Chris. “He’s clearly got the skills…. He’s been working in the radio industry a long time.”
“He knows how to have a conversation, how to ask the right questions and lead me and just let me talk,” says Perez. “And if I’m getting off the subject, he knows how to pull me back in—which is a good thing, because then when it comes to the editing part, I assume that it makes it much easier…. You know, the stuff that I don’t see.”
Being Shortcut Blogging’s very first client, Perez says, the early days were something of “a work in progress.”
“The interviews were much longer, and they were good, but they were a little bit cumbersome,” he remembers. “We’ve evolved since then and made them shorter, more concise, and—I think—better.”
Posting 50,000 Words per Year
The Shortcut Blogging team creates a transcript of each interview, and then rewrites and edits those transcripts to turn them into blog posts. Within the first two months, Shortcut Blogging helped Perez double the word count on Frontline’s blog, and within a year, it had grown to more than 50,000 words.
“We put a lot out there,” says Perez, though he notes that the Shortcut Blogging process helps him distill his message, making it more readable. “Probably double that has come out of my mouth. But with your process, you then go behind the scenes and edit out all the “ums” and “ahs” and all the dead space and actually make it very concise and cogent.”
“You still get the essence of what I said in a paraphrased fashion, a very well written document,” he says. “So, that’s been very helpful. There have been very, very few times that I’ve had to get in there and say, ‘Oh, that’s not what I meant.’ And I change a word, or a year was maybe a little bit off—but that’s minor. Literally, what it would have taken me to actually do this myself—I’d probably still have three posts!”
In addition to the blog on the Frontline website, Perez’s podcast is now available via the iTunes store. “So you can be anywhere in the world and download my podcasts just by doing a search for me and identifying it,” says Perez. “It’s cool for me because I’m not one of those kind of guys that know how about that stuff, but it brings an air of professionalism.” And Perez says he hears from grateful listeners from time to time.
Going from Blogger to Author?
Would Perez recommend Shortcut Blogging to other business owners, would-be authors, or others who may have a story to tell but just don’t have the time or perhaps the skills to get that information across?
“Oh, absolutely, I would recommend it,” he says. “It’s been very affordable, in my opinion, and well worth it,” Perez says.
One outcome of having created so much material: “I have just about enough content now where I can combine all the stuff that I’ve already pulled out of my head—with the help of your interviewer—and organize it so that I can write a book.” At the 15-month mark, Frontline’s blog is now close to 60,000 words—just the right size for a business book.
“Places all over the net and people I’ve met recommend you write a book because it gives you a lot of credibility in what you’re trying to do,” he explains. “In this case, I’m not looking for the credibility, but what I’m trying to do is get this information out to help veterans find work as entrepreneurs.”
“We’ve talked about tons of different subjects within the landscape of entrepreneurs,” says Perez. “Everything from writing a business plan to ‘Where do I find work with the government? How do I do that?’ I mean, the federal government is literally the largest customer in the world. But within that one entity, you have thousands of agencies and small quasigovernmental organizations that use the federal government’s system to buy products—everything from toilet paper to freakin’ howitzers. … So if you have a ware, you have a service, you have something that you manufacture, you could sell to the government. Maybe you just don’t know how to do it.”
Take, for example, someone who’s been a gunsmith all his life, Perez explains. “The government buys guns—millions of them. There are folks like the Special Forces or certain law enforcement agencies within the federal government—the DEA, for example—who have specialized guns. Well, if you have the skill to manage, maintain, or fix those kinds of guns, well, you could sell to the government! You just need to know what your piece is and how you find the people to buy your stuff.”
“There are so many different subjects I’ve talked about,” he continues. “Within those subjects, I can break it down: This is how we do government contracting, this is how I identify a mentor that wants to mentor me in my business, this is how I do collaborations or a joint ventures with another company to help leverage my skill set.” That vast collection of information, the combined product of Chris’s professional interviews and Perez’s knowledge, will form the basis for his upcoming book.
Helping Veterans Find Resources
One of the challenges for veterans entering the business world, Perez points out, is that they simply don’t know about all the resources available to them.
“What I talked to Chris quite a few times about is that if you’re a veteran today, there’s money set aside for you to start a company or grow what you already have. So many veterans don’t even know these benefits exist! Just like a VA home loan, which is backed by the federal government, well, you can do that for a business now. And it’s been around for some years now, but you’d be surprised how many vets that I talk to that say, ‘Oh, you can get that kind of money?’ Yeah. It’s crazy.”
Shortcut Blogging is proud and honored to be part of Joe Perez’s efforts to help our nation’s veterans. And Perez is also happy to have been with us from the very beginning.
“When you brought this to me, we were at some function together,” he recalls. “We were talking, and it was kind of like, ‘Well, I have this idea….” I’m just glad I was a part of the experiment. And it’s working!”