The Accidental Entrepreneur: How Military Life Redefined My Career

This year’s International Women’s Day is on the 8th March, and I’ll be celebrating, along with fellow spouses, female Veterans, and widows aboard HMSBelfast, London at ‘The Female Voice’ event.

I’ve also been asked to speak - something that I love to do. But, I haven’t always felt this confident in business, in fact for a little while there I was completely lost in this challenging military life that I now find myself in.?

Here’s my story…

Female entrepreneurship isn’t a new thing, but the amount of female-run businesses that are achieving amazing things is growing and I love it!?

After years of fighting for equality in the workforce and struggling for equal pay (spoiler alert, we aren’t there yet) women are making great progress and some of it has been fuelled by a recent explosion of female-led businesses.

I am one of this current generation of female entrepreneurs, but not the only one in my family. While my dad went out to work at his ‘real’ job in a ‘real’ company (you know the one with a canteen, Christmas party and a pension scheme?) my amazing mum was running her own design business and acing it!

Fast forward 30 years and I also find myself married and running my own creative business, Design Jessica. Yet, despite being in the 21st century I found myself feeling more than ever the housewife.

You see, I didn't marry an ordinary man who has a ‘real’ job in a ‘real’ company.

My husband is a pilot in His Majesty’s Royal Air Force. Amazing you say! And yes, the uniform does have a certain appeal, but the reality of being a military spouse is very different from what you see in an Officer and a Gentleman.

The military spouse is a glorious thing. Urban dictionary (font of all knowledge) wonderfully describes us as ‘a hard-working spouse of a military member, who keeps things safe at the home front where civilian wives would normally fail’. Now, the world is made of many different people, life is tough for all of us and I still am a civilian despite what Urban Dictionary says. I know that my husband’s job doesn’t define me and my ‘home front’ is normally a shambles. I am a pretty rubbish housewife. But what I do know is that as a business owner and wife to my RAF husband, I relocate every couple of years as his job dictates. I have become what is known as ‘the trailing spouse’.?

Choosing this life was hard. In all honesty, I never actually wanted to run my own business. You might find this hard to believe if you’ve ever met me at a networking event, or running a Milspo Inner Circle workshop.?

Rewind to 2009: smack bang in the middle of the Afghanistan conflict and about six months after I had fallen in love with an RAF officer. Exciting, hey?! And yet, as you probably know, the reality is a little bit different from what you see in An Officer and a Gentleman.

I was enjoying a fantastic career as a graphic designer creating stationery and children’s books for Disney. I lived in beautiful Bath, worked in my dream job and had found the man I was planning to marry. Life was great!

And then, that posting notice arrived.

My boyfriend was posted, along with the whole C-130 Hercules fleet from RAF Lyneham (so close to Bath) to RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire (not so close to Bath).?

He commuted from our home in Bath to Brize Norton for a whole year, adding three hours to his already long day.?

By the time he’d experienced one miserable snowy winter of dangerous driving on the M4, including three short-notice medevac flights from Germany and Afghanistan, he had had enough. This was when one of us had to choose between our careers and our lives together – a conversation that most military families have had at one time or another.?

We decided together that my design work could be made more flexible by leaving my job and starting work as a freelancer. It was my career that took the hit so that our relationship wouldn’t.

That August, I resigned from my job. A week later, I left Bath and we moved into a private rental near RAF Brize Norton. I had lived in Bath for ten years. It was where I had completed my degree, where I had worked in my career over six years, it was where my friends and family were – what had I done?!

Initially, it went well. I spent my time exploring the local area and networking but, as we moved into winter and my boyfriend’s work became even more operational, I spent more and more time alone.?

You see, that’s the thing with RAF bases. They seem to be in the middle of nowhere and with few opportunities, which sucks when you’re a 25-year-old with very little to do. You never really realise the importance of company and friends until you don’t have them.

Apart from doing the big shop, going to the odd wives coffee mornings on the base and monthly networking groups, I barely spoke to anyone.

I attempted to get a job at two local and very well-known book publishers but, as soon as they’d worked out I was a military wife, I was told that my application was no longer needed.?

So, I did what I knew I could do and got stuck into building my business, attempting to make it as a successful freelancer…it didn’t go well.

I was utterly miserable. I had lost my role in the world and was no longer getting the consistent design work that I had initially, as my clients in Bath began to forget me.?

In 2014, we were married and moved into our first married quarter, or service family accommodation (SFA), but nothing changed.

I finally told my husband just how bloody miserable our new life was making me. It was when we were taking a much-needed holiday to Antigua to get to know each other again as a result of too many deployments and one day, after a few too many cocktails, I finally told him how very miserable and lost I was. Together we realised that it was my little design business that made me happy and maybe it was that which could pull me out of the slump.?

I had found an online business course that looked promising and I spent all of the money I had made in my business on this last attempt at salvaging something for me. That course was completely life changing.?

I now had monthly business-building challenges to complete and a whole online network to tap into. It encouraged me to go networking, build my email list and start finding new clients online rather than relying on clients who needed me ‘in-house’.?

Although the first few months were financially challenging, by the summer of 2016 and our new posting to Northwood HQ, I finally had a business and a client base that I could take with me anywhere.

It was in this second posting that I realised I couldn’t be the only one who felt this way. I couldn’t be the only partner who was lonely and longing to create a new and transient business – I just needed to find them.

Here’s a diary entry that I wrote just a few months later….

25th November 2016,

I am considering launching a Milipreneurs project – my members site – a place for female military spouses to get business support but belong to a network.?

I think a second business would technically be simple for me to launch. It’ll take a lot of research and my time, and I hope it will appeal as I am a military wife but it’s frightening, too! I wonder how many military dependents there are in the UK – Milspouses will be the focus of the concept.

And that’s precisely what I have done. The Milspo Business Network is a community of the most remarkable military spouses, partners and other-halves creating the most epic businesses despite the pressures of modern military life… but that’s also a straightforward thing for me to say now. The reality was quite different.

Once I had worked out that I needed to create my network of people who just got it, I decided to start a networking group with the idea that there could be a networking group in every military base. I’d joined two Military Wives Choirs by now and I loved the fact that I could just slot seamlessly into the new one every time I moved. So, it seemed like a no-brainer to do the same for business owners.?

In winter 2016, ‘Milipreneurs’ was launched on Facebook. There were 30 members in the first week, with our first meeting booked at the base community centre for the following Wednesday. The group was only for wives (I hadn’t quite learnt then) and, actually, it was really good fun… even if there were only ever four of us that turned up each month.?

The networking turned into a wine club in classic military style and sadly fizzled out, but the dream never left, which is why the second attempt came through the agency Forces Enterprise Network (FEN) Hub.?

FEN was started in 2015 by Heledd Kendrick, Nadine Monks, Sarah Walker and Christine Dedman to support small business owners in the military community and I always had a soft spot for it. These four amazing women embodied everything that I believe a military spouse in business stands for. They had drive, focus and were running epic established businesses – they were also raising their families so were incredibly short on time. Sadly, the glorious FEN now exists as a dormant company – it just wasn’t the right time. But I learnt so much from the days of FEN and am so grateful to have been a part of it.?

Inspired by the many military partners I had met during the Milipreneurs and the FEN days, I wanted to share their stories with a larger audience, which is why The InDependent Spouse podcast was born.?

If you have listened to any of the interviews I have held with these military partners, you’ll know just how much I love their stories and how connecting, and networking, helped found the idea for the Milspo community.

It was clear from very early on that everyone loved the podcast series – it’s now reached over 22,500 downloads in over 20 countries.?

Still, I wanted to connect these inspirational people to even more of our community. And I managed to do that through online networking sessions, this time from our third posting at RAF High Wycombe HQ.

My lovely business best friend was continually telling me that her best ideas came to her when she was away from her computer and she was not wrong.?

Mine came to me in two parts: the first when changing lanes on the M4. By this point, I’d had four houses since I met my husband and, on this occasion, I’d started to drive on autopilot to the last place that I’d lived. It wasn’t the first time I had done this and I’m sure it won’t be the last, but this time, it really upset me. I had a great networking group at that posting but, as I was only there for a year, I had to leave them when we moved. They’d forgotten me but I missed them.?

The second Eureka! moment came a few weeks later, whilst paying for The InDependent Spouse podcasting software.?

I had attended an online business party on Zoom, where the host had used breakout rooms – I was trying to work out if I could add breakout rooms to my account and whether it would be possible to use them for networking. Someone in the US was already doing this and they called it ‘Virtual Networking’. They were having so much success! It seemed to be the perfect solution for the military spouse community.

I found nothing similar in the UK, which sort of makes sense when you think about it. If you wanted to do business networking, you would go to a real-life group because that’s just how it’s done (or at least it used to be).

I had found a perfect solution. Not only could we network together, no matter where we were posted, we could also put all that expertise we have, using online video calls when our partners are away, to good use – it was a win-win!

Now I just had to get my head around the technology – cue one very comedic night of me, my long-suffering husband and my poor sister ‘zooming’ each other via any mobile phones, laptops and iPads we could find in some multi-screen carnage, just to see if it could work. I can still hear the feedback ringing in my ears but, you know what… it bloody worked.

So, in May 2019, with my poor husband on admin support, we tested the concept with 12 business owners all over the UK (and one in Germany). It was a massive success!?

Connections were made, online business ideas were brought to life and, most importantly, Milspo business owners were no longer limited to networking by location. These members were inspired, happy and building connections, even mentioning how it was the first adult conversation they’d had all day. One attendee’s husband had recently received an admin order for Germany and, not knowing anyone there, now had a new friend who already lived there just by turning up to that first meeting. It worked!

This idea, which was dreamt up all because I didn’t focus properly on the M4, is now helping military spouse business owners all over the UK (and the world) connect and talk about business properly. I love these events. They are encouraging and safe meeting spaces where connections are built, and friends are made.

I am so proud of those early, rickety days of virtual networking and how it kick-started the Milspo community, and I am super proud that they have been tried, tested and evolved into what they are today. They have given me access to a wide range of business owners that I wouldn’t usually have met, and it is something that has remained an integral part of the Milspo support.

So now, years later, after the idea having taken many different forms, Milspo encompasses everything that I was missing in that first posting. This community just ‘get it’. I love connecting with them as well as introducing them to one another. We have an online community, chances to network, Christmas parties, awards nights and some truly great friendships. I can soak up all the excitement of others in business and find like-minded business leaders just rocking this military life!

Choosing this life was hard. In all honesty, I never actually wanted to run my own business but, after 13 years in the business, I just love it! Honestly, self-employment in this military world is just epic!

If you’d like to be inspired in business you’re going to love The InDependent Spouse podcast; Stories from the Heart of the Military Family. Series 7 is coming soon, but you still have time to catch up on the 70+ episodes right here - www.milspo.co.uk/podcast?