Commander's Brief: 1/10/2025

Back again for the weekly newsletter from The Veteran Professional

Veteran Business of the Week

A few weeks ago there was a story in The Economist that went viral in veteran circles.

I even wrote a post about it, which you can check out here.

VA disability can be a crazy thing, and many veterans feel like they got screwed.

That’s where vetclaims.ai comes in.

They can go MUCH faster in looking at your medical records and helping identify something that can help you make a case for the VA. How? AI.

And the results speak for themselves. Having been open less than a year, they have crazy results:

$694,962: Average Lifetime Earnings Increase

$111M: Overall Economic Impact

100%: Veteran Feedback

It was started by Lukas Simianer, a former enlisted Cav Scout who learned to code after getting out of the army. He is also a former podcast guest (episode here and another one coming soon) and legit good dude.

If you think you are being shorted by the VA, you should definitely check out vetclaims.ai 

Resource of The Week

It was about this time of the year, 5 years ao, that I went on a veterans dogsledding trip with Outward Bound. It was a Top 5 life experience. Me, 7 other veterans, 2 instructors, and 11 sled dogs spent 4 nights in the Minnesota Boundary Waters area. It got down to -30 on the last night and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

I even adopted a dog that was set to retire:

Kismet has since passed away, but he was a great dog.

Outward Bound has many options across the country and they even cover travel.

If you can swing it- do it.

Business Idea

This week I had a LinkedIn post go kinda viral. Like crazy viral:

Here is the TLDR:

Over the holidays I started digging into a really simple business model: directories.

What are they?

Just simple websites listing everything in a certain niche (my first one will be resources for buying a small business).

How do they make money?

Ads, affiliate links, referrals, and more (great list here)

They are easy to launch, hard to scale, but also easy to run.

I have a list of about 10+ directory ideas I plan on building this year. And to make them all I am using Directify.

It’s easy to use and helps you launch fast to validate an idea. I love it and you can get it at a great price right now.

New

From The Archives

Thanks for tuning in.

Go crush it,

Mark

“It isn't enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.”

-Tim Ferriss