The Commander's Brief

Ok, I really try and stay out of politics on social media, but this was too funny:

I spent way too much useless time navigating DTS to not have a deep and unabashed hatred for it. Still gives me cold sweats.

On a more fun note, I’ve made a commitment this year to doing more videos.

Step 1 was to get a video guy.

One of my best friends loves to make videos and volunteered his services.

He’s the guy whose arm you can see on the right side of this picture. I’m not hiding his face for security reasons, just that he always rolls his eyes when I post this picture that *just* cuts him out of it.

If you don’t have friends you still give a hard time, were you really in the military??

You can see our first piece of work here.

More on the organization from that, Shift, in a minute.

Veteran Business of the Week: MyHome

I recently connected with an army veteran in Nashville who founded an AI platform to standardize home maintenance after working in the home services industry.

Gabe is a former infantry officer (like me, so obviously he’s awesome) who spent some time working on homes and owned a business in home services. This is an industry that is ripe for people who worked inside of it to bring technology to improve the systems and processes.

I expect to have him on the podcast soon and am excited to share his story.

Resource of The Week: Shift Group

Shift Group is a mentorship, coaching, and recruiting company that works with veterans and former elite athletes to help them find their next role.

What do they do?

Shift Group takes you through a self-guided course. If you really focus, you can knock it out in three days.

In that course, they help you answer a few questions:

• What are your personal values?

• What do you like to do?

• What are you good at?

• What type of work do you want to do?

• What type of company do you want to work for?

After you complete the training module, you get paired with a coach who can work with you to help you find the best company to work for and help you prepare to get hired.

What are their results?

Simply speaking, the numbers speak for themselves.

• 1000+ Athletes and Veterans placed

• 300+ Hiring Partners

• <5% attrition (industry average is 35%)

• 9 months average time to promotion (2x faster than average)

They have quite simply figured it out. Shift knows how to place people in new roles where they thrive and the company is happy.

That’s also why their program is free for veterans. They do the work with you up front and everyone has a better result on the back side.

Here is my last word:

I have had A LOT of companies approach me over the last few years looking to partner. Most are full of fluff and others only want to take from me and offer nothing else. Shift has been nothing but 100% awesome to work with. I like the people I have talked with there and they really want to see veterans succeed. And they have the results to back it up. So I am willing to stake my name to theirs.

Want to learn more? Check out Shift Group here.

Business Idea: Affiliate Link Aggregation

I got this idea after catching up with a buddy from business school and I really like it.

Do you have influencers (damn I hate that term) you follow and like? Do they share products and services with their audience, and because you trust them, you want to buy from those companies?

What if you could them all in one place?

So instead of having to go to someone’s Instagram page or find a newsletter were they mentioned something, you could just go to a site, look up “Kim Kardashian” (which one of you is like, how did he know I follow her?!) and find all her affiliate links.

Here’s how I would do this:

Start with people with a decent, but not huge following. Say 10k-50k followers and they do affiliate marketing.

Reach out and just ask if they would share all their links with you and you will share them all for free on this site.

Yes, free.

The real trick is driving traffic to the site, but once you do you can go back to those people and say “I’m driving you traffic and sales and you don’t have to do anything. I’m going to start charging a monthly fee to stay on my site and if you would like to, it will cost.”

If you are driving sales for them with no effort on their part, it’s a no-brainer.

New Stuff

From the Archives

Go crush it,

Mark

P.S. I now have a JOB BOARD