Service with a side p1 - Military - Start Your Own Business - Military Times Edge

For some, service in uniform isn’t enough. They want more personal fulfillment, more job satisfaction, more income — and they turn to a second job to find it.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says 5.2 percent of workers ages 16 and older held more than one job in 2008. Apply that number to the roughly 1.4 military active-duty military personnel and you get a potential 72,800 service members working other jobs.

It’s no small trick balancing the demands of work in and out of uniform and finding time for both. Ethics matter, too: Where does military work end and private time begin?

Here are three who have learned to make it work.

Stick to a schedule

When the shooting stopped and other troops dropped onto their cots after a long day battling Taliban in Afghanistan, Army Maj. Curtiss Robinson created battles of his own. His fantasy novel “Protectors of the Vale” follows shape-shifter Rosabela and her beast-master brother Wavren as they leave their home to fight against the world’s dark forces.

“I wrote it a little at a time, here and there, a couple paragraphs, maybe a page a day. Sometimes it was midnight or one in the morning,” said Robinson, 38, a full-time guardsman in Charleston, S.C., who joined in 1989. He paid $3,000 to have “Protectors of the Vale” published through Eloquent Books in March 2009. He figures he’ll need to sell about 400 copies to break even on his investment.

The key to writing his novel while on duty in Afghanistan was rigorous time management. “It has to become part of your routine, just like you brush your teeth or take a shower,” he said. “For me, that meant having a schedule, a routine. Some guys go to the gym. After an emotionally intense day, I wrote.”

The effort gave him more than just the satisfaction of seeing his name in print. Working a serious occupation on the side gave him a way to balance out the demands of a tough job.

“I remember one time I was kind of on a roll writing. We had just gotten back from a pretty big firefight, and I cranked out five or six pages that night,” he said. “I know people who have given their marriages, their health, to be in the military. To survive, you have to have something on the side that you love to do.”

Keep it all aboveboard

It took a lousy love life to set Air Force Maj. Jennifer Judd in search of a career outside her military day job.

“Dating was not going well,” said Judd, 38. “So I decided that rather than try to plan a future where I get married and have kids, I would forget about the whole dating thing and invest myself in this thing I really love.”

What she loved was designing and making jewelry from stones of varied shapes and colors. Now stationed at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala., she started crafting baubles as a hobby five years ago while a Pentagon staffer.

So she started her own jewelry business, Jen Judd Rocks. She goes to tradeshows, networks with other craftspeople and devotes all her spare time to her efforts. The key to running a successful side enterprise is to always walk the straight and narrow path, she said.

“It’s important to me to be ethical, to run my business on my time and not on taxpayer time,” said Judd, who is now engaged. “As much as I would want to Google at work, I make a point of not doing that in the office. ... While I might take stuff in and show it to people, I wouldn’t set up a booth in the office and try to sell to people.”

While Judd didn’t need permission to do her craftwork on the side, she made a point of full disclosure. “I informed my boss, ‘Hey, this is what I do.’ I was very open with what I was doing.”

Cultivate support

For some, moonlighting is what you do out of uniform. For others, that second job begins when the uniform goes on, and the juggling act can be just as challenging.

Staff Sgt. Justin Miller’s full-time business demands weekend work. So does his Guard commitment. His challenge comes down to time — portioning out his Saturdays and Sundays effectively.

Miller, 28, served for three years on active duty before leaving in July 2002. A month later he joined the Guard in East Greenwich, R.I., and has since served a year in Baghdad. He’s also earned a degree in culinary nutrition and used that to launch his full-time business, JustIn Time Personal Chef Services.

Miller supplements his catering income with occasional shifts in the kitchen at a nursing home in his home state of Massachusetts.

To manage shift work and still run his own business “takes a lot of planning, preparation and follow-through,” he said. “When you are cooking 12 hours a day, you have to be on top of everything, and not just in the kitchen. With my own business, I still have paperwork to do, I have to do e-mail, create menus, keep up communications with clients.”

So it’s catering full time, nursing home on the side, and weekend drills that contend with weddings and private parties.

He pulls it all together by cultivating the support of his higher-ups.

Often that means putting Guard duty above his outside work. He’ll hand off a catering gig to a colleague, if needed, in order to make an important drill.

But a good relationship can go both ways. In one case, a late change in a weekend drill coincided with a catering job that Miller could not skip. His superiors let him make up the time later.

“I do my job, and they are always pretty flexible,” he said.

For Miller, the rewards have more than made up for the struggles. “I always knew I wanted to be a soldier since I was a kid, and now I see that I can do everything that I want,” he said. “I can be a chef, and still serve my country.”