Ten years ago, my sister Patricia and I launched our first business, BCB Staffing. After two back to back deployments, it was becoming obvious that a regular day job just wasn’t an option. Both my sister and I decided we needed a career that would work with us, not against us, so we decided to take the leap by launching our own business. When we launched BCB Staffing, we did so without a specific plan for the future. We spent a few years bouncing from one idea to the next until 2013 when we finally relaunched and rebranded as a website design firm called Syt Biz. We own and operate this business right here from Prince George’s County.
There were two groups we wanted to focus the mission of Syt Biz around helping - women and military spouses. As two women who have chosen a profession and industry dominated by men, we know the challenges and adversity that women face pursuing paths that have not been defined as traditional. We love that our job allows us to help other women create their own “passion projects” as we call them. As the wife of a former Army SSG, I also have a huge heart for military families. I know the challenges and sacrifices that these families face, because I faced them, and continue to even as we left the active duty life behind. We knew that we wanted our business to give back to these families and help make things a bit easier for them.
“Operation Syt Launch” is an off-shoot of Syt Biz dedicated to helping military spouses (milspouses) gain financial freedom and flexibility by building a web based business. Working from home has become extremely feasible thanks to the internet, and having operated our business successfully from our family rooms (even when those family rooms were on separate sides of the country) for the past ten years, we’re convinced that anyone can do it. The internet and social media have broken down so many barriers that used to exist for military spouses pursuing careers. Now, there are no limitations - and that is our whole mission behind Operation Syt Launch - we want to empower military spouses and show them that they can run businesses from their own computers. In this digital age, all you need is a website (which is where we come in) and a social media presence.
In the past ten years we have learned how to start, grow and run a business day to day - and that’s exactly what we are helping our clients do, so we sit in a very unique (and humble) spot because we are only a few years ahead of our clients. What I always advise our clients is the same though - your website matters, of course, but the first step is driving people to the website. That’s where social media comes in. Early on when we were starting out, we did all of our marketing and advertising on Facebook as we found that it was the most effective place to reach the audience we were trying to connect with. We are beginning to use paid advertising and we also do a lot of organic posting - which surprisingly has driven quite a bit of business too. There are many active Facebook groups of military spouses, so we post frequently in those. The military and veterans community is such a tight-knit one, and this is a community that wants to help one another out.
This Thursday Facebook is announcing a new hub on their platform to help provide active military and veterans with resources to assist them in business endeavors - completely aligned with our passion behind Operation Syt Launch. It is great to see a big tech company like Facebook showing their support and commitment toward helping this wildly deserving group that gives so much to our country yet continues to face so many hurdles. I hope that this hub will inspire veterans and active military to follow their passions and encourage them that there are so many resources and platforms out there to help them in these pursuits.
November 7, 2019
Author: Lily Dagdag
Founder, Operation Syt Launch
https://operationsytlaunch.com/
