Growing Community with Liza Rodewald of Instant Teams

By: Carolyn Rawson

Co-founded by software engineer Liza Rodewald in 2016, Instant Teams’ talent marketplace has consistently grown and facilitated more than 5,000 direct hires. Beyond their remarkable success, we wanted to know more about the launch of their new app, Twelve Million Plus, and how it’s designed to support the military spouse community.

Liza Rodewald was busy writing government software when she met and married her husband, an active-duty Army officer. Immediately enveloped in military life, she found herself surrounded by fellow military spouses wanting to know how she remained so gainfully employed. For most military families, moves are frequent, making it challenging for dependents to find and maintain jobs.

Approaching her, they would often ask, “How are you working from home? What are you doing? I’ve been struggling with getting a job for so many years . . .”

Liza sympathized, admiring their tenacity. “I love the fact that military spouses build community,” she says. “They are productive with their time, they are appreciative of opportunities, they want to keep [those opportunities], and they’re going to perform.”

Since then, Liza has made it her personal and professional ambition to help military spouses find purpose and connection. From programmer to CEO, Liza has made it the goal at Instant Teams always to maintain this core value. “I still stay very much involved in architecting the solution by listening to the customers and what they need and then going back to the team and saying, ‘Here, I have these ideas around the product,’” she says.

This problem-solving approach has led to Instant Teams’ latest initiative, Twelve Million Plus, a free app that consolidates opportunities for military spouses and promotes community partnerships through a military-verified system.

While Twelve Million Plus is destined to bring Instant Teams more business, the app’s real resonance lies in its selfless intent to benefit the military community. Liza explains, “We’re not trying to recreate all the resources; we’re trying to put them all in one spot so military spouses know that these are all the different organizations, these are all the different things that can help them, this is the path they can go down. Instant Teams is one of them, but it’s not the only one.”

Many military spouse communities—even military bases themselves—communicate and share information through Facebook and other social media groups. But Liza warns that these avenues are less private and more easily infiltrated by nonmilitary members with different intentions and interests.

Twelve Million Plus offers an advantage “because everyone is verified in the app. They know they’re actually talking to military spouses, and not another population . . . They can actually have meaningful conversations,” Liza says.

The meaning of Twelve Million Plus? That’s the number of active-duty, retired, and Gold Star military spouses who exist and whom this app has the potential to reach. It’s a significant number of American citizens—one that doesn’t even include the other family dependents who stand to benefit from its existence.

That’s why Liza’s ambitions do not stop there. She regularly fights for legislation, like the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) bill, that aims to improve military-dependent life. Her frequent trips to Washington, D.C. and her federal-level advocacy affirm her big-picture commitment to military spouses and their families.

We asked Liza if she has noticed a trend, in either legislation or in business, toward using military spouses as a resource and/or promoting their potential. At Powerhouse Planning, as a military spouse-owned small business that knows the value of the military spouse resource, that’s certainly our aim.

Our “Empowering the Homefront” initiative, for example, is a program designed to empower military spouses to have careers in their desired fields of expertise. The career kick-start program includes benefits like resume makeovers and six-month mentorship programs with our talented Powerhouse Planning freelancers.

Powerhouse Planning has even teamed with LinkedIn Social Impact to give 50 military spouses free coaching with LinkedIn professionals to ensure these milspouses are getting the most from their LinkedIn profiles. The plan is to offer 50 additional military spouses LinkedIn coaching later this year.

So, with companies like Instant Teams and Powerhouse Planning recognizing and working to ensure military spouses can support their active-duty loved ones—while also establishing meaningful professional lives—our question to Liza remains: Are the needs of military spouses getting more positive, catered attention?

In Liza’s words, “The narrative is getting a little stronger and louder. There are a lot of great organizations working toward that. But I still think there’s a long way to go.”

To learn more about Liza and Instant Teams, visit instantteams.com.

For more about Powerhouse Planning and our commitment to providing military spouses with remote career opportunities, or to learn how our total remote team solution can bring you an entire team of highly skilled professionals, please visit our website at powerhouseplanning.com or email us at admin@powerhouseplanning.com.