There are dozens of local HirePatriots community job boards for US veterans across America. Businesses, schools, organizations, chambers and patriotic activists sponsor these websites. It raises the profile and awareness of these enterprises. It also greatly increases the visits to their website, and it produces new clients and members. Perhaps most of all, it produces an invigorating sense of purpose to be responsible for helping so many people in your area.
The primary purpose of a Patriotic Hearts chapter is to support local US military, veterans and their families through the use of a customized, local communityHirePatriots.com website, job board and blog. It is also an entirely unique and powerfully effective way to promote any business or organization and to recruit at the same time.
Let me tell you how we got started.
My wife and I retired to Oceanside, CA, next door to Camp Pendleton in 2004. Not long afterwards, a young US Marine sergeant stationed at the base nearby, who had served 3 tours in Iraq and who was the lone survivor in a truck that was blown into the air by an IED, knocked on our door. He needed to earn some money to get the lights and heat turned back-on in his rented house for his young family. Finances had gotten tight. The family car had been repossessed and their utilities turned off.
I tried to give him the money he needed, but he refused, adamantly. “I am a US Marine,” he insisted. “I cannot take hand-outs. I must work for my money.” So I gave him some chores to do that I could find. He fixed my favorite chair that had broken; he cleaned my garage, he smoked out a hive of wasps above my patio and threw the hive away; and, he worked on my old truck and got it humming like new. Not until then would he accept my financial help.
That was the impetus for me and my wife, Tori, to have a job board created that other residents could use to hire Marines to help them with their chores and repairs too. It was initially called HireMarines.com.
That website grew very quickly through word-of-mouth. Even US President GW Bush found out about it and wrote to thank us for what we were doing. Then the Admiral of the Navy called me and asked if his sailors could use the site too. I could not refuse, so he asked me to change the name. Since then we have been serving all branches of the US military. — Read Comments from our site’s users HERE.
Companies from across the U.S. started writing and asking us if they could post their jobs too. So we had a job board made for them to use: our Careers job board. Then they asked if we held job fairs. So we rented facilities near our local bases and got over 100 companies at each. Since then, we have hosted 15 job fairs.
After that, as the Marines and sailors in our locale transitioned back into the civilian world, or got re-stationed, they would contact us and ask us if there was a HirePatriots.com job board for their region of the country. But we were just in San Diego. How were we going to spread this extremely popular service for our military, veterans and their spouses across America?
By this time of our development, we had been voted for 2 years in a row as the Number 1 News Story in San Diego. We had been invited to talk about our unique job board by all of the TV News stations in our county. Features about HirePatriots were appearing on the front pages of all the San Diego newspapers. All the local politicians and political parties and community service clubs and veteran organizations and community service clubs invited us to speak at their events. We had been interviewed multiple times by all the conservative, local Talk radio shows. An association of 1500 San Diego business held a huge dinner and then called us on stage to receive an award they had made by Tiffany’s in New York. It was a glass sculpture. They called it the Visionary Award for creating Economic opportunity. The Vice President of the U.S. had flown out to get a picture taken with us. His boss, President GW Bush, gave his Medal of Merit and a Colonel of a division at the Pentagon made a video supporting us. – We were getting up to 50,000 unique visitors a month to our website!
Then the thought occurred to me: With the $100,000’s of dollars in free advertising my website was receiving constantly, it would be a tremendous advantage for any business to have one too! The number of visitors to their own websites would explode! Obviously, their sales and recruiting would become easier and more effective and successful too. That’s how I can spread the HirePatriots job boards across the country!
Since then, hundreds of US military-friendly and veteran-owned businesses have participated in the “Cause Marketing” program. I have also written a book, The Patriotic Business Plan: Strategies for Sensational Success. It goes into detail about how to successfully start and grow this great community program in your area.
Patriotic Hearts is a 501c3 non-profit that serves US military, veterans, and their families. See our programs HERE.
If you are a patriotic business that supports our US military and veterans, Let’s work together to get more of these exemplary citizens sustainably employed. — Give me a call.
At your service,
Mark Baird
