Veterans Moving America
Zach Freeman walked off the graduation stage with degrees from TCU’s Neeley School of Business and immediately jumped headfirst into entrepreneurship.
He was a double business major in entrepreneurial management and supply chain management. A native of San Diego, he was fully aware of all the pitfalls of trying to go home and make a go of it in California’s smoggy business climate. Fort Worth was where a guy with some ambition could get things done.
Zach Freeman
“I loved both degrees,” he says during a phone call this week. “When I got out, I said, ‘You know, if there's ever a time to take a chance and start something on my own, why not do it now when I don't have a family, and a mortgage? If it blows up in my face, which statistically it probably will’ … I mean, I was 22, I knew nothing. ‘So, let's just go for it. If it fails, I'll learn something.’”
His objective was not just any business but one that was purpose-driven with social impact.
That turned out to be Veterans Moving America, a moving company that last year celebrated its 10th birthday. Freeman hires only veterans. In fact, he is the only non-veteran on the staff.
“The theory that I started with was if I started a company that only hired vets maybe I could not only provide the most amount of opportunities as possible, but maybe I could create a space where vets could come to work and they could be surrounded by people that spoke their language, understood their challenges, whatever they're going through, and that that could also serve them in a different way,” Freeman says.
“A big struggle that a lot of veterans face is feeling like they [don’t] belong outside of the military or just finding a community or a place where they can relate to others.”
That’s more like a business and ministry all wrapped into one.
Freeman, 33, says he was able to raise $40,000 to get the business off the ground. It was a band of investors, he says, that saw the value of what he was trying to build.
As of the 10-year anniversary the company had provided 275 jobs to veterans and “put over $3.5 million back into the pockets of veterans and their families,” Freeman says. Those numbers have gone up in the almost full year since. Today, Veterans Moving America has 26 veterans on staff.
“Those are the metrics I care about the most,” he says.
Freeman’s vision is to establish locations throughout the country, all of them staffed by veterans.
Veterans Moving America has also dipped a toe in order fulfillment. Freeman’s veterans do order fulfillment for Piñatagrams, the business of entrepreneur Nathan Butorac, a good friend of Freeman. It's a business Freeman wants to grow.
“You could replace that word in the middle — Veterans Moving America —any verb,” Freeman says. “I don't care. If there's an opportunity that aligns with the skills and talents of veterans, and it's a meaningful job that can pay well and be rewarding and fulfilling, I wanna pursue it.”
Freeman is also one of 13 Fort Worth-Dallas businesses featured this season in PBS’s “START UP.” Freeman is featured in Episode 7.
Toan Luong and Ampersand kicked off the season in Episode 1. The show airs locally at 6 p.m. every Saturday evening on PBS.
Juan and Paige Rodriguez, owners of Magdalena’s Catering and Events, which just this week announced a partnership with the Westland Restaurant Group will appear on Episode 4.
Other Fort Worth entrepreneurs include:
Episode 8: Christie Moore, Mansfield Funeral Home
Episode 10: Edward Morgan, Revitalize Charging Solutions
Episode 11: Skyler and Vanessa Brooks, The Blok Climbing Co.
Moore is a finalist for a second consecutive year in Fort Worth Inc.’s Entrepreneur of Excellence program. Winners will be announced at a gala on Nov. 21 at the Fort Worth Club.
Veterans Moving America
"START UP" is hosted by Gary Bredow, who conducts an interview inside a moving truck.
Freeman wound up at TCU through what he believed at the time was a clever scheme to go to the OU-Texas football game in Dallas. This is actually pretty funny. He wanted to go to the game, but his mother put the kibosh on his plans. Traveling here would require him to miss a day or two of school. So, no, not happening.
Well, the family were big Chargers fans, then based in San Diego. LaDainian Tomlinson, the former TCU standout, was the star running back. Freeman improved his pitch to his mother by telling her he planned to turn the trip into an opportunity to visit universities while he was in the area.
Mom granted him her blessing.
“I had no intention of even considering these schools, but if it let me miss a day or two of high school to come out and go to a football game with my friend and my old coach … sure, whatever, I'll go to a tour. Well, joke's on me because I took the tour and TCU really won me over.”
Back to the business.
Freeman’s inspiration for the business was his family, which took in a Marine in the late aughts, Freeman says. They met him at church. Freeman was finishing up high school.
Freeman’s father served as a mentor to the veteran. That’s how they got to know him. When the economy took a turn south during the Great Recession, the Marine lost his job and his wife filed for divorce. They had two children.
Freeman’s family took him in for what was supposed to be a few months.
“He wound up living with us for almost three years,” Freeman says. “His whole life fell apart in the course of about a month.”
What Freeman learned was “eye-opening.”
The Marine — Jason — "had seen unimaginable things,” Freeman says. His last deployment was particularly traumatic. Jason was one of only four in his unit to survive.
“He had bad PTSD, survivor's guilt, struggled with alcohol, etc.,” Freeman says. “You hear about that stuff, but the most eye-opening thing for me was he was one of the hardest workers I had ever met. No matter what he did, he'd always find a way to exceed your expectation, but he would hop from job to job to job, and I couldn't figure it out.”
There was always a conflict or misunderstanding, Freeman says. Jason didn’t connect well with people. His style in communicating was abrupt, which “rubbed a lot of people who weren’t familiar with that the wrong way.”
“It was very direct and blunt, and that's just what he had been trained to do. That was how you communicate,” Freeman says. “The poor guy, no matter what he did, he never felt like he could find a place where he belonged.”
And then, of course, there’s all the stuff he’s dealing with internally — all the memories and emotions.
“How do you talk about some of these awful experiences that he had to go through with someone who has no relatable experience.”
Jason today is remarried and living in Tennessee, Freeman says. “I sent him a company shirt,” Freeman says.
Because of the nature of his business Freeman runs into employees who have the same issues after combat. Through Jason he had some experience, but, ultimately, he found that patience and understanding were and still are the best tools.
“We don't have a traditional company culture,” Freeman says. “We're pretty tolerant within reason of different things. When those types of issues get in the way, I've always considered it part of my job and the company's responsibility to provide resources or educate our team on the resources available to them and encourage that and be supportive of that.
“I can point them in the right direction; I can be empathetic and understanding, but at the end of the day I didn't serve. So, I can't always relate. The biggest support they get really is from each other.”