We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Freddie Kim a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Freddie, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s talk about innovation. What’s the most innovative thing you’ve done in your career?

Most innovative thing: Hands down, I think it’s starting my business. I spent countless hours thinking and reflecting on my expertise and passions, then finding a way to identify and scope out a problem in the market — to then sell my services. The process in which to truly define the problem and find your target audience is step one, but being innovative is to bring a new solution to that problem and creating a niche or category for yourself. Then, it’s to brand and market that product or service to be easily understood by the market. I’ve tried doing that for my first company I started — FIGHTRIBE — a boxing fitness brand that taught people how to fight, where I assumed a problem to exist in society but my solution (boxing fitness program) was hard to sell and scale, which I discovered when launched and spent a year in the business. I wasn’t willing to continue to invest in that to get it to the point to try and scale, so I quickly pivoted into my other passion — helping military Veterans be recognized and succeed.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My backstory: I am a military Veteran who served a decade in the Army as an Airborne Ranger and a Green Beret commander. I served in over 30 months of combat deployments to Afghanistan (24 months) and in Mindanao, Philippines. I was able to pursue this career in the military by first attending West Point in 2000. At the time (17 yo) I had no idea about the Army and of West Point, but a family friend recommended I look into it and that I would fit being a cadet. At West Point, I learned of what it was to be a Green Beret and decided that I wanted to test myself at the highest levels of service, so I set my sights on that goal and did everything else to support it — I was a poly sci. major to learn international relations, was captain and 4x All-American boxing champ, went to join an Infantry unit with the 82nd Airborne Division, and ultimately went to the 18-24mo. Special Forces selection and the Q-course (qualification course), to ultimately achieve that aspiration. During my time in the military, I was inspired by tremendous leaders and Soldiers, and learned the foundation to be a life-long leadership student. After working in private industry and going through the Kellogg School of Management, I started seeing very clearly how these Veteran leaders could incorporate their leadership background into filling these glaring gaps of leadership in the corporate world. Naturally, I put two and two together and saw that there was a void in the market for headhunters in the corporate-experienced, military Veteran recruiting space, so I built my brand around the Veteran 2.0, the Veterans who have successfully transitioned out of military service and now can quickly add value to a corporation, without a large ramp-up time like most transitioning Veterans (1-3 yrs after military service) require. I’ve written several articles on the values of what a military Veteran brings to the workforce on LinkedIn and at the bottom of our website: https://www.milspectalent.com/

That being said, I chose to focus on helping others recruit, because I think it’s a top 3 most important thing a business leader must learn how to do. (Other two are setting a clear vision/communications and understanding your market). The leader is the one who casts this vision, but this very rarely can be accomplished alone. It’s done only through a team, hence investing the time to carefully select, develop, and lead a team is so critical. My experiences in the military and in business have helped me see the effectiveness of a team under good leaders and vice versa — there is no difference in environment! This is why I chose to specialize in this field, as this is oftentimes the most difficult thing to do.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Resilience: Ranger school is a beat. It’s 62 days of pure hell, broken down into 3 phases: Darby, Mountain, and Swamp. In each, you are beaten down, starved, sleep-deprived, and crushed with incredible stress to perform your mission(s). And for each phase, you can ‘recycle’ where you would have to repeat that phase again, if you failed to perform at GO/NO GO mission, as for each phase, you are put into a position to perform and lead (especially as officers or senior enlisted personnel). I remember during one particular, wet night during the Mountain phase, it was so far below freezing temps that our instructors allowed us to light a small fire. One night. To dry out, I laid out and put my leather boots out towards the fire and instantly fell asleep (as most ranger students do when they get any type of reprieve of their mission and weight of their 90-100 lbs rucksacks). I woke up with my boot on fire, and it pretty much melted a large chunk of my soles off… I ended up using our “100-mile-per-hour tape,” essentially Army duct tape, to wrap it up and continue mission. It was horrendous and painful, as my feet were wet and freezing and I got swamp feet (trench foot). Luckily, I had an extra set when I got to our bunks a few nights later, and was able to swap them out and get back into it! I was only about halfway to graduating.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Growing clientele: Doing a great job. Word of mouth is such a powerful tool, and we aim to do a phenomenal job for each role. Since we specialize in getting to know our client’s pain points and how to overcome them, sometimes they don’t know themselves. Our process is consultative, allowing for new discoveries to shape what the client had initially intended as the required candidate type. We help formulate what that perfect fit looks like.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.milspectalent.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/milspec-talent