Instant Teams

Hello!  I’m Kaycee McCoy, Founder/Chief Community Curator at Happy Kaycee Productions LLC.  I’m a quirky blend of a dreamer and a doer; a creative entrepreneur with enthusiasm and energy for miles.  I’m married to a handsome Active Duty Sailor who has been in the Navy for 13 years, and I am also a mom to our beautiful cat Gussie.  We currently reside in Virginia Beach and have been here for over seven years.

My path to the beach life was a bit winding.  I grew up in an extremely rural (we’re talking more cattle than people kind of situation) area of Southeast Kansas where everyone knew everything about everyone before anything even happened. After high school, I began my slow crawl towards the beach with a stop in Pittsburg, Kansas, to earn my Bachelor’s of Science in Psychology with an Emphasis in Business/Technology at Pittsburg State University (Go’RILLAS!) in 2005.  After college I was a bit of a free spirit and moved from Kansas to Oklahoma, to Texas, Florida and finally wound up at the beach in mid-2009 and have no intentions of ever leaving.

While living in Dallas, Ft. Worth metro, I finally came to my senses and started dating (for the first time as adults) the guy who stole my 15-year-old heart.  He had left our hometown after high school and joined the Navy, but we had kept in touch fairly regularly.  There were emails galore, phone calls and handwritten letters as our friendship continued over the years.  There was one longer than usual gap in communication for whatever reason, but I remember one evening after work receiving a MySpace (I’m showing my age here, huh?!) message from him saying he wanted to talk and left his number for me to call.  I couldn’t dial quick enough!  Six months later he flew me across the country to visit over my birthday weekend, and that went so well there was another flight booked for the following week.  Fast forward another six months, and I’ve successfully packed up all of my belongings and driving to the East Coast to live happily ever after.  That was over eight years ago, and the married bliss continues!

I’m going to be 100% honest here, as well as a tiny bit personal, and say that I had zero intentions of ever getting married before that point in my life.  Especially to someone in the military!  I had no desire to live my life following someone else around and going wherever the government demanded.  However, like many things in life, this military life has been the happiest surprise possible.  There is absolutely nothing else like this community, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to partake.  We have lived in Virginia Beach for seven excellent years, where we’ve made the best friends imaginable, and now we have zero intentions of ever leaving, even in our retirement days.  This is home.  This is where we belong.

Before all the wedded bliss, I began a little company called Happy Kaycee Productions, and it’s stolen my heart forever.  We are a creative marketing and consulting company that provides small as well as large corporations with services such as blogging, social media management, and email campaigns.  We take the hassle out of the hustle by making the daunting task of creating content fun.  Our current clients we are servicing include everything from accountants to therapists to care package companies and more!  I’m in the process of building a team of creative freelancers that can provide a vast array of marketing services.

When I’m not working, you will likely find me volunteering or networking my life away.  Giving back speaks to my soul.  My mother and grandmother taught me that community is everything and I try my very best to embody their giving characters each day of my life.  Currently, I am the Team Leader for COMPASS Norfolk. I lead-free monthly sessions about all the resources/benefits available to Navy, Coast Guard and Marine Spouses on Naval Station Norfolk.  Other organizations I belong to include; Steering Committee for Hampton Roads CORE, Southside Hampton Roads Milspo Project, BizConnect Hampton Roads, Hampton Roads Chief Petty Officer Spouse Association, Hampton Roads InDependent, and will occasionally donate my time and energy to a select few other phenomenal organizations.  I love contributing to and participating in my local community in every way humanly possible!

What was your first move towards working in a remote capacity and/or becoming a military spouse entrepreneur?

About 6.5 years ago, while working at a job, I didn’t exactly love, a co-worker approached me to say I had “creative talent.” He knew a few business owners who might find my skills useful. So I had a meeting with one, received my Business License a few days later and launched Happy Kaycee Productions LLC.  At first, I was a sole proprietor and considered myself a Virtual Assistant.  I took any and all types of contract/freelance gigs I could get those first few years.  Then I started to form a vision for what I wanted to become and the services I loved providing, which are creative marketing services.  I’ve since ditched the administrative work and honed in on marketing services/consulting.  It’s still a work in progress, but it’s beginning to look more and more like what I envisioned a few years ago.

What is your definition of military spouses as an ‘untapped resource’?

Military spouses are highly underrated as employees, and it honestly blows my mind!  The spouses in my circle of friends are extremely motivated, hard-charging, highly intelligent, adaptable, creative, inspired and all around wonderful human beings.  They are the strongest of the strong and the first people I think should be considered for any position, although the downfall of potential PCS moves uprooting them eventually.  I don’t personally see a varied work history or background as a negative; rather, I see it as a strength.  There’s a great amount of raw adaptability lying underneath what may look like a spotty or unfocused resume.  Spouses are constantly reinventing themselves and not by their choice, so that adds another level of tenacity required to thrive.  They’ve got MadSkills and businesses would benefit significantly from putting them to use.

What would you tell other military spouses looking to start a professional career?

My primary piece of advice to any military spouse wanting to work is to use their resources.  There are a plethora of opportunities, organizations and programs available for military spouses who are job hunting and a lot of them are highly underutilized.  Go to Fleet and Family Support Center. Take an interviewing skills class. Log onto the Navy MWR Digital Library. Take online courses for a skill you want to learn/enhance. Find a local Milspo Project and attend a few meetups. Read the thousands of military spouse blogs/articles about employment. Fill out a profile on the MadSkills site. Search the Military Spouse Corporate Career Network website for available job openings. There are entirely too many resources available to us to name them all, but those are just a few that come to mind in regards to spouse employment.  I cannot think of another path in life that offers as many community resources as being a military spouse.  I mean, there’s no “Spouses of Archaeologists” support groups or organizations (to my knowledge) that provide spouses with free resume writing classes.  We are so lucky to have these organizations behind us and giving us such fantastic support.

I would also tell them not to pigeon hole themselves!  I see so many spouses who say, “I’m an XYZ.  I can’t find a job doing XYZ that pays what my last job in another state did, so I’m not currently working.”  I understand if you’re a nurse, you need to be a nurse. Or if you’re a lawyer, you need to practice law.  I understand that completely.  But, I just wish more spouses could take a leap of faith and know that sometimes the best things in life come via surprise.  I took a job as an assistant at a janitorial supply distributorship when we first moved to Virginia Beach in mid-2009 thanks to the first staffing company I found when we arrived.  Did I want to sell toilet paper?  No.  Did I have experience selling toilet paper?  Not even close.  I had previously been the photographer and graphic designer at a large real estate agency in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area and a Human Resources Assistant at an e-commerce sports merchandise store in Florida.  Toilet paper was not exactly thrilling to me, and I took a little bit of a pay cut to start out, but I ran with it hard and networked like a boss until I found my opportunity to start my company, Happy Kaycee Productions LLC.  The moral of my story is don’t limit yourself; you never know who you may meet along the way or what opportunities will arise if you keep charging forward and working hard, no matter what exactly your job entails.

If you were put on a panel involved in an initiative to improve military spouse employment opportunities and corporate awareness of the MadSkills that professional spouses bring to the workforce, what suggestions would you make?

I’d love to serve on a panel for many reasons. Although I have praised the life out of the great resources and opportunities available to military spouses, there is a certain level of disconnect between these organizations and spouses.  I would love to see the businesses interested in hiring spouses help the spouse organizations with their marketing budgets and/or access to marketing/advertising resources.  If some of the larger corporations could sponsor advertising and help spread the word, non-profits and small businesses, who are doing great things, could reach so many more spouses and have a positive impact on their lives.  Many passionate, driven individuals have joined the military spouse employment movement. But, they are start-ups or non-profits with minuscule budgets and lack the resources (a full marketing/advertising team) to make the impact they want.  MadSkills is such a unique platform, and I would love to witness it become a household name for all professional military spouses, and I wholeheartedly believe it soon will.

Another huge barrier I see that needs overcome is tackling the beast that is affordable childcare.  So many spouses with MadSkills want to work, but their ambitions are thwarted by costly, unreliable, etc., childcare.  Any organization that wants to help spouses with employment needs to consider partnerships and be brainstorming on the base level of what is holding spouses back from earning gainful employment.  Spouses who cannot afford or rely on their childcare cannot make it to the base during office hours to tap into these resources and learn about organizations like MadSkills.  Military spouse employment programs certainly do not need to get into the game of providing childcare, but they should be thinking about it and the other barriers that stand between their awesome resources and the spouses who need them the most if they aren’t already.  True solutions start at the root and work their way up.

Connect with Kaycee at happykaycee.com.