After four years of service with the Army and the National Guard, Jerry Flanagan was eager to build a new life and career. But he didn’t know where to start.
“There just weren’t a lot of tools for me to use to get a job,” Flanagan says of his transition to civilian life, a shift he made in the late 1980s. “More than 30 years later, and they still haven’t figured out how to give these veterans a good opportunity to be hired.”
Flanagan has since taken matters into his own hands. As the founder and CEO of JDog Brands, a franchise that provides junk-hauling and carpet-cleaning services, Flanagan is committed to partnering exclusively with veterans and veteran family-members as franchisees. It’s not just helping him build a booming business — he’s fighting to combat veteran unemployment and support mental health.
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The jobless rate for veterans jumped to 6.5% in 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a disproportionately high rate. And according to a 2021 report from Veterans Affairs, the suicide rate for veterans is 52% greater than for non-veteran adults in the U.S. These two troubling statistics, Flanagan says, are closely related.
“When you’re an unemployed veteran, and you’re struggling with PTSD, and maybe you’re involved with drugs and alcohol, you’ve got to get employed and you need to work where you feel you belong,” he says. “When you find that ethos of brotherhood and sisterhood, and you’re working amongst other veterans that understand you, you feel comfortable, you feel like you’re serving your country.”
Flanagan knows what it’s like to feel professionally lost as a veteran. He started JDog “out of desperation” after a previous entrepreneurial endeavor was shuttered by the 2008 recession.
“Here I am, 43 years old with no college degree, kids in middle school, and having a hard time finding a job,” he says. An online search for recession-proof businesses led him to junk removal, and relying on his own physical strength and his Jeep, Flanagan started offering his services. Business took off immediately.
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“People were excited to have a military veteran come into their home,” he says. “There was trust, I was there on time, I said ‘yes sir’ and ‘yes ma’am,’ and I cleaned up when I was done.”
He started to see a dual opportunity to both build a successful business and support a community in need. JDog started franchising its opportunities to veterans and veteran families in 2012, and today has 264 locations stretched across the country. (Most of those veteran franchisees, he notes, hire an additional two to five veterans to support their operation.) In 2016, Flanagan and his wife started the JDog Foundation to provide additional mental health resources to veterans. Their long-term goal, he says, is to eventually have a JDog operation in every zip code across the country, and to help to drop the veteran unemployment rate to below 1%. But that will take buy-in from companies outside of the JDog universe.
“It’s difficult for employers to really understand what veterans have gone through,” Flanagan says. “Our veterans are so overqualified for positions, and employers don’t realize it — they don’t know how many people they’ve led, how much they’ve been responsible for.”
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As companies increasingly commit to inclusivity efforts in recruiting and hiring, Flanagan hopes to see the veteran community be prioritized in a more intentional, systematic way.
“Every corporation should have a military veteran in their human resources department,” he says. “It’s critical, because otherwise talent is going to be overlooked. And if there were tax breaks or a stronger push or an employer benefit to hiring that veteran HR person, that would be a good step to getting more employers to understand this group of workers.”
