It is never easy readjusting to life after the military.
Justin Kordas, who joined the U.S. Marine Corps never thinking he’d one day have to leave, has seen many of his fellow veterans struggle with this transition.
“A lot of veterans I served with or met through service, they haven’t coped with civilian life as well,” said Kordas, who served in the Marine Corps from 2006 to 2011. “A lot of the veterans I know still struggle, as they don’t have the military structure, military support.”
After being medically separated from the Marine Corps in 2011, Kordas found a new path for his future – and a new way to help other veterans coming back home – by becoming a business owner.
Kordas and William Porter co-founded Stone Fleet Inc. in Providence in June 2022.
The two-person operation offers structural consulting services, working with architects, builders and property owners to provide advice and support through the construction process. Most of the clients are contractors within the commercial real estate sphere, but Kordas said the company is starting to lean toward working more directly with property owners and architects, which will allow them to work at earlier stages of building design.
Like for many new business owners, the work was full of surprises. Mostly, realizing how many bureaucratic and administrative tasks they have to take care of.
“We knew there would be administrative tasks, but every time we think we’re done … there’s always more to do for the business,” Porter said. “It’s surprising and it takes a lot of time, but it’s ours.”
About one year into the business, Stone Fleet is steadily growing. Porter and Kordas said they are always working on multiple short- and long-term projects at a given time, with Porter taking up to 20 smaller projects on his plate and Kordas focusing on larger, longer-term projects.
As the company grows, Kordas and Porter said one of their goals is working more with local, state and federal government. And to achieve that last goal, they recently looked into a federal certification that would help them access more work.
The service-disabled veteran-owned small business certification is a federal recognition that allows businesses to bid and compete for federal sole-source and set-aside contracts. For Porter and Kordas, who are hoping to work with federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, obtaining this certification was on top of their to-do list.
But as they started looking into it last summer, they soon learned that the process to get certified was not as straightforward as they thought.
“It was a very confusing process,” Kordas said. “There was a huge list of requirements and a huge list of documentation that was required.”
Eventually, Kordas looked to a local program for help. APEX, formerly known as the Rhode Island Procurement Technical Assistance Center, or RIPTAC, helps local small businesses get federal contract opportunities. A partner program of the R.I. Commerce Corp. and funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, APEX offers free services to small businesses.
For weeks, Kordas worked with APEX to prepare his application, making sure he had all the required documents and that they met the deadline.
Melody Weeks, executive vice president of R.I. Commerce who oversees the APEX program, said it’s not uncommon for small businesses to need some sort of guidance when exploring recognitions and certifications.
“Any time you go through the federal system, it’s intimidating,” Weeks said. “Part of it is just understanding the terminology. And as a business just getting started, people are afraid to make a mistake.”
There are 19 businesses in Rhode Island that are either veteran-owned or service-disabled small businesses, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. Weeks said APEX has helped a handful of companies pursue similar certifications in the last few years.
Without APEX, Porter and Kordas said they would have been lost.
“PTAC was a real guiding light for us,” Porter said. “Even with their help, Justin probably had close to 200 hours of paperwork and research and answering questions. And if it wasn’t for them helping us through the process, I don’t know that we could have made the deadline.”
The main obstacle is knowing who to turn to. Awareness of these certifications is not much of a problem, at least in the construction industry, where Kordas and Porter said there is a push to become more inclusive and bring in businesses from other classes, such as women-owned, minority-owned and veteran-owned businesses. The problem is finding programs such as APEX that are available to guide business owners to achieve the right certification.
“When we’re getting out of the miliary, we are given a firehose of information about what’s available to us and you don’t retain it because it’s just thrown at you,” Kordas said. “So, I think there’s a lot of holes in what people are aware of that are out there for assistance. And there are some people that are afraid. So having someone they can talk to … that is something individually that we can do.”
After weeks of work, Stone Fleet finally received the recognition in December 2022, which will allow it to work with clients that are contracting with government agencies. While they said they haven’t quite broken into the federal market since receiving the certification, Kordas and Porter are hoping that will change soon.
And for Kordas, who knows how hard reentering the civilian world can be for veterans, this certification means so much more.
“Being a veteran-owned business, I am hoping we can attract veterans to be employees,” Kordas said. “I’m hoping that will help other veterans that feel they can’t open up and be themselves. They can be themselves at a veteran-owned business.”
