The team behind your packet.
A combat-injured Infantry retiree who built his own CRSC application from the ground up. A 25-year enterprise change-management leader with Dell and ExxonMobil program scope exceeding $500M. A doctorally-trained nurse practitioner whose nexus letters bridge medical evidence and disability law. Three skills your packet needs — lived expertise, operational rigor, and clinical credibility.
Loy O'Kelley
I retired as a 1LT after enlisted and officer service in the U.S. Army Infantry, with two combat tours in Afghanistan, a Combat Infantryman Badge, and eighteen VA-rated conditions from those years.
When I sat down to file my own CRSC packet, I learned exactly how brutal the process is — and how easy it is to lose tens of thousands of dollars to a single weak narrative or missing enclosure. So I built the packet the way it should be built. 277 pages. Every condition documented. Every causation chain proved.
Standfast exists because the next retiree shouldn't have to figure it out alone. We bring that same discipline to your packet — vet to vet, plain-spoken, no shortcuts.
"Standfast" is a military command. It means hold your position. Don't break. We named the company after it because that's the posture you need when you're up against a system that makes denial the path of least resistance.
Robert Kelley
Robert's career has been spent on a single throughline: helping people navigate complex, high-stakes transitions they didn't ask for. At Dell and ExxonMobil, that meant $500 million in enterprise transformation programs touching 100,000+ employees across 30+ countries. At Standfast, it's the same craft applied at a much more personal scale — one combat-injured retiree at a time, walking through what your service is owed and how to actually recover it.
At Standfast, Robert leads Client Development. The intake call most clients have with the firm is with him; the relationship he builds carries through the engagement. The same discipline that kept billion-dollar deployments on track now anchors how Standfast handles a single retiree's packet — the calm of the first conversation, the structured evidence checklist, the steady cadence of updates while HRC adjudicates, the decision-letter walkthrough.
"You don't manage a $500 million deployment by hoping it works out. You don't file a CRSC packet that way either."
Dr. Carrie Caldwell Johnson, DNP, APRN, FNP-c
Dr. Johnson brings more than 26 years of clinical practice as a Family Nurse Practitioner and Doctor of Nursing Practice to Standfast's leadership. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the owner of Caldwell-Johnson PLLC, a medical-legal consulting practice based in Waco, Texas. Her academic appointments have included Texas A&M University and the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor.
Her clinical specialty is the place where medicine meets disability law: comprehensive medical evaluations to determine service-connected disabilities, independent medical opinions, record reviews, and the medical "Nexus" letters that establish the link between a veteran's current condition and their service. Her academic specializations in chronic disease, disability, and genetics anchor every opinion she provides in current evidence-based practice.
As Chief Nursing Officer, Dr. Johnson currently advises on the medical evidence and clinical narrative components of Standfast's CRSC packets — making sure the medical story in your file is as defensible as the legal one. As Standfast expands into VA disability claims preparation, her clinical leadership and nexus-letter expertise will anchor that practice line.
A strong CRSC or VA packet doesn't just need the right forms. It needs medical evidence that a clinician would defend — written in the language a reviewer is trained to look for. That's the standard Dr. Johnson sets.