The Small Business Administration announced a plan Wednesday to expand entrepreneurial training for disabled veterans and to open new programs for women veterans and members of the National Guard or Reserves.
The program for disabled vets, established in 2007 at Syracuse University, will be expanded to seven business school campuses.
The program is free for qualified veterans.
Karen Mills, the SBA administrator, said that one quarter of veterans say they are interested in starting their own business.
“We believe we have a sacred trust” to help service men and women meet that goal, she added.
Mike Haynie, director of the disabled vets program at the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse, said he’s excited to expand it.
“It started with a simple idea to leverage what we do well to give back to people who have served us,” he said. “We owe it to the men and women to craft a way forward.”
The program helps people develop their ideas, find financing, and deal with problems as they occur, Haynie said.
He said that since 2007, it has graduated 320 people who have started more than 150 new businesses.
He noted that women veterans face some different challenges and have some different opportunities and added he was excited by the new program for them: Women Veterans Igniting the Spirit of Entreneurship.
The program for National Guard members and reservists is called Operation Endure and Grow.
Haynie described them as programs that involve high touch online training and focus on the nuts and bolts of managing a small business.
John Raftery, a Marine who went through the program for disabled vets and started his own contracting business that now employs 18 people in five states, described the training as “a launch pad” for his undertaking.
“It allowed me to develop more than just a concept,” he said. of the training. “I learned how to do a business plan, how to do marking research, how to get financing and it really honed in on our own personal business idea.”
Haynie said the programs will encourage veterans to “try to craft a passion into a vocation.”
Much of the training is online, but the beginning of the program for disabled veterans involves a visit to one of the participating campuses.
There are no universities participating in the Seattle area, but the program will pay people in this region to travel to UCLA and will cover their expenses for the boot camp training.
For more information on the programs, Click here
You can go directly to the veterans program by Clicking here to the women’s program by Clicking here or to the National Guard program by Clicking here
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