A few speakers at a recent gathering focused on veteran-owned businesses had some pointed advice for former military members looking to grow their businesses: Don’t be shy.
Finding ways to leverage their military service and call attention to their business being veteran-owned can help them move ahead of competing companies, the audience heard at the fifth annual Utah Veteran Business Conference.
“If I could give you a tip that would create a margin of 70 percent over some of your competitors, would you be interested in it?” Brian Garrett, chair of the Utah Veteran Owned Business Partnership and senior vice president for military affairs at Zions Bank, asked the crowd.
“It’s your service. It’s your service. According to the SBA (Small Business Administration), the general public would prefer to do business with a veteran-owned business by a margin of 70 percent over that non-veteran-owned business. And I bring this up because, as we work with veteran-owned businesses, we all struggle. We don’t like to tell our service because it’s just the humility we all learn in the military. But at the end of the day, you earned it.”
He suggested that all veterans take advantage of “opportunities to represent your service in line with your business.”
Justin Arriola, a Navy veteran who co-owns two engineering technology companies, said he eventually discovered that edge.
“Leveraging that veteran connection is huge, and actually it’s not something I took advantage of initially,” he said. “I didn’t really push the veteran aspect of my business. I was a veteran-owned business, but I didn’t really push that, and I kind of missed how key that was into opening some doors.”
Dealing with clients and others, they would notice on headers, emails and businesses cards that his was a veteran-owned business.
“And then, all of a sudden, the way you’re being dealt with by the clients really changes,” he said. “Just being able to leverage your connection to the veterans community is really positive from a business aspect. And, you know, veterans have a lot of respect now that we didn’t always have, and I think taking advantage of that is a good idea for your business.”
Among other suggestions Arriola had is making full use of resources available to veterans in business. “We really have a tremendous opportunity as vets to have access to tools that traditional small businesses don’t,” he said.
The conference itself is one of those tools, designed to connect veteran entrepreneurs and business owners with the resources they need to be successful in the marketplace. Keynote presentations, rundowns of available resource programs, business-ownership panels, mentoring sessions and networking were all part of the event, which was presented by the Salt Lake Chamber along with several presenting sponsors, including the Veterans Business Resource Center, Utah Department of Veterans and Military Affairs and Zions Bank.
Gary Harter, executive director of the Utah Department of Veterans and Military Affairs, noted that Utah has a “booming” economy. One reason, he said, is that people like the veterans at the conference have a desire to start and run small businesses, to take an idea and develop it, and be able to provide for themselves and their families.
“And I think there’s a direct connection to that to the veteran piece, for all who served in the military and who are here today who serve in the military and looking at what they can do to be successful, to provide for themselves, their family, their community, and explore things that they’ve never done before, potentially,” Harter said.
The military builds a work ethic that enables a veteran to be part of a team, set a goal and establish up strategies to achieve success, he said. “I think that’s what really makes it special,” he said, “and why we started this thing, the partners and many others who started this five years ago.”