In Place of Fatigues, Business Suits
LOS ANGELES
MAJ. STEPHEN THOMAS began to consider starting a business in the year after he was badly wounded in Iraq and was being treated at a succession of Army hospitals. “I was bored with nothing to do,” he says.
Four years after being treated for the leg and jaw fractures and burns he suffered in a roadside attack, he was talking to an audience at the University of California, Los Angeles, about his proposal to build an events center for business meetings and social occasions in Huntsville, Ala., where he is stationed as a manager of equipment procurement for the Army’s Future Combat Systems project. He plans to build the Venue, as he calls his proposed center, in the next three years and run it full time when he retires in 2011 after 20 years on active duty.
Along with 14 other military veterans, Major Thomas was participating this month in an Entrepreneurship Boot Camp for Veterans With Disabilities. The program was created last year at the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University and has been adopted this year by U.C.L.A, Texas A&M and Florida State to teach disabled soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines the skills needed to start and expand small businesses and help them find financing for their ideas.
In more ways than one, the veterans may have an advantage in entrepreneurship courses. In a recent study, the Small Business Administration said it found that the experience of military service strongly predisposed people to self-employment and business ownership. Repeated confirmations of that finding were demonstrated at U.C.L.A. this month.
Allen McAfee, 26, for example, was a Navy medic serving with the Marines in Iraq when he was wounded in 2004 and earned two Purple Hearts. He got out of the service last year and joined IO Environmental and Infrastructure Inc., a company in San Diego that cleans up polluted Superfund sites at military bases and other government installations.
“I had no experience in business after six years as a nurse and in combat,” Mr. McAfee said. But he said he now hoped to help IO Environmental, where he has become a partner, because he has a disabled veterans preference in government contracting. The company is bidding on major contracts, and Mr. McAfee says that if it wins awards, IO Environmental will need “investments of some $200,000 in bridge financing” to help with gearing up for expanded work. Mr. McAfee presented his case for raising that capital to his fellow veterans at the boot camp as well as to business school professors and local entrepreneurs.
Another participant, Chihung Szeto, 31, said he led a company of 140 soldiers as an Army captain in Baquba, Iraq, was wounded and was awarded the Bronze Star. Mr. Szeto has a bachelor’s degree in economics from the United States Military Academy at West Point but said he wanted to learn the techniques of business management.
“Business is simply knowing people,” he said. “I learned leadership at West Point and with men in combat. I’ll keep in touch with those people all my life. But I need to learn business management; that’s what this program gives me.”
Mr. Szeto manages sales of dental supplies in the Los Angeles area and, with a cousin in China, shares in a business that makes souvenirs and marketing novelties for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Angels as well as other businesses. He says he wants to expand “by having personalized promotional items, pens and other gifts, designed here and manufactured in China.”
Alfred E. Osborne Jr., senior associate dean of U.C.L.A.’s Anderson School of Management, said: “These guys are smart. They understand that running a business is like being on a battlefield. You have to do everything you can to survive and achieve an objective.”
Mr. Osborne is running the university’s boot camp program with Elaine Hagan, who directs the Anderson school’s center for entrepreneurship. The program is more than a quick study. Participants take three weeks of online courses at the start, then come to the university for an intense week of lectures, culminating with presentations of their business plans. After that, university faculty members counsel the students for a year to help them with raising capital and general business issues.
The boot camps have enrolled 60 veterans so far at the four universities, which pay for the program. At U.C.L.A., that is about $250,000, which Mr. Osborne said he raised from private donors.
“We’re going to have a small capital fund, almost a grant program funded by donors, to help guys get over the hump and drive home the message that folks really care about you,” said Mr. Osborne, who was among the first to develop entrepreneurship programs for groups running health clinics and schools as well as minority groups that had difficulty attracting capital in the past.
Indeed, developing their own business may be ideal for veterans with disabilities, Mr. Osborne said. “Many of these guys have medical problems that make it almost impossible for them to work at a traditional business. But if you own a business, we reward that as does no other country on earth.”
Jeffrey Hopson, 39, is an example of a veteran trying to turn his disabilities into a service business for other veterans. A machine gunner in the Marines, Mr. Hopson served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was injured and has to go to Veterans Affairs hospitals frequently for examinations and treatments.
“But I have to wait hours sometimes even though I have appointments. It takes my whole day,” he said. So Mr. Hopson, a developer of Web sites before he joined the Marines, is devising an online service that can link veterans more conveniently to V.A. hospitals and to general hospitals where they can arrange treatments, easing the burdens on veterans and the hospitals.
At a Saturday session of the boot camp on Aug. 9, other veterans cheered Mr. Hopson’s business idea. But they and Mr. Osborne said his challenge would be to create a Web site that could bring so much information about veterans and medical services together. “You have a great idea, but a big job to implement it,” Mr. Osborne told him.
Other veterans presented plans both ambitious and down to earth. Greg Murray, 24, a former Marine sergeant, said he wanted to raise $3 million to build a factory in Central America to turn banana leaves into paper, using an ecologically responsible process invented by an Australian. Shawn James, 33, also a former Marine sergeant who grew up around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, wants to improve the technology of hybrid engines.
Alejandro Galicia, 40, an Army veteran, wants to expand BPI Plumbing, a business started by his uncle, to serve the military in the San Diego area. Rico Edillor, 47, a Navy veteran, wants to start a health-focused Asian foods business catering from vans. Christopher Mahoney, a former Marine sergeant, wants to open a Buffalo Wild Wings franchise near Camp Pendleton, in Orange County, Calif.
U.C.L.A., says Mr. Osborne, will offer another boot camp program next year.
