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Veterans Considering Entrepeneurship

Starting a business could offer veterans a path to financial stability

Advice on how to address financial, experience, and networking barriers to entrepreneurship
Advice on how to address financial, experience, and networking barriers to entrepreneurship

Post-9/11 veterans are pursuing entrepreneurship at a fraction of the rate of WWII veterans for a number of reasons, including a lack of access to capital and little to no previous professional experience as many service members enter the military directly out of high school.

This can make transition from military service to civilian life challenging, regardless of how long you’ve been serving, partially due to a lack of financial stability. Entrepreneurship has long been regarded as a pathway to economic solvency, particularly for veterans who want the sense that they are continuing to serve others beyond themselves.

However, while 49% of WWII veterans went on to start small businesses, millennial veterans are pursuing entrepreneurship at 4.9%. This shift is due in large part to the nature of businesses in the modern landscape.

Decades ago, entrepreneurship may have meant opening a small business that serves your local community, but today, tech-based companies often require six-figure startup costs, as well as a seasoned professional team to take a concept from idea to implementation.

Those sizable needs for both capital and personnel create barriers that post-9/11 veterans are finding it difficult to overcome.

These factors, while challenging, are not impossible to overcome if veterans are able to recognize and leverage the power of their global networks.

In this video, we share advice on how to address those challenges and start your own business.

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Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.