The Business of Veterans: Bottom Line

The big screen shows us painted faces, dangerous combat operations complete with shaky camera shots and harrowing outcomes overlaid with ominous music and sound effects. Fiery, loud, exciting, and with heroism around every corner.?

This is the military, right?

Not really. A relatively small percentage of people in uniform have served in a capacity such as the blockbuster films – and rarely in the same fashion as those films.?After all, these become big screen features and TV shows because of their fantastical, and often farfetched nature – and not because they’re everyday occurrences.

Many service members would argue that a more realistic view of military service in the spirit of “reality tv” would be very, very boring. A lot of sitting, standing, inventorying of gear, cleaning of weapons, paperwork, planning and joking around. We’re all familiar with “hurry up and wait”.

There are absolutely some people that put themselves in harm’s way daily. There are teams of troops dropping into enemy territory under the cover of darkness. There are dark rooms full of TV screens with satellite feeds, beeping radars, and sonar.?There are submarines full of sailors sailing around in the depths with surveillance on enemy movement. And yes, there are fighter pilots streaking across the sky ensuring air superiority, although I hear they don’t say things like “I have a need for speed”.

Why is this great talent??

The US Armed Forces is a massive population of professionals who are well-traveled, educated, diverse, high-tech, and experienced.?It’s a compliment of well over 1.5M people in uniform and churns out around 200k talented young men and women every year; second only to campus recruitment as a single source of talent.

Gone are the days and notions of people having joined the military because they had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. Historically there have been generations of service members, who during call-ups and drafts were pulled from the streets of the country without much formal education. Today’s US Armed Forces are the most primed and ready volunteer force we’ve ever produced.

By comparison to their civilian counterparts, this network of military and veterans has more high school diplomas and advanced degrees and will come with more practical application work experience after an average 4-year enlistment than a typical college graduate. Educational benefits in the US armed forces and beyond are too good to pass up, and results in these people having access to higher-quality higher-ed without accumulation of debt.

I was infantry. There’s no such post-military job…

Even the combat jobs are relevant.?While not in an combat operation status, an infantry leader is a planner, a trainer, a mentor, a logistician, or a management professional.?Special operators, for example, are often hand selected based on criteria like intelligence, test scores, ability to be a strong team member and, sometimes lastly, by their physical abilities.?It’s not all brawn and muscles. A combat operations officer is a college educated large-team leader who often must govern in impossible situations with a diverse set of people and circumstances.?

A combat-arms NCO is a young leader who, in many cases, isn’t college educated by the time they’re responsible for the training and proficiency of 12+ other troops. Add the operations to their resume – they’re leading people in challenging situations often with little guidance or precedent. The learning curves among this population are, by design and necessity efficient and effective. They plan, lead and execute. Do that effectively, and you may compare to the top leaders among corporate entities.

But?business must see that there’s a transition that requires some growth. The infantry leader isn’t going to hang up the boots and come to work the next day and close a sales deal. But of course, neither is the recent grad.

Only about 15% of the US Armed Forces are “combat jobs”.??

The pop-culture reference of military service is this exciting, fast paced, explosion-laden, hardcore looking job. But the fact is that most modern militaries do a lot of what you and I do – administrative, logistical, planning, financial, supply and statistics. While some of the toys and vehicles may be very different – for the most part, they do the jobs we do – in zero fail environments and with countless hours of training and practical application. While a lot of people in any military DO have basic training and exposure to weapons – most don’t regularly handle them in the course of their duties.

In essence, this population consists of professionals like you and I – with jobs just like ours.

If you can manage an aircraft carrier, you can manage technical operations.?

At sea, underwater, in the air or in combat there’s no time to head over to the repair shop when something goes wrong.?The $4B+ nuclear submarine 500 feet under the surface must have built-in maintenance and engineering to keep nuclear reactors, propulsion, electrical and vital life sustaining systems up and running for MONTHS at a time without surfacing. The $11B nuclear aircraft carrier with 5000 sailors on board, maintains aircraft lifts, HVAC, radar, sonar, lights, water…etc – and must be effective under its own power without fail. The crew that maintains a $65M F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet must ensure all parts, logistics and systems are operational with no margin of error.

Beyond technical skills, the modern military must be able to take billions of dollars in equipment, vehicles, and people to the other side of the world, effectively and efficiently - and win.?This takes coordination of low to high level leaders, logisticians, engineers, supply experts and operational excellence.?Once there, troops, vehicles and supplies must be inventoried and housed, often in climate-controlled environments with high tech gear in tow. Medical facilities, storage, living and working space sometimes literally materialize from large containers of equipment.

Interestingly, the average age of the professionals doing this work is between 21 and 22 years old – often with years of experience under their belt by this age.

The support elements that are required in this space range from medical professionals and veterinarians to communications equipment and IT professionals making sure all the elements of military operation are able to function – no different from the clients in our industry.?

What’s this have to do with business?

Business Impact and Bottom Line

Years ago I was riding along with a salesperson from a company in which I led military/veteran programs. We were pitching a service to a client who had our competitor's bids on the table. I was a quiet observer on the sales pitch.

The client wanted a few days to review all of his options from us and our competitors. As we were walking out of his office I asked about the picture frame with a kid in a Navy uniform. The guy's eyes lit up. "That's my son". We had a quick exchange as he told me that his son comes home soon after a few deployments. I told him that I could help his son reconnect with a job and a network if he wanted the help. I went on to explain the program that I lead in the company, and how we impact people like his son.

He said "wait, before you leave - I will sign your contract".

Cultural alignment. The values we represented as a business and what it meant to this client was immeasurable - and it helped just enough to push a deal over the edge.

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There are ~40k nonprofits in the US that service veterans in one way or the other. If you’ve been working in this space long enough, you’ve seen some of them come and go, government programs start up and stop and promising organizations stand out along the way. These organizations operate off of taxpayer dollars or private/corporate donations.

I’m opposed to anything that exploits a service member, or charges the veteran unnecessarily. So I do believe that companies, government, private funders and anyone else who enjoys the security that the service member offers us holds some responsibility of owning the success of the work done here - particularly if we aim to benefit from their great skills and talents.

However, we’ve avoided talking about the cost of doing this work bigger and better. Corporate donations and sponsorships, while sometimes offering a tax incentive, aren’t free -obviously. Limited in spend and budgets, everything comes with a cost.

A few years after the US entered Iraq and was fully involved in Afghanistan – a cry from the public warned that transitioning service members were facing massive disparities in employment, education and post-military success. At one point veteran unemployment was off the charts, suicide rates were looming, and the story became something to the tune of “veterans need our help”.

Veterans did need our help. They still do. But we’ve had so much success in moving education and programming forward that we’ve graduated from it being “the right thing to do”. Somehow we hung onto this notion that the veteran population is still broken, challenged and incapable – because that’s what the stories were showing us.

“This isn’t charity. It’s not just the right thing to do. It’s deploying the best talent and community on earth to have a positive impact on people and business.”

Stop including “it’s the right thing to do” in your strategy.?That’s not sustainable and it victimizes and undermines the most capable population of people on earth. As a veteran myself I don’t feel that anyone owes me anything and I don’t want to be your pet project. I, and my peers are the most proven capable people on earth - it's just that we're starting from scratch. I speak for millions.

Instead use the premise that “it makes great business sense”. It makes business better. It strengthens teams. It positively impacts bottom lines. It accesses one of the largest renewable talent pools of people available, and it employs and engages the best among us. When you use this argument – people will listen. It’s the same reason companies invest millions into early career and campus programs – for the best talent.

It’s how business is done. It’s how non-profits work. It’s about bottom line. If we say it’s not, we’re lying to ourselves.

What do I mean when I talk about sustainability??In order for a business to build, lead, run or execute a any program, there has to be an objective, desired outcome and some impact to the business. Well-run programs require brand advertising, talent offerings, social media, sponsorships, travel, events and people. These things cost money. And when a business needs to right size or faces a slump, a “nice to have” doesn’t make the cut. Nice to haves struggle for efficacy. If you can’t show a bottom line impact through people or revenue, it’s hard to get more money to do more things.

Here's my approach.?Become sustainable by proving the bottom line impact, and your program is far more than “nice to have”. Leading a military/veterans program means you must be a business person, a policy expert, a brand ambassador, a startup leader, and a recruiter. Do the hiring. Be personal and approachable. Do the public outreach. Share results. Show people the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). BUT make sure that there’s a business case. At the end of the day the business case allows for more funds and support to DO MORE.

The Bottom Line – If it is financially sustainable, it will benefit more veterans and more business.

Talent, revenue, relationships or business can be proven bottom line impacts.

If we generate business relationships as a bi-product of these programs, we can do more sponsorships, incubate more veteran small businesses, support more wounded veteran initiatives, affect policy making and have a greater exponential impact than ever before. We can do all of the great things that are “nice to have”, when we make it sustainable. It truly becomes a community that solves the generational issues that we sought out to solve in the first place – servicing the veteran and military population.

Spend Power

The veteran population, milspouse, reserves, dependents and associated community represent a $1T spend power in the US. Veterans alone account for ~20M people, wielding nearly $200B in annual spend power. For retail organizations, this is a massive, often missed target audience that would be fairly easy to reach. For B2B companies, this means that there are still a lot of veteran/affiliated decision makers with whom to align.

This strategy works with veteran owned small businesses too. The trust, comradery, open communication style of veterans and community alignment means that a veteran owned small business may also be able lean on the notion that they can close more business, assuming their offering and service is competitive, with other decision makers who are similarly aligned.

There are ~19M veterans in the US. Do the math. If each veteran has at least 5 close family members who understand this impact. The alignment is vast.

Summary

We’re working with the most capable, educated and diverse military and veteran population we’ve ever seen. The disparities in post-military employment often fall on us, employers. We’re missing a lot, but also doing quite a bit better than we've ever done before. If we properly put in place the mechanisms to attract, reach and employ these men and women – then we have a huge opportunity.

How do we get the resources to put these mechanisms into place? We create the business case and show the bottom line impact. We make our business operate better with great talent and alongside great veteran-aligned cultured organizations.

Together, we do more.

-Dish