Q&A talks with Mike Zacchea, director of the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans (EBV) with Disabilities at UConn. The program, which is part of a national consortium of business schools and universities, provides experiential training in entrepreneurship and small business management to post-9/11 veterans with service-connected disabilities.
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Q&A talks with Mike Zacchea, director of the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans (EBV) with Disabilities at UConn. The program, which is part of a national consortium of business schools and universities, provides experiential training in entrepreneurship and small business management to post-9/11 veterans with service-connected disabilities.
Q: Can you tell us how UConn's Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans came about and how you got involved with the organization? What is its mission?
A: We began looking at the data for veteran-owned businesses in Connecticut and New England and discovered that while the state and region overall are good markets for veteran-owned businesses, the market was underserved. So we identified the opportunity, and said we'd be the New England center for the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans. We hosted our first bootcamp class in 2010.
Our mission is to help post-9/11 service disabled veterans start businesses.
Q. What are some of the key skills you teach veterans?
A: We have a comprehensive instructional curriculum that is heavy on applied knowledge and uses very little theory. We designed the curriculum with the help of the curriculum design center at UConn, using principles of universal access. Ensuring our veterans could access the curriculum regardless of disability or impairment is a mission-critical competency.
We start with an online course, which teaches fundamentals of creating a mission statement, vision statement, values statement, and a value proposition. Veterans also produce a business model canvas for later use as they develop their business plan.
During the bootcamp's residential phase conducted in Hartford, veterans learn ecommerce, marketing, advertising, social media, networking, accounting, venture capital finance, business communications skills, and relationship management skills.
Our bootcamp also leverages several corporate relationships with: Synchrony Financial, which provides instructors; Prudential, which has been supporting our bootcamp since 2011; and LinkedIn, which provides our graduates with a free full one-year premium membership.
Our veterans also read Reid Hoffman's “The Start-up of You.” The idea of the book is that regardless of whether you start a business or work for someone else, your career is an entrepreneurial endeavor. We are all entrepreneurs, ultimately.
Q: Do you have any sense of how many veterans go on to start their own business?
A: Approximately 165,000 post-9/11 veterans have started businesses, but the veteran population overall is shrinking (by 25 percent since 2000) and is projected to shrink further (by an additional 33 percent) by 2030. As a result, the number of veteran-owned businesses is also shrinking.
This is meaningful. It predicts loss of economic, social, and political capital for veterans and the veteran-owned business community.
Q: What impact has the bootcamp had so far? How many veterans have opened a business or found jobs as a result of the bootcamp?
A: We've graduated 157 veterans in seven years, and started 125 businesses that have produced more than $35 million in gross revenues and created more than 300 jobs. Ninety percent of the businesses we've started are still in operation. Additionally, we've had more than two dozen veterans find full-time, career-track employment, and more than a dozen have accessed career-track education opportunities.
The greater impact is that it has started a larger conversation with the business and education communities and policymakers in our state about vets' needs.
Q: How is the program funded?
A: The program is entirely funded through charitable donations, specifically grants and corporate and individual philanthropy. All of our money goes to helping veterans reintegrate into society economically.
We receive no taxpayer money at all. This is not a state program. It's a nonprofit that is sponsored by the University of Connecticut School of Business. Organizationally, we now fall under the CT Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, led by Timothy Folta.
Q: Can you describe some of the challenges veterans face after serving their country and then re-entering the workforce? What can employers/society do to help veteran reintegration?
A: The most immediate obstacles that veterans face re-entering the workforce include: globalization, skills-biased technology change, income inequality, lack of access to opportunities and a business network, the historic shift in the economy from manufacturing to service, and the widening civilian-military gap.
A holistic reintegration consists of several components: timely access to health care, safe/stable housing, nourishing food, educational and workforce re-entry opportunities, and mentorship/navigationship of those resources. We call this model the “Sea of Good Will.” I proposed this model in a book, “Social Entrepreneurship Catalyst.”
