From Service to Enterprise: Understanding the Veteran Entrepreneurial Journey

Roundtable Participants

Kara Rutter, Moderator, retired United States (U.S.) Army Sergeant Major, doctoral candidate in Parks, Recreation & Tourism Management at Clemson University, and President of Project Victory Gardens, whose research advances theory on veteran rural entrepreneurship, agritourism development, and rural resilience. Matt Rutter, Panelist, retired U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major, co-operator of Rutter’s Ranch, and Executive Director of Programming for Palmetto Veterans in Agribusiness, where he leads Farmer Bootcamp, the Farmer Bootcamp Accelerator, DoD SkillBridge agribusiness internships, and Coffee and Chores. David Rozelle, Panelist, retired U.S. Army Colonel, Bronze Star with Valor recipient, and Director of Workforce Enhancement for the South Carolina Department of Veterans’ Affairs, where he leads statewide veteran transition, employment, and entrepreneurship ecosystem initiatives. Holly Aker, Panelist, founder of Aker Strategy and Local Goods Gathered, former Interim Director of the Veterans Business Outreach Center of New England, and creator of The Next Acre cohort-based entrepreneurship program supporting farm and food business growth.

Lori Dickes, Panelist, Professor in the College of Behavioral, Social and Health Sciences at Clemson University, whose scholarly contributions bridge rural development, public policy, and applied research on underserved entrepreneurial populations.

Roundtable Discussion

The following discussion, held virtually on August 12, 2026, was moderated by Kara Rutter. The complete transcript was sent to all participants for review. What follows has been lightly edited by the moderator for clarity and slightly shortened to reduce repetition following transcription using ATLAS.ti (ATLAS.ti Scientific Development GmBH, 2024).

Moderator: Welcome. Thank you for joining us for From Service to Enterprise: Understanding the Veteran Entrepreneurial Journey. We proposed this roundtable because veteran entrepreneurship has received tremendous practitioner and policy attention, while the scholarly literature remains comparatively thin and, in some places, genuinely contradictory (Phipps & Skimmyhorn, 2025; Tihic et al., 2025). Veterans themselves consistently describe veteran military experience as giving them skills they use in business—leadership, discipline, organization, teamwork, adaptability, and resilience/grit—yet recent comparative evidence complicates this familiar story that military service simply produces an entrepreneurial advantage.

Phipps and Skimmyhorn (2025) find that, once demographic differences are accounted for, veterans are less likely to pursue entrepreneurship in their American Community Survey (ACS) analysis, and veteran entrepreneurs also report weaker financial outcomes on several measures. At the same time, Tihic and colleagues (2025) find that some entrepreneurship education training programs materially improve veterans’ transition to civilian life. I want us to keep one question in the back of our minds throughout today’s conversation: What exactly does military service produce, and under what conditions does it become entrepreneurial capacity?

We’ll move from the individual experience of military service outward through the sector and geography, into entrepreneurship programming and networks, and then finish with research and policy. Let’s start with military experience itself. Literature gives us a familiar list of supposed entrepreneurial traits: leadership, discipline, resilience, teamwork, and adaptability. But a list of traits does not tell us how those things actually operate together or whether they translate automatically into business ownership.

How does military service shape entrepreneurial thinking, leadership, and risk-taking? Which military competencies translate most effectively into business ownership, and where do veterans encounter challenges during the transition? So, Matt, when you moved from military leadership into a civilian entrepreneurial framework, what worked almost exactly as advertised? What absolutely did not?

M. Rutter: It’s kind of an interesting thought project, I think, to do that. When I retired, one of the things that really translated quite well into the entrepreneurial [sphere] is the ability to plan, act, adapt, and build teams. Then working through uncertainty is something that the military really teaches well. Most people who come out of the military have a sense of service, sacrifice, hard work and mission accomplishment, and I think all of those are really good for an entrepreneur and an entrepreneurial venture. What’s a little bit missing in it is that hard work and mission accomplishment don’t actually equal financial viability. In business, when you get out of the military, you have to be able to take those skills and translate them into an entrepreneurial skill set. You have to be able to reestablish your network in the sector that you’re working on, so in the agriculture sector, in my experience. But I think that all of us come out of the military a little bit different. The word veteran, I think, is just a very blunt instrument to describe us because our military experiences are not all the same. People have different job sets, different skill sets, different ranks, different links in the service, and they develop different abilities. I think that being able to maybe look at “veteranness”, if that is a word, to more accurately define what you’ve done and what you’ve learned in the military instead of just a binary yes or no question.

Moderator: Dave, you were obviously a relatively senior officer when you retired, then moved into the civilian workforce, and now focus on workforce development for veterans. What would you add to what Matt said?

Rozelle: We’ve been studying it for the last five years and really trying to apply some lessons learned to this population for the last year at least. We hosted an entrepreneurship forum and then two entrepreneurship workshops. One for new veterans who are starting out in business, and the second for those who need a boost, have made at least a million dollars, and are looking at the next phase. What all of them have in common that we found in our survey is that they did not have an understanding of the fiscal restraints and the responsibilities that they were going to have as they developed it. The most successful were those who had a spouse or a partner of some sort who was going to kind of hold them above the water for the year or two or five that it took to get their business going. That’s probably the most difficult task for our veterans as they transition because they’re so used to that month-to-month paycheck, and then they already hit a fiscal cliff as they transition out of service, they lose their basic allowance for housing and their basic allowance for subsistence, and they just have the salary; and then all of a sudden, they’re completely investing into entrepreneurship, where even, say, for instance, if you want a franchise and you use one of the nonprofits that’s going to waive your $10,000 fee for a franchise, you’re still having to come up with a million dollars to buy that franchise. That million dollars that you have to come up with is not something they are comfortable with—there’s not a military occupational skill in our military that does that kind of work. You spent your career, whether it’s four years or 40 years, things sort of magically appear when you need them because you request them, and it goes through a big budget piece. Very few people have had to live and work off a budget. When it comes time to do that, you are putting together a plan that will actually work.

The other piece is that we’re not used to selling stuff. That’s something that we don’t have to do. We don’t even lobby. We’re not even legally allowed to lobby while we’re in service. That’s my understanding of the fiscal piece, and then secondly, really going out there and selling your product, and it’s kind of a dream until you make your first sale. So those are the two things we really work on with veterans, and we’re trying to focus on, really understanding the economics, the financial capability and responsibility, and then, of course, learning how to really sell yourself. Matt put it great in that you’ve got to have a network, and that network changes dramatically when you transition from the military into the entrepreneurship space.

Aker: Those are great comments. That’s exactly some of the things that I’ve seen around fiscal management, around being able to self-promote, to be on social media, pushing out your product or your service, talking really openly about your experience and veteran status and how that translates. One of the things I think has always stood out to me is the ability of veterans to be really uncomfortable for a longer amount of time, while trying to navigate all of these things that come with starting a business. The limited resources, the limited capacity, trying to figure out the fiscal pieces—that level of discomfort in the early stages of operating a business—and still being able to kind of move through with the business.

Moderator: Lori, listening to that, should we think of some of these things as transferable skills, or is transfer too simple a concept for what’s actually happening?

Dickes: That’s a great question, and this is a great thought experiment. I really love thinking through this and talking about it with everyone today. I think transferability is definitely something that exists, but I do think it’s often more complicated than just saying, I have these skills that smoothly align with this other field, if you will, or this other area of professional practice. But I definitely think that exists. I think part of what I’m hearing, too, is also how do you craft a set of skills for a new environment? You have a set of skills, and how do you adapt them? And how are you flexible with a set of skills such that you can utilize them and leverage them fully? Because it’s one thing to have skills that transfer and another to be able to leverage and use those skills fully in this different environment. So, I definitely don’t think that exists in the way we are discussing this issue today. Fundamentally, there are a lot of reasons why not everyone is an entrepreneur. Right? And we could talk about that for hours and hours as well.

But I think that there are a lot of underlying characteristics, many of which you all have discussed, that can potentially place veterans in a position to be more prepared to leverage a set of skills, to be uncomfortable, and to take potential risks that maybe the average person is less equipped to do. I think that that’s really, really important. The literature on risk aversion and how people frame risk, I think, would add value to our lens of why that’s true in many cases. So, I would argue that, yes, transferability is a part of it, but a bigger part of it is also being able to take a set of skills and craft them and utilize your networks and know when to get appropriate training and to have this toolbox, if you will, that allows you to leverage them more fully.

Moderator: I think a lot of what came up moves us into question two, so we’ll dive into that. One of the dangers in talking about the veteran entrepreneur, and Matt mentioned some of this, is that the label makes the population sound much more homogeneous than it is. Military service obviously is not one experience, and entrepreneurship is not one context. Phipps and Skimmyhorn (2025) caution that the survey measures cannot distinguish military rank, occupation, or branch. The National Survey of Military-affiliated Entrepreneurs (NSMAE; Maury et al., 2023) rural data adds another layer. Even amongst veteran entrepreneurs, place and sector meaningfully change the resources, barriers, and networks available to people.

How do geography, industry sector, disability status, military occupation, all of these things, influence entrepreneurial experiences. To what extent does treating veterans as a single category obscure differences that matter for entrepreneurial success? So, Holly, you’ve worked with veteran entrepreneurs through Veteran Business Outreach Centers (VBOC) programming and other Small Business Administration (SBA) programs, as well as with farm and food businesses. What happens when a national or standardized entrepreneurship program hits a highly specific sector or place?

Aker: I think that the comment that David made in the last section around veterans having four or 40 years of service, really stands out to me and talking about what sort of networks have been built, what sort of experiences the veteran has had, that translates over. One of the things about grouping everyone together is assuming that everyone has some of the same experiences or has had shared experiences in this way. It’s really about understanding what’s required for that individual entrepreneur, particularly within the space where they are operating, whether that may be rural or maybe urban, what translates over from their past experience, prior to their service and how that can be connected. When I think about the different experiences or the diversity of veteran entrepreneurship, I also think about the ability to have a network, to have a community, to have a resource pool depending on where you’ve been, where you’re going, and where that business might be. We really can’t assume really any of these things, about an entrepreneur based on that veteran status.

Moderator: Matt, if you want to return to that kind of degree of “veteranness” idea and talk about some of the things that you’ve seen with the programming that you’ve provided, and the work that you’ve done with veteran communities.

M. Rutter: My specialty is agriculture. So, when I think about agriculture and what we do in our space, which is to help connect veterans with the resources that are out there to help them become successful farmers, that degree of “veteranness” matters. Veterans are really good at, doing things and figuring things out. We find that we’re not really training veterans on how to farm, but more on what is available, what is around them, and what to look for. The type of discharge that they have from the military, whether they have a service-connected disability or whether they have, any kind of other things that really impact their “veteranness”, combat deployments, or long overseas assignments or something like that. All of those impact how they approach farming. For us, I think that farming is very capital-intensive; it’s land-dependent, it’s highly regulated and seasonal, and so we have to really kind of think through that process when we’re talking about establishing a farm. You have to understand that you’re going to have a seasonal income and that you can’t rely on your tomatoes to take you through winter if you don’t stash the money away. So, understanding some of the fiscal and financial responsibilities that come with being a farmer, I think, are things that we find ourselves really kind of pushing. The programming that we run is very small; it’s 15 to 20 people, maybe. We can really get into the weeds of each individual’s place in life, where they are trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up, and we can help advise them with that and mentor them through that process. When we’re talking about veteran status and entrepreneurship, we have to really think about, in what sector, in what location, under what conditions. For agriculture, geography is very important. South Carolina farming looks a lot different than Nebraska farming, and so I couldn’t even speak about agriculture generally. I had to speak about it in my state because I understand my state and potentially the bordering states or at least some of the regions around us. I think that that’s important.

Moderator: Dave, from a statewide workforce and transition perspective, how much variation do you see among veterans who technically fall under the same eligibility category?

Rozelle: I was listening in on the “veteranness” piece, and it is really interesting to me because it does seem like our strongest entrepreneurs that have come out of the woodwork to be mentors in those things are not our career military folks. They’re actually people who served in the Marines from 1984 to 1988, and they have the same entrepreneurial status as someone who got out in 2025 and is starting their own business. So, it’s interesting to see the variation and creativity of those who, have those different experiences and really, where does the skill set align, as we sit down and try to come up with. There are some great programs, like the VBOC, which has the Boots to Business program, where they’re taking the time to try to train them and try to find the alignment between the skills they had while serving and what they’re trying to do as they transition; and to be honest with you, there’s often not a big connection between the two. You strike gold when you find someone who’s able to do entrepreneurially what they did in service as an entrepreneur and get that sweet DOD contract or something; that’s everyone’s dream. But to be honest with you, most veterans, from what I’ve studied, they keep it pretty small. They’re borrowing less than a $150,000, which is usual for a small business. There are very few that are going after the big DoD contracts right away and are having to borrow millions of bucks, except for those, as I discussed earlier, that are trying to buy a franchise. But most folks just want to go outside, they want to do stuff. They want to have a fence business, a lawn care business, or a sprinkler business. They’re not doing a huge investment on that first push. But what we’re seeing in these entrepreneurship workshops is that now that they’ve felt like. There’s a great example of a guy who started doing porta potty services back into Fort Jackson and to the Columbia area, and he’s growing and growing and growing and now he’s looking at his next business because he thought that was kind of easy. Now he wants to take on a much bigger chunk, take on a lot more debt, and do a lot more work. So, it’s really the “veteranness” and how it applies to entrepreneurship that is fascinating because it’s such a wide scale. Then it was you, Kara, that taught me that entrepreneurship is not just, starting that small business. It’s everything from the big DoD to farming, and it’s everything in between.

Dickes: One of the things that has struck me over the years when thinking about entrepreneurship is this idea that you have a set of very specific skills, but you are also a human being who comes to life with a whole set of personal life experiences that make you who you are. There’s a reason we’re all doing the things we’re doing now. Some of them are skill-based, but some of them are just who we are, where we grew up, all of those kinds of characteristics. I think that the idea of what Dave said is important. Yes, there are sometimes these skills match, but just as often as not, you have people that may have a different set of experiences, both in work and in life, which have led them to this path. Trying to understand some of that alignment is really very important. Going back to what Matt said, geography may be important here. What I mean, is that there are people, and as someone who grew up in Kansas, I can say that the geography from which people come is really impactful to kind of where they want to be and what they want to do in life. I think we can’t lose sight of that sort of personal side of it, that basket of things that makes us who we are. It struck me not very long ago when somebody said, “Tell us about your life journey and how you came to do what you’re doing now”, not the skill sets you have. I think we can’t lose sight of that part of it, too. It’s really about understanding what the skills are that people gained as a veteran. What did you do in the service? Specifically, what are things that might be transferable? But also, who are you? Who are you and from whence you come that might contribute to what you want to do now? So, I would just piggyback on the conversation and say that it’s not just this basket of skills; it’s a whole other set of things too.

M. Rutter: When Dave was talking about the entrepreneurs that are not investing a lot of money, a lot of farmers, we see them bootstrapping their organization, their whole program, or their whole venture, and they’re not taking on a lot of debt. I think it kind of made me think of the sunk cost fallacy. I think veterans, at least in my experience, we’re willing to pivot from something that’s not working into something that is. If you look at our personal journey through farming; we started in Aiken, we built a farm, we sold it, moved and relocated and built another farm, have been through a bunch of different types of animals and settled on pork. We have high-end, heritage breed, mangalitsas. We were selling fresh cuts, and then we pivoted again to charcuterie. Now we’re looking at bringing in Iberico pigs to get some Spanish charcuterie, and we’re also looking at developing a further meat processing facility in Anderson, South Carolina, so that we don’t have to go to Pennsylvania to have our charcuterie done. I think we just kind of put our toes in the water and experience entrepreneurship, and then as we grow and develop ourselves and our skills after the military, we get a little more confident about what we can do, because we’re now looking at taking on $1.5 million of debt to open up a butcher shop. While it’s scary, I think that we have those skills because we’ve been doing this for a few years.

Rozelle: I’ll jump in on that. We talked about it a minute ago, but with risk, I mean, the veterans spend their career, whether it’s four years or 40, learning about risk assessment and how to assess risk. That’s really the reason you’re able to pivot, is you’re able to look at what you’re doing. Veterans are able to look at what they’re working on, do a risk assessment and say they’re not going to wait until they’re in Chapter 11 to give up. They’re going to pivot before that happens, and they’re going to go for something either has less risk or has more reward and then be able to be able to take that risk on as part of their risk assessment. That’s a skill you learn in service that I think certainly applies to the small business or large business model, and it’s definitely applicable.

Dickes: I think that part is super important, Dave. I think the idea of how a person can separate themselves to some extent from the emotion of entrepreneurship is important. Separating yourself from pivoting or choosing something else because of that potential risk-reward tradeoff, is a really critical trait in terms of being able to be successful or pivot to something that is more successful.

M. Rutter: I think Holly’s actually heard us say when we’re teaching Boots to Business that our business plan is a living, breathing document and that we update it regularly and that we should not be afraid to look at it and say, “Okay, well this isn’t working and what’s the next step?”

Aker: I probably would just add, but to go back to this part of the question about treating veterans as a single category, that isn’t what we say about veterans and entrepreneurship, but not all veterans and their experiences are able to create that structure. Not all veterans dive into a business plan and use that as a decision-making tool. Not everybody understands their financial projections and can dig into the finances of the business, or have a partner that’s able to say, “No, this isn’t the best decision.” So, we do talk about veterans being risk-averse and being really calculated, but not to use a single category because we also see that those necessary steps in understanding planning and having someone guide you are really important to the success of the business.

Moderator: Going back to the literature we discussed earlier, what does success look like? Not everyone is looking for the same outcome from their entrepreneurial journey. There are many factors that suggest veterans are more focused on social entrepreneurship, which may play into some of those findings of Phipps and Skimmyhorn (2025). So, Matt, if you want to address what you’ve seen with the folks who come through your program.

M. Rutter: We often see that farming is a thing that veterans are interested in because it allows them to put down roots and as we were transient for most of our careers and bouncing around the world or around the United States and into countries that are, quite frequently, just not nice to be in. We come back and we want to put down roots and build a community and be part of that community. More often than not, I think, or at least as often as the money that they make isn’t the goal. That’s not success for them; they want to give back to their community. Kara and I established a nonprofit, and we frequently talk to other veterans about how they can establish a nonprofit or some sort of community service because that’s what they want to do. They don’t necessarily want to grow food to make money; they want to grow food to feed their community.

Moderator: There is a very large veteran entrepreneurship support infrastructure across the resources of the SBA, the Department of [Defense], the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Labor, and state resources. The question can no longer simply be whether programs exist. We have to start asking what they are actually changing. Tihic and colleagues (2025) found that only one of the four broad categories of entrepreneurship, education, and resources in their analysis significantly aided the military-to-civilian transition. The resources that performed best tended to be more specialized or personalized, such as one-on-one support, incubators, accelerators, universities, and other resources. Their discussion explicitly raises concerns about standardized one-size-fits-all approaches.

Which program models, services, and support mechanisms appear most effective in helping veteran entrepreneurs launch and sustain businesses? Where do gaps remain between veteran needs and available resources?

I’ll send it to you, Holly, first. When a veteran walked into the VBOC when you were there, when you came up with the Boots to Business Agriculture Reboot program, what does the system tend to assume that they lack? How do you approach those veterans?

Aker: The system tend to assume that they lacked entrepreneurial knowledge. Through Boots to Business or through training programs that happen throughout the different resource partner networks, it’s this sort of core business experience—how to develop your competitive space, your market, build a financial model. That’s the information that’s being provided to complement the background that the veteran has. When we look at which programs or which trainings are the most successful, it always comes from peer delivery. It always comes from someone who has a shared lived experience, has been successful or even unsuccessful in that exact space, and can provide mentorship, guidance, and even honest feedback. I think that’s an important part of it. When I think about the gaps that exist, it does depend on the type of business. So, we can be talking about farming. We can talk about large, multimillion-dollar businesses. We can also be talking about—where a lot of people come in— small investment, sort of what not everyone might consider a business. They might consider an investment piece, like having a rental home or having a cash flow business. Thinking through all of these elements, one of the things that seems to be a roadblock is: how do we translate those years of service into experience that’s now recognized and fundable, and how can we build a bridge across those things.

Rozelle: I love that answer Holly just gave because it really talks about what we’re trying to get after, which is, no matter what stage of life you’re in, you always need a mentor, whether you realize it or not. When you get into entrepreneurial efforts, having a mentor there aligned to you, especially if they’ve been someone who’s been through it before, they can act as a kind of a coach. I know the state [South Carolina] feels this way, and so hopefully, we’re right. We think that if you can align a mentor with a similar background who has been down this road before, they’re not going to shepherd you the whole way, but they can at least have a conversation with you to think about, “Hey, here’s some things that I ran into. Here’s some things that I would consider.” We’ve been working very diligently to try to find veterans who, especially those who have made their initial push and want to get bigger, to find someone who made that bigger push.

Then the other pieces, to answer this is that we have to remind veterans, even though we’ve talked about risk and that most of these ventures may end up in failure. It was interesting as we were preparing for the entrepreneurship forum. We went through the entire list of all the new small businesses registered with the State that were trying to go after the federal contracts, and we called every single one of them to see what their status was. The majority of them had already folded within that first year. They had decided it wasn’t worth it, or they pivoted to something else, and then were going to reregister with the state. At first, my team was frustrated because they were like, “Hey, Dave. We’re having a hard time finding somebody that can tell a good story about developing the program.” And I was like, “No. This is exactly the kind of people we want to talk to.” What was their decision? At what point did they decide they need to pivot or do something else? Or even better, they maybe had to go get a job so they can then fund themselves as they develop it so that their entrepreneurial effort became a side hustle while they were paying the bills with a full-time job. Or some life event happened that made them realize maybe being a new father and being an entrepreneur aren’t a good match right now. Ultimately, the goal is to make money, but you have to be willing to bootstrap yourself for a year or two or more. That’s a tough pill to swallow. So, that’s where we’re really getting after it, is finding the right mentor at the right time for the veteran and their experience. I’d like to do that at scale, and that’s something we’re working on.

Aker: Dave was talking about the percentage of businesses that were no longer in existence or had pivoted. I think an important part of that is creating realistic expectations of entrepreneurship, specifically for veterans. There’s a lot of information out there around opportunities and grants and loans that are available for veterans or access to contracts specifically and we haven’t set realistic expectations for what’s required from a financial, infrastructure, and human resources standpoint. We see a lot of businesses that, because they don’t have that expectation of what it really looks like to operate in contracting or in any entrepreneurial space, face challenges. If we can be more transparent around what’s really possible for a veteran entrepreneur; and I see that a lot coming through the doors, with someone saying, “I’m a veteran, what’s available to me to start my business?”

Moderator: Matt, where have you seen the biggest disconnect between what veterans think they need, and what the curriculum thinks they need?

M. Rutter: I think that it’s kind of interesting looking at the different program models that are out there, and Holly was really talking about and Dave too, the sort of really precise model that is kind of designed at the individual level, and I think that that’s what’s important. If you look at our programming in South Carolina, we run Farmer Bootcamp several times a year, and it’s a four-day program, just what it sounds like, kind of a fire hose through farming. But we don’t really teach farming that much; we teach the business side of it. We teach business plans, marketing, designing your website and how to get your product out to somebody, because we find that the people who are farmers know that part. What they’re lacking is the business acumen. We think that farming in South Carolina is very relational, and we bring people to that table with us. So, Holly talked about unsuccessful stories, and those are my favorite things to teach in Farmer Bootcamp is the mistakes I’ve made because, one, they’re quite humorous, but two, they allow people to live through my mistake and not make the same one. It’s the other reason we bring other people to the table with us. We bring our partners from the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) and the Extension offices, the South Carolina Department of Agriculture (SCDA), and other organizations that help support farmers in South Carolina. And having those people there is good because it brings a level of expertise to the table, but it is also a networking venture. I would say that most of our successes in Farmer Bootcamp, the Farmer Bootcamp Accelerator pilot, the Agritourism Incubator, and some of the other initiatives that we run are because we bring people into the room who are part of that network. We help build people’s relationships with that. Our folks walk away with a little bit of knowledge, but also a rolodex of whom to call when they get stalled out somewhere or if they can’t find the answer to something. I’m not going to claim that this is causal, but it seems to work pretty well for us because this last round of grants from the SCDA, four out of 12 awardees were people who had participated in our programs. So, a third were veteran farmers, and veteran farmers in South Carolina are only about 12% (USDA NASS, 2024). So, we were really overrepresented there. The people who came through our programs took home about $70,000 of the $215,000 awarded (Moore, 2026). I don’t think that has anything to do with what we do. It’s just about getting them in front of the people who understand these programs; it’s about exposing them to those things. It’s making them aware of these programs and that they exist. I think some of that with the program is not that they’re not there, it’s just that they’re hard to find. They’re hard to navigate, and awareness, I think, is quite important. The last thing I would say is that the two-day accelerator or four days for a bootcamp is quite small, and this very light intervention could have outsized effects if you focus on the person and exactly what they need at that moment in their farming journey.

Dickes: I’ll just add. I’m super struck by how siloed academia is both in an applied way, as well as in a basic science way. But there’s a lot of research, especially in public health and medicine, around the importance of the peer-to-peer model. Being entrepreneurial is in part behavioral and relational. Then there’s also an implementation and team science perspective, too, that I think is super important. There is so much evidence that once you have this base set of skills, whatever that base set of skills needs to be, then you have higher success with these peer-to-peer models. It’s important for the peers who are the mentors to help frame what those models might look like. It doesn’t surprise me that we see that here. I can totally see why that would happen. But I do think it means really kind of carefully determining what the base set of skills are that everyone needs to know and then clarifying how you help people have that kind of individualized peer-to-peer experience. What you see in some different settings is that those peer-to-peer models are very specific to a very specific set of skills and issues. If somebody wants to be a wheat farmer or if somebody wants to be an agritourism operator, right, then we’re really trying to be personalized. I’m just piggybacking on what Dave and, I think, Holly both said and that is that the individualized experience becomes very important, to ensure that we set people up for success in this particular setting. So, I just find it interesting that we see this in similar ways, that we would see this in other areas and other disciplines.

Moderator: A lot of the recent comments have focused on relationships, network, social capital, those types of things. That moves us well into question four. Veteran communities often have unusually strong internal trust and shared identity, but entrepreneurship also depends on access to customers, lenders, suppliers, mentors, investors, professional services, and industry specific knowledge. These are not always found within veteran networks. So, the NSMAE (Maury et al., 2023) rural data makes the distinction visible. Rural and urban veteran entrepreneurs reported fairly similar numbers of business social connections, but rural respondents were less likely to have people they could rely on located in their local community, and they perceived fewer veterans and entrepreneurs around them.

What role do peer networks, mentorship, veteran organizations, and entrepreneurial ecosystems play in business success? How can veteran entrepreneurs build social connections that extend beyond veteran-specific communities while still benefiting from shared military experience?

Dickes: I just want to touch on this from an applied research lens, as well as, a practical experience understanding of this. I don’t think we can underestimate the ecosystem piece. Now granted, a lot of the research from the ecosystem perspective has been, in the research triangle and Silicon Valley and places like that. So, clearly, that’s sort of obvious, I guess. But with that said, the ecosystem piece, even in small entrepreneurial settings, even more in very rural places, rural Nebraska, for example, or there’s a really robust rural entrepreneurship community in Wisconsin and Minnesota, is very important. A lot of this work has been focused on developing ecosystems that are robust, that people can tap into. While some of that is a bit amorphous in terms of, what’s that special sauce? But at the same time, there has been this intention to develop that and nurture that over time. So, I think we’ve all hit on this idea of the peer-to-peer idea, ensuring people have the opportunity to build relationships and networks. That just leads right into then, well, how do you then develop that ecosystem such that it’s robust and people can tap into it? The thing about the ecosystem that research also shows is that there’s a virtuous cycle to it. When you have an ecosystem people can tap into to build relationships, it sort of builds on itself. There are multiplier effects. Thereby, you get these places that just have the special sauce, if you will. I just don’t think we can underestimate that enough and that it is worth investing in.

What does investing look like? That’s up for debate. But, it is worth investing in and trying to create these kinds of agglomeration effects, because they do create spillovers for communities.

Rozelle: I think that when we talk about developing that ecosystem, veterans are really good at building coalitions. That’s kind of their skill set—especially anybody who was involved in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. You had to work with foreign armies, you had to work with guys who used to be the enemy to get a job accomplished, and you set all things aside in order to work together for a greater good; certainly, that happens. The kind of movement, the “Thank you for your service” movement of the veteran farmer, and the Homegrown by Heroes-Certified South Carolina branding that you announced last year, which I think is coalition building. For years, veterans would come back from doing their service, go back to family farms, and they would never identify themselves as being a veteran farmer. I believe that this is kind of a new phenomenon. Then not just supporting local, which I think is fantastic, and it’s something that I think communities have done for a long time. I grew up in Austin, Texas, and we’d go to Whole Foods and get the co-op food. We’d pick up a week’s worth of vegetables every Thursday morning from the co-op back when it was a real co-op and not what it is today. That was special. That was how people could help their local farmers. Then you put that veteran farmer tag on it, and it ties those people who have left service back to a larger community that’s more than just themselves. I think the ecosystem will build itself, and the veterans will benefit greatly from it because they can identify with the function they’ve lost. That’s the thing we have at the state—getting veterans to identify themselves, because there’s no ability to do that. They have to out themselves constantly to say, “Well, I am a veteran.” But if there’s no benefit to it, there’s no reason for them to say it, whether they’re a billionaire running a defense company or whether they’re a prisoner. For some reason, people don’t out themselves like that. But if you have the opportunity, like, veteran farmer, I think we continue to grow that, and it’s going to create the ecosystem we want.

Moderator: Matt, play the devil’s advocate for a minute. Do veteran-only programs risk creating very strong bonding capital without enough bridging capital? Are we approaching this in the wrong way?

M. Rutter: I don’t think so. I think that, well, maybe we are when I think about it. So, are the programs we’re using and doing helpful in bridging relationships into the market, capital, expertise or institutions? I think, when we think about, like, what we do in South Carolina, generally, just from my perspective, we try very hard to do that. We try to bring in people who are good at marketing or who are good at getting capital, whether it’s financiers, grant writers, or something like that. We try to be very deliberate about it. I don’t know that every program around the United States does that. I think we should be more deliberate about doing so to help them take the next step in the entrepreneurial space. Just because you have some pigs in a fence on your property does not make you a farmer. That makes you maybe a homesteader. The real part of being a farmer is when you can take that pig that’s in the fence on your property and get it to a market and sell it and make a profit out of it. Bridging that use it finding the right relationships to bridge that, that’s important. I know that I talked about it a little bit earlier. I probably jumped the gun on this question, but that’s why we do what we do with Farmer Bootcamp. We try to be very deliberate about it by having the pieces that are inside the SBA, so the SBDC and the VBOC or the Clemson Extension or any of the other resources that are out there that can help veterans work through what that looks like and think through how their business grows, think through their market and whom they’re trying to sell to. Oftentimes, we’ve been teaching a class to veterans, and we’ll talk about who is your market. That’s an interesting thought process because some people are like, whoever is going to buy my stuff and that’s not really it. We sell high-end $35–50 a pound charcuterie. We know who our market is; our market is very bougie people with expendable income. Our market is not someone that wants to find $0.99 cents a pound pork chops. Understanding who is and isn’t your market, I think, is essential; and, yeah, maybe we don’t do as well on that as we should.

Moderator: Holly, what should a good veteran entrepreneurship program connect people to, not merely connect them with?

Aker: I think this question and the overall conversation that we’re having around this topic is really interesting. I like the thought about going beyond veteran-specific. We know that entrepreneurs have very limited capacity. We know that new entrepreneurs are dealing with financial instability, families, trying to navigate something completely new, and often all of this great ecosystem and these resources are way beyond their time and availability. So, making sure that we are going beyond veteran-specific and bringing things to communities that are engaging people where they’re at with the services that they need. One of the things that I always come back to in this conversation is the Coffee and Chores that happens out in South Carolina, that you do, because it says, “We see that you can’t actually engage in the ecosystem the way you want to. We’ll come to you. Let’s be together. Let’s help us get a goal and then still have this community.” I think that more of these types of events need to be happening, that is building community outside of what people are able or capable of doing or even thinking about that shared sort of veteran experience and saying, “We can come and meet you where you’re at and with what you need.” I think that’s an important part of when we’re thinking about the future and we’re thinking about success. How can we pull people together?

Moderator: The literature is reaching the point where simply asking whether veterans are more entrepreneurial than civilians is no longer enough. Phipps and Skimmyhorn (2025) show why aggregate comparisons matter but also why they are incomplete. Tihic and colleagues (2025) show that transition itself can be a meaningful outcome and the NSMAE (Maury et al., 2023) findings show how much place, sector, and ecosystem can matter.

What are the most significant gaps in the current literature on veteran entrepreneurship or entrepreneurship in general, and which methodological approaches and policy changes have the greatest potential to improve understanding and support of veteran-owned enterprises?

Lori, if someone gave you one well-funded study tomorrow, what question would you want answered?

Dickes: Wow. Holy moly. Well, I think the best way to really understand it is if you were actually able to do some type of experiment, where you were to have some matched pair entrepreneurs that you could follow for some period of time, maybe five years. You would need to include some measure that match the literature as well, in terms of likelihood of success and or failure. Then the question is what does a matched-pairs study means in this case? So, having somewhat nascent entrepreneurs that are in a similar field that have, in general, similar backgrounds, with the exception of the veteran piece. I think that would be the cleanest way to really understand, to some extent, that skill set piece because, in large part, you are really trying to isolate the veteran effect. That’s really what you’re trying to isolate in large part, and with any kind of behavioral social science piece, that’s really hard. There is a lot of really good research right now in development economics, which is not dissimilar in terms of the way that you might want to isolate certain characteristics. So, I think that’s what I would try to do. It would be hard, but it would be really cool if you could have some matched-pair entrepreneurs you could follow for five years and really understand what some of those impacts are. That’d be very interesting.

Moderator: Matt, from a policy perspective, what do you think that we’re missing that we need?

M. Rutter: I really think that when we’re thinking about entrepreneurs and veteran entrepreneurs, we probably should stop asking are veterans more entrepreneurial. We should be really looking at which veterans, what military experiences, and which sectors. Maybe we are more successful in some sectors than others, and under what conditions and what interventions. I think that, once we understand that, Lori would probably have to figure out what that survey looked like because to measure “veteranness” would take 100 questions, and I would hit survey burnout just looking at it. But once we can understand what that looked like, we could develop policies that are much more targeted at the veterans who are successful, and we could really help mentor people. If, say, a trait or characteristic (A) allows you a greater chance of success, but characteristic (B) gives you a greater chance of failure. When we see characteristic (B), we can mentor people and say, “Look, this is going to be very challenging for you in this sector. But if you’ve thought of this sector, you’re a much more natural fit over here.” I think it would be very hard because policy is not super precise like that; it’s a blunt object. So, trying to make a one-size-fits-all policy for veterans is very difficult. But I think if we could figure out exactly which mechanisms we do bring out of the military that are helpful in that space, I think that being able to do that would be absolutely earth-shattering in our ability to work through what success looks like. Of course, you’d have to start before they got out of the military, track them for a very long time. I’d probably be dead and gone before it was all resolved.

Moderator: Holly, from a program side of things, what do you see that we’re missing? If you had a magic wand to wave over the transition from the military to entrepreneurship, what would it be?

Aker: I think, going back to an earlier comment, it would be providing some sort of recognition of experience and service in the military so that it becomes fundable in the next step of business. I think a way to adapt information and be able to look at it from a financial perspective and say, “Yes, this was your experience, this is who you are; now let’s invest money in building this business, with you.” I think that’s a continual gap in entrepreneurship in general. But if you’ve served 20 years and then you want to go and start a franchise, how do we create some sort of system that says, “Here’s what these twenty years look like.”

Moderator: What is the thing the veteran entrepreneurship ecosystem most misunderstands about veteran entrepreneurs?

M. Rutter: I think veteran entrepreneurs often bring a substantial capacity already from their experience. There’s an opportunity out there for veterans to succeed in this entrepreneurial space, but they need a little bit of, maybe mentorship to help select the right business, to build some of that business knowledge and acumen, and to develop the relationships that are needed, and in order to succeed into something that’s viable and profitable.

Aker: I think moving beyond thinking about veterans as a single category is something that is missing within the ecosystem. Understanding that veterans bring unique experiences, service, and skills that apply differently to different spaces, and figuring out how we maximize all of those things to lead to success, is really important.

Rozelle: I think there is a misunderstanding that all veterans have the capability to be successful. Although veterans show a higher rate of success, it is not a guarantee. I believe the reason that some veteran entrepreneurs fail is that they don’t reach out and ask for resources. Although we work hard to get the word out, there certainly appears to be a generation of veterans who feel like they can do it on their own. Time will tell.

Dickes: I think recognizing that veterans are not one thing or one set of characteristics. These are all individual people with individual backgrounds and goals, and ensuring that understanding and experience are, as much as possible, individualized so that each person can maximize whatever capacity they have. That journey to being a veteran is as individual as they are. Each veteran’s experience is individual. Recognizing that, I think, is important.

Moderator: What I hear across this conversation is that military service matters, but not in a simple veteran versus non-veteran way. It shapes orientations, competencies, identities, networks, and expectations, which interact with sectors, places, institutions, education, and entrepreneurial ecosystems. The challenge for research and practice is therefore less about proving that the veterans are inherently better or worse entrepreneurs and more about understanding what veterans bring, what must be translated, and the conditions under which this capacity can be expressed. Thank you to our panelists and thank you to the Journal of Veterans Studies for creating space for this conversation.

Follow-up

M. Rutter: The question about bonding and bridging capital is one I did not answer as directly as I would have liked during the roundtable. Veteran-specific programs can create valuable bonding social capital by providing trust, shared experience, and peer support, particularly during the transition into entrepreneurship. The risk arises when those relationships remain primarily within the veteran community. Entrepreneurship ultimately requires bridging capital: connections to customers, lenders, suppliers, technical experts, markets, and institutions that may have little relationship to veteran identity. In that sense, I do not think veteran-focused programming is inherently too insular, but I do think effective programs should use the trust created through veteran networks as a starting point and then deliberately connect participants to the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem. For programs such as Farmer Bootcamp, that is increasingly how I think about the intervention: the veteran identity may help bring people into the room, but long-term entrepreneurial capacity depends on who and what they can reach once they leave it.

Opportunities for Further Research

This roundtable discussion raised several unresolved questions that suggest opportunities for further research. Fundamentally, the field needs greater clarity about what constitutes entrepreneurial success in the veteran context. While financial viability and venture survival remain important, panelists described veteran entrepreneurs whose goals also include autonomy, putting down roots after years of military mobility, serving their communities, and creating social value. Research relying on revenue, profitability, or operational survival may capture only part of the entrepreneurial outcomes veterans seek.

The discussion also suggests that entrepreneurial capacity should not solely be examined at the individual level. Rozelle’s observation that spouses and partners can provide critical financial stability during venture formation points toward the importance of household resources and transition conditions. Geography, sector, access to capital, mentorship, and entrepreneurial ecosystems similarly emerged throughout the discussion as conditions that may enable or constrain the expression of veterans’ existing capacities. Future research should not only examine what veterans bring to entrepreneurship, but also the conditions under which those resources can be successfully deployed.

Finally, the roundtable raised questions about how we conceptualize and measure entrepreneurial failure. Panelists described pivoting, temporarily returning to wage employment, changing business models, or abandoning unviable ventures as potentially rational responses to risk rather than simple entrepreneurial failures. Longitudinal research could help distinguish venture failure from entrepreneurial adaptation and examine whether military-derived approaches to planning, risk assessment, and after-action learning influence these decisions.

These questions suggest moving veteran entrepreneurship research beyond binary comparisons of veterans and non-veterans. Much of the body of work on veteran entrepreneurship has relied on census, demographic, and economic outcomes to establish population-level patterns, whereas these more nuanced questions would benefit from an ethnographic or case-study approach to deeply examine how identity, ecosystem support, place, and experiences shape entrepreneurial pathways. Future scholarship might instead ask which veterans, with which military and life experiences, operating in which sectors and contexts, benefit from which interventions—and toward which definitions of success. Such an agenda would provide a more precise foundation for theory, program design, and policy while recognizing the heterogeneity that characterized the experiences described throughout this roundtable.

Ethics and Consent

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Author Information

During the roundtable discussion, participants referred to the “Department of War,” an unofficial adopted secondary title. The transcript has been corrected to reflect the departments legal name, the Department of Defense, as the United States Congress has not passed legislation to rename it as of 26 September 2026. The correction was made to ensure accuracy of the Department of Defense’s legal name at the time of publication and does not reflect any editorial position on the proposed name change.