What is the one reason you can't or couldn't start a business?

SFC Doug Lee. I am going to suggest the greatest difficulty is attracting investment sufficient to both launch and sustain a business until it becomes profitable enough to sustain itself and provide enough return on investment in a short enough time to satisfy investors and staff. The second greatest difficulty is most military personnel are not trained in for profit corporate finance, accounting, legal affairs, management, and marketing. Any small business requires broad range of corporate management skills not typically available within one or a few troops. That said . . . some small technical consulting / personnel staffing businesses started by our troops are very successful . . . like Blackwater (Xe Academi ) have succeeded beyond belief. For my company greatest difficulty was convincing early clients we could deliver as promised given we had no track record outside of military and intel operations management experience. What really helped was bringing on a CEO / CFO / General Counsel / CMO / Board of Directors with several decades of for profit business development and management experience . . . this opened a floodgate of nondilutive and investor funding. We remain woman veteran owned . . . but the guys put up a good front that supports business opportunities. Political support, operator experience, and connections were helpful. It quite frankly takes a lot of nerve to start a new business when you can far more easily work in another business. Warmest Regards, Sandy

p.s. Maybe the question should be what helps business. . . rather than why businesses fail before they start.

CPT Aaron Kletzing LTC Yinon Weiss MAJ Joseph Parker CMDCM Gene Treants LTC Stephen C. SGM (Join to see) SPC Jeff Daley, PhD CPT Richard Riley MAJ (Join to see) SSG(P) (Join to see)

Initiative, start up capital, experience, skills... It's a combination of problems. You can get a lot of good education about the way the military works, but it isn't so good at providing translatable skill sets to the civilian side.

After I retired I bought a snap -on tool franchise. I was self employed but had strong corporate support I was a snap-on dealer for almost 20 years. If your are a self starter and a hard worker this is not a bad way to go. I retired as a snap-on dealer in June of last year. My week now consists of one Sunday and six Saturdays.