Remembering and honoring Veterans Day for all our vets and their families!

I’d like to honor our vets on Veteran’s Day! To all of the vets who read this blog on a regular basis, thank you for your service to our country. How can entrepreneurs gain from the coming wave of military retirement? In the next 12 months, between 250,000-400,000 service members will be exiting the military. These vets are highly trained and skilled in any number of key capabilities that can help you grow your business to the next level. The number one challenge facing entrepreneurs is finding, developing, and retaining great people for your organization as baby boomers continue to retire. These vets can help you overcome the challenges as key people in your organization retire.

Since its Veterans Day I thought I might share with you why you might want to consider hiring a vet over the next several months and years. For many years veterans have provided my larger clients an edge in their markets. Here are three reasons why you should consider hiring a vet as you continue build your team.

The first reason to hire vets is they are more mature than their peers. How many times have you hired a person to have them leave because they didn’t like the work they were hired to do. Vets tend to be more stable than other young people because this is not their first job or position. They have a more realistic outlook on life and work. They require no more training than other people you hire, but they bring tremendous energy and focus to a new role.

The second reason to hire vets is they can help you add depth to your leadership bench. By the nature of being in today’s military, our vets are strong team members. They are used to develop people around them and are capable managers and leaders. If you’re looking for people who understand and live the concept of working on a high performing team you would be hard pressed to find better men and woman than these former military people.

The third reason to hire vets for an emerging technology business is you can find incredible technical talent among our vets. Our military trains their people on the best technologies available. Entrepreneurs should consider how much money has been invested to develop the technical expertise of these men and women. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested to make sure that military people keep growing and advancing their technical capabilities. The good news for you as an employer is they are willing to bring you all those skills and talents at a fair price.

If you’re in manufacturing and want to know who has the best supply chain and front line operations management people you might want to consider hiring a vet. I’ve seen many mid-market manufacturing organizations gain by hiring first line managers who are vets.  Vets understand how to work with all kinds of people with diverse backgrounds and global connections. These people can help you build a great organization.

Many information technology consulting and software companies have found that many of the vets they hire have a significant network that can help you grow your business. Many of my better clients are former vets themselves.  LinkedIn and other social networks has made it easier for vets to network with peers with military experience. Your business could gain from having the connections in many great organizations that you are trying to develop as clients.  Working and thriving in the connected age come down to having a strong network of professionals who know you and your organization.

I spend time working with entrepreneurs on regular basis. The number one challenge these entrepreneurs face is lack of strong leadership and management talent. Over the coming years your organization can add incredible talent to your team if you would consider hiring vets for your organization. I’ve found that the vets I work with our some of the best leaders I’ve known.

Now what can we do? If you know people who are looking to hire people, let us know. We can help put the information out on the network. If you’re a vet or you’re a family member of a vet please let them know I would be open to helping them get a better understanding of how their skills translate to the business community. If they need help, we can figure out how to provide it to them.

If you’re interested in helping me help vets, please let me know.  You can’t imagine how good it feels when you help these people succeed. As an added bonus, if we do a good job I would put together a mastermind group of people who are helping vets succeed and make sure each of you get significant value from our extended group.

People have invested significant money with me over the years to help grow their business and I would share the secrets I’ve learned to help the people who help our vets. In the past, I reviewed veterans’ resumes and made suggestions where they might look for work or how to improve the resume.  I’ve made my network available to them as they go through their job search.  They can send me an invite on LinkedIn if they would like access to the many people I know around the world. If we get enough interest, I can put together a conference call series to help them develop their job hunting skills. There would be no cost to these vets other than the cost of the call. For most of you on a cell plan, it won’t cost you anything.

If you’re an employer looking to hire our vets, please drop me a line. We can set up a time to talk about what you need to do today to find the right vets for your organization. There are many great resources available for you to use. You don’t have to do this on your own.  If you want to hire vets, I want to make this as easy as I can to help put our former military back to work.

Thank you and see you Thursday.