Initiative Aims to Help Veterans Start Businesses

12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, July 18, 2010

A new initiative will help veterans returning to the Dallas-Fort Worth area from Afghanistan and Iraq successfully start their own businesses. Jim Reid, president of the nonprofit Momentum Texas Inc., whose mission is "Building Communities and Growing Entrepreneurs," announced the initiative.

Reid unveiled the Dallas-Fort Worth Veterans Business Assistance Program at a recent breakfast meeting convened by Grant Seabolt, an "ambassador" of the U.S. Veterans Chamber of Commerce, a national veterans organization based in Plano. Reid also announced that Momentum Texas has gotten a $200,000 grant from the Texas Workforce Commission to start the program. Returning veterans have substantially higher unemployment and homeless rates than the overall population, Reid said.

Plenty of Mentors

He also pointed out that the new program dovetails with the great interest in entrepreneurship in the country at large, borne out by a report in May by the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Mo., that despite the recession, U.S. entrepreneurial activity rose in 2009 to the highest rate in the last 14 years. Another sign that both the Momentum Texas mission and the local Veterans Business Assistance Program are on the right track is the plethora of successful entrepreneurs available to serve as mentors. This echoes Kauffman Foundation research that indicates that 90 percent of the knowledge gained by entrepreneurs comes from interaction with other entrepreneurs. "Successful entrepreneurs are consummate networkers," the report said.

The Advisers

Reid has appointed an ad-hoc advisory committee that includes Joel Chaverri of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Billy Medina of the Small Business Administration, Mark Kerssemakers of the Texas Veterans Commission, Grant Collins of the Texas Veterans Leadership Program, Richard Lester of the Texas A&M Center for New Ventures and Entrepreneurship, Freddie Streeter, a veteran entrepreneur and president of the Texas chapter of Elite Service Disabled Veteran-Owned Businesses, Sal Adamski of Workforce Solutions of Tarrant County and Gary Carlin of the University of Texas at Arlington. The committee will develop an aggressive outreach program to inform returning veterans of the help available to them to start a business through the D-FW Veterans Business Assistance Program.

On the national level, Momentum Texas is being advised by James Mingey, president and CEO of the Veterans Corp. in Washington, D.C., who is helping establish a Veteran-Owned Call Center in Laredo.
Reid is no novice to programs of this type. He is a former Dallas assistant city manager and a former president of both the nonprofit Southern Dallas Development Corp. and the Texas Mezzanine Fund. He also served as the chairman of Mayor Tom Leppert's Southern Dallas Task Force Small Business Committee.

The Goal

To begin the D-FW Veterans Business Assistance Program, Momentum Texas staff will meet with 250 interested veterans and assess their readiness to start a small business and succeed.
The no-cost assessment will include a questionnaire on the veteran's readiness to become a business owner. The goal is to help 100 veterans successfully launch businesses. The program began this month and will end in May. Outreach activities, assessment and training will be conducted at two locations, the Bill J. Priest Business Incubator near downtown Dallas and the Mountain View Community College Business Incubation Center in the New Economic and Workforce Development Building B near the Illinois exit of Loop 12-Walton Walker.
Interested veterans may call Reid at 214-421-3771 or visit the website at www .momentumtexas.org for more information.
Momentum Texas is raising money from foundations and other sources to address items not funded by the state of Texas grant, including $20,000 for travel stipends for the trainees and $11,100 for meals to be served to participating veterans.