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Key Takeaways Veterans bring crucial skills to entrepreneurship, such as decisive leadership, resourcefulness and adaptability, honed under the extreme pressures of military service.
Trust, clear communication and accountability foster a robust company culture, paralleling the trust built through shared risks and responsibilities in the military.
The dynamic and volatile nature of today’s business landscape requires the same agility and commitment to the mission that veterans have developed through their military training.
Most people think military service is about following orders. March here. Salute there. In reality, the best leaders in combat are trained for something entirely different: making decisions with incomplete information, earning trust fast and keeping teams aligned under extreme pressure. If that doesn’t sound like entrepreneurship, I don’t know what does.
When I was a young officer in Baghdad, I didn’t have the luxury of waiting until every fact was in. A mortar could land on our base, or a convoy could stall in the middle of the city, and in those moments, seconds mattered. You had to assess, decide and act. And your soldiers were watching every move. Did you project calm? Did you trust them to execute? Did you give them clarity when chaos reigned?
Not every veteran leads troops in combat, but all of us are trained for that dynamic. We learn to act when the ground shifts beneath our feet. We learn to communicate clearly under stress. And we learn that trust is earned through action, not words. Those habits stick for life — and they map perfectly onto what it takes to start and grow a business.
Entrepreneurs face the same pressure, just in a different theater. You’ll never have perfect data. The market shifts, investors waffle, competitors come out of nowhere. Waiting for certainty is a losing strategy. Veterans are trained to move with conviction in uncertainty, to take responsibility for the decision and to bring others with them.
Related: 5 Things Being a Marine Taught Me About Being an Entrepreneur
Trust is at the heart of it. In the military, rank gives you authority, but real commitment comes when people believe you’ll share risk, take responsibility and put the mission ahead of your ego. That same dynamic exists in a startup. When employees believe their founder will shoulder the weight with them, they’ll go further than any stock option or motivational speech can carry them.
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