Service Academy Business Mastermind

"For me, it's about creating as much value as you can and sharing it amongst as many people as you can. The bigger the community, the bigger the opportunity…I get a lot of joy from being around other people and working with other people. " – Joshua Awad (USNA '02) Navy Veteran, Joshua Awad is the Co-Founder of OnePet, a portfolio of digitally native companies in the veterinary and pet care space....

"The whole idea is to create something that provides lifelong memories that Veterans can share with their friends and family." - Toby Prudhomme (USMA '96) Toby Prudhomme (USMA '96) is President of Extreme Adventures, a 501(c)(19) non-profit organization that provides outdoor experiences for Veterans and their families. His goal is to enhance the lives of America's Veterans through recreational and...

"The big vision is how can we bring order to the mess that is the ocean transportation industry on the bulk side? $1.3 trillion is being spent to transport commodities annually…this is an international business and every ship is filled to the brim. The smallest shipment we've done is 50,000 metric tons. What that looks like is two and a half football fields long and seven stories high….you're talk...

"Ingram Capital builds community through real estate…we buy dilapidated, abandoned homes, fix them up, and turn them into safe, single-family homes as long-term rentals." - Wil Ingram (USNA '11) Wil Ingram is a U.S. Navy veteran on a mission to build community through real estate. His interest in real estate began while serving as a Surface Warfare Officer in the U.S. Navy. After spending three ou...

"You have to be very selective about what you do and how you maintain your property as well as how you're going to get income…this is a whole new arena." - Gary Klaben (USMA '79) Gary Klaben is the President of Coyle Financial Counsel, an innovative wealth management firm dedicated to helping families preserve and grow their wealth so they can have complete confidence in their financial legacy. Th...

"We really believe that we're going to change the global workforce by taking the best of military chaplaincy and pivoting that toward the corporate world…our commitment is to impact the company bottom line by increasing employee resiliency, engagement, performance and retention through chaplaincy." - Alan "Blues" Baker (USNA '78) Alan "Blues" Baker  is the Founder & CEO of ChaplainCare, which serv...

"Look at the example of continuous performance feedback. We take it for granted that part of being a leader is providing regular, consistent feedback, both critical and complimentary. If you're in the platform, and it says, hey, it's time for you to provide feedback, you start developing that habit early and often." - Scott Taylor (USMA '01) Scott Taylor (USMA '01) is the Founder of Startwise, a S...

"Our theme is having partners who are experts at what they do. One of the founding principles behind Blue Flag is we really want to do things that we're great at. We're not interested in faking it until we make it. We're interested in doing what we've had decades to get good at." - Christian Jensen (USAFA '96) Christian Jensen (USAFA '96) is a Managing Partner at Blue Flag, an LLP, or partnership...

"Academy grads have a special kind of independence and willingness to do things that are really difficult and see things through in the long term…I think that hardens your character and makes you push through…We really want to emphasize some of these core values: to present good opportunities to our team members and do operations in a way that's honest and in a way that's not only good for our cus...

"We are committed to our purpose, our mission to help our members live well and serve better so we like to think ahead as to what it means to craft a new model for housing and building wealth. We want to have a true impact on the main problems we're attacking…not only on our members' ability to build wealth, but also the connections our members are having to the local communities in which they liv...

"For the last 20 years, I've either consulted or been a COO in small to medium-sized businesses so I know the specific pain that these 'tweener' companies have…my military experience really set the foundation…I want to bring those military values to my COO consultancy. My company values are military values without being militaristic. The deep values are the things that really matter in the long ru...

"Our goal is to help companies achieve their business goals faster…the people side is the hardest part of business and the knowledge piece is one of the core components of that people side. How do you document the knowledge that you have? How do you take that knowledge and impart it to the next generation? How do you ensure you can rapidly pass off information as things change? These are all reall...

Jake Dulle is the Pre-Deployment Program Manager at LocalVest where he helps military veterans raise capital through their innovative online platform and community based events. Despite their impressive numbers, Veterans receive less overall financing from conventional lenders than their civilian-peers, despite filing more applications to more lenders. Without capital, Veteran businesses close and...

"Loyalty, trust and transparency no matter what you're doing in life–whether it's running a business, having a family, being with your friends–if you keep that mentality and look after each other, you can make that path to success much easier." - Tyler Laverick (USMMA '06) Tyler Laverick is a U.S. Merchant Marine Corps Academy grad and results-driven leader with a passion for tackling the toughest...

"My goal is to see this become a billion-dollar brand in the home services and construction industry. I want to get there by helping people build a sustainable source of wealth for themselves and their families. I want to get there by helping people build really solid businesses where they can define their participation…I don't want to get there any other way." - Zach Peyton (USMA '04) After gradu...

"We hang our hats on every deal and, with that, we've been able to make a real impact on the market we're in." - Kimberly Gile "A lot of the success that we've seen and that we're having is because we're ready. We've got the investor  money ready, we've got the structures ready, we've got the tenants ready…that's the secret sauce, just being ready to rock n' roll when the time comes." - Christian...

"There's a lack of transparency in a system where we're dealing with people's health…it's a tricky, frustrating space, but we're just trying to do our small part to change that." - Jason Belvill (USAFA '08) Jason Belvill is the Co-Founder & Director of Operations for BodySpec where he combines a passion for athletics with singular expertise in engineering to help design and oversee BodySpec's mobi...

"I helped several veterans in franchising start businesses that they otherwise would not have found and do things that are good for their communities, but this is a way where I'm helping potentially hundreds, thousands, millions of people through the type of lending and investing that Sansbank is doing so I thought I'd go for it." - Josh Emison (USNA '14) Josh Emison is the Co-Founder & CEO of San...

"Number one, don't give up. Number two, think outside of the box. And, number three, build a strong team. If you have those three things working for you and a half-decent idea, you've got a good chance of making it." - Eric Johnson (USNA '81) Eric Johnson is CEO and Director at HELM Audio, a company focused on audio innovation. HELM Audio was founded in 2017 by a proven team of product developers,...

"I genuinely believe that this pathway was made for me and I had to meet the right people and take the right steps and have the right hardships and the right adversity to be the person I am now to write these songs that I'm putting out there…that's what makes a song so good, capturing an emotion that's real and raw. It's a work of expression." - Chris Nurthen, USNA '15 On a mission to build someth...

"All of this is very easy to do if you form a relationship with a firm like ours very early because we can crawl with the business, we can walk with the business and then run with the business as it goes from the idea phase to the startup phase to the growth phase…depending on where you are and how mature your business is, you can always reevaluate strategy, you can always identify what the strate...

"I think a lot of us as entrepreneurs need to hit that home run in the beginning, early. We just need to get something and we're going to crush it. But it's those singles and doubles, and winning those little by little, getting one client. Making them very happy with your service, or your product, then doing it again and again." - Freddie Kim (USMA '04) Freddie Kim, a former Special Forces Green B...

"If you want to build resilience in kids, the first rule is to take them into an unfamiliar environment…and the second rule is to plan it in a stepwise way meaning plan, discuss, do and then revisit the shared memory together….We built this curriculum for a ship out of a need, but this isn't just a Navy thing this is something that everyone can benefit from." - Matt Brown (USNA '05) Matthew Brown...

"My personal mission statement in a phrase is to eliminate the civilian-military divide in the country…what we bring with us as veterans, those underlying soft skills are precisely what today's corporate leaders say they desire for success for their businesses in the marketplace." - Matt Louis (USMA '91) Matt Louis is a leading expert in career transition for veterans and public service profession...

"Once you start thinking about residual results, meaning you do something once that will pay you in perpetuity, then things change in your life. I try to do more things to create these residual results because that gives you so much more capacity, autonomy, and control over your time."   - Kirby Atwell (USMA '05) Kirby Atwell started his first full-time property rehabbing company, iCandy Homes, wi...