The survey is located at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LQ7B5XM.

Full Report

March 2012
No. 393

By Joseph Sobota, with contributions from Jules Lichtenstein

U.S. Small Business Administration, Office of Advocacy. 88 pages.

Purpose

Businesses owned by veterans and by service-disabled veterans have been a research priority for the U. S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy since the enactment of the Veterans Entrepreneurship and Small Business Development Act of 1999, Public Law 106-50. This report continues Advocacy’s ongoing veteran entrepreneurship research program and features data on veteran-owned businesses and their owners. The report is based on 2007 Survey of Business Owners data released in 2011.

Overall Findings

According to the Census Bureau, in 2007 there were 2.45 million businesses with majority ownership by veterans. Of these, 491,000 were employers and 1.956 million were nonemployers. They represented 9 percent of all U.S. firms.

Highlights

• Veteran-owned firms had sales/receipts of $1.220 trillion, 5.793 million employees, and annual payroll of $210 billion. Employer firms were responsible for 92.3 percent of the receipts, $1.126 trillion.
• Nearly one third of all veteran-owned firms were in two industry groups: construction and professional, scientific, and technical services.
• By industry, finance and insurance had the largest share of veteran-owned businesses, at 13.2 percent, followed by transportation and warehousing; mining; construction; professional, scientific, and technical services; and manufacturing.
• By state, California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Georgia had the largest numbers of veteran-owned businesses. Ranked by the veteran-owned percentage of businesses in the state, the top five states were South Carolina, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama.
• Veteran business owners were overwhelmingly male (94.8 percent) and White (89.7 percent); 7.6 percent of veteran-owned firms were owned by African Americans and 4.6 percent by Hispanic Americans.
• The owners were predominantly over the age of 55 (75.1 percent), reflecting the ages of  veterans overall, and they tended to be better educated than other business owners.
• Of the veteran business owners who responded to the survey, 8.3 percent had service- connected disabilities.
• By far the largest source of capital for veteran-owned business startup or acquisition was personal or family savings: 61.7 percent of respondents reported using this source. Business loans from banks or other commercial lenders were the second most important source at 9.8 percent.
• For business expansion or capital improvements, 30 percent used personal or family savings. Personal and business credit cards were also important sources of capital, at 10.9 percent.
• Veteran-owned businesses were more likely to be home-based, less likely to be family-owned, and somewhat less likely to be franchises than the business population overall.
• Veteran-owned employer businesses were slightly more likely to offer benefits such as health insurance, contributions to retirement plans, profit sharing, and paid leave than businesses overall.

Scope and Methodology

A critical source of data on veteran-owned businesses and their owners is the U.S. Census  Bureau’s Survey of Business Owners (SBO). The SBO was first conducted in its present form for data year 2002, and the most recent edition is for data year 2007. About 2.3 million businesses received the SBO survey instrument during 2008-2009 asking for information about the characteristics of the business and its owners. The information obtained from respondents was combined with additional Census data and administrative records from other agencies to develop a wide variety of data products, including information on veteran-owned firms and their owners.

The 2007 SBO provides the most detailed data on veterans and service-disabled veterans in business ever collected, far more than was available in the 2002 SBO. Datasets with specialized veteran-related information from the 2007 SBO were released in 2011.

These analyses summarized key data from large datasets available online at  http://www.census.gov/csd/sbo/veteran2007.htm. In all, 39 datasets have information on veteran-owned businesses or their owners, including seven with full-universe estimates of all firms by industry, location, size by receipts/sales, size by number of employees, gender, race, and ethnicity. Another 22 datasets concern characteristics of respondent businesses, and 10 more have data on the characteristics of the owners of respondent firms.

Respondent firms include all firms that responded to the characteristic(s) tabulated in this  dataset and reported gender, ethnicity, race, or veteran status or that were publicly held or not classifiable by gender, ethnicity, race, and veteran status. For additional information on  methodology, definitions, relative standard errors, and confidentiality protection, see the 2007 SBO website at http://www.census.gov/econ/sbo.

This report was peer-reviewed consistent with Advocacy’s data quality guidelines. More information on this process can be obtained by contacting the director of economic research by email at advocacy@sba.gov or by phone at (202) 205-6533.

Ordering Information

Research from the Office of Advocacy is online at www.sba.gov/advocacy/847. Copies are available for purchase from:

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The opinions and recommendations of the authors of this study do not necessarily reflect official policies of the SBA or other agencies of the U.S. government.

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Posted : Tuesday Apr 20, 2010 16:07:39 EDT

Concerned that the unemployment rate for veterans is high and heading higher, a bipartisan group of senators has introduced a bill to improve job training and placement services.

Building mostly on current transition assistance, vocational training and education programs, the Veterans Employment Act of 2010 is aimed at addressing the 21 percent unemployment rate facing Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, up from 14.7 percent in 2008.

“Too often, our veterans return home and have their resumes lost in the stack,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the chief sponsor of the bill.

Murray said veterans have unique skills, know how to learn and have “sacrificed so much.”

“We can’t continue to pat veterans on the back for their service and then push them out into the job market alone,” Murray said.

“The last people who should be waiting at the end of the line for a job are the people who served our country,” added Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., one of the bill’s original cosponsors.

Two veterans who are having difficulty getting post-service jobs appeared along with senators at an April 20 press conference outside the U.S. Capitol.

West Point graduate Joe Tyron, an Iraq war veteran who has a master’s degree in health administration, said he has been unemployed for 14 months and is living on savings and disability pay received by his wife, a 100-percent disabled veteran.

Tyron, who lives in Arlington, Va., said he thought his degrees and six years of experience would help him find work, but employers are looking for people with experience in civilian health care administration, not in leading troops in combat.

Former Army Reserve Sgt. Jason Hansman, another Iraq veteran who managed civil works projects in Iraq, said he sent out hundreds of resumes and applied for every job he could find, but the only interview came after five months of searching — and that was as a night shift security guard.

“I thought it would be easy to come back and find a job,” he said.

Security guard was not the job he wanted, but Hansman took it because he was a newlywed who needed an income. Meanwhile, he continued searching for another job. He recently was hired as the online community manager for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

The bill, introduced Wednesday and not yet assigned a number, takes six different approaches to improving veterans’ employment:

• It sets the stage for an overhaul of transition assistance classes given to separating and retiring service members, ordering a study to be followed within about six months by upgrades and updates.

One thing that can go is the Power Point briefings used in the transition assistance classes, said Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, one of the cosponsors. The briefing now includes 130 slides, he said, “and after 40 to 50 you probably are not paying attention.”

Transition classes, which became standard at the end of the Cold War, are outdated and considered ineffective by many veterans, Murray said. The program “doesn’t work with today’s businesses that are hiring. It should,” she said.

• The Post-9/11 GI Bill would be expanded to include apprenticeships and worker training programs, allowing veterans to receive both tuition help and living stipends.

• Pilot transition programs would be authorized to see if veterans with some specific skills, such as computer specialists, medics and other health care workers, could quickly be placed in civilian jobs with little or no additional training. Klobuchar said getting military medics qualified as paramedics would be of particular assistance in rural areas where there are shortages of emergency medical people.

• The National Guard Employment Enhancement Project would be expanded to provide transition assistance to more demobilizing Guard members at locations near their homes.

• Grants would be provided for two programs to help train veterans for environmentally conscious jobs. Up to $250,000 would be available to states creating a veterans conservation corps or a veterans green jobs program. The programs would teach skills and provide job referrals for people who complete training.

• An existing program aimed at helping veterans and reservists open small businesses would be expanded, with more standardized training and counseling provided by the Small Business Administration. “We know veterans, when they open up their own businesses, hire veterans,” Murray said.

In addition to Murray, Klobuchar and Begich, other cosponsors of the bill include Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.; Senate Assistant Majority Leader Richard Durbin, D-Ill.; and Sens. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.

The measure is being referred to the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee for consideration, but other Senate committees might end up with jurisdiction over some parts of the sweeping proposal. Shared jurisdiction could delay consideration of the bill, but Murray said having some high-powered cosponsors and support from major military and veterans groups will help in getting quick action.

It is with great sadness that we have to inform you that John K. Lopez, Chairman of the Association for Service Disabled Veterans Founding Member of VET-Force, Proud Korean War Marine Corps Veteran, known to many as the ‘Father of the Veterans Small Business Movement in America’ passed away on Friday, April 13, 2012

Memorial Services for John K. Lopez

Directions: http://www.ccla.us/home-1/directions

Christ Church Main Phone: 650-948-2151

For more details, contact J.A. Lopez  at: webmaster@asdv.org

In lieu of flowers or memorial tributes, please make a contribution to the “John K. Lopez Service Disabled Veteran Fund” at PO Box 20312, Stanford, CA 94309.

The fund will continue John’s mission of supporting service disabled veteran entrepreneurship.