What is starting a business after the military like?

Steve Ulman, a U.S. Army Veteran, actor and off grid solar business owner, quit his job, moved onto a piece of desert with no neighbor for miles and built a cabin in twenty days. He had been a high voltage technician for a car maker. Power, he figured, would be the easy part.

“I’m going to build my own solar grid. I know how this works.”

Hear it at 6:41

It took him one more sentence to get to the result.

“It did not work. Did not work at all.”

Hear it at 6:48

So he read a book cover to cover and designed one that did. That is how his company started: not with a plan, with a dead battery bank and an hour-and-a-half drive to buy fuel.

Search for how to start a business after the military and you get process: forms, certifications, a checklist. What you do not get is anybody telling you what the first year felt like. In interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit, twelve Veterans did. We are a camera crew, not a bank, and nothing here is business, tax or legal advice. It is what they built and what it cost.

Nobody planned this

Almost none of them set out to be business owners. They backed into it.

Curtez Riggs, a retired Army First Sergeant and founder of the Military Influencer Conference, traces his to a pair of boots. The Army had just changed uniforms, he bought a comfortable pair at the exchange, and a sergeant major told him at formation they were not authorized. Riggs went and checked every boot the exchange sold against the regulation. The sergeant major was right. So were Riggs’s suspicions about the rest of the shelf.

“I took all of that information and made a boot website.”

Hear it at 43:24

A picture of each boot, marked green or red. He sent it around his brigade, more or less as revenge. It spread. What nobody clicking on it noticed was that every boot carried an affiliate link, so he was paid when someone bought a pair.

“A boot company ended up coming to me and buying that website from me.”

Hear it at 44:03

He was still on active duty. A uniform correction had turned into his first sale of a business.

Caitlin Duffy, a U.S. Army Veteran, 50 cal gunner and VA loan specialist, got out faster than she expected and called the man who had written her own mortgage to ask what she should do with her life. He told her to come answer phones. She is still in lending, paid on what she closes, which is the last thing she pictured.

“I actually always thought that I would never be in sales. I would never be commission.”

Hear it at 10:46

“When I say I fell into it, legit I fell into it.” Hear it at 11:16

Jacob “Stitch” Duran, a U.S. Air Force Veteran and cutman in boxing and UFC, opened a kickboxing school in Northern California while holding down a sales job he kept for 23 years. One of his accounts was shrinking a store and offered him three months of free rent. The rest of the financing was simpler.

“As crazy as I was, it was a credit card.”

Hear it at 44:49

Bags, mirrors, carpet. When the day job finally transferred him to Las Vegas, he gave the school to a student.

Keep the day job. Or do not.

Here our guests split, and some of them split with themselves.

Bruce Cardenas, a Marine Corps Veteran, LAPD officer, now with Legendary Foods, started by working security off duty for a retired officer’s company. Nine months in he opened his own. He did not hand in his badge to do it; he stayed on the force until the side work outgrew his calendar, and even then went to the reserve. His closing instruction to our audience is the same thing he did.

“Don’t quit your day job, but start your side hustle today.”

Hear it at 1:01:47

Lucky Lopez, an Army National Guard Veteran, mechanic and car business YouTuber, opened a shop in Las Vegas in 2000 and sounds like the opposite case.

“I’ve been self-employed since I’ve been 18 and the only time I worked for anybody was Uncle Sam and you couldn’t pay me to come back.”

Hear it at 59:37

He would rather struggle on his own than be comfortable on a payroll, he says, and then in the next breath tells people with a job to keep it and build something on the side until it can carry them. The man who has never had a boss gives the same advice as the cop.

Ulman did it the other way: thirty days’ notice first, plan later. And Nikki Kraus, a U.S. Air Force Veteran and weather forecaster, wrote a business plan and filed an LLC at home with two small daughters, working, by her count, five hours before they woke up. The only comment her husband at the time offered, she says, was a question.

“Why are you building the business in the middle of a recession?”

Hear it at 36:40

She built it anyway. Her line for that stretch of her life: “There’s no cavalry coming. I’m the cavalry.” Hear it at 34:49

Why do so many of us try it at all? Someone put it well in our interview with Delvin Bourn, in a stretch where guest and host are finishing each other’s sentences and we cannot say which one said it. Veterans drift toward running their own thing, the line goes, because:

“It’s nothing but problems and you’re like, I will solve all of them.”

Hear it at 55:15

What it cost

Now the bill.

Lopez went from fixing cars to selling them, with ads built to make car buying less miserable. Then he learned how the loans behind the cars worked. If a buyer with poor credit missed the first payments, the bank could make the dealer buy the loan back.

“I remember one of my worst months, I had six people default in the first month.”

Hear it at 20:12

He woke up to a business account that was lighter by, in his words, a hundred and something thousand dollars. He says he loved the business and could not stand what came with it. The end came at Disneyland, on his 38th birthday, on the Dumbo ride, looking down at a stranger asleep on a bench.

“I want to be as worry-free as that guy right there.”

Hear it at 21:27

On the drive home he called a banker and asked if they wanted to buy the dealership.

Ulman’s cost was money first. Before the company existed he was broke and in debt with a piece of heavy equipment parked on his land, until, he says, “somebody looked at me and said, ‘You got a $1,000 a day machine sitting there.’” Hear it at 7:32 Then it was pricing. He charged so little for his first solar jobs that he still winces: “The prices that I was offering when I first started this company were way low.” Hear it at 8:14

Cardenas mentions his in half a sentence, on the way to something else: “I had a divorce and some financial problems, but the bodyguard business is going well.” Hear it at 36:28 That “but” is carrying a lot.

Riggs paid in pride. When he wanted to turn what he knew into a conference, he took the idea to the headquarters of a large company that had encouraged him.

“They practically laughed me out of the room.”

Hear it at 48:12

His read on it afterward was that he had pitched someone who could cheer but could not sign. He cut his costs, borrowed rooms from another conference’s founder and sold tickets to people he knew. The first sponsor’s check, he says, was very small. “But back then, all money was good money.” Hear it at 49:28

Duffy pays in hours. Other lenders have told her to get a team number so she can take a vacation. She gives clients her own.

“This is my personal cell phone number. You can text me at night, you can call me on the weekends.”

Hear it at 23:42

Jessica Jay Dee, a Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant and combat Veteran, pays in customers. She kept the Corps’s standards and applies them to the people who hire her.

“I will fire a client in a heartbeat now because they’re unethical.”

Hear it at 16:48

And some are still at the part where the cost is patience. Rachel Veronica, a U.S. Army Veteran and clinical hypnotherapist, was asked whether she had a full list of clients. Not at the moment, she said. “I’m still just kind of fresh in this, getting my face out there.” Hear it at 9:23 Evelyn Pacheco, a U.S. Army Veteran and Nevada’s first Black female union plumber, had her training program for women, Nevada Women in Trades, up and running on paper when the pandemic arrived. “When COVID hit it was disastrous for everybody,” she says. Hear it at 17:05 A board member told her to move the whole thing online. Her first answer was “Hell no.” Then she did it.

In one of our earliest episodes Brandon Mills, a U.S. Army Veteran, Abrams tank gunner and print shop founder, said the part most of them circle: “As an entrepreneur, there’s ups and downs all the time and the downs hurt a lot.” Hear it at 43:26

The first customer

It is not all invoice. In another early episode Ureal Irving, a U.S. Army Veteran who founded Envision Footwear, remembers his first sale: a man who bought two pairs before Irving had announced the shoe existed. “He didn’t even give me time to tell people that the shoe was out.” Hear it at 20:25

And at our 4th of July table, someone looked around and pointed out that every Marine sitting there had started a business, which is not the picture of Veterans most people carry. Then, before anyone could enjoy that, the same table added the footnote. We credit the episode, not a speaker.

“We still struggle.”

Hear it at 39:32

They are not rare. The Census Bureau’s most recent Annual Business Survey, released in November 2025, counted about 261,000 Veteran-owned employer firms in the country in 2023, or 4.4 percent of all firms with employees. That does not count the one-person shops, which is where most of the people above began.

There is also a class, and for once it is not the one you slept through. The Small Business Administration says its Boots to Business course is part of the Defense Department’s Transition Assistance Program and is offered on installations worldwide, with a version for Veterans of any era. None of our twelve mentioned taking it. We will start asking.