Honored to co-create and host the first Sandhills Veteran-owned Business and Non-Profit forum. We simply wanted to educate our community about the businesses in our area owned by veterans and learn more about their transition into the business world.

Thanks to all the businesses that participated. We hope to do this more often and include all the local businesses eventually.

We made some great advances and learned some valuable insights. This is a simple project that can be recreated in every local community to help ensure our veterans find yet another way to transition back to civilian life.

1. We have decided to create a Sandhills Veteran Business Owner guild to help support each other, assist transitioning veterans to join the business community, and better communicate veteran needs to local officials.

2. We discovered the organizations and people in our community that were very helpful to veterans in starting and operating their businesses.

3. We discovered stumbling blocks for veteran business owners and discussed remedies.

4. We built a close relationship between the participating businesses and also began mentoring future veterans and military spouse business owners in the audience.

Thanks so much to my co-creator Lisa Richman and to the Sandhills Community College team for their partnership.

This is how we chose to celebrate our veterans on Veterans Day.

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