Welcome To The Veteran Business News Blog!
I’d like to welcome you to Veteran Business News Blog.
Hopefully, you will find this site a place where Veterans can gather to view the latest news that is important and informative.
It is also a place where subscribers to Veteran Business News can leave comments about the latest issue so that I can receive some of your valuable feedback.
As an introduction, I’d like to tell you a bit about myself. Besides the obvious fact that I am a Veteran, I have several Purple Hearts as a result of serving in Viet Nam. I’ve also enjoyed a successful business career.
After my 7 year military career as an infantry officer, I graduated from the University of Nebraska with a degree in Real Estate. For most of my career, I spent it with Fortune 500 companies lending money. I started by financing commercial real estate and moved on to lending and leasing commercial equipment.
I ended my “big business” career by spending 12 years with Digital Equipment Corporation. For my first 5 years with Digital, I built a captive finance company for them. Then, I became part of a management team that essentially made decisions for the entire central part of the United States and ended up managing a revenue stream of $1.2 Billion annually.
After leaving Digital, that’s when the “fun” began. I started my “small business” career. At first, I worked for a couple of technology companies that wanted to grow their business so the owners could ultimately sell their company and retire. I successfully helped two companies grow and ultimately, they were sold to larger companies.
Finally, I started my own successful technology company in Dallas and it grew very rapidly. Ultimately, I sold that company and worked as a consultant for awhile.
Although I spent a significant part of my career around computers, I really didn’t know much about how the Internet operated. One day, I took my son to an all day seminar on how to do business online. My head almost exploded by the many opportunities that I learned about.
I knew I wanted to start another company but this time, I wanted to do it from home. No more “brick and mortar” businesses for me. While I was simultaneously doing some research for my sister-in-law to see if she qualified for any Veteran Benefits because of her father’s Veteran status, I began to uncover so many benefits that were available to Veterans to help them start a business that I began to shake my head.
I’m fairly intelligent and I wondered why I had never heard of these benefits before. The more I searched, the more benefits I found. To make a long story short, I used my Veteran Benefits to start another company but this time, I structured it to sell products to the government.
You see, as a Veteran, you have some huge preferences if you own a company that is qualified to do business with the government. Of course, I went about it backwards. I knew that my neighbor across the street owned a business selling industrial tires and he had several locations in Texas and Louisiana. I simply went across the street and asked if I could use his business as my supplier so I could help him expand his business by selling his tires to the government.
I started a company, got it qualified to do business with the government and began looking for bid opportunities that I could respond to. As luck would have it, I came across an opportunity to bid on some industrial tires, printed out the bid specs, invited my neighbor over and we assembled a bid response. That bid was ultimately awarded for $423,000!
It took me about 4 hours to create my company, another 4 days to get it qualified to do business with the government (including opening two bank accounts for $100 each). The bid took a bit longer to respond to but in the end, I couldn’t believe what had just happened.
Now, I teach Veterans how to find out what the government wants to buy before they pick a product to sell. Obviously, that’s what I should have done too but everything fell into place so easily that I decided to expand my business and learn all the ways that owning a Veteran-owned business could make me rich.
During a conversation with one of my SCORE mentors, he mentioned that I should take what I had learned and teach other Veterans how to take advantage of the many benefits they have so they could duplicate my success. That’s how Veteran Business News was created.
I also used everything that I had learned to write my first book, “The Veteran Advantage“. I had always wanted to become an author and this was my opportunity. As I learned how to create and sell the book online, I gradually learned how to market on the Internet so I included that as part of a successful strategy for Veterans to incorporate into their business model. Selling information online is one of the most profitable things you can do so I naturally included that part of the business into my original book and revised it to teach Veterans how to create wealth for their families by starting a business that sold products to the government and also sold information to anyone that was looking for it online.
Now, I have created several streams of income and I’ve developed a passion for teaching Veterans how to do the exact same thing.
This passion led me to my final venture (so far) of taking my desire to write and become a published author and fulfilling that dream. This month (January, 2007) I will release a book that I was fortunate enough to co-author with Tony Robbins, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Brian Tracy and several others called “Wake Up, Live The Life You Love“. It is part of a series of Best Selling books and I’m positive that this one will become a Best Seller also.
As soon as the book is available for sale, I’ll post a note in this blog so we can all watch as the book climbs the Best Seller list together.
I just turned 60 two days before Christmas so I’m thankful that I’m only at mid-life right now. I’ve got so many other things to do before I leave this earth. Sign up for my free newsletter and join me along my way to the second half of my life. Read my books. Follow my advice. Learn to have fun with your Veteran Benefits. Feel free to use me as a Mentor.
Over time, I’ll add some videos of me and my family on this blog so you can get to meet me in person.
Thanks again for visiting my blog and do yourself a favor, add a post to introduce yourself and take advantage of all the knowledge that other members can bring to the table to make you and your family successful. Even though Washington hasn’t figured out how to be bi-partisan and work together, my experience is that Veterans have long since learned how to find a common interest and more than any other species on this planet, we have learned how to “watch each other’s back” for the common good of the group and ultimately, the country.
Here’s to a great New Year and to our future friendship,
Pat Kiggins