Every month, I sit on a Transition Assistance Panel at the Air Force Academy. Most of the people around that table are helping separating service members land their next job. My role is different. I’m the one asking whether finding an employer is even the right goal.
That’s a harder conversation than it sounds. Not because the people in the room aren’t capable, but because most of them have already decided the answer before I open my mouth. We live in a wage-based system. The default assumption, the one baked into how most people were raised, is that you go out and get a job. Someone else starts the businesses. You work for them.
And if you push back on that, the objections come fast. Car payments. Mortgage. Kids. I need something steady. I get it. Those are real obligations. But beneath it all, two objections drive almost every conversation. The first is stability, the belief that employment is more secure than going out on your own. The second is cost and risk, the assumption that starting a business is expensive and likely to fail. Both are worth examining, because both are based on a version of entrepreneurship that most people never actually pursue.
The first is stability. The steady paycheck feels like security, and it is, right up until it isn’t. The average person leaving the Armed Services will experience one to two involuntary separations over the remainder of their working life. When that happens, W-2 income doesn’t slow down. It stops. Zero. The bills don’t care.
An entrepreneurial path, even something as simple as consulting for a handful of clients, rarely goes to zero. Sure, revenue fluctuates. When a client leaves, it hurts, but in most cases, there are others still in the pipeline. That’s income diversification. It’s the same principle behind not putting all your money in a single stock. The swings can be uncomfortable. The floor is almost never zero.
The second objection is risk and cost. And those fears are real, but they’re built on a distorted picture of what entrepreneurship actually is. Most people’s mental model comes from what they see in the working world: large corporations, big infrastructure, massive headcount. Those companies dominate the news, culture, and career conversations. But here’s the part that gets missed. Somewhere around 200 companies in the United States employ roughly half of the workforce. That sounds like a lot until you realize those companies represent less than one percent of all businesses in the country. The other 99 percent are small businesses. And most people never see them, because small businesses don’t make the news.
That gap between perception and reality matters because the risk profile of a small service business looks nothing like a capital-intensive startup. No inventory. No commercial lease. No research and development burn rate. In most cases, just a laptop, an internet connection, and a market that already exists and already understands what you’re selling. You can start it as a side hustle at your kitchen table while you keep a day job, build traction, and decide later whether it becomes your primary income or a reserve parachute if things go sideways somewhere else.
The Job Market Has Changed
Before you commit to either path, it’s worth understanding what the employment landscape actually looks like right now, because it’s shifted in ways that most people haven’t fully absorbed.
Entry-level cognitive jobs, the ones that traditionally served as the starting point for building a career, are increasingly being automated at an accelerating pace. Mid-level roles and management positions are next. Agentic AI handles project coordination, information processing, and decision support more effectively and at a lower cost than the people currently holding many of those titles. That’s not a distant concern. It’s here now, and that’s where the investment is going right now.
Add to that: when you complete a resume and send it to a job board, a human being may never see it. Today, most larger employers use an applicant tracking system to filter applications before they ever reach a recruiter. Your resume gets scored against keywords, and if it doesn’t match the algorithm’s criteria closely enough, it never surfaces. You can be exactly the right person for the role and still disappear into the stack.
The competition isn’t local anymore either. That posting is open to candidates everywhere. The person you’re competing against might be in another state, another time zone, or another country. Geography used to be a natural filter that worked in your favor. It no longer is.
And then there are the ghost jobs. A meaningful share of job listings aren’t tied to a real open position at all. Some companies post roles they have no immediate intention of filling, simply to build a candidate pipeline for future needs. Others are fishing for market intelligence, using applications to benchmark what talent costs and what skills are bundled together in the real candidate pool before they commit to anything.
Some postings exist for internal reasons that have nothing to do with you. A role gets filled by an internal transfer or a referral, but company policy requires it to be posted publicly first to satisfy HR or legal process. The job was never actually available to outside candidates, but it looked like it was.
And some of it is theater. Active job postings signal growth and momentum. For companies managing investor perception or trying to project health to the market, a board full of open roles communicates the right story even when hiring is effectively frozen. You’re not failing to land an interview because you’re underqualified. You’re responding to a signal that was never meant for you.
The result is a job market that looks more accessible than it actually is. Someone can spend weeks customizing resumes, writing cover letters, and chasing silence, not because they’re the wrong candidate, but because the door was never open in the first place. That’s not a personal failure. That’s a system that isn’t being straight with you.
I’m not saying don’t look for employment. I’m saying go in with clear eyes, and seriously consider whether building something of your own deserves a real spot on the list.
The skills you built in service translate better to business ownership than most people tell you, and in ways that go beyond the obvious. Discipline and mission focus are only the surface. What really transfers is the ability to operate with incomplete information and make decisions anyway. To lead under pressure. To hold people accountable while also being responsible for their welfare. Those aren’t soft skills. They’re exactly what separates business owners who survive the hard stretches from those who don’t.
You’ve also already demonstrated a tolerance for risk that most civilians haven’t tested. You operated in environments where the stakes were real, the information was incomplete, and the margin for error was sometimes zero. That’s not a personality trait you develop in a classroom or a corporate training program. It’s proven capacity. Signing a consulting agreement or buying a small service business doesn’t ask more of you than what you’ve already done. In most cases, it asks considerably less.
But the environment is fundamentally different from military life, and that part deserves equal time.
There’s no chain of command to provide direction. No logistical support structure. No one to tell you what the mission is today. No guaranteed paycheck at the end of the week. You build all of that yourself, and you have to be comfortable not knowing exactly how it comes together before you start.
That mental shift is harder than it sounds. Military life is structured by design. Everything from your schedule to your chain of authority to your financial baseline has been defined for you. Entrepreneurship strips all of that away. The freedom is real, but so is the disorientation that comes with it, at least initially.
The businesses worth considering don’t require a massive investment. They can be started lean, grown carefully, and scaled at a pace that matches your actual risk tolerance. And here’s what most people miss: it doesn’t have to be a binary choice.
You don’t have to take off your uniform on a Friday and wake up Monday morning as a business owner with no clients, no revenue, and a mortgage that doesn’t care about your transition plan. That’s the version of entrepreneurship that scares people, and it should. But that’s not the only version.
Most small service businesses can be started on the side. A few clients. A couple of evenings a week. Work that builds on skills you already have and a market that already exists. Sometimes that means taking a day job that isn’t your end goal, something that covers the bills and keeps the health insurance intact while you build on the side. That job isn’t the destination. It’s the runway. You keep a steady income while you figure out whether there’s real demand, whether you enjoy the work, and whether the numbers make sense.
By the time you’re ready to make a full transition, you’re not leaping into the unknown. You’re stepping into something you’ve already been building. You have clients. You have proof. You have a floor. The scariest part of starting a business, going from zero to something, is already behind you. The goal isn’t to make a dramatic leap. It’s to build a platform that gives you options, and to do it in a way that doesn’t require betting everything on a single moment.
Why Franchises Deserve a Serious Look
Franchises, in particular, are worth a close look for anyone coming out of a structured environment, and I say that with intent.
The franchise model is built around execution. The franchisor provides the playbook. Your job is to run it with precision and discipline. That’s not so different from how you operated in uniform. You received the mission parameters and executed. Franchising works the same way. That’s a meaningfully different challenge than a startup, where there is no playbook, and you’re writing it under fire.
Franchises tend to be far easier to finance than a startup concept you’re building from scratch. Lenders understand the franchise model. There’s a track record, a brand, and a proven system behind the loan request, which makes the conversation with a bank considerably easier than walking in with a startup concept and a pitch deck. If you’re looking at buying an existing business, the financing picture gets even better, but we’ll get to that.
Don’t limit your thinking to quick-service restaurants or retail storefronts. The franchise world is far broader than most people realize. Home services, restoration, staffing, IT support, senior care, commercial cleaning, logistics. Many of the best opportunities are B2B or service-based with recurring revenue and lower startup costs than a traditional consumer-facing location. There’s likely a category that fits your background better than you’d expect.
One more thing worth knowing. The franchisor is screening you just as much as you’re evaluating them. Before they award a franchise, they’ll review your financials and background, and assess whether they believe you have what it takes to protect their brand. That vetting cuts both ways. If they say yes, it means a company with significant experience evaluating operators looked at your profile and decided you were a good bet. That’s not nothing. And if they don’t, they’ve saved you from a costly mistake. Either way, the process works in your favor.
The following is a list of some of the more common franchise platforms. Each subsection below represents the platform’s curated list of offerings best suited for veterans, as franchisors recognize the value veterans bring to their brand.
Franchising isn’t the only option. Buying an existing business is often underrated and frequently overlooked. When you acquire an existing business, you’re getting customers, cash flow, and an established operational track record. You’re not starting from zero, which matters a great deal when you’re also adjusting to civilian life and building new routines at the same time.
The financing picture is also the most favorable among the paths we’ve discussed. Lenders are far more comfortable making a loan against a business with existing revenue than they are funding a startup or even a new franchise location. And in many cases, the seller carries part of the note themselves, meaning they finance a portion of the purchase price directly. That does two things. It makes the outside lender more comfortable because the seller has skin in the game, and it gives the previous owner a vested interest in your success. They want you to make it. Their payment depends on it. That kind of built-in mentorship and alignment is something you simply don’t get when you’re starting from scratch.
A solopreneur model, one person operating with low overhead and AI-assisted tools, is also more viable today than it’s ever been. And the timing matters. We’re at an inflection point where artificial intelligence has moved well beyond the prompt-and-response tools most people are familiar with. The newer generation of agentic AI can be given goals, rules, and defined boundaries and then actually execute functions on your behalf. Think of it less like a smart search engine and more like a junior employee who doesn’t sleep, doesn’t call in sick, and scales without adding payroll. Marketing, sales support, administrative functions, customer follow-up, even certain specialized services, much of what used to require hiring staff can now be handled or substantially assisted by AI working in the background. That lowers the barrier to entry significantly and changes the math on what one person can realistically operate alone.
This isn’t theoretical. Solopreneurs today are running businesses that would have required a small team five years ago. The overhead stays low. The margins stay healthy. And the operator stays in control.
Starting from scratch is the most flexible and riskiest path of everything we’ve discussed. You write the playbook as you go. There’s no franchisor vetting your readiness, no existing customer base to inherit, no proven system to execute against. It’s all on you from day one. That suits certain temperaments well. Whether it suits you is an honest question worth sitting with before you commit.
The Underlying Principle
Whatever model you choose, the most important thing I can tell you is this: don’t trade one structure of dependency for another.
In the military, the institution was responsible for your livelihood. In civilian employment, that shifts to a single employer. That’s still dependency. The goal of entrepreneurship, at whatever scale, is to build something where your income is attached to the value you create and the relationships you own, not to a single decision made by someone else in a boardroom you’ll never enter.
That’s a different kind of security. It’s not easier. But it’s yours.
And for someone who spent years operating in environments where the mission could change overnight and the only reliable constant was your own capability, that kind of self-reliance probably already feels familiar.
Is Entrepreneurship the Right Next Mission for You?
