Forbes Entrepreneurs:
Bob Corcoran (photo) spent 15 years flying jets in the Air Force. He would need all that banking and rolling experience for his next dogfight - dealing with the twisted maze of government agencies established to help ex-soldiers start their own businesses.
When Corcoran retired in 2004 with a severe foot infection, weeks before his second tour of duty in Iraq, the government wrote a severance check for $90,000. He planned to start a gym franchise, but after a free 13-week entrepreneurship class at Robert Morris University, paid for by the federally funded Veterans Business Outreach Center in Pittsburgh, he quickly found out the numbers didn’t add up.
Disaster averted, Corcoran decided to parlay his aviation training into a new aerial photography company called Top Flight Photos in Beaver, Pa. Staff members at the local veterans’ center chipped in with tutorials in Quickbooks accounting software and introduced him to a network of local entrepreneurs. ‘They’ve funneled me more information and contacts and practical help than all the other organizations put together,’ says Corcoran.
Yet not all of Corcoran’s attempts to get aid proved as fruitful. He ran into headwinds at the local chapter of the Small Business Administration when he sought help securing government contracts. The SBA sent Corcoran to the local branch of SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives), a volunteer mentoring organization, where he was told he couldn’t meet with a counselor until he took (and paid for) a day-long class at the University of Pittsburgh that essentially covered the same material he had learned at Robert Morris. Then came more paperwork and a long delay before he met with an ultimately unhelpful SCORE representative. Read on…
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