All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.
This is Veterans Radio.
Welcome to Veterans Radio.
I am Jim Fausone.
I'm the officer of the deck today.
We've got some great programs for you.
I think you'll find very interesting.
We always want to remind you you can find more about Veterans Radio at its Facebook site
or at the web.
VeteransRadio.org is our new URL, VeteransRadio.org.
Where we're on the web 24-7, you can find a lot of our podcasts there as well.
We post new ones every Tuesday, so you can get a new story, a new interview, something
you didn't know before by going to VeteransRadio.org.
And before we get started, we want to thank our sponsors.
First up, we want to thank National Veteran Business Development Council, NVBDC.org.
It was established to certify both service disabled and veteran owned businesses.
You'll find out how they can help your business by going to NVBDC.org.
We want to thank Legal Help for Veterans.
Legal Help for Veterans fights for veterans disability rights all across the nation.
You can reach them at 800-693-4800 or on the web at LegalHelpForVeterans.com.
We want to welcome to VeteransRadio today Jason Van Camp.
Now we've got him on because of a group called Warrior Rising that he's going to tell us
about.
But before we get there, I'm going to tell you a little bit about Jason.
He's a decorated U.S. Special Forces officer, Green Beret.
Grew up in the Washington, D.C. area, went to the United States Military Academy at West
Point.
Actually played a linebacker for the Army Black Knights football team.
He earned his Ranger Tab in 2002.
His Green Beret, coveted Green Beret in 2006 and did numerous combat rotations as a Special
Forces commander in the Middle East and Africa.
Went on in 2013 to earn his MBA from Brigham Young University and developed a passion for
entrepreneurship.
That's where we're going to talk about a little bit here because he's the founder and executive
director of Warrior Rising as well as CEO of Mission 6-0.
Jason, welcome to VeteransRadio.
Jim, thanks for having me on.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Excited to get after it.
Now a guy who grew up in Washington, D.C. area in Springfield, Virginia, was the Military
Academy always something you were focused on?
No, no, absolutely not.
I was not focused on that at all.
Even when I was at the Military Academy, I was not focused on it.
I grew up in the D.C. area like you said.
There's a huge military community there.
My father was in the Army during the Vietnam War and he was a civilian that worked at the
Pentagon for a long time.
That's what he did with his career.
Most of my friends, grown up there, had fathers or mothers that were in the military in some
capacity.
I was the only one that was normal to understand the military.
Army-Navy game was a big thing in the community.
You kind of looked at it like this.
The enemy at the time in the 1980s where I was growing up, it was very clearly the Russians
and the Dallas Cowboys.
Well, let's talk about the Russians because one of the interesting things you did along
the way was a two-year LDS Mormon mission in Russia.
How did that affect your view of the world?
As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ, a LDS Mormon, you are given an opportunity
when you're 18 years old to serve a two-year mission, a religious mission for your church.
At the time, it wasn't forced upon you, but it was sort of expected.
I had looked forward to that since I was young.
I was like, I'm going to go on a mission, I'm going to do this, it'll be a great time
and what to expect.
You kind of think about what is going to happen, but until you do it, you really have no idea.
When you go overseas and you live essentially on your own in a foreign country where you
have to learn another language and you're required to do a job and speak that language
every single day.
On top of that, you're essentially trying to sell religion.
On top of that, you're in Russia where former Soviet Union, where religion was suppressed
for such a long time.
There are so many non-believers and atheists there.
It was a very difficult time, but I enjoyed it.
I loved every second of it.
The people there were wonderful to me.
It was a time where communism had fallen just a few years prior.
People were working jobs and not getting paid and somehow surviving.
People were living in these circumstances which were unfathomable to an 18, 19-year-old
kid in the United States.
We talked to the Russians and they would say things like, man, I feel so bad for you as
an American.
I'm like, why do you feel bad for me?
Well, we hear how you guys live and you guys live in poverty and your streets aren't paved
and people are walking around with guns on their hips and you're shooting each other.
There's Indians.
I'm like, are you describing the Wild West from the 1800s?
You see how propaganda creeps into each country, each group's psyche and you can see how those
governments can control your mindset on certain things.
So, long story short, I really enjoyed my time.
Well, it was a lot for an 18-year-old to 20-year-old to open your mind to see a different world,
to have a different understanding.
You come back and finish up your service commitment.
When did you get out?
I know you went in in 1995 into the Military Academy.
So I retired in 2015.
And along the way you earned your MBA and got into the world of business and thinking
about that.
How did those experiences all sort of blend themselves into your passion for entrepreneurship?
Yeah, so my mother used to tell me when I was younger, she said, show me your friends
and I'll show you your future.
And so what that means to me is if you want to be a starter on the football team, you
hang around the starters.
At the same time, if you want to be a loser or if you find yourself hanging around people
that are slinging dope on the street corner or at a gas station, chances are you'll probably
do that yourself.
And so I looked around at what my friends were doing post-notary career or if they never
served what they were doing.
And a lot of them had started businesses and they were very successful.
And I thought to myself, man, when I get out, I think that's the route I want to go.
As a Green Beret, you sort of adopt this unconventional mindset.
And I found that going to get my master's in business administration, my MBA, I found
that the same mindset was the mindset of an entrepreneur.
And so I said, wow, this fits perfectly for me and my personality and my experiences in
life and my mindset.
And so I want to pursue business as an opportunity to be creative and to be successful.
And so that's what I did.
And one of the ways in which you wanted to be an action leader, not just a thought leader,
was how do I help other military veterans kind of start or accelerate their businesses?
So talk to us about Warrior Rising.
There are so many quote unquote thought leaders out there.
And you're kind of like, some of them have credentials and some don't.
Some of them say really interesting things and most don't, I would say.
And I thought to myself, if I'm going to go into this space, I don't want to be a thought
leader.
I want to be an action leader.
I don't want to be a guru.
I want to be a do-roo.
I want to do things.
I want to take action.
And so I created Warrior Rising.
It's a nonprofit organization of 501c3.
We help veterans in the most altruistic way I know how is to help them help themselves.
And we do that by helping veterans and intermediate family members start or accelerate their own
businesses.
We started that in 2015, the same year that I retired from the military.
We helped six veterans in year one.
And last year, we helped over 10,000 veterans start, I think just under 10,000, 9,405 veterans
in 2023.
We helped start in that year alone.
This year will be well over 10,000.
We're about a $5 million a year organization, you know, is what we get in through donations
and so forth.
And we're extremely proud of the fact that we give over 82% of every dollar raised back
to the veteran, you know, and we have a phenomenal board, a phenomenal staff, and we have exciting
events all throughout the country.
The events that we help these veterans are called business showers, and we have a few
of them coming up.
Well, before we get there, that's what I want to back you up to because you talk about helping
veterans and family members start their businesses.
What do you mean by helping?
Well, it means that we don't do it for them, you know?
I think there are a lot of people out there that are saying, give me money, do this for
me and build me a home or things like that.
It's like, no, I'm not going to do any of that stuff.
I'm not going to give you a fish.
I'm going to teach you how to fish.
So once you know, you're not going to come back to me again and again and again with
your handout and asking for help.
We're going to teach you how to do it.
And once you got it, we expect you to do it yourself.
And on top of that, we expect you to help other people.
And I feel like the veteran mindset resonates with that statement.
People join for a reason.
They're patriotic.
They want to do more with their lives.
They want to serve other people.
And there's too many people right now serving them.
And I feel like the people that are trying to serve the veterans, they have good intentions,
they want to help, but they're not doing it the right way because they're not asking
the veterans, what do you want?
And so that's how Warrior Rising was started by asking these veterans, what do you guys
want?
They saw what I was doing.
They saw what other people in our community were doing with business.
And they said, we want that.
And we said, okay, we want to help you get that.
And we're talking to Jason Van Camp.
Jason, talk to us about what Warrior Academy is and what Warrior University is.
Sure thing.
So Jim, Warrior Academy is a 40 video curriculum.
It's a virtual curriculum.
It translates the military decision making process, the operations order into a business
model.
So for veterans and immediate family members of veterans that have never taken a business
class in their lives, but they understand military speak, they can attend the Warrior
Academy at their own pace.
So it's a self-paced curriculum and it's free.
It's free and it always will be free.
They can go through that and understand holistically how to start a business.
Now as you go through the Warrior Academy, we give our participants an opportunity to
attend a monthly coaching call where if they're confused about something or they just want
to talk to somebody about something in business, they'll attend this call and sort of an open
form if you ask any question you want.
And we also have a master class every month where if you want to hear something about
an expert in some specific industry talk for about 30 minutes and then take Q&A, you can
do so.
As you complete the Warrior Academy, you get an opportunity to attend the Warrior University.
And that is an eight week online course, again free.
Everything we do at Warrior Rising is free for the veterans and their immediate family
members.
The Warrior University is in collaboration with Grand Valley State University.
And so it's an eight week virtual live course that you go through.
And at the conclusion of the Warrior University, you can submit for an opportunity to compete
and attend a business shower.
And one of the keys here, I think, and why your reach is so vast is you don't have to
be in Washington, D.C. and come to D.C. to do this or go to Utah where I think your head
quarter.
Most of this is virtual, isn't it?
Yeah.
So in the beginning, I guess in 2015, everything was done in person.
And so it was very time consuming.
And we quickly realized that we couldn't scale our business if we were to go continue going
in this direction.
So I did something that really no other nonprofit is doing or have done, created our own curriculum
and turned it into a virtual curriculum.
And so we did that.
We created it with the help of several university level business professors and one of my partners
and some lawyers and subject matter experts.
And we feel really strongly that what we teach and what we offer is highly beneficial to
the veteran.
And so that's out there.
And we add to that curriculum as time goes by and things develop and things change.
And we feel that we're getting great feedback from Warrior Academy.
So that's the first gate in the process of becoming a successful veteran.
Oh, it's a great concept and it's a great way to scale it.
And certainly post pandemic, all of us are real comfortable with this virtual format.
So great, great idea.
Now you mentioned earlier something called business showers.
Can you explain that?
So a business shower is a is an in person event where our supporters, our sponsors,
our donors, they come together and they shower our veterans with everything they could possibly
need to succeed in business.
So similar to a bridal shower or a baby shower, we give these veterans things that they need
to win in life and their business.
And so, for example, we offer custom offerings for each individual veteran.
It could be things like custom business suits, websites, laptops, professionally done marketing
videos.
Everybody gets a grant, so everybody gets money to get going, introductions to potential
clients, introductions to potential investors, opening up our network to them and helping
them speak and work with each other in a way.
People helping people.
And that's sort of how it all goes down at a business shower.
So what happens is the veterans come in at no cost to them, we fly them in, we give them
a nice hotel.
They show up in the lobby, we give them a really stellar welcome bag.
We introduce them to usually a bank where we do a sort of round robin speed date pitch
practice and then give everybody a chance to meet and mingle and get to know each other
a little bit better.
So the next day we have the competition and so it's a pitch competition and we'll select
three finalists from the first round of judging and then those three finalists will pitch
again to a different panel of judges and then the judges will determine who the champion
is of that particular city.
Then that night we'll have a big gala.
Usually it's a dinner, a plate of dinner.
Between 300 and 2500 people will show up.
Wow.
So we'll give them a chance to give an event and we'll have some entertainment.
We'll do a live auction.
We're talking to Jason Van Camp who is the head guru of Warriors Rising, really about
vet entrepreneurs.
Jason, you've explained a lot of this to us, but how does a veteran get involved with
Warrior Rising and start taking the classes and move forward?
That's a great question.
So thanks for that, Jim.
It's pretty simple.
When you hear about Warrior Rising on social media, you see it on the VN newsletter, you
learn about it wherever and you want to sign up.
First step is just go to the Warrior Rising website, warriorrising.org and you'll see
a call to action button which will allow you to gain immediate access into the Warrior
Academy.
So there is a sign up where we collect data from you.
We're not going to use that or give that to anybody else.
We just want to vet you to make sure you are who you say you are.
There are some questions that we ask you and once you get through that, you get immediate
access to the Warrior Academy platform.
It's soon to be published on our smartphone app, so just a few weeks away from that.
But right now you can just get it online and use it and like I said before, it's free.
It's a self-paced program so it takes you seven hours or if it takes you seven years,
it's fine with us.
It's all for you.
It's to help you create or accelerate your own business.
Well, and it just gives, I think, a veteran that confidence of, hey, I don't really know
how to start a business, but these guys have put together the recipe book, the standard
operating procedures that I can follow and it really helps in that networking, doesn't
it?
That's correct.
So saying that you don't know how to do it is no longer an excuse because here it is.
Here's how you do it.
But the same token, we're not going to give you a business.
You have to come up with the idea yourself and once you have that business, we're not
going to run it for you.
We're not going to sell for you.
We're not going to fundraise for you.
We're not going to do any of that.
You do it on your own.
We're going to help you.
I'm going to, on commercial warfare, how I operate as a special forces commander, as
a Green Beret.
We'll train the indigenous forces to kick the door down for us and then we'll follow
in as instructors, as leaders, as observers sort of thing.
Anybody in business knows you got to put in the work and one of the things veterans generally
are known for is you're willing to put in the work even when it sucks.
You embrace the suck.
So you're training them up, you're showing them how, and then you're saying, hey, get
out there and do the work.
But you also do some supporting of them.
We talked about that, but you have some upcoming events that kind of highlight this too.
You have a Michigan range day coming up and a Detroit business shower.
Talk to us about those.
That's correct.
So it's all about having that deliberate discomfort mindset.
So getting comfortable, being uncomfortable.
Everybody can start something when you're fresh and when you're new, when you're excited,
but it's hard when things aren't as exciting, when things start to be difficult, and that's
when you find out who you really are and if you really want to do what you're doing.
We're an event-heavy organization, and so we have a number of events left this year.
Our next event is going to be between September 19th and 21st in Detroit, Michigan.
It's a business shower, and I explained what that is earlier in the conversation.
Part of that event is a range day, so we have a number of lanes set up, a number of weapon
systems, rifles, pistols, you name it.
We have it there, and we are going to shoot some guns.
We have a food truck.
We're going to do a mantis class.
We're going to do a stop the bleed class.
We're just going to have a lot of fun, super casual, informal, and that'll be an option
for our veteran community to go out there and meet us and see what we're all about,
learn what we're doing.
We do have the ammo covered, so we'd love to see you there.
The next day, we're going to be at the Marriott Renaissance Detroit, so that's downtown.
We'll be there for the business shower.
If you're interested in learning more about that, we're going to have Nate Lavery and
James Dixon as our guest speakers.
We imagine about 350 people in attendance, and you can go on our website, warriorrising.org,
look for our classy page for Detroit, and you can sign up and register for that.
Following that, we'll be in Atlanta for the Military Influencer Conference.
We're going to take that over shortly at Warrior Rising.
We've got John Stewart and some amazing speakers there.
I've managed about 3,000 people will be down there.
That's September 30th to October 2nd.
We're going to be in Salt Lake City, Utah for our biggest event of the year.
It's going to be on Thursday, November 21st.
That's going to be at the Eccles Theater downtown.
We have a comedian, Nate Bargatze there.
Imagine 2,500 people will be there, Pac Stadium.
Really exciting.
Our last event of the year is going to be in Washington, D.C.
That's going to be on Thursday, December 12th.
We'll be at the Skyler Hotel, which is downtown Washington, D.C., not too far from the White
House.
We've got a surprise guest speaker.
I don't want to let the cat out of the bag, but she is amazing.
That event is just for women veteran entrepreneurs, the D.C. events for women only.
We're really proud about that.
Then we'll go to the Army, Navy, Football, Game in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, December
14th.
That's great.
As you can see, a lot of action packed, a lot of camaraderie, a lot of networking.
If you're in the business world as a veteran, you want to get into these events.
Give us the website again, Jason.
Sure thing.
WarriorRising.org.
Org.
WarriorRising.org.
If I was a business out there or a donor out there and I said, hey, this sounds like
a project or an entity that I want to get behind, how does somebody do that?
Well, there's a couple ways.
If you're interested in donating, we welcome it, we can only exist because of your donations.
They're tax deductible.
You can write it off and they help veterans.
82% of every dollar that we raise goes back to the veteran community that we support.
Go to the website, warriorrising.org.
There's a donate now button there.
There's a few different options that you can see the donate section.
It all directs you to the same place and you can donate through that.
Or if you're interested in more of a corporate or a foundational donation, a bigger donation
and you want to get some recognition or something like that, just email us directly.
Ken, Ken at warriorrising.org and we'll get you taken care of.
Well we really appreciate the time that you've given us today to put this information out
to the veteran community.
We think it's really important for veterans as they transition.
Many of them just don't want to be an employee.
They got a little more get up and go and want to get after maybe a business idea.
This is a great way to get comfortable doing that.
Jason, keep up the good work with warriorrising and thanks for the time you've devoted to Veterans
Radio today.
My pleasure Jim.
Thanks for having me on.
I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today.
I am Jim Fossone.
It's been a pleasure to be your host.
I'm a Veterans Disability Lawyer at Legal Help for Veterans and you can reach us at
800-693-4800 or legalhelpforveterans.com on the web.
You can follow Veterans Radio on Facebook and listen to its podcasts and internet radio
shows by visiting us at veteransradio.org.
That's veteransradio.org.
And until next time, you are dismissed.
If you have a VA claim denied by the Board of Veterans Appeals, contact Legal Help for
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They're experts in handling cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims.
Their number again, 1-800-693-4800.
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the America Charles S. Kettles Chapter, Ann Arbor, Michigan, VFW Graff O'Hara Post 423
in Ann Arbor, and the American Legion Press Corn Post 46 also in Ann Arbor.
We appreciate all your support.
You can go to veteransradio.net, click on the sponsor level and continue to support keeping
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And until next time, you are dismissed.