More than 200,000 United States military veterans return to civilian life every year, 10 percent of whom have a desire to own a business, creating a pipeline of new entrepreneurs.

Veterans are disciplined, well-trained leaders, and, with access to capital and business training, their success rate as small-business owners is high.

It’s no surprise, then, that there are more than 2.5 million businesses in the U.S. — about 10 percent of all small businesses — that are veteran-owned, generating more than $1 trillion in annual sales.

Here in Arizona, over 48,000 veteran-owned small businesses generate approximately $21 billion in sales, . These significant impacts underscore how important veteran-owned businesses are to the region.

However, veterans can struggle to find capital and connections they need to get their businesses going. In fact, more than 75 percent of veterans reported encountering challenges as they started to grow their businesses, citing access to capital as a top challenge, according to by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families.

I am proud that Bank of America has long provided access to capital for the men and women who served our great nation make the transition into entrepreneurism.

As the country’s No. 1 small business lender, Bank of America last year committed to help even more U.S. military veterans kickstart and expand their own businesses by creating a $20 million “” (VELP) to connect military-veteran business owners with affordable capital. So far, within one year of introducing the VELP program, more than half of that capital — about $14 million — has already been deployed to more than 170 veteran small-business owners.

Having served the U.S. military branches for more than 100 years, Bank of America provides active-duty service members, veterans and their families with specialized products, reduced rates and flexible services that their lives demand — through deployment to transitioning from military service and beyond.

Beginning this month, U.S. veterans are eligible for our Small Business Veterans Discount Initiative, featuring an exclusive 25 percent fee discount for their or line of credit.

Helping our veterans translate and utilize their tremendous military skills to become successful entrepreneurs driving local economies is an important way Bank of America can give back and show our gratitude to the brave men and women who have served in the military.

Vince Thelander is the senior vice president for business banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and a member of Bank of America’s military employee network.

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Family businesses are prominent throughout the nation, offering a variety of family-operated goods and services.

Around 30 percent of these businesses make it to the second generation and 12 percent are successful by the third generation, according to the .

How can these businesses achieve success while maintaining their unique family values?

Dr. Luis Gomez-Mejia, W. P. Carey Management and Entrepreneurship Regents Professor at Arizona State University (ASU), researched family businesses and their decision-making drivers.  

His research also delves into the relationships of international management, strategic management and executive compensation.

“I began to realize family firms behave in a different way than non-family firms,” Dr. Gomez-Mejia explained.

A few key differences Dr. Gomez-Mejia noted are family firms are more long-term oriented, more likely to survive when performance is not high and more persistent.

On the other hand, non-family firms are typically more diverse, more likely to internationalize and are driven by economic factors.

Other include an unlikeliness to tackle new business ventures, values that align with the family’s values, low turnover, limited management processes and nepotism.

“ are really unique in terms of independent choices they make in comparison to non-family firms,” Dr. Gomez-Mejia said. “So, family firms want to preserve what I call socioemotional wealth.”

Dr. Gomez-Mejia explained that approximately 70 percent of publicly traded firms in the U.S. are family-founded and employ 80 percent of the workforce.

Those family businesses are often driven by socioemotional wealth, which focuses on family values, preservation of tradition and pride.

He added, “It’s an important utility for the family. They get the satisfaction of having a family identity embedded in the firm, the family image is important.”

PING, a subsidiary of Karsten Manufacturing Corporation, is a leading golf equipment brand with 845 employees, 25 buildings and 52 acres around that. It is also a family business.

Dawn Grove, corporate counsel of Karsten Manufacturing Corp., said her grandparents incorporated the company and bought a building to continue production of PING golf equipment more than 50 years ago.

“My grandparents’ values of integrity, ingenuity, continuous improvement and service were naturally weaved into everything we do because my uncles and dad- and later my cousins and I- worked alongside them. Our passion has always been to make the best golf clubs possible, not to have the flashiest marketing shtick or to make the most money,” Grove said.

Although the socioemotional drive often overshadows the financial aspect of conducting business, PING uses its family values to enhance its business practices.

“Our family character inhabits all we do and uplifts our professionalism,” Grove said.

CEOs and other leadership positions of family businesses tend to maintain that position much longer than leaders of non-family businesses, Dr. Gomez-Mejia explained.

“You’ve got an attachment, that continuing identity of the family firm,” Dr. Gomez-Mejia said. “The firm is their baby, usually they launched the company in the first place- they founded the company.”

“What happens is the economic drivers are also important because if you lose that, you also lose the socioemotional wealth,” Dr. Gomez-Mejia said. “The main advice would be to be able to step back and be willing to professionalize when the situation demands that. The willingness to do that will make a difference as to whether or not the company survives and how well it will do in the future.”

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