As service members transition out of the military, there’s one opportunity for entrepreneurship that they may not realize is possible — and it’s one that’s growing more important by the day: private security.
On this week’s episode of Yahoo Finance’s Warrior Money, hosts Patrick Murphy and Dan Kunze are joined by Fran Racioppi, founder and CEO of FRsix. Through FRsix, Racioppi provides security operations and training services to businesses in both the public and private sectors, including a number of partnerships with state and local governments.
For Racioppi, a key step in launching his own business was becoming certified as a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (service-disabled veterans who own 51% or more of their business can qualify for this certification). In an effort to uplift veteran entrepreneurs, the federal government offers set-aside contracts to these companies.
It’s a useful resource for veterans considering launching their own business — a path that, according to Racioppi, is more possible than some people realize.
“There’s only one Mark Zuckerberg. There’s only one Elon Musk. There’s only a handful of people in the world who sat down and had these series of ideas that changed the world,” Racioppi says. “But being an entrepreneur can be as simple as, ‘I like carpentry’ [or] ‘I like painting.’”
“All of these things are trades that you can learn,” he adds. “It doesn’t need to be this thing that we invent and go change the world.”
For Racioppi, who served as a Green Beret in the US Army, this meant leaning on the security skills he honed in the military to launch FRsix — a company whose work feels particularly relevant today.
The topic of corporate security has taken center stage in the wake of the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Reflecting on this, Racioppi cites a term often used within the corporate security industry: “duty of care.”
“What duty of care means is that we have a responsibility for every single person in this organization,” he says. “We have to protect their safety and we have to protect their security. And that is paramount both in the workplace and when they leave the workplace — especially when they’re on official business for the company.”
According to Racioppi, corporate security is often wrongly viewed as a static need rather than an ever-changing one — something that should be evaluated consistently and for all levels of employees.
“[Thompson] has a risk profile. Every single person in the company has a risk profile,” Racioppi explains. “He has a risk profile when he’s at home, and that’s going to be at a certain level. When he comes into a city like New York City for a publicly advertised meeting, that’s going to change, especially when you have threats… We’ve got to think about how does it change when we put our team in different situations. And that can be for the most junior person in an organization all the way up to the CEO.”
In his conversation with Murphy and Kunze, Racioppi also dives into the strategies he has used to launch FRsix, from taking advantage of his network and available veteran benefits to finding creative ways to access capital to fund the business.
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