An Insiders Look at the Citi Salutes: Realizing Your Dream Business Competition

It was a sunny, warm weekend in Long Beach, CA, but the participants of the Citi Salutes: Realizing Your Dream Business Competition were not spending time enjoying the weather outside. Most could be seen pacing the quiet hotel hallway outside of rooms filled with cameras, photographers and panels of successful entrepreneurs and business professionals who would be judging their business plan presentations to determine who would advance to the finalist round of the competition.

Participants in the competition comprised graduates and aspiring veteran entrepreneurs of the Veteran Women Igniting the Spirit of Entrepreneurship (V-WISE) and Operation Boots to Business programs operated by the Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University (IVMF). While it was the panels of judges who would advance three veterans from each IVMF program to the finals, it would eventually be the group of veteran women and female military spouses who gathered at the same hotel that weekend to attend the 2014 V-WISE Long Beach conference that would cast votes for the winning business ideas.

Molly Blake, a freelance writer, joined the conference to chronicle the competition and its participants and was there as Citi presented $130,000 in prize money, funded by the Citi Foundation, to the next generation of veteran entrepreneurs.

Read Molly’s insider account of the competition through her blog posts below.

View a full list of the 2014 winners and judges here.

Now or Never

Sonia Deal stood at the dark-wood paneled podium and smiled confidently.  Her hands shook a bit lakbut the panel of three judges, seated a few yards away at a table, couldn’t see the tremble.  All they saw was a passionate, smart registered nurse with an idea. “Our collaboration through case management [Read more…]

Finalists Have Been Announced!

After Kristina Guerrero, the owner of and genius behind TurboPup, finished her presentation, the three judges watching were thrilled when she passed out samples. ‘This one’s peanut butter,” said the former Air Force C-130 pilot of her complete meal bars for dogs, made with 100% American sourced, human grade ingredients. [Read more…]

And the Winners Are…

With a double fist pump and a mega-watt smile on her face, Jill Hinton told an audience fueled up on coffee, Katy Perry’s women kick-butt-anthems and country music singer turned vet advocate Michael Peterson that she wanted to be the Oprah Winfrey of the outdoors Hinton had 90-seconds to pitch her [Read more…]