The Hardest Part is Believing
For a lot of veterans, the hardest part of starting a business isn’t the business. It’s believing the skills they built during service are strong enough to bet on themselves outside of it.
Joe Smarro built one of the most replicated mental health crisis response programs in American law enforcement from inside the San Antonio Police Department. Over the course of 11 years on SAPD’s Mental Health Unit, his work earned a TEDx talk, an Emmy Award-winning HBO documentary, and visits from police chiefs, judges, and elected officials across the country who wanted to study the model his team had built.
None of that convinced him he could run a business.
“Way too insecure of a human to do that,” Joe said. “I’m a Marine and a cop.”
“I’m a Marine and a cop.” is an important sentence to identify. Joe saw those two positions as his identity, one built inside a structure with a clear hierarchy, defined guard rails, and no ambiguity about what success looks like. The military builds extraordinary competence within a structure that is effective on the battlefield, but that structure can make it hard for veterans to see their skills as valuable outside of it. Veterans leave service knowing exactly what they can do, but are often unsure what that’s worth in the civilian economy.
26 Years of Friendship
In 2000, Jesse Trevino was mopping the floors of a Dollar General in Carrizo Springs, Texas, when a Marine Corps recruiter walked in. One conversation later, Jesse was on a bus to San Diego. At the end of bootcamp, he broke his foot during the Crucible, a 56-hour graduation exercise. His platoon shipped out to the fleet without him. While Jesse healed and got reassigned, he gained a new roommate named Joe Smarro.
They deployed together for Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, and they have been inseparable for 26 years. They both became police officers in San Antonio. Joe built the mental health unit into a national model. Jesse followed a parallel path through patrol, DWI enforcement, and eventually the Mental Health Unit himself, where he became a certified crisis intervention instructor and later established the first local-level behavioral threat assessment program in the country through the Southwest Texas Fusion Center. He is currently completing his PhD at Walden University, focusing on crisis intervention in rural environments.
Two Marines. Two police officers. Two careers built entirely inside the structure.
“I discovered a lot about myself,” Jesse said. “There’s this philosophy, you can’t really fix anything about the world until you fix yourself.”
Neither of them was looking for a different life. They had built solid, stable and successful careers.
The Decision
For Joe, the turning point came in 2016, when a fellow Marine veteran told him about IVMF’s Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans (EBV). Joe applied to the Texas A&M cohort more out of curiosity than conviction in himself. What he found changed his trajectory. It wasn’t just the curriculum, it was the room. Veterans who have the same experiences, thought like him, and had the same calculation that they were ill-prepared to be entrepreneurs. They were all figuring out that they weren’t alone, and that they may be wrong about their skill translation to business ownership.
“I not only want to do this,” Joe said after completing the program, “but now I genuinely believe that I can do this.”
He came home to San Antonio and called his best friend Jesse.
He didn’t have a polished pitch. He had a conviction of 26 years of trust. Jesse didn’t ask for a business plan or a revenue model.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Jesse said, “but if you want to do this, I want to support it.” That was all it took to decide to start a company. Not months of deliberation or bartering. Two people who had spent their entire adult lives building inside a structure someone else designed, deciding for the first time to build something of their own.
By 2017, SolutionPoint+ was incorporated. It started as a side operation while both remained on the force, but by 2020, Joe left SAPD to run the company full time. Jesse followed shortly after. Two years after Joe went through EBV, Jesse completed the EBV program himself at Syracuse University. The capstone pitch of SolutionPoint+ won the Captain Melvin T. Smith Pioneer Award.
What The Decision Built
The company Joe and Jesse built is the direct translation of two military careers and two policing careers into a scalable business. SolutionPoint+ trains first responders, corrections officers, healthcare workers, educators, and transit employees in crisis intervention, de-escalation, and mental wellness. Their stated vision is to eradicate suicide among first responders. Their largest client is the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Every federal correctional facility in the United States falls under their training contract. They operate internationally, with contracts in Canada, and the company appears on both the Inc 5000 and the Vet 100 lists.
None of that happened in spite of their military background. It happened because of it.
Joe describes one of the core lessons of the Marine Corps as “Semper Gumby.” Always flexible. “Whatever plan you ever come up with is never going to fully execute because of unforeseen things,” he said. “The Marine Corps did a really good job of preparing us for that.”
He pointed to a recent example. SolutionPoint+ had a training team deployed to Iowa during a blizzard. The client spent five days assuring Joe that attendees would be there. His team showed up ready, but only two people arrived out of twenty. The client canceled. Joe had predicted it a week earlier. He rescheduled and moved on.
That response to unexpected events isn’t incidental. IVMF research shows that 71% of veteran entrepreneurs report their military experience helped them adapt and persevere through business challenges, and 93% say their military skills directly contributed to their success. For Joe and Jesse, those are not abstract statistics. They are operational reality.
According to IVMF’s National Survey of Military-Affiliated Entrepreneurs, 47% of veteran entrepreneurs identify as social entrepreneurs, and most of them are not running nonprofits. They are building for-profit businesses oriented around a mission that extends beyond revenue. Joe and Jesse didn’t abandon that instinct when they separated. They built a company around it.
Finding The Right Ecosystem
The decision to build is one thing. The ability to sustain it is another.
SolutionPoint+ did not reach this point alone. Joe has completed EBV , EBV Accelerate, and is currently in CEOcircle. Jesse completed EBV at Syracuse and has attended Veteran EDGE multiple times with Joe. In fact, a connection made at Veteran EDGE led directly to their first federal contracting opportunity, which put SolutionPoint+ on their path to their Federal Bureau of Prisons work. Connections like that are why Joe and Jesse return to Veteran EDGE year after year.
For Jesse, the value went deeper than business development, it was permission. “When you realize there’s a lot of people, even when they’re at the next level, and they’re figuring it out as they go,” he said, “that network provided confidence.”
Joe doesn’t qualify it. “I do not believe we would be where we are if not for IVMF.”
For veterans who spent years building competence within the military or a civilian career, the hardest part of entrepreneurship is often believing the skills translate. Joe and Jesse took that step and made the decision to build. Through IVMF, they found the education, the community, and the opportunities to build a company whose mission is as serious as the one they served in uniform.
IVMF Has Helped 100,000 Veterans Pursue Entrepreneurship
Joe and Jesse are two out of 100,000. Their story isn’t unusual inside the IVMF community.
If you’re a veteran or military spouse sitting with that same quiet conviction that you could build something, and the same quiet doubt that you’re the kind of person who does, IVMF’s entrepreneurship programs were built for exactly that moment. The decision is yours. The ecosystem is ready.
Explore IVMF’s programs and join a community of 100,000 veteran entrepreneurs.