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OKVetWorksApril 2022NewsletterApril 12 - Civil War Began (1861)InsideCivil War HistoryFoolish Mistakes Small Businesses MakeUpcoming Events

There is so much going on I'm VERY excited! Just to name a few things going on...May - Boots to Suits classMay 14 - Piedmont Veterans FestivalMay 19 - East Central University - Veterans and Military Appreciation DayMay 11-12 - Boots to Business - Tinker AFBCONFERENCE!We also can't forget about our FIRST Annual Conference coming up in September. Thisconference will be a 2 day, in person, conference. The schedule will be from 7:30am -8:00pm both days with a Meet and Greet Networking the evening before the conferencebegins. The conference will have 18 breakout sessions to chose from, various keynote speakers,fireside chats, awards ceremony and dinner and MUCH more!This will be an event you don't want to miss! And the best part...It's FREE!There will also be a resource and vendor fair for you to share your business and learn moreof what is available to you. If you would like to have a vendor booth at this event,unfortunately, this is the only thing that will cost you. The cost for a booth space (1 clothedtable and 2 chairs). The booth space is $75 and must be paid in advance. VERIFICATIONIf you have not sent in your Certification Application yet, please do so. I am working with theOklahoma Department of Commerce and the OMES Central Purchasing Divisions to reallydrive Veteran Owned Business awareness and having this "Verification" will certainly helpeveryone. You will find the application later in this newsletter and I can email a fillable versionto you upon request.

https://forms.office.com/g/CyDdsA0BjARegister Here toAttendKeynote SpeakersFireside Chats18 Breakout SessionsNetworking OpportunitiesResource/Vendor FairAwards Ceremony/BanquetDON'T MISSOUT ON THEOPPORTUNITYTO ATTENDTHIS FREECONFERENCE!LOCATION:Metro Technology Center1900 Springlake Dr, Oklahoma City, OK 73111

History of the Civil WarSource: Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_WarThe American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 9, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United Statesbetween the Union (states that remained loyal to the federal union, or "the North") and the Confederacy (states that votedto secede, or "the South"). The central cause of the war was the status of slavery, especially the expansion of slavery intoterritories acquired as a result of the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican–American War. On the eve of the Civil War in1860, four million of the 32 million Americans (~13%) were enslaved black people, almost all in the South. [e][f][14][15]The practice of slavery in the United States was one of the key political issues of the 19th century. Decades of politicalunrest over slavery led up to the Civil War. Disunion came after Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 United States presidentialelection on an anti-slavery expansion platform. An initial seven southern slave states declared their secession from thecountry to form the Confederacy. Confederate forces seized federal forts within territory they claimed. The last-minuteCrittenden Compromise tried to avert conflict but failed; both sides prepared for war. Fighting broke out in April 1861 whenthe Confederate army began the Battle of Fort Sumter in South Carolina, just over a month after the first inauguration ofAbraham Lincoln. The Confederacy grew to control at least a majority of territory in eleven states (out of the 34 U.S. statesin February 1861), and asserted claims to two more. Both sides raised large volunteer and conscription armies. Four yearsof intense combat, mostly in the South, ensued. During 1861–1862 in the war's Western Theater, the Union made significant permanent gains—though in the war'sEastern Theater the conflict was inconclusive. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, whichmade ending slavery a war goal, declaring all persons held as slaves in states in rebellion "forever free." To the west, theUnion destroyed the Confederate river navy by the summer of 1862, then much of its western armies, and seized NewOrleans. The successful 1863 Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi River. In 1863,Confederate General Robert E. Lee's incursion north ended at the Battle of Gettysburg. Western successes led to GeneralUlysses S. Grant's command of all Union armies in 1864. Inflicting an ever-tightening naval blockade of Confederate ports,the Union marshaled resources and manpower to attack the Confederacy from all directions. This led to the fall of Atlantain 1864 to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman and his march to the sea. The last significant battles raged aroundthe ten-month Siege of Petersburg, gateway to the Confederate capital of Richmond.

The Civil War effectively ended on April 9, 1865, when Confederate General Lee surrendered to Union General Grant atthe Battle of Appomattox Court House, after Lee had abandoned Petersburg and Richmond. Confederate generalsthroughout the Confederate army followed suit. The conclusion of the American Civil War lacks a clean end date: landforces continued surrendering until June 23. By the end of the war, much of the South's infrastructure was destroyed,especially its railroads. The Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and four million enslaved black people werefreed. The war-torn nation then entered the Reconstruction era in a partially successful attempt to rebuild the countryand grant civil rights to freed slaves. The Civil War is one of the most studied and written about episodes in the history of the United States. It remains thesubject of cultural and historiographical debate. Of particular interest is the persisting myth of the Lost Cause of theConfederacy. The American Civil War was among the earliest to use industrial warfare. Railroads, the telegraph,steamships, the ironclad warship, and mass-produced weapons saw wide use. In total the war left between 620,000 and750,000 soldiers dead, along with an undetermined number of civilian casualties. President Lincoln was assassinatedjust five days after Lee's surrender. The Civil War remains the deadliest military conflict in American history. Thetechnology and brutality of the Civil War foreshadowed the coming World Wars. [g]Civil War (cont.)The causes of secession were complex and havebeen controversial since the war began, but mostacademic scholars identify slavery as the centralcause of the war. The issue has been furthercomplicated by historical revisionists, who havetried to offer a variety of reasons for the war.Slavery was the central source of escalatingpolitical tension in the 1850s. The RepublicanParty was determined to prevent any spread ofslavery to the territories, which, after they wereadmitted as states, would give the North greaterrepresentation in Congress and the ElectoralCollege. Many Southern leaders had threatenedsecession if the Republican candidate, Lincoln,won the 1860 election. After Lincoln won, manySouthern leaders felt that disunion was their onlyoption, fearing that the loss of representationwould hamper their ability to promote pro-slaveryacts and policies. In his second inauguraladdress, Lincoln said that "slaves constituted apeculiar and powerful interest. All knew that thisinterest was, somehow, the cause of the war. Tostrengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interestwas the object for which the insurgents would rendthe Union, even by war; while the governmentclaimed no right to do more than to restrict theterritorial enlargement of it." [16][17][18][19]

Civil War (cont.)Slavery was the main cause of disunion. Slavery had been a controversial issue during the framing of theConstitution but had been left unsettled. The issue of slavery had confounded the nation since its inception, andincreasingly separated the United States into a slaveholding South and a free North. The issue was exacerbated by therapid territorial expansion of the country, which repeatedly brought to the fore the issue of whether new territory should beslaveholding or free. The issue had dominated politics for decades leading up to the war. Key attempts to solve the issueincluded the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, but these only postponed an inevitable showdown overslavery. [20][21][22][23]The motivations of the average person were not inherently those of their faction; some Northern soldiers were evenindifferent on the subject of slavery, but a general pattern can be established. Confederate soldiers fought the warprimarily to protect a Southern society of which slavery was an integral part. From the anti-slavery perspective, theissue was primarily whether slavery was an anachronistic evil incompatible with republicanism. The strategy of the anti-slavery forces was containment—to stop the expansion of slavery and thereby put it on a path to ultimate extinction.The slaveholding interests in the South denounced this strategy as infringing upon their constitutional rights. Southernwhites believed that the emancipation of slaves would destroy the South's economy, due to the large amount of capitalinvested in slaves and fears of integrating the ex-slave black population. In particular, many Southerners feared a repeatof 1804 Haiti massacre (also known as "the horrors of Santo Domingo"), in which former slaves systematicallymurdered most of what was left of the country's white population — including men, women, children, and even manysympathetic to abolition — after the successful slave revolt in Haiti. Historian Thomas Fleming points to the historicalphrase "a disease in the public mind" used by critics of this idea and proposes it contributed to the segregation in the JimCrow era following emancipation. These fears were exacerbated by the 1859 attempt of John Brown to instigate anarmed slave rebellion in the South. [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35]

Civil War (cont.)The abolitionists – those advocating the end of slavery – were very active in thedecades leading up to the Civil War. They traced their philosophical roots back to thePuritans, who strongly believed that slavery was morally wrong. One of the earlyPuritan writings on this subject was The Selling of Joseph, by Samuel Sewall in 1700.In it, Sewall condemned slavery and the slave trade and refuted many of the era'stypical justifications for slavery. [36][37]The American Revolution and the cause of liberty added tremendous impetus to theabolitionist cause. Slavery, which had been around for thousands of years, wasconsidered normal and was not a significant issue of public debate prior to theRevolution. The Revolution changed that and made it into an issue that had to beaddressed. As a result, during and shortly after the Revolution, the northern statesquickly started outlawing slavery. Even in southern states, laws were changed to limitslavery and facilitate manumission. The amount of indentured servitude droppeddramatically throughout the country. An Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves sailedthrough Congress with little opposition. President Thomas Jefferson supported it, and itwent into effect on January 1, 1808. Benjamin Franklin and James Madison eachhelped found manumission societies. Influenced by the Revolution, many slave ownersfreed their slaves, but some, such as George Washington, did so only in their wills. Thenumber of free blacks as a proportion of the black population in the upper Southincreased from less than 1 percent to nearly 10 percent between 1790 and 1810 as aresult of these actions.The establishment of the Northwest Territory as "free soil" – no slavery – by ManassehCutler and Rufus Putnam (who both came from Puritan New England) would alsoprove crucial. This territory (which became the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana,Illinois, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota) doubled the size of the United States. Frederick Douglass, a former slave, was a leading abolitionistIn the decades leading up to the Civil War, abolitionists, such as Theodore Parker,Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Douglass, repeatedly usedthe Puritan heritage of the country to bolster their cause. The most radical anti-slaverynewspaper, The Liberator, invoked the Puritans and Puritan values over a thousandtimes. Parker, in urging New England Congressmen to support the abolition of slavery,wrote that "The son of the Puritan ... is sent to Congress to stand up for Truth andRight...." Literature served as a means to spread the message to common folks.Key works included Twelve Years a Slave, the Narrative of the Life of FrederickDouglass, American Slavery as It Is, and the most important: Uncle Tom's Cabin, thebest-selling book of the 19th century aside from the Bible. [39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][37][47][48][49][50][51]By 1840 more than 15,000 people were members of abolitionist societies in the United States. Abolitionism in the UnitedStates became a popular expression of moralism, and led directly to the Civil War. In churches, conventions andnewspapers, reformers promoted an absolute and immediate rejection of slavery. Support for abolition among thereligious was not universal though. As the war approached, even the main denominations split along political lines, formingrival southern and northern churches. In 1845, for example, Baptists split into the Northern Baptists and Southern Baptistsover the issue of slavery.Abolitionist sentiment was not strictly religious or moral in origin. The Whig Party became increasingly opposed to slaverybecause they saw it as inherently against the ideals of capitalism and the free market. Whig leader William H. Seward(who would serve in Lincoln's cabinet) proclaimed that there was an "irrepressible conflict" between slavery and free labor,and that slavery had left the South backward and undeveloped. As the Whig party dissolved in the 1850s, the mantle ofabolition fell to its newly formed successor, the Republican Party. [52][53][54][55][56][57]For more Civil War History go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

7 small business tips:‘Foolish’ mistakes smallbusinesses make It’s April, but you don’t have to make common foolish mistakes as a small business ownerto take part in the Fools’ Day.One article reminds us that no matter how steeped you are in business-ownership experience, youare bound to run into problems at some point. So, the month of April is a good opportunity forbusiness owners to reflect on foolish mistakes that could ruin their business (given it’s the month of“fools” and all). Some of the most foolish mistakes a business owner could make might not even be obvious.Thankfully, a lot of these problems are avoidable and, in the long-term, will benefit your businessmore than you think if you take appropriate steps to avoid them. Consider some of the following mistakes that SBOs tend to make (numbered in no particularorder):1. Get-rich-quick mentality2. Overconfidence/”no” competition3. Jack of all trades/not utilizing team members4. Premature product launch5. No business credit/proper funding6. Doing what you want, not what the customer is asking for7. Neglecting digital presence (social media, website, reviews, etc.) Some common mistakes made by small business owners could be avoided, though. Let’s take alook at how small businesses make these mistakes and how to avoid them.

‘Foolish’ mistakes small businesses make (cont.) 1. Getting rich quick will lead to long-term disappoint                Overnight success usually takes 15 to 20 years to achieve. If you go in expecting to be rich overnight, you may becomediscouraged early on (this could lead to you giving up your dream prematurely). If you understand that success takestime, perseverance, and preparation, you can avoid this detrimental mentality. The key is to give your business time togrow. If your company is stagnant for a long time, you can take it as an indication that you need to try something new.However, many small businesses that are starting up should get comfortable with time — this will either make or breakyour success. 2. Overconfidence, or assuming youhave no competition because yourproduct is a "breakthrough," will biteyou in the buttEven if you have the latest, greatest, never-been-done-before approach to something, don’t assume that you have nocompetition. Competition is more than just the direct, obvious competitors. Competition is also all the availablealternatives. If you create a breakthrough product, chances are other companies in your field will find your product andstart asking questions to capitalize on your product. This isn’t to discourage you from continuing with your product, butconvincing yourself that you’re going to remain the “one-and-only” is only going to set yourself up for failure. Competitiondoes exist, and that’s okay. 3. Doing everything on your own...poorly instead of delegating tasks toappropriate team members You might want to do it all by yourself, but we don’t recommend it. Just like any other person, an entrepreneur has one ortwo natural talents. As an entrepreneur, it is your job to identify those talents and focus on them to your fullest. So, it’simportant to build a strong, well-rounded team. Find people who are strong in the areas that you aren’t.Effective delegationcan be one of the best ways for SBOs to build their businesses, free up their time for business activities that require theirunique expertise, and build a team positioned for future success. While you can do almost everything, you don’t want to doalmost everything poorly.

‘Foolish’ mistakes small businesses make (cont.) 4. Launching your business or productprematurelyYour product isn’t ready, but you are. This is when the Nike slogan isn’t going to work —Don’t just do it. One of thebiggest mistakes startups make is launching before they are ready. The saying ‘done is better than perfect’ is the rightadvice, however, the ‘done’ needs to ensure it can handle new clients. Once you have launched into the public and youstart getting clients, ensure that your systems and processes are in place, such as payment terms and process, contracts,communications, whilst still being able to maintain your marketing strategy. The back-end processes need to bewatertight before you start taking on clients; if they aren’t, these are the cracks that will show and appearunprofessional. You likely won’t have a “perfect” product, but it’s best to get it as close as possible to “perfect” ratherthan rush with a mediocre product.5. Not paying attention to businesscredit when it comes to findingproper funding One business owner said that part of the reason 30 percent of businesses fail within the first three years is because oflack of proper funding. Similar to personal credit, business credit determines whether your company can be trusted bythe way it manages money. The thing is: Most banks will not trust a new business owner with a loan unless they havecollateral to back it up, and most people put a lot of their money into trying to develop something profitable whenstarting a new venture. Is that is a catch-22 situation? Not necessarily. Building your business credit enables you toobtain the capital you need to expand, cover everyday expenses, purchase inventory, hire additional staff, andconserve the cash on-hand to cover your cost of doing business. A wise man admits his mistakes but afoolish fellow does the opposite.-William Churchill

6. Only doing what you want insteadof listening to customer needs This tip has its place in the world of business. At some point, you do what you want because you don’t even have acustomer base, but once you do get a customer base, you start to pay more attention to their requests. Customersare the most important part of a business because they are literally what keeps you in business. If you don’t considertheir needs and their satisfaction as one of your primary goals, you’ll lose them so remember to meet their needs andtreat them as individuals when the time comes and, as we stated before, the time comes when you do get a loyalcustomer base that actually begins to make requests.7. Neglecting your digital presence(social media, website, reviews, etc.)Here’s a statistic: 74 percent of American adults internet users use Facebook. Regardless of opinion, your potentialcustomers are on various social media networks.If you are a business owner or work for a business that refuses to havesocial media, you’re missing out! Especially since this number will only increase in time as the world gets more mobile.And having a website lets the business tell their story while providing useful information for clients. It’s also a greatgateway to gain additional traffic with search engines. But creating a website and having a social media presence isn’tenough for your business. Don’t neglect reviews on social media pages and review sites such as Yelp and Google! Thankcustomers for good reviews and respond to the critical reviews to show other potential clients you care.‘Foolish’ mistakes small businesses make (cont.)

Boots to Business - Ft. Sill