TRUST and The Forces Family Feeling.

“To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.”

Business owners in the Armed Forces community have been celebrated at the London Stock Exchange on the tenth anniversary of the UK’s largest business support organisation for the Armed Forces community, X-Forces Enterprise (XFE).

Vice Admiral Phil Hally CB MBE, Chief of Defence People, joined XFE CEO and Founder, Ren Kapur MBE to close the market at London Stock Exchange, hosted by Eric Warren and James Eaton of London Stock Exchange Group. The celebratory event included a session on the impact of military entrepreneurship, which was opened with an address by Johnny Mercer MP, Minister for Veterans’ Affairs. Leaders from the Ministry of Defence, big business and military charities gathered with entrepreneurs to celebrate the occasion and signify a unique collaboration that has fostered thousands of new businesses.

On 6 July we celebrated 10 years of X-Forces Enterprise. It was a joy for me to share such a wonderful and emotional occasion with so many people who have been there as XFE has grown and developed over the years.

The word family means a lot to me – I put my heart and soul into our community to get where we are today. I have reflected much these last couple of weeks and one word that comes back time and again is TRUST. The trust we have in each to do the best we can by each other is why it feels like a family.

So where did it all start and why? This is a question I have been asked many times. The genesis started in 2012 when there were redundancies and a reform to the then 2010 defence strategy. There was a danger that there were going to be many people who were in fear of being displaced and unfortunately a few who struggled with readjusting.

Having been someone, a long time ago, who didn’t fit in culturally and experienced certain vulnerabilities, I wondered how people who had put their lives on the line for their country could be supported better at that time of transition. That was all it took to start the Armed Forces into entrepreneurship model which is X-Forces Enterprise. That was a lot of TRUST and faith to create a solution and where the friendships started to be built and many of those are part of the journey today.

From the beginning we knew that it was vital to get the right stakeholders in the room. Our finance partner, British Business Bank, enabled us to offer ethical microfinancing to budding entrepreneurs. Their approach is rigorous, and we live by that code every day. Their support has not only changed lives for the better but has launched new lives in the world of enterprise.

Similarly, way back at the beginning, we were blessed with a wonderful intervention by David Murray, then the Director General of SSAFA, who explained that we would have some very vulnerable people coming to us that we couldn’t help into entrepreneurship or at least at that time. He said, however, that we had an SOS that we could use, which was to call on the charity partners. That’s the power of community. Without our partners we wouldn’t be able to look after people the way we have done. TRUST.

People are living longer, retiring sooner, and no longer have one career for life. Instead, they ebb and flow from employment to self-employment, side hustles, and freelancing. Our programme is one of lifelong learning, whether an individual intends to start a business or not and we are grateful to be able to put our specialism of enterprise and entrepreneurship into practice.

My sincere thanks go to everyone who has been involved over the last ten years; partners, clients, government departments, and not least the community themselves who now help others in their journey, providing mentoring and peer-to-peer support.

“To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.”
― George MacDonald [Scottish Author and Poet]

Ren