Morristown retiree’s second act: Helping veterans start businesses

By Kristen Neymarc

For some, retirement means slowing down. For Morristown resident Alan Levitan, an Army veteran and former president and CEO of Kings Super Markets, it meant a new way to stay in business:  Helping veterans and military families start their own.

His reasoning was simple.  “We need to do more for our veterans,” Levitan said.

For more than 15 years, Levitan has helped lead what is now the Veteran Ventures Program, or VVP, a free entrepreneurship program offered through Centenary University. Applications are now being accepted for the next cohort, with interviews beginning Sept. 8, 2026.

The program traces its beginnings to Fairleigh Dickinson University, where a small group of retired business executives began working with aspiring veteran entrepreneurs. Classes were held in person in Madison until COVID-19 forced the program online.

Jose Amarista, a Morris Township resident who has volunteered with the program since roughly 2010, remembers the shift as both a disruption and an opportunity. Suddenly, consultants who had been working with people in New Jersey were advising participants in California and even service members stationed overseas.

The program later moved to Centenary, but its central idea remained the same: Pair each aspiring entrepreneur with an experienced business professional.

Video: The Mobile Cigar Lounge:

VVP centers on a nine-week virtual business-planning course designed to move participants step by step from an idea to a workable business plan and final pitch.

Participants meet weekly online for three hours, then complete assignments applying that week’s concepts to their own businesses. Sakti Kunz, a former Honeywell data-and-analytics executive who leads the curriculum, reviews roughly 20 to 25 assignments each week and returns them with detailed comments.

Each participant then meets one-on-one with an assigned business consultant to review the feedback, challenge assumptions and work out how those concepts apply to that particular venture.

The process repeats week after week: Instruction, homework, feedback, consultation and revision, with each step building toward the final business plan.

That individualized attention matters because people in the same cohort can arrive with vastly different backgrounds, from a high school education to an MBA.

“It’s tailored to that person’s experience, that person’s knowledge,” Kunz said.

Kunz, who first joined the program as a consultant around 2012, makes no claim to having invented a secret formula for entrepreneurship.

“A business course is a business course,” she said. What matters, she said, is how the information is interpreted and applied. The curriculum is continually revised as business changes and as students tell the instructors what is useful. “Constant innovation” is what keeps the program alive, Kunz said.

Sometimes the most useful lesson is discovering that an idea should not become a business at all. Kunz recalled a participant who reached the middle of the course, worked through his numbers and realized his concept would lose money. He decided to stop, rethink the business and return with a new plan in a later cohort.

That, too, counts as learning.

For Abraham and Lindsey Beates, a married couple and Navy veterans who both completed the program, the question was not whether their fly-fishing shop, South Branch Outfitters in Califon, worked. They already knew it did. The challenge was pinpointing why.

Their VVP consultant, Long Valley resident Grant Pridmore, created spreadsheets breaking down their many products. The analysis showed which merchandise was generating the strongest returns and allowed them to refocus the business accordingly.

The pairing was particularly apt: Pridmore is an avid fisherman himself.

Amarista, the longtime VVP consultant, spent nearly four decades in product development for major companies including Cadbury, Pinnacle Foods and Conagra. Asked how that corporpate experience translates to advising someone starting a small business from scratch, he said the scale may change, but the fundamentals do not.

“The business principles are exactly the same,” he said. The entrepreneur still must understand why the product should exist, who wants it and who the ideal customer is.

He often stays connected after the formal class ends. In one case, Amarista brought back a former participant who had become successful selling through Amazon and Walmart to advise a newer student facing the same challenge.

“It worked wonders,” he said.

Another graduate, Marine Corps Iraq veteran Joey Mac Dizon, completed the program in 2017 and went on to build The Mobile Cigar Lounge, a national events business that now employs veterans, first responders and members of their families.

More recently, VVP has attracted a large contingent from the Coast Guard. Eighteen Coast Guard-affiliated participants graduated from its programs in fall 2025, according to the United States Coast Guard, winning six of seven awards in the final pitch competition.

Coast Guard Lt. Jaclyn Olszewski credited the individual guidance. “Being paired with a mentor who has been successful in business and entrepreneurship was a game changer,” she said.

That one-on-one connection is precisely what Levitan does not want to lose.

He and the other organizers have resisted the usual push to chase grants, add layers of administration and make the organization as large as possible. Levitan said he wants VVP to remain free, flexible, volunteer-driven and small enough that participants still receive individual attention.

For Kunz, the work is deeply personal. She grew up in a family committed to public service, and helping veterans and military families build businesses feels like a way to honor that tradition.

“Serving in the military is the ultimate service,” she said.

And in his retirement from big business, Levitan appears content measuring growth differently these days. One veteran. One consultant. One business at a time.