Erica Dobbs founded Dobbs Defense Solutions to bring women and veterans into STEM and cybersecurity. She bootstrapped the company from personal savings, used SBA programs like SCORE and APEX, and now runs training for high school and college students. Her Navy background shaped her belief that diversity drives American innovation.
Questions this video answers
She started as an enlisted E1 and worked her way up to E7.
She started the company with about $100 (a jar of spare change; went to the bank with a hundred bucks).
$8.2 million in revenue (cleared last year at $8.2 million).
SBA Maryland Veteran Company of the Year.
Chapters
So my name is Erica Dobbs, and.
I'm the CEO of Dobbs Defense Solutions. Our companies support the intelligence community, but we also support federal civilian agencies as well. We do traditional it, and then we.
Lose a lot of software tools that help safeguard America. So I started my business as a.
Means to provide an avenue for people who look like me. And what I mean by that is women and veterans. I wanted to give them a safe place to be able to go to work where they weren't judged because of their gender, age, or ethnicity. And so I decided to create jobs, and I think I've created a family that's a rainbow.
So I think the diversity in small.
Businesses is really unique, because when you.
Look at America, a lot of the technology that was derived in America, it came from minorities. I think it's important for America to.
Accept us because we are the innovators.
And we are the ones that make.
A difference in America.
It's not the other companies. It's us, and we belong. What's important to me is building a generation of STEM people that look like me and you.
I forego my salary in order to build a legacy for people that look.
Like you and I. I bring high school kids in.
I bring in kids from colleges and universities, and we create a sandbox for them to actually practice in, to learn stem, to be free, to actually explore and break things. It validates them. The challenges are always going to be your ethnicity and your gender, right?
So all of my challenges, I use.
Them as my vitamin. They energize me to go fight harder for people that look like me. So it's my job to make sure that the dream that I have put.
In place for all of us is successful.
I was started out in the Navy at the bottom of the ranks. I started out in the Navy as an enlisted E1, which means that you have nothing. And I worked my way up the ranks to E7. What I did learn from the Navy is never give up. Never give up the ship. Keep fighting, because you will end with positive results.
One thing that I got from the.
Navy that actually helped me as a CEO is leadership. And so the Navy started me out on how to be a leader.
I love the SBA because I utilized their resources. When I first started my business, I used the SCORE program. I used the counselors. I love that. I used the Apex, the ptacs. I've used all of those resources. I started my company with a jar of spare change. I went to the bank with a hundred bucks, and I started Dobbs Event Solutions today, I can tell you that I bootstrapped it without those bankers. They told me no. And we cleared last year at $8.2 million. We won the SBA, Maryland Veteran Company of the Year. We're soaring, we're soaring.
