Founders
At Founders ASCEND, we are helping Founders succeed and thrive. We believe entrepreneurship is one of the boldest acts of courage—and one of the most underserved when it comes to ongoing support, advocacy, and growth. Founders carry the vision, the pressure, and the responsibility to build something that didn’t exist before, often in isolation and under uncertainty.
Supporting entrepreneurs, is not just about business success. It’s about fueling innovation, driving economic mobility, and building stronger communities from the ground up. Founders ASCEND is a bold new initiative from The ASCEND Collective, created to champion, support, and elevate entrepreneurs—helping Founders succeed and thrive with tools, mentors, networking and more!
At Founders ASCEND, we know that people are the foundation of every thriving business. That’s why we developed the H.O.P.E. Model of Success — a practical HR training framework built to help small business founders strengthen their teams and sustain long-term growth. H.O.P.E. stands for Hiring, Onboarding, Performance, and Engagement — the four pillars that turn talent into foundational success.
With H.O.P.E., we provide small business leaders with the tools to not just build teams, but to create communities of success within their organizations.
Stay tuned for the launch! In the meantime, if you have an HR or talent optimization question – schedule a fifteen minute call with our Founder and Talent Optimization expert.
Skills-First Hiring
A Hiring Solution that Puts Your Business First with Military Talent
We simplify hiring so you can focus on what matters.
Too often, talent is filtered through resumés, job titles, and assumptions that don’t reflect what people can actually do. Skills-first models change the landscape by focusing on capability over credentials, readiness over resumés, and opportunity over assumptions.
With the right match, hiring isn’t a headache—it’s an opportunity to shine.
We make hiring smarter, faster, and more human.
From potential to performance, faster.
Vanguard Rising is our experiential applied learning lab that prepares military-connected talent to thrive in modern workplaces. We translate skills, build readiness, and deliver real-world project experience so candidates arrive confident, capable, and ready to contribute.
- What sets the Lab apart is a commitment to agility. Students actively engage as teams, collaborate, and tackle real-world challenges.
- Are you a small business who needs a compliant Talent Optimization package?
✔️ Skills-first job descriptions
✔️ Onboarding systems
✔️ Structured interviews and performance management process
✔️ Turnover and engagement data
Hiring the right talent is one of the most critical and challenging aspects of running a small business. Limited resources, competing priorities, and a lack of expertise often result in reactive hiring processes, costly turnover, and missed opportunities for growth. Small businesses need a solution that simplifies hiring, ensures access to high-quality talent, and aligns with their budgets.
This is where an AI-powered, skills-based matching model with a blind hiring process offers a game-changing solution. By focusing on skills over traditional metrics like resumes and leveraging technology to remove bias, small businesses can make smarter, faster, and more inclusive hiring decisions—all at an affordable cost.