Veteran Owned Tour Company in Nashville: Why We Give 1% of Every Dollar to Veterans
- Paul Whitten
- 4 hours ago
- 6 min read
There are a lot of ways to describe a tour company. Highly rated. Locally owned. Small group. We use those words too, because they are true.
But the one that shapes every decision we make at Nashville Adventures is this: we are a veteran owned tour company in Nashville, and we give one percent of every dollar we take in to veterans.
Not one percent of profit. One percent of revenue. There is a difference, and it is the whole point.
On July 30, 2026, the Greater Nashville Hospitality Association named Nashville Adventures its Community Service Award winner at the Stars of the Industry Awards at Nissan Stadium. The same night, our Operations Director Cody Witten was named Nashville's Tourism Manager of the Year.
We are proud of both. But the award is not the story. The reason we won it is.
What Veteran Owned Tour Company Actually Means Here
“Veteran owned” shows up on a lot of storefronts. Sometimes it means something. Sometimes it is a decal on the door.
Here is what it means at Nashville Adventures.
I am Paul Whitten, and I founded this company in 2023. Before that I spent a career in the U.S. Army, including leading electronic warfare operations in Afghanistan in support of more than 2,000 service members. After the Army I spent three years in the Peace Corps in Armenia. Then I came home to Nashville and started walking people around a city I love.
I am not unusual in that. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy, veterans are the majority owners of more than 1.6 million American firms, and those firms employ close to 3.3 million people.
What veterans tend to bring to a business is not a marketing angle. It is a habit of mind. You plan for the thing going wrong before it goes wrong. You take care of the people to your left and right before you take care of yourself. You do not leave a job half finished because it got uncomfortable or because nobody was watching.
That happens to be a decent description of how you run a walking tour in Nashville in July.
One Percent of Revenue, Not One Percent of Profit
Most companies that give back give a share of profit. That sounds generous. In practice it is a much smaller and much softer commitment than it appears.
Profit is a choice. It is whatever is left after a business decides what to pay its owners, what to reinvest, how to book its expenses, and what to call a cost. A company can have a strong year and report very little profit. A young company can go years without any profit at all. “We give a percentage of profits” can quietly mean nothing for a very long time, and nobody outside the company would ever know.
Revenue is a fact. Money either came in the door or it did not.
So we give one percent of revenue. Every tour, every booking, every corporate group, every private event. One cent out of every dollar, before we pay ourselves anything.
We wrote that policy in 2023, when this company had almost no money and no particular reason to believe it ever would. That is the part that actually mattered. It is easy to promise to give once you are comfortable. Committing before you are comfortable is the thing that changes how you behave when the numbers get tight, and the numbers do get tight in year one.
It also means our guests are part of it whether they think about it or not. If you have taken a walking tour with us, or a pub crawl, or brought your team downtown for an afternoon, you funded veteran services in Middle Tennessee. You did not have to opt in, round up at checkout, or click a box. It was already built into the price you paid.
Where the Money Goes
Our primary partner is Operation Stand Down Tennessee.
OSDTN began in 1993 as a coalition of volunteers and organizations serving Nashville's chronically homeless veteran population. It has since grown into a comprehensive services organization covering 31 counties across Middle and West Tennessee, and it reports serving more than 10,000 veterans in 2025 alone.
Their mission, in their own words:
“To engage, equip, and empower military Veterans and their families through crisis, career, connection, and community services.”
In practice that covers housing and transitional housing, food assistance, transportation, career and resume services, help applying for VA benefits, legal services, and suicide prevention.
Those are not abstractions. A veteran in Nashville who cannot make rent this month, or cannot get across town to a job interview, or cannot navigate a benefits claim alone, is a specific person with a specific problem. One percent of a walking tour is not going to end veteran homelessness in Tennessee. But it is real money going every month to an organization that knows exactly what to do with it, without us having to decide whether we feel generous this quarter.
Nashville Recognized It
The Greater Nashville Hospitality Association has represented the region's hospitality industry since 1970. Its Stars of the Industry Awards recognize the people and organizations raising the bar across lodging, dining, and tourism.
On July 30, 2026, GNHA named Nashville Adventures its Community Service Award winner.
The same night, our Operations Director Cody Witten was named Tourism Manager of the Year. That one matters to me more than people might expect. In 2025 I was named Tourism General Manager of the Year for both Nashville and the State of Tennessee. When the founder wins something, it says something about the founder. When the person actually running your operations wins the very next year, it says something about the company.
We opened our doors in September 2023. There are eight of us. That is four hospitality titles in two award cycles, in one of the most competitive tourism markets in the country, against operators many times our size and many times our age.
This is also not the first time the veteran side of what we do has been noticed. NewsChannel 5 previously featured our military appreciation work here in Nashville.
The Tours Themselves
None of the above matters if the tour is not good. So here is what we actually run.
Our history walking tours cover downtown Nashville the way it deserves to be covered, with real research behind every stop rather than the same four anecdotes every operator repeats. Our Civil War tour goes deeper for people who want the full weight of what happened here. Our ghost tours lean into the genuinely strange corners of the city's past, and they get busy fast once fall arrives. Our pub crawls and distillery tours handle the other side of Nashville, the one most visitors come for anyway.
For companies, we run corporate and team building experiences for groups from ten to a hundred and fifty, including conference groups working out of the Music City Center and leadership teams in town for a retreat.
Across all of it, the guides are the product. Ours are trained properly, paid properly, and they stay, which is a much bigger deal than it sounds in an industry with brutal seasonal turnover. That retention is a large part of why Cody won what he won, and it is the single biggest reason our reviews look the way they do.
What This Means When You Book
You should book a tour because it is a good tour. Nobody wants a mediocre two hours in the heat with a side of moral credit.
So here is the honest version. Book us because the storytelling is better and the guides are better. Then, separately, one percent of what you pay goes to veterans in Tennessee. It is not the reason to book. It is what happens when you do.
If you want the full downtown experience, start with our Nashville walking tour. If you are bringing a team to town, our corporate and team building tours are built for exactly that. You can see everything we run on our tours page.
Tour With Us
Nashville is a better story than most people get told, and we would like to be the ones who tell it to you.
If being a veteran owned tour company in Nashville that gives away one percent of every dollar happens to be part of why you pick us, that is a good enough reason too.
Book a tour, or get in touch about a group.