New and revived developments for veteran businesses

The American Legion’s push to improve access to capital for veteran entrepreneurs and to streamline the process of obtaining Small Business Administration credentialing for loans and contract procurement – government and non-government alike – is gaining ground, attendees of Small Business Workshop learned Saturday evening at the 105th National Convention of the nation’s largest veterans organization.

The workshop and networking reception – sponsored by Capital Bank and Charles Fowler, American Legion Small Business Task Force chairman – filled a meeting room with veterans and advocates who learned how the SBA is smoothing out its online business credentialing process, how the Veterans Institute for Procurement is successfully training hundreds of veteran entrepreneurs in the complicated world of government contracting, how regional Veterans Business Outreach Centers are expanding across the country, and how opportunities for capital are back on the front burner after the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The service-disabled veteran-owned small business set-aside is not an entitlement,” said Fowler, emcee of the workshop and reception. “It’s an earned benefit. There’s only one way to become a service-disabled veteran-owned small business. You have to serve, and you have to be disabled in the conduct of that service … It’s absurd that there would be certain folks within our legislature and government who look at us as some sort of tax on them, some sort of burden on them.”

Capital Bank Senior Vice President David Vardeman, department head of not-for-profit business development at the financial institution, spoke of the opportunity to reinvigorate an American Legion-supported pilot project to ease the burden of capital access for veteran-owned businesses.  

“Through a few months of work, (the pilot) was starting to get a lot of traction on the Hill, but what happened was COVID-19 came, and everything sort of shut down, we shifted everything to PPP (Paycheck Protection Program),” Vardeman explained to the crowd. The PPP initiative’s success, he indicated, served as a glimpse of what a veteran-owned business capitalization program could become.

He said the PPP’s success can be quantified in the $793 billion in government-guaranteed loans, with an average loan of $72,100 per business, “and 86 million jobs were retained. It took a tremendous amount of effort from the SBA and the banks, in cooperation, to make this happen. It was just an astonishing accomplishment.”

Now that the pandemic is over, the pilot project concept to clear pathways to business loans between $50,000 and $1 million for veteran-owned businesses has new legs that can be advanced, with continued support of The American Legion, he suggested.

Another development is the SBA’s unification of four different online platforms and processes to apply for credentialing into one. The new MySBA credentialing program   will allow certification applicants to flow one set of documents, forms and proposals into one portal that would make them eligible for multiple programs, all of which include veterans; one is specific to help those who served in uniform get business capital. It launches Sept. 9.

“We’ve got one platform now that business owners are going to come to,” said SBA Deputy Associate Administrator of Government Contracting and Business Development Larry Stubblefield. “We’re going to have one place to go, MySBA certifications – one log-in, one common application, and you upload your documents one time.”

The process is built to substantially to improve the user experience and assist contracting agencies, as well. “A lot of excitement at SBA to get this done,” Stubblefield said. “This is probably something we should have done years ago.”

“It’s an incredible time to be a business owner,” said Barbara Ashe, national director of the Veteran Institute for Procurement (VIP), which provides cost-free training for veteran business owners at different levels, in multiple tracks.

VIP has trained more than 2,600 veterans since its launch in 2010.  “We have curriculums that are designed to meet the business where the company is in their development,” she said, noting that VIP graduates have been awarded over $35 billion in prime government contracts over the years, in the United States and overseas.

The workshop included presentations from other top officials from the SBA, the director of the Veterans Business Outreach Center at Mississippi State University and the executive director of vendor relations for the Veterans Health Administration, a major contractor of disabled veteran-owned businesses.

The workshop and networking event demonstrated renewed vitality in an area of advocacy The American Legion has been working since its founding – helping veterans find prosperous civilian careers after service.

American Legion Employment & Education Commission Chairman Jay Bowen of Colorado, who has spent much of his career in defense contracting, summed it up this way:

“Our active-duty servicemembers – men and women – blocked out a part of their life to serve our country. At the same time they were doing that, their contemporaries, their buddies they grew up with, stayed in the civilian world and they started their own businesses. They grew their business while their buddies were in the trenches serving our country. Those servicemembers didn’t have the opportunity to start a business and grow a business. They came home, and it just wasn’t fair for them to have to start at square one. That’s not fair for what they had given up, for what they had sacrificed.”