Veterans: The Government Will Literally Pay You to Start a Business

mergers and acquisitions, these owners, they're nobody special. You know, I can do it. >> That's an army veteran who spent four years on mergers and acquisitions desk reading the financials of small government contractors while they were being bought and sold. That's how he found out there was nothing special about them. So, he stopped reading other people's deals. He used an SBA loan and his veteran status to buy a 20-person veteran-owned company that already held government contracts and he's been growing it ever since. There's an entire system built to let veterans do that and most have no idea any of this even exists. I'm not talking about one loan that you pay back with interest. I'm talking about a stack of programs which I'm going to walk you through all of them one by one. Last year, the Department of Veteran Affairs spent almost $67 billion on contracts and then across the whole government, contract set-asides just for veteran-owned businesses came to about $33 billion. If you served, this world's practically built with you in mind. Let me show exactly how it works and what's changed because a lot of advice online is now out of date. Here's the core thing to understand. The government set-aside portion of its contracts specifically for veteran-owned and service-disabled veteran-owned businesses. That means when you compete for that work, you're competing against other veteran-owned businesses, not the giant corporations, a much smaller field. And here's a number that just changed. The government's goal for how much it spends with service-disabled veteran-owned businesses used to be 3%. Congress raised it to 5% starting in fiscal year 2024. And then that first year alone, the government didn't just hit it, it went over, 5.14%, about $32.8 billion to service-disabled veteran-owned businesses. So, the demand isn't charity, it's a target the government is legally trying to hit and it needs more veteran-owned businesses in order to hit it. Now, to unlock that advantage, you must get certified as a veteran-owned business or a service-disabled veteran-owned business. And I want to be precise here because this changed recently and a lot of old information is still floating around. The certification used to be handled by the VA through something called CVE, and as of January 1st, 2023, it moved to the SBA. The program is now called VetCert. You apply through the SBA at veterans.certified.sba.gov. So, if you look this up and find old guys pointing to the old VA system, ignore them. You go through the SBA now. Get the one thing right and you save yourself months of confusion. One more distinction, if you're a service-disabled veteran, that certification let you compete for set-aside contracts across the entire government. If you're a veteran without a service-connected disability, the certification mainly helps you at the VA itself under program called Veterans First. Either way, get certified through the SBA. Now, the program stack. The advantage is the contracts, but there's a whole stack of programs that actually help you build the businesses that wins them. Let me go through them right now. Number one, Veteran Readiness and Employment. If you have a service-connected disability, look at Veteran Readiness and Employment, Chapter 31. It used to be called Vocational Rehab. It has a self-employment track built specifically for veterans who want to start their own businesses. Now, I want to be careful and accurate about this because what it provides, it helps developing your business plan, analysis of your business concept, training you on how to run a business, the marketing, the finance, and guiding to getting resources to launch. It's real hands-on support to get a business off the ground and exists for veterans with a disability. Now, I recently made a video about this that you can find in my YouTube channel here below, but we've got a lot of people saying that they've had trouble with their counselors and they haven't had much success in this program. However, in the video, it lists in there specific things to do if you're having problems getting assistance with this. I think a lot of times what we're doing is we're watching only one or two minutes of the video and then going out and trying it and then not actually having complete the entire video to understand what are some of the things that you do in case you get pushed back from some of the services that are supposed to be providing. Again, as a person who's been teaching government contract for a long time, I know that there are better quality counselors than others out there. And so, the goal is to go through the entire video, understand what are the first through five steps, and then what are some of the things to do in case you run into problems. Number two, Boots to Business. This is a free entrepreneurship course run by the SBA, part of the military transition program, two days introduction to starting a business. And if you're already out, there's a version called Boots to Business Reboot, that's open to veterans of any era in your community absolute for free. Number three, Veteran Business Outreach Centers. There are more than 30 of them across the country funded by the SBA. They give you one-on-one counseling, helping you with your business plan, mentorship, workshops. A real person sits down with you. Find one near you. >> Many times what we find out with the many resources that are out there, people get frustrated because one, there's a gazillion of them, and you don't really know how to navigate them. And two, when they finally do navigate to one, they're asking the wrong question. So, our part of our job is to make sure that when you go to a SCORE chapter or small business development center, that you're asking good solid questions so that you can get good feedback. >> Number four, the money side. The SBA runs an express loan program up to $500,000, and for veteran-owned businesses, that's an upfront guarantee fee on these loans of zero. That's a real benefit for this fiscal year. There's also the special disaster loan, the military reservist loan, and if you're a reservist called to active duty and it hurts your business, this is what these programs are designed for. I'll put the links to every one of these in the description so you don't have to write them down. And so, what you really have here, in what I want to hear, is that the skills you built in the military, the discipline, following a process, getting things done, operating under pressure, those are exactly the skills that this work rewards. Government contracting is about doing what you say on time by the standard. That's a language that you already speak. I find that a lot of veterans out here somehow think that they're disconnected from these programs and also from the process. But you already understand a lot of the things that we're trying to teach businesses because as a person who served, you understand rank, you understand file, you understand acronyms. There's a lot of this stuff that other civilian people don't know, you already know. You're not under qualified for this. In a lot of ways, you're over qualified. >> I was a lot younger than most of those individuals and had a lot less experience. I had 3 years experience in GovCon at that time. But I was not afraid to swing out of my weight class and >> So the question becomes, what is the government actually buying in what you do? All of that spending is public, but to be honest, it is spread across government websites that can be a pain to search. So I built this free tool that pulls all of that information into one place. You type in what your business does and it shows you which agencies are buying it and how much. It's free. The link's in the description. Go see what's out there for a veteran-owned business like yours. All right. So I'm over here in the free tool that we built and I just want to show you an example, right? Here I'm looking at I'm going to pull up all the opportunities listed under sam.gov. As you can see here, there's 9,000 opportunities, 4,000 due, but if you look at the top agencies that are putting out this opportunity, you'll see that Veteran Affairs literally has So they're number two behind the actual Department of Defense. Again, there's a lots of opportunities out there and if we were to look at set-asides, they put up like service-disabled veteran-owned businesses, there's over 374 out there, more than any other group that exists. So again, there's lots of opportunities out there for veterans. You just have to know where to look and how to go after them. You already [snorts] did the hard part. You served. Now there's a customer that spends tens of billions of dollars a year and specifically wants to work with people like you and a whole support system built to help you get there. The The the training, the mentorship, the money. Most veterans never find out any of this exists. You just did. Go see what they're buying. The free tool and the free starter guide are in the description below. I'm going to pull up a demonstration of how many actual opportunities are set aside right now for veterans that you could be eligible for. If you served, these programs exist because of that service. The only thing left is to use them. I put every program from this video into a free breakdown for veterans. What it pays, who qualifies, and where to start. Links in the description, and if you know a veteran who should hear this, send it to them. That's how these opportunities actually travel. 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