All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.
This is Veterans Radio.
Welcome to Veterans Radio.
I am Jim Fossone.
I'm the officer of the deck today.
We've got some great programs for you.
I think you'll find very interesting.
We always want to remind you you can find more about Veterans Radio at its Facebook site
or at the web.
VeteransRadio.org is our new URL, VeteransRadio.org.
Where we're on the web 24-7, you can find a lot of our podcasts there as well.
We post new ones every Tuesday, so you can get a new story, a new interview, something
you didn't know before by going to VeteransRadio.org.
And before we get started, we want to thank our sponsors.
First up, we want to thank National Veteran Business Development Council, NVBDC.org.
It was established to certify both service disabled and veteran owned businesses.
You'll find out how they can help your business by going to NVBDC.org.
We want to thank Legal Help for Veterans.
Legal Help for Veterans fights for veterans disability rights all across the nation.
You can reach them at 800-693-4800 or on the web at LegalHelpForVeterans.com.
Hi, I'm Jim Fosso and welcome.
This is VeteransRadio's spotlight on the National Veteran Business Development Council, better
known as NVBDC.org.
VeteransRadio. America has a partnership with NVBDC where we talk and put some spotlight
on the value of being a certified veteran owned business.
NVBDC is the nation's leading third party authority for certification of veteran owned
businesses of all sizes.
It's a 501C3 nonprofit established in 2013.
It addresses the growing need to identify and certify both service disabled and veteran
owned businesses in the government and commercial marketplace.
It administers a rigorous certification process designed to withstand the scrutiny of governmental
and corporate entities seeking to utilize certified companies.
We want to welcome to VeteransRadio Todd McCracken.
He is the president and CEO of the National Small Business Association.
He directs all their advocacy and program orientated operations.
He's been there for, as he just told me about forever.
Todd, welcome to VeteransRadio.
Thank you, Jim.
It's great to be here.
Well, we're going to talk about National Small Business Association and some of its veterans'
activities, its network.
But before we start there, you were recently at an NVBDC program where you got to speak
last month.
Tell us a little bit about why you think it's important for veteran owned businesses to
get certified.
Well, we're lucky enough that we're at a period of time where big corporations really see
it as important to engage more deeply with, well, small businesses generally, but especially
with veteran owned small companies.
And they're reaching out in a way they hadn't for a long time.
And NVBDC really is the place to go to get certified and to become one of those businesses
that can do business with those much larger companies.
And they do just a great job.
As you said, they have not been around that long, a little over a decade now.
But they've really developed a really strong network, great relationships with some of
the biggest companies in the country, and really run the only viable and really rigorous
certification program for veterans.
And it's something that opens all kinds of doors for the veterans who've gotten certified
through them.
And I just can't say enough good stuff about their work.
Well, certainly some of your members at the National Small Business Association are probably
certified by NVBDC.
You got the opportunity to attend one of the kind of premier functions of NVBDC.
After you get certified, they don't leave you alone.
They help you in the business world.
And as you know, as a national association, that networking is all important.
Tell us what you observed and your impressions out of the NVBDC networking event held in
Detroit in August of 2024.
Yeah, I was just there last month.
It was a great event.
I was able to speak to the folks that were going on in Washington, DC that affect small
companies and about our veterans network.
But they were also able to hear from a number of big companies on how they do procurement,
how they work with small businesses, how they get involved with them from sort of an overview
perspective.
But then all the veterans that were there were then able to sort of sit down and at
the end of the network, not just for each other, but with representatives from all those
companies and figure out what they're looking for, how to get contracts, how to develop their
businesses.
And boy, the range of veteran businesses that were there was really impressive.
A lot of folks from all kinds of sectors of the economy doing all kinds of interesting
things, super diverse crowd.
And I think they got a lot out of networking with each other as well and learning from
each other about what has worked, what hasn't worked, how they've been able to advance their
businesses.
And all of course, sharing this veteran service background that I think really brings them
together as well in this sort of atmosphere of trust and camaraderie.
It's really great of that.
Well, we certainly want to encourage people, business owners out there who are veteran-owned,
to look into NVBDC.org, see if certification might be right for them.
And maybe it'll help boost their business.
It's only a door opener.
You still have to be able to perform, be price sensitive.
And we're talking to Todd McCracken, who is the president and CEO of the National Small
Business Association.
But for those who might not be familiar with NSBA, tell us a little bit about it.
Well, we are the oldest national small business organization in the country.
We were founded actually in Akron, Ohio by a printer, DeWitt McKinley-Emery.
There was no such organization in existence in the country back during the Great Depression
in the 30s when he founded it.
That was a time, of course, when small companies were facing a great deal of economic stress,
but also a somewhat more activist government.
So we were saying, of course, with the New Deal and all that, there were new taxes that
were coming on board to pay for some of those programs, new labor regulations and other
regulations that were coming to the fore for the first time.
And a lot of small companies were struggling to figure out how to deal with these new things
at the same time of what was happening in the economy.
So he founded our organization.
We've been here ever since.
And that's basically what we do.
We advocate for small companies at the federal level.
We try to make sure that regulators, the administration, and Congress understand what's happening in
the small business world, what their needs are, and what they can do to help support
the growth and survival of small companies and what they should avoid doing in that space.
So we do that in all kinds of different ways through direct advocacy from our staff here
in Washington, but also the engagement of small businesses all across the country.
And so we see that as increasingly important for us.
And interestingly, that's one of the things that led us to starting our veterans network
in the first place.
We really noticed just almost anecdotally a lot of the good work of our members who
happened to be veterans.
We noticed a trend that veteran-owned businesses often were much more engaged, much more,
for lack of a better word, phrase, mission-driven.
And we're the kind of companies that would really engage with us and advocate for the
larger small business community.
And then we also saw some of the obstacles those businesses face, and we thought we should
really start a veterans network both to cultivate that membership, but also to provide information
and services for them.
And so we started it a couple of years ago.
That's about when we also started our strategy partnership with NVBDC.
And it's really grown.
We've provided a lot of speaker series and webinars and learning content for those veterans,
small businesses.
And the key is they don't have to be a member of NSBA to be a part of that.
Anyone can join.
Of course, we would love for them to join and be a member, but it's not a requirement.
So we have to get them to join our website and sign up.
Let's start with some more of the basics, which is what does NSBA define as a small business?
And we're talking to Todd McCracken, who's been with the organization since 1988.
He's been its president, I believe, since 1997.
He's a native of New Mexico, a graduate of the University in San Antonio, Texas.
So let's come back to the basics.
What is a small business?
Well, for membership purposes, we define a small business as a company that has fewer
than 500 employees.
Just to keep things simple.
But that said, when people ask me what's a small business, I say only somewhat jokingly,
it depends on why you ask because it really does.
So what we try to work on are those issues and topics that are unique to small business
or something that affects a company differently because of their size.
And that's going to be different depending on the issue.
So for instance, if we're dealing with a federal regulation that imposes a new workplace requirement,
for instance, something that the HR department has to deal with and figure out, it matters
if you have an HR department.
For very small companies, probably those with fewer than 15 or 20 employees, all those
issues are being dealt with directly by the business owner who may or may not have an
HR background and has to learn all of their stuff themselves.
When you get beyond 20 or so, typically a company does have a dedicated HR function,
maybe a person, maybe a team of people who deal with these issues.
And so for those issues, we kind of look at, well, how does it affect companies with fewer
than 15 or 20 employees?
For other issues, the federal government actually defines cutoff points, like for the family
and medical leave act, cutoff is 50 employees.
And so companies above that size have to deal with that.
So we have to help them with that.
So 50 is the working definition of the small business for businesses of that law.
So it really does depend, I guess, as Troy said, what we're working on.
For federal procurement issues, for instance, the SBA sets size standards that vary by industry
sector.
So they update their size standards regularly, but it depends on which part of the economy
that you're in, what defines a small business.
And this is really a good example, Todd, of why business owners need to be a part of an
association, part of a group like NSBA that can give them information, point them in a
direction, and why these don't shy away from these national organizations.
I think it's easy to sit there and have 20 employees and say, I'm just too small for
these guys.
I'm just about NVBDC all the time and say, we certify those guys too and they get great
opportunities.
And I suspect the same's with you.
Your profile member is not a 500 employee company.
It is not.
That's our cutoff, but our average company has 16 employees.
And we have thousands of companies that have zero employees or self-employed individual
business owners.
So it runs the gamut of everything.
Yeah, that's why it's important to get that idea out to people because I think you hear
national organization, been around since the 30s.
Geez, that's just more than I'm going to be able to swallow.
And it's really not the case.
You're really set up to help those kind of companies.
And let me bring it back to the Veterans Network.
I kind of cut you off in the middle of that because I wanted to set the groundwork here
about the size of the companies that you help.
This Veterans Network is really interesting because you've said it's not just for our
members, although we want you to be a member.
But we see this as a larger mission of helping veteran business owners.
So tell us about how the Veterans Network works.
Well, basically, we have a lot of what I'll call e-information on our website for companies
and a sort of library of past webinars we've had.
It really is, we have a series of events that are online so that virtually you don't have
to go to a meeting or fly someplace.
We have sort of having a whole webinar series of various topics that occur every couple
of months.
But also, we maintain a library of all of the past events on our website that you can
go and look at and download.
And if you sign up for an individual program, we email you all of the collateral information
from that event and also the recording of the event itself directly.
So you have that and you can go back to it.
You can contact some of the speakers if that's helpful to you to talk with them directly.
We try to make it as interactive as possible.
And we do encourage people to actually participate live because we try to make sure there's a
significant share of your webinar where people can engage directly and ask their questions,
get responses, and even talk to each other.
So I think we've gotten really good reviews for it and we continue to reach out to folks
to find out what they want to see, what they want to hear more about.
But it really is a learning program primarily.
Well, it sounds like a great opportunity for somebody also to sort of, hey, I'm not sure
what I'll get out of this if it's worth my time and money.
To dip a toe in, see what's going on in a live program, go watch some historical ones
that are on the speaker series and available to be watched, and then realize, hey, yeah,
this might really work for me.
So when did the Veterans Network start again?
We've only started it in the last 18 months.
It's a relatively new thing for us.
And another thing I'll mention before I forget is we also have started a mentor mentee part
of it.
So we're actually right now actively recruiting other sort of more established veteran business
owners to be mentors in the program so that we can roll out a more robust program for
folks.
So if there's anyone out there that would be interested in doing that, you can sign
up to your mentor on our website.
We'd love your help.
That's excellent.
This is the kind of information we want to get out to our veteran radio listeners, and
they can pass along to their veterans who may be running a business, starting a business,
thinking about a business.
We're talking to Todd McCracken, who is the president and CEO of NSBA.
Todd, I don't think we've given it out.
What is the website and how do people go find this information and maybe sign up?
Our website is nsba.biz, so B-I-Z.
And you can get to the Veterans Network page from there by clicking through.
But if you want to go directly there, it's www.nsba.biz backslash Veterans Network.
Well, this is a great effort.
We're going to talk to you in a few more months or years to find out how well it's going,
but we want to direct our veteran radio listeners to nsba.biz and find out more about the organization
and more about the Veterans Network.
Todd, we appreciate the time that you've given to Veterans Radio Today.
We appreciate having me.
I really enjoyed talking to you and I hope we can do this again.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio Today.
I am Jim Fossone.
It's been a pleasure to be your host.
I'm a Veterans Disability Lawyer at Legal Help for Veterans and you can reach us at
800-6934800 or LegalHelpforVeterans.com on the web.
You can follow Veterans Radio on Facebook and listen to its podcasts and internet radio
shows by visiting us at veteransradio.org.
That's veteransradio.org.
And until next time, you are dismissed.
If you have a VA claim denied by the Board of Veterans Appeals, contact Legal Help for
Veterans at 1-800-6934800.
They're experts in handling cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims.
Their number again, 1-800-6934800.
We again want to thank our national sponsors, the National Veterans Business Development
Council, NVBDC.org, VA Ann Arbor Health Care System, the Vietnam Veterans of America,
the America Charles S. Kettles Chapter, Ann Arbor, Michigan, VFW Graff O'Hara Post 423
in Ann Arbor, and the American Legion Press Corn Post 46 also in Ann Arbor.
We appreciate all your support.
You can go to veteransradio.net, click on the sponsor level and continue to support
keeping Veterans Radio on the air.
And until next time, you are dismissed.