Originally published: 2026-09-30T18:30:00+00:00. Historical source article: benefits, rules, amounts and deadlines may have changed. Check the official source for current information.
Vetpreneurs encouraged to show up, connect and own the opportunity
The 2026 National Veterans Small Business Engagement conference takes place Dec. 8–9, 2026, at the Huntington Convention Center of Cleveland in Cleveland, Ohio. Registration is now open for Veteran entrepreneurs and other small business owners. The annual conference is a great opportunity to see more of the federal marketplace up close, learn from the people inside it and decide what the next step should be for your business.
Where to begin?
You can have the skill. You can have the idea. You can have the team, the determination and a business you believe in, and still look at the federal marketplace like a complex maze and wonder where to begin.
For many Veterans, the feeling is familiar. You know how to learn a new environment, adapt quickly and keep moving forward when the path isn’t obvious. Entrepreneurship can demand those same instincts, but federal contracting adds additional layers: new language, unfamiliar organizations, long processes and a marketplace that can be difficult to see from the outside.
But the opportunity itself isn’t abstract.
In fiscal year 2025, small businesses received more than $179 billion in federal prime contracts, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. Service-disabled Veteran-owned small businesses received $32.5 billion of that total. At the Department of Veterans Affairs alone, VA reports that $10.1 billion, about 21.7 percent of its prime contract dollars, went to service-disabled Veteran-owned small businesses, with more than 2,200 SDVOSB firms receiving awards.
Those numbers alone don’t promise an outcome for any one business, but they do show something important: this is a real marketplace, and Veteran-owned businesses are already part of it.
So take a moment and imagine the next step.
It’s the morning of Dec. 8 in Cleveland. Your badge is on. The agenda is open. Conversations are already starting around you. There are sessions you could attend, people you could meet and more information than you could possibly absorb in two days.
Where do you go first? Who do you need to understand? And what do you want to know when you leave that you do not know today?
That is where the 2026 National Veterans Small Business Engagement begins to make sense.
Show up
You need to arrive with a reason for being there.
NVSBE brings Veteran-owned and other small businesses together with federal representatives, acquisition professionals, industry partners and business-resource organizations. For someone who has never attended a federal small business event, that can sound almost too broad to be useful and even downright intimidating.
The value becomes clearer when you picture it as a series of choices. One conversation. One session. One question at a time.
Abby Armijo of ADCO Hearing knows that experience from multiple NVSBE events. She has participated both as a sponsor and as an attendee, and one of the most practical lessons she carries forward is simple: start planning before you arrive.
“Study the agenda early. Smaller meetings can fill quickly. Decide which conversations matter most to your goals instead of trying to be everywhere at once,” she advised.
That doesn’t require a Veteran entrepreneur to already be an expert in federal contracting. It requires a starting point. What does your business do well? What problem can it help solve? What part of the federal marketplace do you want to understand better?
“I personally found more value in the Veterans Integrated Service Network and Network Contracting Office meetings than in the roundtables, but that has varied by year with the type of information that officials were sharing,” Armijo added.
Armijo’s experience also shows why there is no single ‘right’ NVSBE schedule. The lesson isn’t that one room is better than another. It’s that showing up is most useful when you know what you’re looking for.
Connect
Have a plan to turn a crowded room into meaningful conversations.
Now picture it’s the middle of the day. The hallways are busier. A session has just ended. Someone from an agency you’ve been researching is a few feet away. At another table is a business owner who has already spent years navigating the market you’re trying to enter.
Painting this picture and highlighting this part of the event, which showcases two different opportunities and paths, is difficult to capture in a single flyer.
The opportunity isn’t simply access to a room full of people. It’s the chance to make the federal marketplace feel less distant, to hear how people describe their mission, understand what matters to them, ask better questions and learn where your business may or may not fit.
For a Veteran who is new to this space, that can be just as valuable as walking away with a list of contacts. You begin to put faces to organizations. Acronyms start to have meaningful context. A huge marketplace becomes a series of people, missions and problems you can actually understand.
The connection works in more than one direction. The person who changes the way you think about your business may not be a program manager. It could be another small business owner, an industry partner or someone who points you toward a resource you didn’t know existed.
Armijo’s approach reinforces that idea: prioritize the settings that are most useful for what you’re trying to learn. The goal isn’t to collect the most handshakes or sit through the most sessions. It’s to leave each worthwhile conversation understanding something you didn’t understand before.
Own the opportunity
What you do after Cleveland is just as important as being there.
By the end of two days, your notebook could be full. You may have names to remember, questions to research and ideas you didn’t have when you arrived.
That’s where the final part of the NVSBE theme matters.
Owning the opportunity doesn’t mean expecting a contract because you attended an event. NVSBE cannot guarantee an award, a meeting, a partnership or a particular business result.
It means deciding what you’re going to do with what you learned.
Maybe you discovered that your capability needs to be explained differently. Maybe you found an organization that deserves more research. Maybe a conversation showed you that the market you were pursuing isn’t actually the best fit, or it revealed a path you hadn’t considered.
The next step could be as simple as following up with someone who invited the conversation to continue, revising how you describe your business or sitting down with your team and asking, ‘What did we learn, and what changes because of it?’
Armijo plans to return for NVSBE 2026, this time attending independently. That doesn’t make her experience a promise of what another company will gain. It does make it a useful reminder that the value of an event can change as a business changes and that experienced attendees still come back with new questions to answer.
The first step doesn’t have to be the whole map
For a Veteran looking at federal contracting for the first time, the scale can be intimidating. Billions of dollars in contracts, thousands of businesses and an acquisition system with its own language can make it seem like you need to understand everything before you begin.
You don’t. You just need a place to start.
Walk in with a question. Leave with a clearer direction.
Show up. Connect. Own the opportunity.
If you’re ready to take that next step, register for the 2026 National Veterans Small Business Engagement online at https://portal.vetbiz.va.gov/nvsbe/2026/.
Source: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Its Veterans is an independent publication and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. government.
