Federal contracting for small businesses: how to register on SAM.gov, qualify for set-asides, and get certified through SBA — explained by two Business Opportunity Specialists from the SBA Houston District Office.

The federal government awarded $179 billion in prime contracts to small businesses in FY 2025 — nearly 28% of all federal spending. In this episode of the SCORE Houston Podcast's SBA Series, host PV Bala sits down with Ida Benson and Jesus Gomez to turn that opportunity into a practical action plan.

What you'll learn:

— What products and services federal agencies buy from small businesses

— Business readiness: cash flow requirements, market research, and SAM.gov registration

— Set-aside contracts and the 23% small business spending goal

— SBA certifications: HUBZone, Women-Owned (WOSB), Veteran-Owned (VOSB/SDVOSB), and Small Disadvantaged Business (8a)

— How to get your UEI number, complete your SAM registration, and identify NAICS codes

— Building past performance from zero — including subcontracting as an entry strategy

— How Apex Accelerators provide free registration, market research, and proposal support

— Where to research contract opportunities: SAM.gov, USAspending.gov, and Acquisition.gov

0:00 – Intro & Welcome to SCORE Houston SBA Series 0:00

0:51 – Meet the Guests: Ida Benson & Jesus Gomez 0:51

2:45 – The Opportunity: $179B in Federal Contracts 2:45

4:08 – Business Readiness Checklist & Cash Flow 4:08

5:51 – Common Reasons Small Businesses Fail 5:51

8:22 – What Are Set-Aside Contracts? 8:22

13:51 – Local vs National Bidding Advantage 13:51

15:01 – Set-Aside Categories: WOSB, VOSB, HUBZone & More 15:01

17:18 – SAM.gov Registration Explained 17:18

20:14 – NAICS Codes: What They Are & Why They Matter 20:14

23:02 – Finding Opportunities & SAM Notifications 23:02

23:40 – Certifications: HUBZone, WOSB, VOSB Benefits 23:40

26:16 – Building Past Performance From Zero 26:16

29:11 – What Is Apex Accelerators? (Free Help) 29:11

32:38 – Capability Statements Explained 32:38

34:04 – Recap: Key Resources & Advice 34:04

38:29 – Action Plan: How to Get Started Today 38:29

40:29 – Closing & Where to Get Free SCORE Mentoring 40:29

Guests:

Ida Benson — Business Opportunity Specialist, SBA Houston District Office

Jesus Gomez — Business Opportunity Specialist, SBA Houston District Office

Host: PV Bala — Certified SCORE Mentor

Free small business mentoring: www.score.org/houston

🔗 SCORE Houston Podcast —

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwYwZdflYjHJeI8oTA_fRJw

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/score-houstons-podcast/id1845697492

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3DTCZlNpp4FWgp1xdgrhQb

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Shorts: https://www.youtube.com/@SCOREHouston/shorts

Let us know what you think of this episode. What subjects you would like us to cover in next episodes.

Give your comments at https://scorehoustonpodcast.blogspot.com or write to pv.bala@scorevolunteer.org. Let us know what you like of this episode and suggest subjects on which you wish to know more.

How Estée Lauder built a global beauty business with zero marketing budget, no business degree, no formal advertising — and what small business owners can learn from her playbook today. Starting from a backyard stable in Queens, New York, she grew a $150 bath oil into a product line generating $150 million a year.

Who was Estée Lauder? Born Josephine Esther Mentzer in 1908, she built The Estée Lauder Companies from a kitchen-formula skincare business into one of the world's largest prestige beauty empires — a publicly traded company with revenues exceeding $10 billion. She is widely regarded as one of the greatest self-made entrepreneurs of the 20th century.

This episode covers her sales psychology, the "gift with purchase" tactic that permanently changed retail, her word-of-mouth networking strategy that scaled a local brand nationally, the London expansion that proved her international instincts, and the Youth Dew reframe that turned a bath oil into a $150M product line.

Part of the Lessons from the Greats series on the SCORE Houston Podcast — practical business lessons drawn from iconic founders, for small business owners building today.

Free business mentoring from SCORE Houston: www.score.org/houston

Subscribe for weekly episodes: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwYwZdflYjHJeI8oTA_fRJw

Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro: Cohesion's Lessons from the Greats 00:42 – The stable where it all started 03:07 – Why passion is the foundation of every business 07:38 – The Florence Morris salon: the power of demonstration 08:47 – Inventing the "gift with purchase" 12:19 – Scaling loyalty into a national brand 15:38 – The London expansion masterclass 16:54 – Youth Dew: reframing perfume into a $150M product 18:42 – Trusting your "louder inner voice" 21:55 – Final thoughts: the future of human connection in business

Let us know what you think of this episode. What subjects you would like us to cover in next episodes.

Give your comments at https://scorehoustonpodcast.blogspot.com or write to pv.bala@scorevolunteer.org. Let us know what you like of this episode and suggest subjects on which you wish to know more.

Veteran entrepreneur Jason Burleson bought an abandoned lake in rural Texas that no bank would touch and no investor would fund. Today, Mammoth Lake Dive Academy in Clute, Texas is the largest dedicated scuba park in the United States.

He launched during COVID with no outside capital. Hurricane Beryl destroyed his home and much of what he'd built. He kept going — bootstrapped, debt-free, and now certifying thousands of divers annually including police, firefighters, and military veterans.

In this episode of Small Business Success Stories from SCORE Houston, Dr. Jeffrey Ricken sits down with Jason Burleson — 2026 SBA Houston District Rural Small Business Owner of the Year — to walk through the decisions, setbacks, and mentorship that turned a part-time dive instructor into the founder of a Gulf Coast institution.

Topics covered:

- Buying the lake: what due diligence looked like when there was no playbook

- Launching a business during COVID with zero outside funding

- Rebuilding after Hurricane Beryl — the mindset shift that made it possible

- SBA loan strategy, bootstrapping, and reaching debt-free status

- Building a student pipeline from open-water certification to NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Lab

- What the U.S. Air Force taught him about running a small business

- AI tools, mentorship, and the gaps his formal education left behind

If you run a small business, are considering a career pivot, or want to understand how veteran-owned businesses scale without traditional funding — this episode delivers a clear, practical picture of how it's done.

Chapters

0:00 – Welcome

0:45 – The Lake Nobody Wanted

3:00 – Launching During COVID

6:30 – Building Partnerships That Matter

10:00 – From Air Force to the Ocean Floor

14:00 – Hurricane Beryl: Losing Everything, Starting Over

19:00 – Bootstrapping, SBA, and the Road to Debt-Free

22:00 – Mentorship, AI Tools & What School Doesn't Teach You

26:00 – What the Military Taught Him About Business

28:00 – Final Words

Let us know what you think of this episode. What subjects you would like us to cover in next episodes.

Give your comments at https://scorehoustonpodcast.blogspot.com or write to pv.bala@scorevolunteer.org. Let us know what you like of this episode and suggest subjects on which you wish to know more.

Charlie Munger's 14 mental models, applied specifically to small business owners navigating real-world entrepreneurial chaos. Most businesses don't fail from bad products or lack of funding — they fail because founders are running the wrong cognitive operating system.

In this episode of the SCORE Houston Podcast's Lessons from the Greats series, we unpack Munger's mental model framework — built around what he called a "cognitive lattice” and translate each model into concrete, actionable strategy for entrepreneurs in Houston and across the USA.

The models covered include:

The Foundation Layer — Your deepest passion reshapes your perception through the reticular activating system. Taking a simple idea seriously beats adding complexity. Moving too fast accrues "friction debt" that costs exponentially more time and capital downstream.

The Human Element — Truth operates on a logarithmic scale: moving from 90% to 99% honesty generates a disproportionate trust advantage. Surrounding yourself with high-caliber people, and aligning incentives to your actual values, determines whether your culture scales or collapses.

The Strategy Layer — Shameless cloning caps downside risk by letting large competitors pay the "pioneer tax" before you enter. Segment and dominate a hyper-narrow niche for outsized pricing power. Ruthlessly value your own time and delegate everything below your strategic hourly rate.

The Customer Core — Business exists to remove friction from a customer's life; revenue is the output, not the goal. Let customers redesign your business through relentless listening. Extreme quality compounds into self-sustaining word-of-mouth.

The Lollapalooza Effect — When multiple mental models align simultaneously, business growth becomes nonlinear. This is the difference between a business that adds incrementally and one that multiplies exponentially.

Subscribe & Listen:

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwYwZdflYjHJeI8oTA_fRJw
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/score-houstons-podcast/id1845697492
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3DTCZlNpp4FWgp1xdgrhQb
• Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b4ac4d74-acb2-43cc-b5f0-433ad259fccb/score-houstons-podcast

00:00 Introduction: The Wrong Cognitive Operating System

02:04 Your Deepest Desire Is Your Destiny

03:35 Take a Simple Idea Seriously & Fast Is Slow

05:18 Truth and Trust Are Not Binary

06:44 Surround Yourself with Better People & Incentives

08:16 Be a Shameless Cloner

09:37 Segment and Dominate Your Niche

10:48 Value Your Own Time Ruthlessly

11:48 The Purpose of Business Is to Serve

12:54 Your Customers Will Tell You the Business

14:28 The Lollapalooza Effect & Cascading Models

17:19 Applying the Models: Take Action

Photo by Nick - Charlie Munger, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75743370

Let us know what you think of this episode. What subjects you would like us to cover in next episodes.

Give your comments at https://scorehoustonpodcast.blogspot.com or write to pv.bala@scorevolunteer.org. Let us know what you like of this episode and suggest subjects on which you wish to know more.

Aging in place is becoming a healthcare strategy, not a home improvement project. Cameron Carter, CEO and Co-Founder of Rosarium Health, explains why health plans and hospitals are now paying to modify homes, and how that fits into value-based care.

Cameron spent nearly a decade inside major healthcare organizations — including DaVita and Bright Health — before founding Rosarium Health, a company that partners with health plans and hospitals to fund in-home assessments and modifications so older adults and people with disabilities can safely age in place. Rosarium Health is now in-network for over one million Medicaid lives across 30+ states.

In this episode of the SCORE Houston Podcast — Small Business Success Stories — host PV Bala covers:

✅ What value-based care means and how it differs from fee-for-service healthcare

✅ Why the home is a critical, overlooked social determinant of health

✅ How Cameron pivoted from a direct-to-consumer model to health plan partnerships

✅ Lessons on raising venture capital for a healthcare startup

✅ How SCORE mentorship — including guidance from mentor Art O'Connor — shaped his path as a founder

✅ Scaling a mission-driven business to serve underserved communities

• 0:00 — Intro to SCORE Houston
• 1:02 — Guest introduction: Cameron Carter
• 2:15 — What is value-based care?
• 3:18 — Origin story: home modifications and healthcare
• 5:19 — Spotting the business opportunity
• 7:09 — Pivoting from direct-to-consumer to B2B
• 13:46 — Market maturity and industry landscape
• 25:57 — Vision for Rosarium's next five years
• 27:57 — Closing / subscribe reminder
• 28:15 — Outro and contact info

🔗 Learn more about Rosarium Health: https://www.rosariumhealth.com/

🔗 Connect with Cameron Carter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameron-carter-62117175/

🔗 Request free SCORE Houston mentoring: https://www.score.org/houston

Subscribe: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwYwZdflYjHJeI8oTA_fRJw

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3DTCZlN...
Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b4a.

Shorts: https://www.youtube.com/@SCOREHouston/shorts

Let us know what you think of this episode. What subjects you would like us to cover in next episodes.

Give your comments at https://scorehoustonpodcast.blogspot.com or write to pv.bala@scorevolunteer.org. Let us know what you like of this episode and suggest subjects on which you wish to know more.

Dr. Beata Lerman spent nearly 20 years as a cancer research scientist with patents in cancer immunotherapy. Then a personal cancer diagnosis led her to build a sugar-free chocolate company safe for diabetics.

On this episode of the SCORE Houston Podcast, host PV Bala talks with Dr. Lerman about leaving biomedical research for small-business manufacturing, the science behind sugar-free chocolate, and how SCORE mentors Jim Davis and Jim Nordhaus helped her grow from a 200-square-foot kitchen into a full manufacturing facility and retail café. Her company, Sinless Treats (now rebranding as D'Ora Fine Chocolate), is a Houston-based maker of sugar-free, chemical-free chocolate designed to support blood sugar management and reduce inflammation, now expanding into ingredient supply for other consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands.

What we cover:

• Leaving cancer immunotherapy research to found a food manufacturing company
• The science of sugar, insulin resistance, and metabolic health
• Developing the product and scaling a chocolate manufacturing operation
• Startup capital, the breakeven timeline, and self-funded growth
• Marketing lessons for small-business owners: SEO, GEO, and avoiding costly agency mistakes
• How SCORE Houston mentorship supported her path to SBA's Houston District Small Business Manufacturer of the Year

0:00 Intro 1:01 Guest introduction 2:13 Beata's science background 3:40 Leaving research to start Sinless Treats 5:30 The sugar debate 7:41 Cancer diagnosis & the science of sugar 9:33 Learning to make healthy chocolate 11:01 Product testing & feedback 13:54 Early days in a tiny kitchen 17:07 Scaling up & compliance 19:05 Startup costs & financing 20:26 Breaking even & revenue growth 23:18 Quality control 23:38 Marketing lessons 27:19 Retail cafe launch 28:30 Vision & rebrand to D'Ora 30:08 Closing thoughts 30:27 Outro

🔗 D'Ora Fine Chocolate: https://sinlesstreatschocolate.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoo-3Yz_BoAs-jE5PDFLiFSlERzLQB0dshlAAPeb7p7cOnaWKI6k

🔗 Free SCORE Houston mentoring: www.score.org/houston

🔗 Subscribe FREE for more Small Business Success Stories: [: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwYwZdflYjHJeI8oTA_fRJw]

🔗 Listen on your favorite podcast platform:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3DTCZlN...
Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/b4a.

Let us know what you think of this episode. What subjects you would like us to cover in next episodes.

Give your comments at https://scorehoustonpodcast.blogspot.com or write to pv.bala@scorevolunteer.org. Let us know what you like of this episode and suggest subjects on which you wish to know more.

SCORE Houston Podcast: Subscribe/ Follow FREE:

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Houston small business success stories don't get more inspiring than this. In this episode of SCORE Houston Podcast, host Dr. Jeffrey Ricken sits down with the founders of Garden Girls — Nicole Shah, Jen McDonald, and Jill Oliver — three Houston entrepreneurs who transformed a shared passion for gardening into a thriving boutique kitchen garden design company.

Coming from established corporate careers in law, pharmaceutical sales, and speech pathology, these women share how they made the leap from stable professions to small business ownership after 40, the startup challenges they navigated, and how free SCORE Houston mentorship helped them accelerate their growth.

Discover how SCORE mentors Art O'Connor and Greg Helma guided Garden Girls through critical business decisions — from hiring the right accountant and photographer to shaping their expansion strategy. This conversation delivers practical small business insights on startup funding, marketing on a limited budget, building a team, and balancing entrepreneurship with family life.

Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur, a small business owner navigating growth, or considering a mid-career pivot, this episode offers actionable guidance on mentorship, partnership dynamics, and building a small Houston business from the ground up.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Passion can become a profitable small business with the right strategy
• Free SCORE mentorship accelerates business growth and decision-making
• Identify weaknesses early and hire experts (accountant, photographer, specialists)
• Word-of-mouth and community networking can replace expensive advertising
• It is never too late to start a business — these founders launched in their 40s
• Partnership synergy — combining legal, creative, and operational skill sets — strengthens a business

TIMESTAMPS 00:00 — Introduction & Welcome 00:40 — Meet the Garden Girls: Nicole, Jen & Jill 01:39 — Career Pivots from Law, Sales & Speech Pathology to Gardening 02:47 — Founding Garden Girls in 2022 05:14 — Building a Turnkey Garden Design Business 09:19 — Marketing, Networking & Word-of-Mouth Growth 11:22 — Overcoming Startup Challenges: Bookkeeping & Hiring 13:20 — Working with SCORE Mentors Art O'Connor & Greg Helma 15:08 — How Mentorship Exceeded Expectations 17:24 — Jill Oliver on Networking & Community Building 19:29 — Gardening Through Houston's Climate Challenges 22:01 — Balancing Business Ownership & Family Life 23:14 — Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs 23:49 — Closing Thoughts & Where to Find Garden Girls 24:15 — SCORE Houston Contact Info & Free Mentoring

Let us know what you think of this episode. What subjects you would like us to cover in next episodes.

Give your comments at https://scorehoustonpodcast.blogspot.com or write to pv.bala@scorevolunteer.org. Let us know what you like of this episode and suggest subjects on which you wish to know more.