The Santa Clarita Valley Chamber of Commerce’s 2026 Business Expo squeezed more than 100 local business’ booths into a high-energy corner of the Valencia Town Center Thursday, giving Santa Clarita businesses face-to-face time unique to the event.
Ivan Volschenk, president/CEO of the SCV Chamber, said the expo is seeing repeat showings from businesses going several years back — the chamber revised the Business Expo about six years ago, Volschenk said — and deals that may never have happened otherwise.
“We’ve had some businesses telling us that they basically met a business that they made a contract with that they don’t need to do any business ever again,” Volschenk said. “You just don’t know who you’re going to meet.”
But the expo is also strategically placed for laypeople filtering through the mall on a Thursday evening to meet the faces of business they may never have heard of. For more niche service needs, that meeting could be crucial, he said.
“I think for the layperson as well, there’s not that much awareness in a lot of things for our businesses,” Volschenk said. “If any one of the community wants to find an attorney … (there’s) not really a central place for them to go, other than the chamber directory … so it’s great to be able to bring that to the businesses and for the community to see that.”
And while expo guests were free to meander at will, the chamber had specifically designed a raffle game to incentivize visitors to meet with multiple businesses throughout the “zones” designating the 103 participating booths.
Visitors collected marks on a stamp card to become eligible for the grand prize: the “ultimate SCV experience,” Volschenk said, including (but not limited to) a hotel stay, movie tickets and Six Flags Magic Mountain tickets.
Many of the businesses waiting to meet visitors Thursday — whatever their motivations — were offering services both sorely needed and not particularly well-known.
That included Serving Our Seniors, an organization currently working on its nonprofit status that coordinates the families of seniors with vetted specialists in a laundry list of fields, including health care support, housing transitions, psychotherapy and financial planning.
Scott Hoolahan, this year’s Man of the Year and Serving Our Seniors’ president, said the organization’s mission is to address a local knowledge vacuum among Santa Clarita seniors when it comes to essential services. As a sales manager at Loan Depot, Hoolahan’s specialty is helping seniors use the equity in their home for a reverse mortgage, he said.
“That’s the passion that this group has, is making certain that the seniors in this community get access to the information and the services that are tailored for them,” Hoolahan said. “The inspiration comes from how many seniors come to one or more of us and say, ‘I wish I would have known that. I wish I would have known that service was available.’”
Some businesses were using Thursday’s expo to inform visitors about services they might not know exist at all.
Bena Daniels, a clinical outreach specialist at Life Landscaping, said the organization’s third outpatient services office had just opened in Santa Clarita, after Kaiser Permanente and Optum Insurance asked the company to serve a “need for intensive outpatient (services) in this area,” she said.
Santa Clarita Behavior Health opened in August 2025, treating patients for mental health, substance use and eating disorder issues with an approach that takes a middle ground between more intense inpatient treatment and therapy. It’s an option not many people know exists, Daniels said.
“They know inpatient treatment, they know therapy, they don’t know that there’s kind of an intermediary space,” Daniels said. “Partial hospitalization is six-hours-a-day day treatment, and intensive outpatient is three-hours-a-day day treatment, and so people can focus a little bit more intensely than doing individual therapy, but don’t have to go and live somewhere and go into inpatient.”
Daniels said the office’s case management program even helps prospective patients with leave of absence paperwork, including Family and Medical Leave Act documents that legally protects their job in the meantime.
Daniels said being at the expo Thursday had given her the opportunity to get the word out — in just the place it’s particularly needed.
“I want to share as much information about it as I can, because a lot of people don’t know we’re out here,” Daniels said. “To me it was an opportunity for us to really tell people, ‘Hey, we’re here to help.’”
