About Myself

I am currently an instructor in a veteran business boot camp that’s funded by the small business administration and I am also associated with Lockheed Martin. I am a service- disabled veteran-owned small business owner myself for 14 years. The whole reason why we are here is to understand how to do business with the government. In my 20 plus years of experience, I have noticed that it can be a complex puzzle if you do not know it but as soon as you understand the process, it’s quite simple. This is the reason why some people excel well, while some still struggle in the process.

If you would follow the methodologies that I am going to share then your chances of succeeding are much greater and I am drawing it from my experience of being a sales rep in a large company selling to the government for several years. I am teaching you techniques that most large companies apply and do well in the government. I will teach you how they do it and if you follow this blueprint then your chances for success are a lot greater.

Why would I want to do business with the Government?

Now the question is why would I want to do business with the government? The government spends trillions of dollars every year and I think nobody can argue this point as you see it all over the news. The government has small business quotas, which means they have to do business with the government. Different parts of the government have different quota numbers but it could be as much as 30 percent to 35 percent of the government budget that needs to be spent with small businesses. Now if you do your math, we are talking about trillions of dollars, so 30 to 35 percent is a lot of money.

Women, service-disabled, and minority-owned businesses

Government usually prefers doing business with women-owned, service-disabled veteran-owned, and minority-owned small businesses. In different parts of the government, these small business designations are given the ability to have a streamlined process to give you contracts. It means that if you are a disabled veteran on a small business or a woman on a small business depending on what part of the government you are marketing, you might not have to bid in certain cases. This will also mean that you will receive multiple quotas and they may just be able to give you a direct contract with no competition.

Does the Government buy what I sell?

Now the most important question arises, “does the government buy what I sell? The short answer to your questions is that the government buys pretty much everything.

I have sold a diverse variety of things to the government. As a matter of fact, I had someone call me one time this true story that the government bought five million dollars worth of toilet paper. You might have this question that why would the government buy five million dollars worth of toilet paper? It is due to the fact that the government manages a lot of buildings and these buildings do have people that have to go to the bathroom and the bathrooms have toilet paper.

Anything that we typically need as a regular contributing citizen of the country, it’s highly likely the government is also buying it. Now there are different parts of the government – there is the federal government then there is state and local government, so you can decide whether you want to focus on the federal government, the state government, or both. I do business with both, so there is nothing that says that you cannot.

Now you might have this question that the government spends a lot of money and they are probably buying what I am selling then how do I start and how do I do this right?

What parts of the Government buy what you sell?

So, the first is we want to identify what parts of the government buy what you sell, which makes perfect sense. You can perhaps start the process by reaching out to the government asking that they can consider you for the products that they have bought in the past. There is always a chance that they are likely to buy it again.

There are many different public resources out there – some are free and there are paid ones that take it to a whole another level. This makes your life a lot easier as it will save you a lot of time. In the beginning, I would highly recommend that you look at free resources and I will give links to these free resources. There are not that many but there are a couple so that you can actually go in there and do some basic searches. If you go to these places to do searches don’t go in with highly detailed keywords. So instead of writing, “buy charming toilet paper” just put down “toilet paper.”

If you are selling computers then just write down, “computers” do not put down “Lenovo computers” or “Acer computers.” This information is publicly available because this is your tax dollars and because it’s your tax dollars, there is a level of transparency that they have to report. So, if it is over a certain dollar amount, the government has to report that they actually gave this contract to a certain company.

Entities that buy your products or services

Now we should focus and choose the entities of the government that buys your product or service often. This is because if they buy your product or service fairly often, they are highly likely to buy it again versus a part of the government who has only bought it once five years ago or two years ago. If they have only ever bought it once, they are less likely to buy it again. Now how do you define “often” depends on your product or service? If it is something that they have to buy once a month, twice a year, once a year, once every other year, once every four years then it can also be termed as, “often.”

There may be tens of thousands of buyers in the government, so you really need to get somewhat focused. So instead of having to reach out to 10, 20, 30, or 40 thousand entities, just start with a few hundred then you can learn a lot more from it.

As the information about Government contracts is public, you can learn some things about it but how the government buys what you sell is extremely critical. This is the linchpin on doing business with the government and I am going to give you a real-life example of it. This happened when I first started doing this in consulting and actually took out a company to meet with a government customer. We started explaining to them what that company can do and the government customer was really impressed.

They said, “yeah it definitely sounds like you understand our problem, you could solve it.” So, it basically checked all the boxes”, then she started to ask us questions such as, “Are you on this contract.” So, our answer was, “no.” The second question was, “Do you have this certification?” and our answer to that was also in negation. Finally, we got the response, “well you know what, I can’t even buy it from you and you just wasted my time.”

Government buys what’s easier for them

When the government customer is interested in what you have, it’s easy for them to buy it from you. Here the emphasis is on the word, “easy”. The government deals with a lot of bureaucracy and red tape, so if you can remove or minimize it then you start becoming an attractive option. They may say, “Wait a minute since you are set up the way we prefer then we may not have to bid this thing.”

It basically means that if they bid it out, they may get 20, 50, or hundreds of proposals. Do you think that it is going to be competitive? do you think your margins are going to be anywhere near reasonable for you to even win? The answer is simple, “no” but let me ask you this question, what if there was no competition? how much margin do you think you can now make? I am not talking about gouging the government – not at all – we always do ethical business with the government.

Now instead of me having to make one percent profit or maybe even negative profit, I can make myself 10, 15 maybe 20 profit or more depending on what it is that you do. It is important to understand this particular piece of the puzzle. As I mentioned, this could be a complex puzzle but if you know these things then it is not as complex. This was one of the key techniques that we learned in corporate America when I was a sales rep. When we managed to do this, the Government buyer is usually like, “Oh, great, you just made my life easy and now I am not going to compete or I am not even going to bid it. Because you checked all the boxes you made my life easy and I can just give you the contract.”

Go-to-Market Strategy

When the majority of the companies start reaching out to the government, they try to sell to the government without knowing it. The government tries to tell them this but they do not know how to go about doing it or they do not understand it well. Once you do it, you will have your blueprint or what we call your go-to-market strategy; even in the commercial world, you got to have a go-to-market strategy. It means you have to identify your demographic that is likely to be a prospect or a lead for you and then at that point you make sure or you have already confirmed that your product or service is a great fit for that target audience. If you do that correctly then every person that you speak to could be a potential prospect that can convert into a paying client.

The aforementioned process will save you tons of time in the government marketplace. I know companies that try continuously and get zero results. I had a client last year; one person just started all within after a few months he got himself a multi-year contract over a million dollars right out of the gate.

This is not even something that he necessarily did or was his sweet spot or his main offering but it was something that he had knowledge of and he was able to convince the government. As this was something that he did well at and so they gave him a contract within six months. This is not a result that everyone can expect and it depends on what you are selling.

Always start small

If you are selling a high-ticket item that is in multi-millions, there is a likelihood that it is going to take some time. It could take anywhere from a year to two years to three years. I have seen some of these deals at 40-50 million dollars go as long as five to six years. If you are just starting to get into the government and you have no experience in selling to the government then the government could not give you a contract for 50 million dollars or 20 million dollars or 10 million dollars or even 5 million or even a million dollars right out of the gate with no government experience. You really have to have a realistic mindset and you should always start small by getting your foot in the door.

Unique Marketing Strategy

Each entity in the government may have a unique marketing strategy. What does that mean?

As an example, you can call the department of transportation if they like to buy your product and service from a particular contract and they might accept it. On the contrary, you now go to the department of education and they might say, “no”, “we don’t like to use those contracts but if you are woman-owned that’s a different go-to-market strategy.” You might go to the department of defense and they may say, “well you know what, we don’t like that contract but we really like veteran-owned businesses.”

In this case, you may not be a veteran-owned business but it doesn’t stop you to reach out to a veteran-owned business and possibly partnering up. Why do we do it this way? because if you do it this way, it builds trust with the government.

If you go to a different country and you know how to speak their language, you are going to develop credibility and trust with them. They are possibly going to say, “you talk like us, you walk like us; you probably understand us and if you understand us then it’s likely that if we give you work, you will be able to deliver.” People like to do business with people that they know and trust. Nobody wants to give you a contract all of a sudden and lose their job as the government could be a very cushy job if they play their cards.

Teaming up with another company

I had mentioned something about teaming up with another company with a particular designation. Now from my experience, if you are just starting new and you do not have any exposure to the government, we recommend teaming up. What does that mean? teaming means to meet and develop a relationship with another entity that has experience with the government that checks the boxes that you are not able to check so that you can get work from the government. This is not my strategy this is the main successful strategy that a lot of companies use.

As a matter of fact, the largest companies in the country, like Lockheed Martins, IBM, Boeing, and Microsoft often team with small businesses. It happens because when the government gives a large company a contract, 35 percent of that contract will have to be given to a small business. It is three percent for women-owned, and three percent for the veteran.

It is mandatory for large companies to have a stable team of small businesses with different classifications and different designations in order to meet these quotas. They have full-time dedicated resources as supplier diversity managers. Their entire job is to find you. So, the question is why are you not reaching out to them? The worst thing that will happen is they will say, “Hey, thank you but we’re not interested.”

Mentorship

The other way is to find mentors; there are a lot of companies out there that have walked a mile in this space and have learned a lot.

Who better to learn from than someone who has just done it? If someone has done it do not you think you could learn from that person? Who does not go to YouTube – like I need to fix this or I need to do that or I want to check this out? We go to YouTube and see how someone else did it. I might look at four or five different people and see if they did it differently or the same. It means teaming and mentoring are highly recommended.

If you do not know how to go about doing it, there are also techniques on how to do it. We do webinars that help people in this process but at times it is not fair to give a lot of information in just one session in a boot camp style.

To learn, how to do business with the government, it really requires a step-by-step procedure, so you can understand it and it really gets simpler this way.

You do not have to remember all of these things as some of them start to become natural and that is when the trust factor really develops with the government.

Now you really want to insert yourself into an ecosystem of companies. This means that you want to look for companies that can check some of the crucial boxes. This includes:

1) Past Performance

2) Contract Vehicles

3) Capabilities

4) Socio-economic Categories

5) Proposal Support

6) Delivery Support

7) Financial Support

If they do check off the aforementioned categories then this is definitely a potential company that you want to develop a mentoring or a teaming relationship with.

1) Past Performance

It basically means that they have done past work with the government and they have experience

2) Contract vehicles

It is necessary because the government likes to use contract vehicles to buy a lot of different products and services.

3) Capabilities

If you are a new business, you may not have a lot of capability. If you are an IT company, you may have knowledge in one specific part of it but you may not have the capability to actually deliver a full solution. If you are in construction and do the electrical part, you may need someone to do drywall and plumbing to get a contract. If you find a company that does drywall and plumbing and they have past performance and have contract vehicle, it will make your offer a lot more attractive and makes the government’s life a lot easier.

4) Certification

There are many different certifications and you need to find out which certifications are relevant to your line of work.

5) Socio economic categories

This includes business categories like woman-owned, veteran-owned, disabled veteran-owned, and minority-owned. It also includes “AA”, which requires an entire new e-book all in itself because that is a powerful socioeconomic classification that can give you a contract with no competition at a maximum amount. They can go higher but just to be to simplify, it can range from five and a half to six and a half million dollars. Think about this big number that can be life-changing for some companies.

6) Proposal Support

You should look for companies that have proposal support. People need to know how to write a government proposal. It is not just a quote with your price; it is not going to get you any work in the government. Let me tell you that you need to write a proposal and if you do not know it, you need to learn how to write a proposal. This is the reason why it’s good to build an ecosystem of companies that have proposal support. Many can write a proposal but a winning proposal results in getting a government contract.

7) Delivery support

This is when you are going to deliver your product or service. This is when you decide how many resources you need to have to deliver the results.

8) Financial support

I have seen people sell their companies after getting a government contract because they did not have the financial capacity to deliver on a contract.

It is good to have the aforementioned things as key points when you look for companies that you can either team with or find as a mentor. We have an ecosystem of companies that are willing to help and some of them check a lot of those boxes.

This is where we can potentially help you. We cannot work with everyone but for this particular community, we would be willing to come up with a unique offering that makes sense for all parties involved.

We offer our services in a group session; we do not do it in a boot camp-style but at a slower pace with a step-by-step phase, which encourages each person to advance to the next step.