If the government buys what you already sell then your decision is fairly easy. If the government doesn’t buy what you sell, you can find out what are some similar products or services that the government buys and then go ahead with it by marketing them to the government.

Free and Public Resources

There is a lot of information you can get that is free and public. The government spends our tax dollars, which we give them, and because it’s our tax dollars, there’s a level of transparency. Some resources are free and public, and we’re going to use one of them. It gives you enough information to find out if the government buys what you sell and what parts of the government buy it. This also highlights how many times does the government buys it and do they buy a lot of it?

USAspending.gov

Our key resource is the website, www.usaspending.gov. There’s a lot of different options here, but just to keep it simple, for those of you who are just new to government, you can go into the keyword search. There you can search all sorts of things.

Scenario 1

So here I’ll look up, “toilet paper” as an example. If I, do it, I can see, the government buys a lot of toilet paper. As a matter of fact, over a million of contracts. Well, let’s think about it how the government manages millions of people worldwide. These people work in buildings and these buildings have restrooms, so absolutely it makes perfect sense. This is not crazy spending as they have to give services to the people that are servicing the government.

Scenario 2

Let’s do another scenario for construction companies. In the search, you can see that there are thousands of renovation projects that the government has awarded. You can also see who the recipient is ,when it was done, the transaction amount, the awarding agency, and what part of the government has bought it including the sub-agency. So, these thousands of contracts for renovation lead me to believe that the government buys quite a bit of it.