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.