Column: It’s the New Year! What’s Your Plan?

By Tom Johnson, publisher, Set-Aside Alert

      The beginning of a new fiscal year is just the right time to take a look at the plan for the coming year.

      The agency contracting officers are recovering from the year-end hassle, and so perhaps are you and your team.

      After you update your government paperwork, SAM (System for Award Management) and DSBS (Dynamic Small Business Search) listings, and capability statement, spec out the bidding schedule for the coming year.

      Some companies can be quite assured of when recurrent opportunities will hit the street, while others can only make general guesses. Either way, take advantage of some free time and do your homework.

      Here is the annual checklist of things to do now to maximize your federal contracting success.

SAM, DSBS and Capabilities Statement

• Check your SAM.gov and DSBS.sba.gov listings and review all of your NAICS codes. If you are claiming a wide variety of industry codes, your listing will be suspect.
• Confirm your Product/Service Codes (PSCs). We learned long ago that PSC searches are often more reliable than NAICS code searches.
• Your DSBS listing is referenced by many contracting officers and small business specialists. Compare your DSBS listing with those of a couple of your competitors. If a contracting specialist is looking for bidders, which one will he or she select?
• Verify your capability statement. Have you included several relevant contract awards?
• Post any address change. If you have moved, make the appropriate change in SAM.gov; Dun & Bradstreet no longer is the site to post changes.)

Unique Entity Identifier

      Confirm that your team has implemented your new Unique Entity ID (UEI) across all of your federal procurement processes. This includes your capability statement, your website content, your bidding and billing documents, your proposal boilerplate, your IDIQ/GWAC product/service catalogs and price lists and the company’s marketing collateral.

Review existing contracts

      Schedule out the dates on your calendar for when they expire or will be completed. Evaluate each as to whether it is a recurring requirement, or a one-time purchase.

      If it’s a recurring requirement, note when the solicitation or RFI is usually posted, and then back off the necessary number of weeks to allow for pre-proposal efforts. These include honing the key personnel bios, updating your boilerplate, estimating changes in staffing needs, verifying your teaming needs and maintaining contact with the Contracting Officer, program executives and agency managers.

Opportunity Alerts

      If procurements arise on an ad hoc basis, verify that all of your opportunity alert efforts are up-to-date. These might include:

• The monitoring process you have implemented with Set-Aside Alert’s daily emails;
• Your saved searches now available in SAM.gov;
• Your method for managing and responding to Sources Sought and RFI listings;
• Your action assignments for GSA eBuy and similar agency/GWAC acquisition sites orders; and
• Your allocation of responsibility for participation in industry associations, industry events and keeping an eye on industry news sources.

Grow your business

      Assuming your company has bandwidth for growth, use the no-cost web-based tools available for assessing the competition and gaining market share in the federal market. Take advantage of their availability and use them!

      Most significant, perhaps, are the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS.gov) and USASpending.gov. These two sites are generally duplicative, sharing a common database of past contract awards, so select one and gain expertise in searching it. This database can be mined by industry code, agency/subagency, set-aside category, geographic location and other key characteristics.

      And don’t forget to search past awards using the names of your competitors, You’ll learn not only what the competitor is winning, but what agencies are buying, where the procurements are being initiated, the acquisition method used by the buyer, when the solicitation is released and when the award comes out, the competitor’s contract price and other useful strategic and tactical information. Crank this into your calendar and get focused on new opportunities coming down the pike.

      Other data sources, depending upon your industry and products, are DLA’s Internet Bid Board System (DIBBS) and GSA’s GSAAdvantage (and its sister site, the Schedule Sales Query Plus). These resources expose data about pricing, competition sales, ordering info, contract expiration dates and other characteristics of their respective parts of the federal market.

Conclusion

      The pace for issuing new solicitations is at a low point right now. Use this break in the federal business year to fine-tune your company listings, assure your company is displayed at its best in the government databases, verify that you will be alerted for every opportunity you can win, update your promotional material and bid document boilerplate and target your team on the agencies and government requirements where you are uniquely qualified to bid and win.

Tom Johnson is the publisher of Set-Aside Alert and president of Business Research Services in Bethesda, MD. He can be reached via email at tjohnson@set asidealert.com.

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Column: It’s the New Year! What’s Your Plan?

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