“They’re not raining down on me like manna from heaven!  I have my SDVOSB and [INSERT ANY OTHER POPULAR FEDERAL SMALL DISADVANTAGED BUSINESS CATEGORY CERTIFICATION HERE]!  What gives?”

 

In my work over the past decade supplying PMP and Sec+ certified veteran project and program managers and PMP and Sec+ training to GovCons, I have heard this common theme a lot.

 

Or, “I just can’t figure out how our win rate is so low!  We bid on everything we see in SAM.gov!”

 

It’s all about relationships, not certs.  If you don’t have one with the Functional Manager (“FM”) or Contracting Officer (“KO/CO”) in agencies you support, your certifications just don’t matter.  There are tens of thousands of small businesses with the exact same categories.

 

Start with who you are, what you do, for whom, and how it solves their common problems.  Then identify whether they have those problems or not, or ones that you could solve in a novel way.  When the discussions are far enough down the road, they’ll ask for your categories, and you’ll know they fit.

 

Contracts rain on you when you’ve established you can solve X problem(s) for X KO in X agency; people like to do business with people they can trust.  You said you could, you did, over and over, I’ll keep calling you.

 

Meet some of these folks and opportunities in Washington, D.C. on 2 May at SGA’s Tribal 8(a) Conference (https://stratgrowthadvisors.com/2024-tribal-partnership-summit), at SAME’s JETC Conference 14-16 May in Orlando, FL (https://www.samejetc.org/), and at NVSBC’s Vets2024 Conference 20-23 May in Orlando too (https://s6.goeshow.com/nvsbc/vets/2024/registration1.cfm).

 

Find me and I’ll have challenge coins for you as well as introductions to folks that can help you realize GovCon opportunities and success.  As has been said for  a long time now, “The size of your net worth correlates to the size of your network”.