GSA Schedules: The New Marketing Tool With More Muscle

Okay. It's twelve o one, and I'm gonna get started. We have a lot of information to cover. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Artesha Meehan, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to today's webinar titled GSA schedules, the new marketing tool with more muscles. Our agenda today is pretty simple. I'm gonna do a quick introduction. I'm gonna do not even a thirty second overview of GSA brands and then introduce Jennifer and get into the presentation. This webinar is being recorded, and the presentation slides and will be posted on the website, will be sent to everyone. So please be on the lookout for that. Also, any questions that you might have, please put that in the q and a section so that we are able to get to them. So quickly for everyone, GovSpend provides intelligence on the federal and state local education side to companies. The federal platform, FedMind, basically integrates nineteen datasets into one easy to use platform to provide the market intelligence that a company needs. The GovSpend platform provides a three sixty degree view of the sled market and provides a really deep and comprehensive view into the buying and selling at the state, local, and education levels. So, you know, feel free if you've not heard about GovSpend or if you wanna have a look at them to definitely reach out to them. So let me quickly sort of get into the trends that we've noticed. GSA schedules account for almost seven percent of the seven hundred and seventy four billion dollars that was spent in f y twenty four. And if we start looking at GSA managed Gvax and IDIQ, such as the Alliant and the Oasis, we are looking at a total of almost ten percent of the total spend that is managed by the GSA. So that's one of the reasons why we thought that it is important to have Jennifer Schraus here and talk about GSA schedules. I also did a quick slide on on looking at the top ten GWACs and IDIQs. And as you can see, we have started seeing an increased use of the GSA mass schedule as also the Alliant two and the Oasis vehicles. So it's really important for us to get into this super important topic. So having said that, I am gonna I'm so happy to have Jennifer Schrouts here. She has been a good friend of GovSpend and, yeah, and of me. And, you know, she has been in the federal contracting sector for over twenty years. She started her career at Dun and Bradstreet and moved into the federal government division in nineteen ninety eight, selling data to intel agencies as well as DOD and civilian agencies. While at Dun and Bradstreet, she the firm secured a GSA schedule to, of course, make it easier for their federal clients to purchase subscriptions to the DNB financial database. Eventually, using her knowledge of the federal procurement system and specifically GSA schedules, she launched her own business. Her firm works with large publicly traded organizations, including Chevron, Brother Printer, Amerisco, Invisalign, just to name a few, as well as mid and small firms to help them secure and maintain the COVID Govita GSA schedule procurement vehicle. In addition to GSA schedules, Jennifer and her team have amassed a library of almost eight hundred YouTube videos, all of which are free. So I would definitely encourage everyone to have a look at that. And, also, you are free to sign up for her federal contracting news by subscribing to our organization's newsletter, which is also complimentary and reaches almost forty thousand subscribers. Jennifer holds a BA from Towson University as well as leadership certificates from both Cornell University and UC Berkeley. With that, Jennifer, I'm gonna hand it over to you, and, we are looking forward to this important, presentation. Okay. Thank you so much, Arshisha, and also to the good folks over at GovSpend. I will reference their database often, today in our one hour together as, market research is really essential to being successful in this market. So thanks again to GovSpend for the opportunity to present, and thanks to everybody who, who made it here today. So, basically, what I wanna cover today is just, educate you as much as I can about GSA. I've been in the sector for quite some time. I've got the gray hair and the wrinkles to prove it. There are obviously a lot of things that are happening quickly with GSA and executive orders, and I'm gonna just kinda buzz through the kind of the highlights there. If we had more time together, we could dig in a little bit deeper on all of these topics. But I will also say that I'm human, and I don't know everything. So I'm gonna cover as much as I can in the, again, the short time that we have. If you do have questions, feel free to go ahead and type them in to, I believe, the chat. And I'm gonna pause every, couple minutes and check-in with, with Archisa to see if any questions have come in. So, again, I'm just gonna share some information and knowledge, and we'll, go ahead and dig in. So let's, look at the agenda, a little bit of just high level information about GSA so you know who they are and kind of why they, operate. As I mentioned, we'll talk about the executive orders and then just the solicitation requirements so you know kind of once you get to that point of deciding, yes, this is something you wanna pursue that you know, if you meet, preferably exceed the requirements. We'll talk about the companies that we've seen over the past twenty plus years, what makes them successful, and then some things that you can do, best practices to also be successful. I just put q and a there, but, again, I'm gonna pause throughout to take those. And then resources, I always like to include a lot of links so you can do your own homework. I always encourage companies to, navigate the websites themselves. Don't ask somebody to do the homework for you. You'll learn a lot more. You'll be more savvy. You'll be more educated. You'll be more successful. Okay. Let's go ahead and dig in. And okay. So GSA background. Who is GSA general services administration? Not they are not appropriated agency, meaning that they do not receive any taxpayer funding, which is a little bit of a lie. They receive less than one percent. So how do they make money? They make money through some of the, divisions that they operate. One is the public building service. So GSA is, we'll call them the real estate agent for the federal government. So if you've been to the Smithsonian or the, to the mall, and you've gone up on to the top of the Washington Monument, those public lands, the National Park Service, all of that, GSA is the, the landlord there. Also through the schedules program, all of the GSA schedule holders, which assuming if you're on this phone call, you're aspiring to be one of them. As you start generating revenue through your sales, your GSA sales, you will actually pay GSA a small fee, and so they make money again through the schedule holders. Your customer actually pays that fee, and you extract it and pay it to GSA. So it's it's kind of a wash, but that is how they generate money. So, just a side little note there is to keep in mind that GSA is motivated by the dollar because that's how they stay in business. So if you're not doing any business through your schedule, you're costing them money, because they still need to maintain your schedule and communicate with you and make sure that you're compliant, etcetera, etcetera. If you're bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars through your schedule, then GSA is happy because you're generating revenue for them. So I I've got here that third bullet there at the very bottom of how GSA is organized. They also have the technology transfer system, which is the GSA maintains a lot of the government websites. So FPDS, SAM dot gov, GSA is kind of the operator behind the scenes on those. They're also run by a political appointee as I've got noted there, and we can keep on moving. So they've been around for quite some time. They've got quite a few employees, and they do a decent amount of revenue. And that sixty one billion includes the real estate money as well as the money that comes in from the schedule holders. We anticipate that that is going to go up in fiscal year twenty five just based on some of these executive orders. But keep in mind, they're they're not, small potatoes, and they they kinda have their tentacles everywhere because they do reach through both PBS and the, schedules program. They reach, across the entire federal government platform. So next slide, please. So let's talk about the executive orders and the impact, and these are just kind of three of the main ones that are, impacting GSA. And I will say this with the caveat that I'm not a lobbyist. I'm not a policy person. But just like you, I have access to the Internet as well as publications that spit out information related to federal procurement. And you can go on to the federal register to get additional information on each of these executive orders. I don't think anybody needs to memorize these, but you need to know that they exist, and the federal landscape acquisition landscape is changing. So we'll just go through the, the first one, and we'll just kinda take these sequentially in the the next slide, please. So the fourteen two forty eliminates waste and, taxpayer dollars, and it's consolidated procurement. It's pretty simple. It, it makes sense. Came out March twentieth. Let's go to the next slide, which will kinda give you, more information about what it does. It's basically saying that GSA should go back to its original function because there are a lot of other contract vehicles that are out there, meaning NASA SEWP, Navy Seaport e, DHS Eagle. So a lot of the other departments and agencies in federal contracting have their own vehicles because they had to pay GSA in order to use the GSA schedule, which is what I talked about a couple minutes ago. So with this executive order, it's trying to consolidate everything and have procurement run through GSA. And let me just also state here. Today, we're talking about just GSA plain old vanilla schedules. We're not talking about Oasis or Alliant. I know Archisa had some slides earlier about kind of these different flavors of GSA schedules, But everything I'm talking about as far as requirements and executive orders, we're just talking about the main GSA multiple awards schedule. So what this executive order doing is really just saying GSA should be the main hub where the federal government is going to purchase goods and services. And they're trying to standardize everything, and they've organized it into ten different categories. If you click on this link here for acquisition dot gov, it'll take us to what we see on the next, actually, two slides, the ten categories that GSA is organizing. And, again, I'd encourage you to to go over to these websites and read and learn and attend as many of these webinars and conferences and trainings as you can. So, again, you're more educated, you'll make better decisions, and you'll be more successful. So here's the first five. And then on the next slide, it gives you the next five. So, that's just kind of a a heads up. Keep that, in mind, and let's go to the next, slide, please. And this, OMB memorandum is related to that executive order, the fourteen two forty. This just gives you a nice visual about what, the government is trying to do, the executive branch is trying to do with just making procurement a little bit easier to, to navigate both for the vendors as well as for the government. Right now, the the federal acquisition regulation, which is the rule book for the contracting officers on kind of how and when they purchase and all the steps that they have to take, is over two thousand pages. So in order for them to make procurements, they've got to follow all of these various rules and then nuances if they work for one of the departments that has a FAR supplement. And it's hard for the government contractors for you guys to navigate and understand how the government's conducting market research, the various small business programs, etcetera, etcetera. So, again, the main goal of these executive orders is really just to consolidate procurement and centralize it at GSA. So slide in the beginning stated that it was, I believe, six point six percent, is basically what is running through the GSA multiple awards schedule out of the entire federal government purchases. So if you took a pie chart, it's a pretty thin slice. But GSA does a great job of marketing themselves, so a lot of people want to get onto the GSA schedule. But please keep in mind that six point six percent, it's still billions of dollars, but it is a pretty small and narrow, pathway to procurement, which is obviously going to be expanding. By how much? To be determined. Let's go to the next slide, please. So here's just more kind of, data on that, the last slide, that flow chart from OMB, talking about, excuse me, category management and then just centralizing procurement through GSA. So as I mentioned, there are other agencies and contract vehicles that are, options for, the government to make purchases, and, those potentially are going away. I did a webinar about a week or two ago, and some of the questions came in about NASA SEWP, which, again, is just another contract vehicle that is specific to NASA. You know, is that going to be moving over to GSA? Again, I would just say, you know, do what everybody else is doing. Follow these information pieces on the various government news publications that are out there. Look at the Federal Register. Stay up to date on you know, make sure you're subscribed to newsletters and news related to these topics that impact the roles of the game that you're playing. And let's go to the next slide, please. Okay. The next one is executive order fourteen two seventy one. Again, you do not need to memorize these or or their exact titles. You just need to know what they're doing. And, again, it's probably things that you do with your own money. So you wanna be cost effective with making purchases of commercial items. And we can go to the next slide, which gives you more detail as far as the government purchasing commercially available products and services. So not just products, which, obviously, the government buys products, services, software, the whole nine yards, and we can go back one. Thanks. So, again, just encouraging the government to make good decisions. Do some market research if you're not buying anything that's kind of standard commercial. And then if it is available, to then use the the required commercial sources. And it looks like some of the content got sliced off there. But and if you're buying something that's not commercially available, that you just go through the proper channels to get, the approvals. And let's go to the next slide. And then this one, the fourteen two seventy five, which should be the last one that we, cover for executive orders. And you can set up Google alerts for these, because they all have timelines on the date that they came out. This one, April fifteenth. But then they're gonna have you know, within thirty days, the government has to submit, you know, proposals on the various procurements that are gonna be consolidated, within ninety days, within a hundred and twenty days. So, again, I didn't put all that content on these slides because I don't wanna overwhelm you with too much information. Just know that these exist. They're out there and stay up to date and, and stay well read and well versed. Again, these are the rules of the game. So next slide here on the common sense. Again, just, this one is focused on the FAR overhaul, FAR two point o. You may have seen these things on LinkedIn and some of the government contracting groups that hopefully you're a part of and some of the, GovCon influencers on, LinkedIn that you're following, hopefully, and staying up to date that the FAR is changing again, the federal acquisition regulation. These are the rules for how the government purchases from you. There's about fifty two parts to them. For example, FAR part nine is market research, how the government conducts market research when they're going to purchase something. So, again, there's two thousand pages of this, and they're trying to make it easier for both the government to make, procurement, quicker and faster and make it easier for you, the vendors, to do business with the government. So that's about it on the common sense in this FAR two point o and the FAR overhaul. But, again, just, stay up to date on these topics. They are hot topics, and you'll find them in, Federal News Network, Government Executive, NextGov. There's so many publications out there that, again, you guys are probably already subscribed to them. So let's, keep on moving here. And, Jennifer, just to sort of add, the FAR overhaul is is is a lot, and people should be tracking it. There is public period for comments and things like that. So I encourage businesses to make sure that they're reading and commenting because there is a lot of change that's gonna happen. So Correct. Yep. And, yeah, you've got an opportunity as a vendor to to comment and share your thoughts on how you think you can make this easier and better. So why not take a moment to to contribute to, again, the rules of the game here. If you're if you're gonna be playing the game, you may as well understand the rules and and try to influence them so it it makes it easier for everybody. So let's now talk about just the GSA schedule, what it is, what it's not. It's a marketing tool only that you do not need this to sell to the government at all. Now if your prospect or your customer says, hey. We've been purchasing through you, and we've, you know, been directed to now make our purchases through GSA Schedule. Well, if you wanna keep that heartbeat alive with your your sale, then, yes, then you would be highly encouraged to then take steps to get onto the schedule. But, again, it's one of many, many, many, many options. Again, it's only used last fiscal year six point six percent of the time. So, again, a pretty narrow path to sell to the government. It is an RFP, meaning it's a solicitation request for proposal with absolutely no due date. So you can start the proposal process today, get really, really busy with the end of the fiscal year, and pick it up again in December, January or next year this time, and you can still submit a response. Like any solicitation, you're gonna find it over on SAM dot gov. We've got the solicitation number there for you. All you've gotta do is plug it in, download the solicitation documents, and you will have everything that you need to submit a compliant and competitive proposal. As GSA makes changes to the solicitation, whether there's a new form you need to fill out, whether there's additional documentation that you need to provide on, I don't know, executive compensation or whatever it is, GSA will make updates, via what they call the refresh number. They're currently on refresh twenty eight. I just saw an email. I think it was last night. It could have been in the afternoon. I can't remember, but they're moving on to twenty nine. I have not, looked at the full details. I just kinda did a a breeze through on that. But, for example, some of these refresh numbers have, again, changed some of the requirements, either loosen them or made them more stringent. They've eliminated, some of the offerings under GSA and so forth. So, the only thing I'll say is because there is no due date, should you download the solicitation today and then you get busy with the end of the fiscal year and you pick it back up in, let's say, December, January. If GSA is on a new refresh number, you wanna make sure that you are submitting for the current refresh if that's, you know, January of twenty twenty six, to make sure that the the documents that you have are, applicable and that they haven't added an additional question to one of the documents or, a new form that you need to submit. So, again, just be cognizant, of that. Again, you can do that simply by following the solicitation on sam dot gov. And then where do you go to submit the proposal over onto eoffer dot g s a dot gov? And you'll select the option that's on the far left hand side. It just says submit new offer. Should you be lucky enough to get the award, there's really, not too much to be jumping up and down about because you are now on a list with about eighteen to twenty thousand other companies, total. And, you're still gonna have to compete for, RFPs, for opportunities, for contracts within that, GSA schedule. However, once you're then on this list, it's I'm not gonna say bad news, but it just depends. If you've got good relationships, if you understand government contracting, if you understand how to leverage the GSA schedule, you'll be successful. But the vendors here are it's more fierce competition than what you're gonna have over on, you know, sam dot gov. Sam dot gov, you're gonna have anybody and everybody. When you get to GSA schedule, everybody's kind of been vetted on the same metrics. Their pricing will be very similar. So your differentiators, once you're on the schedule, will be your relationships. And if you don't have any, or some really solid past performance or some really solid technical capabilities that perhaps nobody else has. But if you don't have that, then you will just be kind of a a number over there. And, unfortunately, on the schedule, it's kind of the eighty twenty rule, almost the ninety ten rule where ten percent of the vendors are doing ninety percent of the work. And when you do your research to look at that, you can use the GovSpend platform to do your research, and I'd highly encourage you to do this before you decide to get onto the schedule. Again, before you decide to get onto the schedule to really find out who is selling the same or similar product services or software as you. How much are they selling? What does the competition look like? Are there potential partners? So, again, just keep that in mind that the schedule then just puts you at a higher playing field with, again, more fierce competition. Let's go to the next slide, please. Here's what the just a little visual to break up some of the the words on the slides here. That's what you're gonna see over on Sam dot gov. And, again, the, the schedule is organized, by these twelve large categories and then eighty one subcategories. That gives you a total of two hundred and, ninety one special item numbers. And special item numbers are just the way that GSA categorizes what it is you're selling. So for example, the SIN number five four one five one s, s as in Sierra, is for IT professional services. That corresponds to a NAICS code. Sometimes they are similar, very similar to the NAICS codes. Sometimes they're, you know, a a character or a number or a letter off. So just, keep that in mind. And you also wanna make sure that you've got contracts that are similar to your special item number description. So when we go to the next slide, I believe it should be a visual of a spreadsheet. Yep. Okay. I color coded this when you download it from GSA. It will not be color coded like this, but I did it just for the purpose of demonstrating that in that green section, you're gonna have the SIN number, the SIN title, and the SIN description. So this is really kind of the first place that you should start after you've decided that, yes, it it kinda makes sense for you to be on the schedule. I would say do some keyword searches to understand kinda what SIN or SIN numbers you fall into. And then you wanna make sure that in that purple column where I've got the list of the NAICS, that you have that as your primary NAICS over in SAM dot gov. And then the SIN will really dictate the requirements of the proposal when it would get to, like, that technical section of the proposal. We'll get there eventually, in today's presentation. But some of the SINs will require, again, additional hoops that you might have to jump through or just additional paperwork to submit, but most are gonna be pretty similar. They will also products and services are gonna have different spreadsheets, software, etcetera. So you wanna make sure you're using the right, spreadsheet and the right forms, based on the SIN number that you're pursuing. And, again, you can find you can download all of this information over on sam dot gov if you plug in that solicitation number, and then you'll navigate to the, the category for the SINs and all that documentation. The forms that you need to fill out are there. I've also got the third from the right hand side column, highlighted there in black, which says TDR. That's transactional data reporting, which is also kind of a hot topic in GSA schedules, which has, the focus there is really, pricing, your pricing. And, I'll talk about that, not in super great detail, but GSA is migrating. They've got, you know, more than, let's say, ninety percent now of the, SINs are now, TDR required, meaning that it eliminates some of the paperwork on the pricing side with the upfront submission. But then there's a lot of data points that you're going to have to submit in order for GSA to determine that your pricing is fair and reasonable, which is really the main focus. The main impetus of the schedule is really just having everybody in similar kind of pricing for similar products, similar services, kinda all things being equal. So a lot of information I realize, especially if you're new to government contracting and if you're new to GSA schedules, but, there's obviously a lot of information that is out there that you can read about to educate yourself. So let's go to the next slide, please. So as I mentioned, and we had kind of a a pie chart, you know, slices of pizza. GSA is a pretty thin slice, again, at six point six percent. And then, I've got there ten to fifteen percent. That's really kind of including, more of these GSA Alliant, GSA Oasis, and it's probably on the smaller side there closer to the the ten percent as I think Arshisa had demonstrated in one of her slides. Now with these executive orders and more procurements going through GSA, what can we anticipate? I'm not sure if GovSpend has any projections on this, but, it's kinda, you know, to be determined. Another important, piece of information here is in the event that your company is also selling to state local educations, the SLED market or quasi government, UN, World Bank, IFC, IMF, Red Cross, those, entities, those state and local and education, the government entities that I just rattled off also have the ability to purchase off of the GSA schedule. It doesn't mean that they will or that they sometimes you may need to educate your customer on that. So if you've diversified in kind of your your selling strategy and you're going after some federal, some state and local, just know that that GSA schedule can potentially be helpful to you at at some of the state and local at the at that level. And we'll go to the next slide. So if this was the, the pizza, again, GSA is gonna come in at about, let's say, six to ten percent. That fifteen is probably a little high, but, we'll see. But full and open competition is going to be everything that you see over on sam dot gov, and that's probably, I don't know, I'm gonna say thirty percent or so set asides. These would be all your checkboxes, small women owned, eight a, the hub zone, service disabled, veteran owned, small business, etcetera. Those are probably again, these are just around numbers, but you should for each of these categories, you should be using the GovSpend platform to have percentages and numbers so you know if you should be going after GSA or not or another contract vehicle where you should be getting, finding a partner who's got, you know, one of the set aside designations, or you should be focused on anything else that I've got listed here. The department wide contract vehicles, as I mentioned, NASA SEWP, Seaport e, etcetera, we'll see what happens with them being kind of rolled into GSA schedules, but those could potentially be sunset, again, to be determined. And I would say it would behoove you to, again, stay abreast via Google Alerts and following some of the news publications that cover government contracting news. Simplified acquisition, those are gonna be the contracts set aside for small businesses valued at two hundred fifty thousand dollars or below. There's also the contracts that you don't see on sam dot gov that are below twenty five thousand. OTAs, those have kind of, they became very popular during COVID contracting, what I call the COVID contracting era. They can only be used by specific departments, but they are also I think there's, comments are open for OTAs. I think there's some changes happening there. Sole source and then the the Peak Card purchases. So, again, there's a variety of ways that the government purchases. Try to be cognizant of most of the the popular ones and do the research to find out how the government's purchasing your specific product or service. It's not gonna be, you know, a blanket answer. If you type in a question, we provide consulting services or we're an IT company. How does the government purchase our work with GovSpend to get a specific detailed report on that information and let the data drive where you spend your time, how you what avenues you decide to pursue for contract vehicles, and how you spend your time and money. And let's go to the next slide. Okay. So the once you've got the GSA schedule and you've kind of completed everything, you're on the contract, it is actually a contract. So it's got terms and conditions. So you do need to bring in at least a hundred thousand dollars in those first five years, not per year, but cumulative. Years one through five, a hundred thousand dollars through your schedule. If you've got a fifty million dollar contract with, the Air Force and it's not through your schedule, GSA does not care. They're looking for your point seven five percent to be paid, to them of your GSA schedule sales. So, you're costing them money if you're not running business through your schedule. And then you've gotta bring in a hundred and twenty five thousand dollars for each of those cumulative periods after. So had you if you meet the hundred k for the first five years, and you're compliant with everything else, then they will renew you for another, five years and so forth. But if you're not meeting the sales quota or the sales minimum, I guess I should say, then you'll probably get a letter that says, hey. You're you're kinda costing us money, and what's your plan to bring in some money through your schedule? So just keep that in mind. If you don't have a sales pipeline, if you haven't done the business development and the marketing first before you decide to get on to the schedule, then you're probably not gonna be successful. Don't get the schedule and then decide to do your marketing and business development. So, again, meet the sales quota through your schedule. I'll pause, take a sip of my water. I saw a couple things popping up. I didn't get a chance to actually read them, but perhaps some questions. Yeah. So there's a question. If I heard correctly, if you're already on GSA schedule, do you have to reapply because of the new executive orders? Or if you're already on it, nothing needs to be done. Yeah. Nothing to be done. You're just you're just gonna have you know, with the new refreshes, you'll just have just as you would any of the GSA initiated modifications. So over on the, vendor support center, you just need to navigate over to your mass mods to make sure you're compliant there. Again, this is for companies that are on the schedule. Yeah. And there's another question. If this is something new, FSS award schedule is five years with an option here for one five year option total of ten years. I think that's standard. Right? I'm not sure I understand the question. But when you get on the schedule, you're as long as you're compliant and you're bringing in the hundred k in those first five years, they will renew you for another five years. That's year six through ten. If you meet that sales quota and you're compliant, you've completed all the, GSA initiated modifications, you got your price list up and everything else, they'll renew you for another five years. That's years eleven through sixteen. Same thing through seventeen through twenty. And usually around year eighteen, you'll get a letter that says, you know, your contract's getting ready to end at the end of the twenty years. You can reapply to get back on. So just keep that in mind. Okay. Let's keep moving because I've got a lot of content here. Yeah. So the industrial funding fee, mentioned this. This is what keeps GSA happy. You're gonna pay GSA point seven five percent of your GSA schedule sales. Again, your customer is paying this as part of your it's built into your pricing. Your customer pays it to you. You extract it, pay it to GSA. So it's kind of it's kind of a wash. If you have no sales through your schedule, that's not good, but you still need to go on to the, GSA platform and report that you had zero sales to through GSA. Again, if you've got fifty million dollars to the Air Force, but it's not through your schedule, then do not report do not report fifty million. If it's if you've got nothing through your schedule, you report nothing. Let's go to the next slide. These are just still the terms and conditions. If you're a large business, you need to submit a subcontracting plan. Again, large businesses only. And just this this is just kind of a little side note here that, one, the GSA eLibrary, which lists all of the GSA schedule holders. So if any of the information today is scaring you and you think, well, I don't think I should be on the schedule, you can actually partner or be a subcontractor to companies on the schedule, and you do not need a schedule to be a subcontractor to companies on the schedule. So you can look for some of these large businesses because if they have contracts that are valued at seven fifty seven hundred fifty thousand dollars or above, they need to, basically, that subcontracting plan gets triggered, and they need to, parse out certain percentage of that work to small women owned, but all the check boxes, small women owned, veteran owned, hub zone, and all the rest. So how do you find those large businesses? They're over on the GSA eLibrary with an o next to their name. O stands for other. Other stands for large businesses. I've got a screenshot on the next slide. And, again, it's the GSA eLibrary. If you can't figure out how to get to the GSA eLibrary, I would suggest check out Google and just type in GSA eLibrary. It'll take you there. And I've circled there the o's. And then what I would do as kind of a next step is then click on the terms and or the price list. I'm sorry. And that will tell you their labor categories or their products, whatever it is they're selling with their pricing. If your pricing is higher than these companies, then it's probably not gonna be a good fit for you because they're going to dictate rates that they need to be profitable. So if they've got a project manager, I'm just gonna use a very common job title, that's listed on their schedule at, let's say, say, a hundred and fifty dollars, they may be dictating a rate to you that's a hundred and twenty or or, I don't know, a hundred and twenty five, whatever it is. So if you don't think you can live with rates that are lower than what's listed on their schedule, don't waste your time registering on their website as a small business vendor or contacting them. Do your homework. It will save you a lot of time the more that you use, again, data to make decisions. I'm not sure if GovSpend platform has any of that pricing information, but if not, you can hop over to the, well, you can just use this. You can use the buy dot g s a dot gov website. Let's, keep on moving here. Yep. We can go to the next slide. So, again, this is still, terms and conditions. So if you're already on the schedule as GSA makes updates to the, to the solicitation for companies that want to get onto the schedule, it's going to look like a refresh number. For companies that are on the schedule, it will look like a mass mod, and then you just those are GSA initiated modifications, again, which, kind of change or edit the terms and conditions, and all you have to do is go in and accept those as part of your regular compliance. And let's keep going. That's actually found over on the vendor support center. Here's what it looks like if you're an existing contractor. You log in. You go through the prompts and accept the MAS modifications. Again, these are GSA initiated. If you're not a schedule holder, don't worry about this yet. Next slide. Okay. Let's talk about, what it actually takes to get on to the schedule. There's three main components of every solicitation, your administrative, technical, and pricing. Let's move to the next, which is going to be the administrative. And one more. Okay. So what's in the administrative section? You've got your cover letter and, GSA, in all of their documents gives you, I believe, a sample cover letter in there. They also have a checklist. I would use that. You should also have your own kind of compliance checklist, which should mirror that GSA checklist. You probably have some time lines and responsible parties for who's kind of doing what within your company to get, everything kind of put together and packaged nicely. You need your financials. They do not need to be audited. This can be a simple printout from your QuickBooks, your whatever financial kind of accounting platform that you use. You need two full years. So let's say you're on a kind of, you know, standard, very common January through December fiscal year. You'll need your balance sheet and your income statement. And let's say you're submitting today, which is, August, I think, twelfth maybe. And so you'll submit, January through December twenty twenty three, January through December twenty twenty four, and then your year to date, January through August twenty twenty five. If you were showing any losses in your company, you probably wanna pause and, perhaps wait until your company is more profitable and you've got some processes in place. Financials can be a showstopper if you are not profitable. And now there is not a specific number that you need for sales, but what we have seen in the twenty plus years we've been helping companies get onto the schedule, you ideally, for you to be somewhat successful, you should probably have, revenues at least of a million, and up. I'm not saying if you have less than a million, you're not gonna be successful or you can't get onto the schedule. Yes. We've have helped small businesses, and, yes, GSA has a program for those companies. Do I think it's a good idea? It depends. If you've got relationships and somebody that's gonna buy from you fairly immediately once you're on the schedule, then, yeah, go ahead and pull the trigger. Pathway to success and readiness assessment, those are found over on the vendor support center. Those are just kind of GSA, I'll call them test in in quotations where they require you to do some research to find out how many vendors within your special item number, that SIN number, how many of those vendors actually have zero sales. And when you look at those numbers, you might be astonished or or not. Again, it's kind of that, eighty twenty rule where the bulk of the, work is being done by just a very few, small list of companies. You wanna also make sure in your SAM record that your NAICS code, that is listed with the corresponding special item number is listed in SAM. You also need to include if you've had a previous schedule or if you submitted a proposal to GSA and it got rejected or you withdrew, or you were on the schedule and you got kicked off because you didn't meet the sales requirements or you had some other, issues. So that's your administrative section. Let's keep moving here. If you're a large business, again, you're gonna need to submit that subcontracting plan, either the individual or the company wide plan, depending upon how you're going to tackle that. If you're selling products, you'll need the letter of supply. This comes from the manufacturer. So if you're a dealer, reseller, distributor, again, that letter of supply only for product companies. You wanna make sure that that manufacturer is okay with signing off on that letter. There is this is GSA verbiage and language that sometimes manufacturers are not comfortable with. You also wanna make sure I should have put this higher up. But, again, if you are selling products that they are trade agreement act compliant, so if your products are being made in China, North Korea, Iran, Argentina, Thailand, list of these countries, you need to make sure that you've got something in place to kind of monitor that. Section five zero eight, that's gonna be for making sure that, that you've got the section five zero eight, IT capabilities, available. And then also here in that administrative section, if you are submitting a proposal as a joint venture to companies that have a GSA schedule that are joining forces to set up a new entity and kind of go after business together, which is very common and very strategic and, at times, very smart and lucrative. You'll indicate that there here in this administrative section. That's usually gonna be in your, cover letter. And let's go to the next slide, which will take us over to the technical section. And this is really kind of the the meat and potatoes. This is your opportunity to shine and tell GSA how great you are doing what it is you are proposing to do through them, through whatever the special item number is that you've selected or special item numbers that you've selected. Factor one is the corporate experience. As you can see here, these are gonna be about six or seven questions that GSA has come up with, for you to answer. You know, how long have you been in business? What's the genesis of your company? Blah blah blah. Kind of, you know, typical questions to demonstrate that you've got experience doing this type of work. And just answer the questions here. Again, this is really your chance to shine. Factor two is the past performance. These will, if you are if you've got past performance directly with the federal government, then you probably have CPARS. If you do not, then you'll submit questionnaires. Three past performance questionnaires will go to customers, commercial, government, nonprofit association. It could be your local church. It could be, whoever you've done work with, any customer. A customer is a customer is a customer. Again, does not matter if it's government or commercial or or something else, some other category, again, nonprofit, etcetera. Those past performance questionnaires, you send that to your customer. They complete it. They send it back to you. You can pile those three together and, upload that into the GSA e offer platform that I mentioned earlier. Factor three is the quality control. These are gonna also be similar to that corporate experience, about six or seven questions about the quality control measures that your company has in place. What are your processes? Who's in charge of quality control? How do you handle multiple projects at the same time? How do you does your company deal with, problems or errors in, deliverables? Again, please answer these to your to your fullest ability and allow your company to kind of shine here. Factor four is going to be the project experience. This is kind of similar to number two, but it's much more detailed. Now for factor four, I've got I should've moved that up a little notch, a line that you want to check the special item number, the SIN specific requirements, because some SINs may require just one project experience, where others may require two, or they may have a oral presentation component to them, or they may require an additional form that you need to complete, or they may have subcategories to them. So, again, read and download all of the solicitation documents for your specific special item number. But, basically, what this looks like is, again, demonstrating that you've done the type of work that is described in the special item number. You'll list the company name, the point of contact, their email, their phone number, the dollar amount of the contract, the type of work that was done. Again, it's a a narrative. It's a a written section. There's about, again, like, six or seven questions there, maybe actually, maybe more like eight or nine. And, again, this is your chance to shine and to tell GSA, hey. We are, you know, the best landscape artists, our, you know, architects because we do x, y, and z, and we've done this for ABC company, or we did this for ABC nonprofit, or we did this for the state of Missouri, whatever it is. You will also need a copy of the contract. You will need it's gonna have signatures and dates and dollar amounts on it, but, really, what they're looking for inside that is the statement of work. There's gonna be a timeline on that too. Actually, on all of these documents, you wanna make sure that you follow the guidelines as far as not having documents that are out of date. But the general rule here is going to be that a customer is a customer is a customer. So if you do have direct federal government experience, I would say you probably wanna use that. If you're a subcontractor, you can use that too. If you've got work at know, state and local, use that too. It just shows that you've got that public sector experience. And let's keep moving here. And let's go to pricing, and I'm just trying to be cognizant of the time here. So pricing, this is the main focus of the GSA schedule. So and with this TDR that I had mentioned, the transactional data reporting, GSA is kind of eliminating some, some components of the initial proposal, and they're gonna capture them in in other ways. But, really, it's the main goal, again, of the the schedule is or the main focus is really just for GSA to get, you know, your lowest price. And they're going to conduct a litmus test and look at the other companies on the GSA schedule who are selling similar or the same services or products and say, okay. The average rate for this widget is or this or the software or the hourly rate is a hundred dollars and you're proposing two hundred dollars, well, they're gonna laugh at you, and they're gonna negotiate you down to a lower rate. So do that market research before you decide to pursue the schedule, because your rates are, as I've got listed here, a price ceiling. So once you're on the schedule, you're actually gonna be encouraged to give discounts through the schedule. So, if you're gonna be using any subcontractors, then you're really gonna be dipping lower than your GSA rates because or if you're coming in as a subcontractor, then, again, keep in mind those primes, they need to, they're gonna discount their GSA rates, plus they need to be profitable on top of whatever they're they're going to potentially, parse out to you. So, again, do your homework there. And, again, as I've got noted there, GSA should be your lowest priced customer, but TDR kind of changes some of these things where you'll be reporting on sixteen. Various data points that GSA has determined to kind of keep everyone's pricing in kind of a a similar price band to keep things kind of fair and reasonable is, I guess, they would say. And let's go to the next slide. So in the pricing section, you'll have your price proposal template. Keep in mind, it's different for product services software. And then you'll have another document. It's an Excel spreadsheet, the pricing terms and conditions, and this will also indicate how you are escalating your prices on the through the schedule. So at the end of every twelve months, you're either going to submit a modification to GSA stating that your commercial prices have gone up. Otherwise, you will use some sort of negotiated percentage. For example, a lot of times companies will use Department of Labor, Table five, Bureau of Labor Statistics. They'll take the average for the last three periods that had been reported and use that. Right now, I think you're getting an average of about three point four for professional services, should you happen to be selling professional services. You also need the support documentation, so copies of invoices to show that you've sold each and every line item that you're proposing to GSA. And then these these this TDR is really kind of eliminating the CSP, which is the commercial sales practices document, as well as the basis of award and the most favored customer. A lot of these disclosures were really just indicating to GSA who your best price customer was and kind of, that kinda had a dotted line over to your GSA pricing, making sure that GSA was always your lowest price customer. Let's go to the next slide just in the interest of time. And I do see questions coming in, but I promise I will get there. Also, in your pricing, if you're selling software, you need your end user license agreement. If you're selling professional services or any sort of hourly rates, you'll need your HR plan that includes the information I've got here, as well as, any information on service contract to act should any of your labor categories fall under that category. And we can go to the next slide. TDR, again, as I mentioned, eliminates the, CSP, the commercial sales practice. You're not going to have a most favorite customer or basis of award customer, or that price reduction clause. Again, you're gonna have to report on the sixteen data elements, and everyone will eventually be transitioning to this TDR. And if you want more information on that, I would just say same thing. Go to Google, type in GSA TDR, and you can find some articles that have been written as well as GSA has a great website, Interact, which I've got listed on the resources with a a list of other links. And let's go to next slide, please. That will take you to some more information on TDR and kind of how that works. Best practices. Okay. And read the solicitation. Again, you know where to find it now over on sam dot gov. You can also go to the GSA website. They've got some potentially easier ways to download some of the requirements and documentation. Make your own compliance matrix to make sure that you are submitting a proposal that is compliant, particularly if you end up getting busy and you put the proposal to GSA on hold and they're on refresh twenty eight. And then, you know, twenty nine, like I said, is right around the corner. I just saw something in my email last night about that. And maybe by the time you get to it, they're on, you know, thirty three. Who knows? And make sure that your customers are actually going to use this. Go back and do market research. Use the GovSpend platform to go back a couple fiscal years. Look at acquisition forecast to find out what is going to be purchased through GSA. If you can't find those acquisition forecasts or the department or agency doesn't have it, contact the OSDBU office, and they can help you or the OSDBU. Let's go to the next slide. And, again, you need to have a pipeline of opportunities. If you're just getting on the schedule and you don't have any relationships with anyone that's gonna buy from you, I'm a little bit of a tough love here on the GSA schedule that no. I'm not saying, you know, this for everybody. But if you don't have the relationships in place, work on that first. Conduct the business development. Get educated on the market, how the federal government purchases. Get your financials in order. Make sure you have processes in place. Does your company even have a you could be a one person shop and still have a bid, no bid decision kind of matrix that you run all of the opportunities through to make sure that you're not wasting time being reactive, that you're being proactive, and that you're not gonna go after the solicitation because it doesn't meet you know, because you scored seventy five percent or less on it based on whatever sort of bid, no bid process you have in place. Do you have some humans out there that understand your business? They understand GSA, and they understand how to navigate federal sales. Have you looked at the the pricing of the other companies on the schedule within your special item number, and are you gonna be competitive not only with your pricing, but really more importantly with your relationships? And why is it that you wanna get on the schedule? You shouldn't be conducting your your sales and marketing after you get on. And, yeah, the rest you can kinda read. I'm not gonna read off to you. Let's go to the next slide, please. And so you wouldn't jump into a swimming pool if you didn't know there was water in it. So how much water is in the GSA swimming pool? Is there, you know, fifty million dollars worth of opportunity within your special item number, or is it three million? I mean, who knows? You don't wanna jump into a to an empty swimming pool. So find out how much is being purchased via GSA. Again, there's that six point six percent of overall federal government purchases, but maybe it's lower for you. Maybe it's higher for you. Maybe it's three x that. Do the research. Look at the other vendors. Are there partnership opportunities? And look at their pricing. Can you be profitable if you partner with them and kinda take some baby steps? So, next slide. You don't wanna jump into a pool like that if there's, you know, not much to swim in. And the next slide, I've just got another visual to just try to clean to make it a little more enjoyable than listening to me and looking at a bunch of words. So if you're looking at opportunities on sam dot gov, to me, that's kinda like Little League. Anybody has access to it. Obviously, yes, the big players are there as well. I'm not insinuating that they are not. But when you get onto the GSA schedule, that's kind of that's big leagues. That's major league. That is you know, you've got fierce competition. Everybody's got has been vetted on the same metrics, past performance. Their pricing is all similar. So if you don't have relationships, you don't have processes in place, you don't have healthy financials, you're you're gonna be competing against companies that'll potentially wipe you wipe you out. Not wipe you out, but I'm just saying you're not probably not gonna be profitable. You won't have any sales, and you've spent then you have spent time and money getting onto the schedule, and there's no return on your investment. And I think that's my last slide. Q and A. And then I've got if you go past this, Archisa, I think I've got some links that just to let folks know that I had a bunch of yeah. Resources if we keep going. Yeah. TDR. Yeah. I've got some information there, and there should be a couple more. The solicitation, GSA Interact, that'll give you some great that's you can find information about that refresh twenty nine as well as TDR and a bunch of other services. You can do your pricing research there, and then we've got a class that's coming up. That's right. Okay. That was a lot. Maybe you should've done this in two webinars. But I think so. But I know we've got some questions. And if you don't mind staying on another five minutes, I can Yeah. So I'm here. Go through that. So I'm gonna start from one of the first ones. There's a specific person who's having an issue with the PPA, but I think that person should just reach out directly to you. Okay. There's another question that you mentioned if you're already on the schedule, all you have to do is navigate to assess modes to make sure we are in compliance. Can you please elaborate on this to make it clear what we need to do and how to do? Maybe attending a For existing schedule holders, you should be getting emails from GSA in regards to GSA initiated modifications, and you just go on to the to the GSA platform, to accept those. Yes. I know. It's pretty simple, actually. Yeah. As a small business, is there any benefit of subcontracting to a large company rather than having our own schedule? I think that's a business decision, a market research decision. But Yeah. Market research. Look at the pricing of the large companies within the special item number. Yeah. Use the data to make those decisions. It's hard to kinda give blanket answers. Every decision in government contracting is really GSA or not, just in general, is really gonna be based on your company and, you know, where you are in the process. Are you do you have processes in place even just a bid, no bid decision? Do you have labor categories? Do have healthy financials? Do you have you know, where are you in the process? What do your relationships look like? Right. There was another question. Can you update pricing more frequently than twelve months? No. So well, to there's various ways that once you get on as you're getting onto the schedule, you're either using commercial published price list, and, typically, you're gonna see that for products. You know? Product catalogs are updated, let's say, January first of every year. And so let's say you get onto the schedule and it's, you know, August twelfth. That's your effective date of your GSA catalog. So August twelfth of next year, you can then had you gone that route with a commercial price list, yes, you can then make a modification saying that, hey. Our commercial prices went up by x percent. We're proposing, you know, y percent increase. And you may or may not get it. It just depends on your negotiation with GSA, and they're gonna, again, conduct that litmus test to say, what do the other vendors look like that are on the schedule? Has their pricing changed? TDR will also impact this because they'll be able to then go back and look at the pricing, that's been charged, through the schedule and and elsewhere for those same services or products. Right. Now if you've gone the other routes of using market rates, then typically, again, you've used something like the Department of Labor, table five, Bureau of Labor Statistics, last three periods, average, which is a pretty common way to increase your prices and have that percentage. Like I mentioned, I think right now, it's about three point four. Again, using the last three periods, that's specifically for professional services. Okay. There was another question. I thought GSA was going towards best value versus lowest price. Thoughts on that? Yeah. I would the TDRs, yeah, pushing things more to value, but within similar, we'll say, like, kind of price bands. Look. Like, there's more there's more we'll say it's more labor intensive now for the vendors to go in and and populate the TDR data fields on pricing. So I would say just review the in the interest of time, review those links on Yeah. On TDR. Do you have a guide by any chance, Jennifer, for all the acronyms on your website? Someone was asking for a guide on all the acronyms used. Don't know. You know, I knew a guy years ago that was putting together not just GS, but all the governments. I remember. Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to remember. Do a search, I think, if you do a search government acronyms. I know there's another company that's put out something or had one. The other question is, is there good training on how to navigate the scheduled sales query? Do you do that training, Jennifer? Oh, that's a tough one. I have a colleague that does. So if anyone needs help on that, happy to To put you in touch. Okay. Yep. And then I think the final question that I have is is there another question? No. Question is, would you recommend your class for contractors already on the schedule? I just took over managing our schedule. No. This the class is to help companies get on to the schedule. Okay. So but we can if someone's on the schedule and they need help with compliance and back office reporting, we can assist. Perfect. And someone did post a link to common acronyms on GSAs. Great. Thank you for doing that, Kelly. And someone else needs help on Sales Query, so I think if they reach out directly to you, they should you would let put them in touch with your colleague. And for everyone, these are our contact. Thank you. I think I don't have any more questions. Great. Thanks so so much. Yes. Thank you. Thanks to GovSpend. Thanks, Archisa. And I know I probably went kinda fast, but in an hour, was just trying to cover as much as possible. Everyone will get the slides and the recording. And Yes. Please feel free to contact us directly if you've got questions. Again, appreciate everybody's time. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.