What Makes a Good Government Marketing Consultant?

What should a small-to-medium sized enterprise (SME) look for, in a government marketing consultant?

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🕵🏽‍♂️Government Contracting Expertise – A qualified marketing and operations consultant for a small business entering government contracting should possess a deep understanding of the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) and the intricate processes involved in government procurement. This includes familiarity with set-aside programs tailored for small businesses, such as the 8(a) Business Development Program, HUBZone, and Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB). The consultant should bring a wealth of experience in navigating the complexities of government contracting, ensuring that the SME can leverage available opportunities and comply with regulatory requirements.

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📊 Market Research and Analysis – An effective consultant must excel in market research to identify and assess viable government contracting opportunities for the SME. This involves a keen understanding of agency needs, upcoming contracts, and a thorough analysis of the competitive landscape – proficiency in conducting competitive analyses, enabling the SME to position itself strategically in the market and increase its chances of securing valuable government contracts.

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📗Proposal Development and Management – The consultant should possess strong writing skills to articulate the SME's capabilities, value proposition, and solutions that meet government requirements. Moreover, expertise in bid management is essential, encompassing the entire bid process from pre-solicitation to post-submission activities. This includes developing win themes, assembling proposal teams, and ensuring the timely and accurate submission of bids.

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⚔️Compliance and Risk Management - A proficient consultant should have a comprehensive understanding of compliance requirements associated with government contracts. This includes expertise in navigating cybersecurity, accounting, and reporting standards. Additionally, the consultant should be skilled in identifying and mitigating risks that may arise during the execution of government contracts, ensuring the SME operates in accordance with all regulations and standards.

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🛠Operational Efficiency and Scalability - The consultant should be adept at evaluating and enhancing internal processes to improve operational efficiency. This involves process improvement skills to streamline operations, implement effective project management tools, and optimize workflows. Furthermore, the consultant should possess a strategic mindset for scalability planning, guiding the SME in preparing for growth and ensuring that operational capacities align with the increasing volume and complexity of government contracts. By focusing on these critical skills, SMEs can position themselves for success in government contracting with the guidance of a knowledgeable and experienced consultant.

With www.Bluedog.net, you can be assured of talent, expertise, and alacrity.

Consulting is About Adding Value - So Do Yourself a Favor and Ease Your Own Pain Points with On-Demand Expertise

Since the late 1980s, “consultant” might be considered a dirty word in the business world. But in actuality, there are plenty of solid reasons to hire a consultant for your next project. With today’s uncertain market conditions, any organization should seek to improve efficiencies and explore new opportunities. For a commercial concern, that means looking for a competitive edge, increasing revenues — and positioning the company to stand out.

A primary benefit consultants can provide is temporary expertise, on demand, as it were. Retaining a consultant on a per project basis limits the financial and operational risks. Of course, if you as the client find value in a consultant’s outputs, you can continue to use their services on a repeat basis. If a project is not brining value to your organization, you need to reconsider. 

But how do you measure this value? Tangible value is usually easy to measure: it often is realized as cost reduction, or an increase in income. Intrinsic value, however, is more complicated. How do you appreciate the impact of a culture and diversity project, or process improvement, or system optimization? Using social sciences methods, many have succeeded in measuring intangibles such as client satisfaction or employee performance. When the benefits of a project correspond to the desired outcome, we can easily say the effort is successful. 

For strategic change, consider why a consultant should be considered a valued member of your team, long-term. Long term success requires careful strategizing: with a plan, you may succeed. Without a plan, you won’t succeed.

Finding and selecting the best consultant suited to specific needs is half the battle in the successful completion of a project. Consider when it make sense to hire outside consultant:

When executives or other decision makers do not have enough expertise or experience in solving certain complex issues.

When many stakeholders are involved and the risk of failure is high, having an outside perspective and coordination can alleviate concern and mitigate risk.

When staff are not trained on solving specific problems, or don’t have available bandwidth to work on special projects outside their routine work.

Often, organizational knowledge is limited to specific  products and service. Consultants bring value in that they often have solved large numbers of problems in different industries. An experienced consultant relieves an organization of many hassles. As a professional, consultants can get to root causes and find avenues of success in the most optimal time. Importantly, this can be at a much lower cost as compared to hiring a full time employee to do the same job. 

Every organization can benefit from improving their performance. And at some point, we all encounter problems outside of existing expertise. An external advisor with specialized expertise can get an organize past a sticking point, find efficiencies in work processes, and open doors to new opportunities.

Small Businesses Need to Know about GSA Professional Services Schedule PSS 99

The Professional Services Schedule is the second largest GSA Schedule after IT70.  It is the combination of 30 unique professional services many of which have few similarities to each other.  Therefore, the reality is the Professional Services Schedule or 00CORP in many ways is the combination of many niche services to form one large inter working grouping.
 
The purpose of combining all these services into one schedule was to reduce the administrative burden for firms that need access to more than one of these unique niches.  We learned that most small businesses utilize on average 3.78 niches or SINs and most large businesses utilize 4.88 SINs.  Consolidation makes sense for ease of access and simplicity of award.

Professional services tend to have high sales volumes even though many of the firms in this grouping are niche players and often smaller than the average federal contractor.  The average small business that holds the Professional Services Schedule conducts over $1MM per year in federal sales.

On PSS, all GSA contracts under $10,000 will be direct no bid awards. (Small Business only)
All contracts under $250,000 will be GSA Small Business Elite Direct Awards. (Small Business only). GSA will break out over $900 million in GSA Prime Vendor Contracts for re-distribution to GSA Small Business Schedule Holders in 2020.

In FY2017, GSA saved taxpayers over 10% of the dollar amount spent through the GSA. This increased efficiency and reduction of administrative burned resulted in $6.8B in savings. GSA enables 15,000 small businesses $1MM plus per year in direct federal contract awards. This means 37% of every dollar spent through the GSA schedule system are with small business —  the highest utilization of small business throughout the federal government.

Read more at: https://gsa.federalschedules.com/industries/gsa-professional-services-schedule-pss/

The GSA PSS Contract only covers the categories detailed below. Certain IT, HR, and energy related services can be offered through PSS, but only to complement the core service offerings.

• Mission Oriented Business Integrated Services (MOBIS) (formerly Schedule 874)
• Professional Engineering Services (PES) (formerly Schedule 871)
• Financial and Business Solutions (FABS) (formerly Schedule 520)
• Advertising and Integrated Marketing (AIMS) (formerly Schedule 541)
• Logistics Worldwide (LOGWORLD) (formerly Schedule 874 V)
• Environmental Services (formerly Schedule 899)
• Language Services (formerly Schedule 738 II)

Services including IT, HR, energy, travel, security, and healthcare staffing can be offered under different GSA Schedules.

US Department of Defense JEDI cloud contract under fire from Oracle

From The Register:

Ahead of its first day in a U.S. federal claims court in Washington DC, Oracle has outlined its position against the Pentagon's award of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract to Amazon Web Services. Big Red's lengthy filing questions the basis of Uncle Sam's procurement procedure as well as Amazon's hiring of senior Department of Defense staff involved in that procurement process. Oracle's first day in court is set for 10 July. The JEDI deal could be worth up to $10 billion over 10 years. The Department of Defense handed the contract to AWS after deciding that only Amazon and Microsoft could meet the minimum security standards required in time. 

Oracle's filing said that U.S. "warfighters and taxpayers have a vested interest in obtaining the best services through lawful, competitive means... Instead, DoD (with AWS's help) has delivered a conflict-ridden mess in which hundreds of contractors expressed an interest in JEDI, over 60 responded to requests for information, yet only the two largest global cloud providers can clear the qualification gates." The company said giving JEDI, with its "near constant technology refresh requirements", to just one company was in breach of procurement rules. It accused the DoD of gaming the metrics used in the process to restrict competition for the contract. Oracle also accused Amazon of breaking the rules by hiring two senior DoD staff, Deap Ubhi and Anthony DeMartino, who were involved in the JEDI procurement process. Ubhi is described as "lead PM." A third name is redacted in the publicly released filing.

End of The Jasons? Who Will Lead if this brain trust is disbanded?

The Department of Defense says is ending a decades-long, open-ended agreement with a legacy science advisory board, a move that has set off alarm bells for some analysts. But the department has not ruled out relying on that office for more information in the future.

The Jasons — an important advisory committee that assessed many difficult issues. Named for Jason of the Argonauts, luminaries on this panel answered (in secret) pressing questions the government had, such as:  Are there UFO? No. Should we nuke Vietnam? Also, no. What is Quantum Computing? Using the spin of quarks like bits. All answered in the 1960s!

As a Federally Funded Research Bureau (FFRB), MITRE doesn’t implement ideas, only the non-profit only consults. After WWII, the government decided it would not be caught with its pants down again (having been severely understaffed after the Depression, at the start of the war). MITRE and other FFRBs are funded as a percent of the total budget — MITRE isn’t taking work from contractors, it is providing neutral oversight and guidance. 

Read more about the Jason at 

https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2019/04/11/pentagon-confirms-it-is-ending-the-jason-advisory-contract-but-groups-work-may-continue/