Government Market

For Professional Services Firms

Provided by Enlightened GFS Software

The current status of our economy has forced many firms to reevaluate their position in respect to the local, state and federal markets. Previously considered "too tough a nut to crack" by some marketing departments, government agencies have fast become the only player in town able to provide opportunities for work. With virtually no private sector projects available and the prospect of recovery still far off in the future, now is a great time to consider throwing your firm’s hat in the ring on some of those lucrative government contracts.

There are a variety of tools available via the web to help you find projects. FedBizOps is the standard as far as federal work is concerned. Another approach is to use commercial online products like GovernmentBids or BidNet which will automatically notify you of opportunities for a small monthly fee. Additionally, many agencies list and mange their jobs on their own web sites.

Once you find a project of interest there is typically a qualification process that agencies have in place based on the Brooks Act of 1972. By submitting the “required information” your firm will be evaluated by the agency based on a variety of criteria with the ultimate goal of generating a short-list of the best-qualified companies for that project. Your goal is to get on that short list! Once on that list, your firm is typically called in for an interview for a presentation (think dog and pony) to the selection committee might also be necessary.

In the past the true burden of going after government work in the first place was the time it takes to locate, organize and generate the required forms and information for the submittal itself. There is cost involved in doing all that and if you don’t have all your ducks in a row when generating the submittal, that cost can be very high indeed, a fact that keeps many firms out of the market.

Government Forms Software (GFS) is a tool used by many firms to help ease the burden of generating the information (including the Standard Form 330) required for government work by providing a robust marketing database and form generation tool. With the ability to hold relevant project history along with personnel and firm experience, boilerplate marketing material, and true collaboration between users (and even firms as both primes and subs), GFS has helped many companies take their first step into the government market.

With the prospect of all agencies moving to an electronic submittal process (using the Standard Form 330) the notion of government work being too difficult to pursue may become a distant memory. The availability and user-friendliness of tools like GFS will bolster your firm’s marketing capabilities and open doors that may have once been locked by prohibitive costs or apprehension and fear of bureaucracy.

Information from your Protrax or Portfolio software can import into GFS.