Graphic Designers Selling to the US Army? (Podcast Transcript)

                         [00:10] Richard C. Howard : Hey guys, Ricky here with DoD contract academy at Dodcontract.com. And today's topic is graphic design services. And does the US. Government buy them? So graphic design can cover are a lot of different things. I'm going to read to you just some snippets of what the government would consider falling under this kind of graphic designed category. So this would be planning, designing, managing the production of visual communication, conveying specific messages, clarifying information, project visual identities. The services can include printed materials, packaging, advertising, signage, corporate identification. It can be putting together logos. It could be commercial artists generating drawings. Some of the different things that are listed are commercial. Illustrators, I mentioned logo design services essentially taking whatever the government organization you're working with, taking their concept and designing something graphically for that. So obviously, this could be a wide range of services. But I did want to bring this up because I know there's a lot of you out there that are involved with this type of business.

                         Graphic design may be targeted at commercial and unaware that the government is actually buying these services as well. Now, it's not a ton. This isn't a billion dollar industry, but just taking a snapshot. Okay. And again, there's going to be more of these services out there that are rolled up in different contracts. But just what I'm looking at now through some of the research tools I use is about 137,000,000 spent in graphic design services over the past couple of years. Believe it or not, the army is actually the largest spender in this category. So they spent about $35 million, followed by Health and Human Services at 14 million and Missile Defense Agency at 14 million. Now most of the departments and agencies and offices that fall under the federal government are going to fall under here in various levels of spending. When I give you guys an overview, I might mention the top two or three spenders. It's not going to add up to the total amount spent for that. I'd have to list everybody, right? Just as an example, the US. Commission of Fine Arts spent $9,000 on contract that was focused on graphic design services.

                         Now some of the things that we might be interested in are what do some of these contracts look like. And I'm looking at things that are designing graphics for an annual report, designing exhibits. A lot of exhibits actually are popping up here. Here's another one, interpretive exhibit for $82,000. When was this awarded? And again, I'm just kind of looking through different contracts right now with you to give you an idea of what we're seeing, what you can expect to make. What are these individual contracts for? And by the way, we also want to know how are they awarded? That's one of those things that is going to help us design how we're actually going to sell to the government. Now, taking a look at some of these here. So this one I just mentioned for 82 grand. This is for the Fish and Wildlife Service, and sorry about that. And this is under photo, map, print publications. So there's a product service category that covers that. And I'm not looking under that product service category, but that just popped up for this. So that can give us a little bit of an idea as to what they might have been putting together. So they might have been putting together a pamphlet or a brochure or something for that agency.

                         Taking a look at maybe some of the others that I'm finding here. Let's see here. I'm going to click on one of the exhibits. This was Department of Interior. And let's see if we can find out how much was awarded here. I get a variety of awards under this one. This is designing exhibits for a historical park. One delivery order on this was for $525,000 2019. I can see a couple more. Looks like one was for $110,000. So there's certainly some money here to be made. Now, that's just sampling of some of the things here, right? But I'm trying to in some of these episodes, give you some thoughts on what the government buys and letting you know that it is more than just weapons. And I wanted to give some examples of that. Now, how do they buy? We kind of talked about who are going to be the top three or so purchasers here, but we want to know some more specifics, right? So if I look at I can break this down and start looking at not only which agencies did the awarding, but I can look at how they awarded them. Were there any set asides? Right? So if I look at extent competed. So this is where I want to know, hey, how are these guys real? Are they full and open competitions? Like, are you bidding against a bunch of other companies for this work? And this is unusual.

                         So when I look through that, I can see that 26%, which is the highest percentage, was not available for competition. That can mean a lot of different things. That can mean potentially a sole Source Award. That can mean that the government just went out and used simplified acquisitions to put someone on contract. Well, there were also simplified acquisitions categories. And again, these are not all encompassing, right. But this just gives you an idea of what they're doing. I see. Next, 25.6% full and open competition. So that's about $35 million. That means that you'd see the Solicitation come over Sam Gov, and you put a bid on it. We can see that about 15% was not competed under SAP, which SAP is simplified acquisitions procedures. Another 11% were competed under simplified acquisitions procedures. And then we see.

                         The bottom line here is only about 25% of these were full and open competition, and the rest were either simplified acquisitions not available for competition, sole Source awards, or competed after a set aside was put out like, hey, we're only going to compete this among women owned small businesses. So this is a great place for a small business to sell and avoid competition and sell directly to the government. So the key here is really just knowing, hey, who's doing the buying? So you got to do some research, right? So you're going to want to dig in a little bit deeper and say, okay, so within the army, who's actually going to be doing the buying here and letting them know that you exist, right? Are you registered to sell to the government? Is what you specialize in what they are actually looking for as far as purchasing is concerned? Now, I would imagine that a lot of the graphic design services could be done from anywhere. Because unless it's a services contract where you are actually providing a government, a graphic designer at a military base or something like that, a couple of other things we can look at is what were the set asides used when they initially put the Solicitations out? Most of them don't have a solicitide that was used. So about 80, 62% of them know set aside, but for the rest they were, and the leader of that is Eight A.

                         So and again, we should do, you know, an episode that is just about Eight A, because that set aside can be powerful for you as far as receiving sole source contracts. There's language within the fire that allows the government to award Eight A certified companies a contract without competing it. And that anytime you can make it easier for the government to buy from you, that is one of your objectives. Absolutely. And the Eight A, if you want to see if you qualify for that, you can go to the Small Business Association SBA website, check out what the criteria is for sole source. You could just Google SBA Eight and it's going to pop up and you might be surprised. You'd be surprised how many companies actually qualify for this. And you're not eight a forever. You're Eight A for a set number of years. But a lot of companies have built a huge government contracting presence using eight, and then they graduate and a lot of them become bigger companies just with the amount of federal contracts they're bringing in. And again, it looks like the rest of the set asides are there to a certain extent, but meaning Sdvosp woman owned, but the leader without question is Eight A. In fact, Eight A is actually higher than just a total small business set aside. So this is an interesting one. This is not typically how we see the government buying things.

                         We usually see openly competed being the largest majority of the contracts. We're not seeing that here. So there's a lot of opportunity, it looks like, here, for graphic design services. One thing I wanted to take a look at is how much of this went through GSA. And again, I'm using a paid for tool. I use a couple of different tools here. I'm not seeing enough of this going through GSA to warrant needing a schedule for this, which is another good thing, right? So probably maybe 115 percent of these going through GSA. So this is ripe for going in there, using simplified acquisitions, selling direct to the government, maybe even using eight if you're an eight, a certified business. So hopefully this was beneficial for you guys. Check out Dodcontract.com if you want some free training. You want to check out more about what we are doing. And hey, if you like this episode, make sure that you leave a review that helps us keep going in the ratings. It helps us get better guests on the podcast. I appreciate everybody listening, and I hear from a lot of you. Feel free to send me a note if you want to schedule something or if you just have a request for an episode. We can do an episode on the topic of your choice. All right, we'll see you next time.

If you enjoyed this episode, you can also check out Cleaning up the Government Mess for $16 Billion Dollars!! where we took some advice from #MikeRowe and look at what the Fed is spending on jobs most of us just don't want to do! He famously talks about doing hard jobs that are in high demand vs following your "passion". This episode focuses on the "Dirty Jobs" that the US government pays big bucks for!!