Orbital Prime (Podcast Transcript)

                   [01:12] Richard C. Howard: Hey, guys, Richard here with government sales momentum podcast. Hey, if you want to have a consultation with us, you can go to dodcontract.com, fill out the consultation form. It's free. We'll do a 30 minutes consult with you to talk about your approach to the federal marketplace. But moving on to today's topic. Now today is all about a SIBR phase one that just came out, and this one is specific to space. So if your company doesn't have technologies that focus on innovative ways to do things in space and there's something very specific we're going to talk about, this is probably not you. You can go maybe review one of our older episodes. But this one is interesting because it's a SPACEWERX SIBR phase, one release that came out a few days back. And what this has to do with is it's called Orbital Prime and they're looking for a phase one silver. So for this one, it's going to be worth up to $250,000. They're going to be looking at making the awards next year. And they are trying to leverage commercial on orbiting servicing technology. Now what does that mean? So there's basically three tracks that they're interested in and again, the way zippers work is if you have a technology that's new or you're working on something, you're not seeing solicitations for it because it's new or because maybe you need investment to continue to build that technology. Or maybe it's a commercial off the shelf technology that needs to be modified for military use is a great program for you.

                   Now, the three kind of areas that they're looking for from this separate submission are on Orbit, Object Approach, Acquisition and Docking, and Object Servicing. So if you have something that fits within one of those buckets, where do you go next? Right. Well, certainly you can Google Space works in Orbital Prime, but really what you're going to have to do, especially when we're talking about submitting one of these, is you're going to go to a website called DSIP, the Defense SIBR STDR Innovation Portal. Now, you're going to have to create an account eventually, because to submit these, you need a DCIP account. And by the way, whenever you're submitting an SBAR STI through the DSIP portal, this portal has a habit of crashing. So you want to make sure that you're doing it a couple of days beforehand so you're not scrambling a couple of hours before it's due, only to realize you're not going to be able to make a submission because the whole website crashed. But if you go there and I'm going to navigate through it now just to kind of show you or talk you through what you're going to look at. But in the right hand corner, you're going to see the open topics right and right now, and today it's almost Thanksgiving of 2021. So this is time sensitive, but one of the blocks in there says AF, which stands for F or X 21 Point S CISO Commercial Solutions Opening, and it tells you when it closes. And right now, as of today, we have 71 days and 2 hours, twelve minutes and 43 seconds to get your submissions in. And if you click on it, you can go to topics and then it's going to give you a whole bunch of information about what they're looking for. It's going to talk about keywords. It's going to give you available documents that you can download and then a description for this one, it talks about the Space Force and some of the things that they're looking for. It goes through Itower. And for this one, this topic area is restricted under the international Traffic and Arms regulation. Itah, by the way, is a whole subject matter that we could talk about for days and days and really not only can have monetary repercussions if you get it wrong, but can also have legal repercussions. And so whenever you're dealing with Itah, you want to have a lawyer start looking at exactly what you're signing up for. But this is not about Itah today. We're talking about the Space Works phase one. SBIR. When you go down here and you look at the objective, and I'm going to read it to you guys, this is an open topic for partnership with Space Works and AFRL. It says the Phase 1 may be awarded for a maximum period of four months, including three months technical performance and one month for reporting at a maximum of $250,000.

                      Baseline phase two efforts can be awarded for a maximum period of 15 months and value up to 1.5 million. The objective is to explore innovative defense related, dual purpose technologies related to on orbit servicing. As I talked about assembly and manufacturing, it talks about growing the Space Force industrial base. So there's a lot of interesting information in here but phase one and they're all a little bit different. This is why you need to go into the document and read through it. Typically phase one is a study, a feasibility study. You're talking about concepts, how you can help the government. I often tell companies that not only is this a great way to get on contract quickly and get some past performance, you're almost getting paid to do business development, right? So yes, there's going to be some type of study document, usually not prototyping of any kind. Usually the dollar amount is not high enough so you're going to owe something because of this. But typically just by virtue of being in the silver program, you're going to start being introduced to people that can sponsor you.

                     What you really want to get to is the phase two. That's where a little bit more money is at play and we're actually usually making the modifications, the prototyping. Maybe you're running a test bed for the technology that you're working on in phase two. When you graduate from phase two, that can have a lot of benefits and really help you as far as your contracting with the government for larger contracts. Now companies struggle in this area because I think that not only do companies not really understand what being a phase two graduate means, but a lot of the contracting officers don't understand it either. So this is where you have to do some educating. And we put a one pager together walking through contracting officers saying, hey, this company graduated from phase two and what this means is it legally gives you the ability to give them a sole source contract and it doesn't even have to be specific to it doesn't have to be like the next logical step necessarily of the phase two. And there's a lot of legalese and some jargon you'd have to have to read through there. But it really opens the door because trust me, getting a sole source contract to a company is a major effort for your program managers, your contracting officers, your finance people, because you have to justify to the government and usually if we're talking about the Department of Defense, sometimes up to generals, that the company you want to award to. Nobody else can do that.

                   There is a legal reason that we don't have to compete and that is a huge lift and frankly, typically is not something that when I was in the government, something that we would want to do. Typically we would compete as usual or we would figure out a way to get a company on contract other than that. But those were reserved for very rare opportunities where we knew we had locks on case for a sole source contract. But the Silver phase three really opens things up. But for these purposes, just know. Hey, if you have a technology and it fits one of the buckets that we talked about today. The super phase one could be a great way to get on contract quick and get some funding to start talking about what a prototype or some of the efforts that you could actually work through with the government. Now, ultimately, where are they going with this? It's a three phase program, and they're looking to culminate in 2024. So potentially on orbit demonstrations, this can change over the years, but that's kind of the synopsis of what we're looking at now. So don't hesitate to reach out. Hopefully that helps you provided some value. We're testing out just kind of providing you guys with information on upcoming opportunities and seeing how that resonates with the community. And if it does, we'll keep doing it. If it doesn't, we'll go back to more strategy and tactics, things that aren't exactly time sensitive.

                     Speaking of time sensitive, you probably want to know exactly when this is due. So this closes February 3, 2022. So you have a few months, but this is something that you want to work at. And by the way, there are a lot of strategies at winning a phase one. Typically, you don't need a sponsor, and I haven't read through this to see if this is asking for it probably isn't. But if you do have a government sponsor, that could increase the odds of you winning a phase one. Now, usually phase two, you have to have somebody sponsoring you on the government side. In phase one, you don't.

                     [10:01] Richard C. Howard: Great talking to you guys again, and subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. It's very much appreciated. If you're interested in selling products and services to the Department of Defense, I have something for you that you're not going to find anywhere else in the world. The team and I created a program that takes everything you need to win defense contracts and put it into one place. Up until now, only large defense companies and a small amount of people in the know have had access to how products and services are really sold to the Department of Defense. I've taken all of that information and put it in a step-by-step training module that shows you how to consistently sell to the US. Military. If you join our membership, not only do you get the model, but you get weekly sessions with former DOD acquisitions officers for training guidance to answer your questions, and a community of like minded business owners that want to partner on different opportunities to bid for subcontracting and teaming, or just to discuss general strategy on how to sell to the DOD. You have access to every course I've created, every coaching session I've ever recorded, and every interview with an acquisition professional that I've ever conducted. And we cover topics that range from defense sales planning and competitor analysis to SBIR and STTR, foreign military sales. The list goes on. Go to Dodcontract.com if you are interested and I would love to see you in the membership. Thanks.

If you enjoyed this episode, check out also Project Convergence and learn how this is an opportunity for companies that have technologies that could enable JADC2 to get that in front of the right people at the army.