Teachers Selling To The US Military! (Podcast Transcript)

                         [00:16] Richard C. Howard: Hey guys, Ricky here with the Dodcontract Academy podcast. Or if you're watching live on Facebook, we also have some videos going out to LinkedIn and some other areas. So wherever you are picking this up, you've tuned into the right place to learn about selling products and services to the US military and other government agencies. As you're aware, US government is the single biggest purchaser of goods and services in the world and most small businesses just aren't selling to them. So especially if you're a freelancer or you have a little side gig going on, this may be a good episode for you because I'm going to start talking about instruction and some of those passion projects that people have.

                         So for instance, teaching yoga or Tai chi, there are some areas that most people would never suspect that the US military in particular are spending a lot of money in. We're going to go over some of those areas today. So what I'm going to do, especially if you are watching Live right now, we can start talking about what that looks like, how much they actually spending. Just so you have a big picture view, right? So first, less than 1% of all small businesses actually sell anything to the US government. Despite the fact they are mandated to buy from small businesses. 23% and higher of all of their contract spending goes to small businesses. A lot of people are unaware of that. And so today we are going to look at, we call it a NAICS code, a North American Industry Classification code. And today's code is 61169 nine. You can Google it if you feel like you need to. And so this covers all other schools and instructions. So what does that mean? I'm just going to read some of the examples of the types of services the government's buying that falls under this NAICS code. Again, this is broad. This covers a lot of different things that aren't going to be mentioned here. This is just to give you some detail, I'm going to read this verbatim.

                         So under this, the US industry establishment is primarily engaged in offering instruction to Bible schools. Bridge and other card game instruction is listed in there. Charm schools, lifeguard training. I mean, you can't make this up guys so this is all government agencies. Public speaking training, self defense, CPR, Dictation school, first aid instruction, speed reading instruction, survival training instruction, yoga instruction. And that's just a that's the tip of the iceberg. That's just an example of some different types of instructions that the government is buying here. So what are we talking about as far as money is concerned? How much are they spending? So we always talk about if it's a small business that's thinking about selling to the government, I want to know, big picture, is the government buying what you sell? Then I want to get an idea of who's actually doing the purchases. That's going to give me an idea of who my target client is.

So government and military sales, we focus at DOD Contract Academy on selling to the Department of Defense, although what we're telling you can apply to all of the federal agencies. And we make it very simple on the website, if you go to Dodcontract.com, we have an academy program there where our students and our clients will go through that and learn step by step, everything from registering to the government all the way to closing those initial contracts and increasing the contract. So if you've been in a while, you're just looking to increase what you're doing, it's also a good place for you. So back to this NAICS code, $921.9 million, according to the numbers I'm looking at right now, spent in other instructions, some of the things we just talked about, that's almost a billion dollars over the past three years spent by the federal government on a lot of different types of instructions, services, in person training. So first, we know that the spending is out there.

                         What are some of the next things I like to look at? I want to know, in order, who's really doing that spending, right? So at the top of the list, and again, this is why I like to focus on the military. I was a military acquisitions officer. So this is where my bread and butter is. And it's also something I'm passionate about, because if you're selling to the military, you're also helping our men and women in uniform. And remember, the military is about people. And the bases that we have all around the world are like little mini cities. That's why everything you could think of technically would have to be purchased by the Department of Defense. So the DOD spent $458,000,000 in instruction purchases over the past three years. So that's, again, almost half a billion dollars, followed by Special Operations Command, which also technically falls under the DOD. Just the website I'm using right now classifies these things, that's another hundred and 9 million. So we're already up over $600 million spent by the DOD. And guess who that's followed by? The Navy and the Air Force. Navy, 96 million. Air Force, 65 million. So again, another over another 100 million. So most of this is going through the department of Defense, US Military. And then there's some stuff with the Department of State and Homeland Security.

                         A lot of the Departments of State purchases we see would be for overseas locations and a lot of the embassies and whatnot. So after I look at who's actually doing the spending, and I'm going to show you, especially for those that are logging in and watching this live, we can show you how we walk through and take a look at some of these numbers. But I like to take a look at who's winning. I like to look at how these were competed, right, because if you're listening to this, you're probably a small business. So I like to know, hey, what is the small business makeup of some of these and how are they competed? So first I'm looking at, hey, is this full and open competition? So of all of the purchases, the almost billion dollars of purchases over the past couple of years, about half of these were full and open competition, which means that this is probably going to come out on something like Sam.gov, which we'll take a look at here in a minute. And there's no restrictions, meaning if it's other than full and open, usually it could either be a Sole Source Award, meaning no competition to a company. It could be a Simplified acquisitions purchase, usually to a small business, always to a small business if it's Simplified Acquisitions, or it could be just set aside. For instance, woman owns small business service, disabled, veteran owned small business. So that means it could still be competed.

                         But now if you're not registered as a woman owned small business, you're not going to be able to compete on that. And of course we talk a lot about how you can influence the government's decision to set something aside. And that as a business, if you're a woman-owned small business, that can be very profitable for you if you can eliminate every other company out there that doesn't have that certification we have about these opportunities were full and open after excluding different sources. So that could fall into the category we just talked about. And then 10% competed under SAP, another 7% not available for competition, not competed. So let's see. Three, eight, about 15. So 25% of these either weren't competed at all or were just awarded to a small business. So that's interesting to know going in, because we know that there's going to be a lot of opportunity here for a small business to go in and either try to win a Sole Source Award, try to do a Simplified acquisition. We're big on relation based selling, so there are a lot of ways to find these opportunities. Now, what I'm going to do now, I'm going to share my screen with you here and let's see. Okay, so this is a free website, this is a government website, USAspending.gov, and you can use this website to track spending on your own. So if I am going to go into, let's see here, Advanced Search, I'm just going to show you how I did this here. And now I clicked advanced search.

                         If you're listening on the podcast award, search is a drop down menu, advanced Search. And I'm going over here. The last podcast, I also covered this, but I am going to click. Now this is a different website than I used to give you the numbers, but going to be pretty similar. I like to look at the past three years of spending. It's 22, 21, 20. This is October of calendar year 22. Right now that I'm coming to you. But the fiscal year for the government ends at the end of September, begins October 1. So we're technically in fiscal year 23 for the entire federal government. And I just clicked back here. So by the way, there's also a lag in reporting. So the 22 numbers aren't going to be in. Nothing has happened in 23 really yet here it's the first week, so I'm sure there's a few things, but usually at least a 90 day lag before we see anything. I'm going to click 2019 also. So 2019, FY 20, FY 21, 22 and I click 23. But I don't expect much to pop up for that. But it's going to give me all the spending for those years. The next thing I'm going to do is go down to North American Industry Classification code and the NAICS code. We decided on 61169 nine because we are looking at all their schools and instruction.

                         Of course, there are you can see if you're following this online, there are other codes above that which will give you some different options. So I'm going to click on that one and I'm going to click Search and I'm going to see what we come up with. First thing it's doing is it's showing me a list of all of the contracts that have been awarded over the past couple of years. So it has 2587 contracts that were awarded. Now there's four tabs next to this time map and categories. Depending on what you're interested in, you may have a service that you only offer in Massachusetts or Texas or wherever you're from. You may be interested to see what's being spent each year. So in this one, it's showing 19, $293,000,000 and then I'm going through 2020. It's showing me 21 and then 22 as well. So basically this USA spending is giving me about 293 for 19, 273 million for 2000, and 2241 million for 21 and it showing 176,000,000 for 2022. So you may say to yourself, well, hey, how come that looks like it's trending down? Well, I can tell you that even the 21 numbers are going to increase. I've seen delay in reporting of spending, so that could go up in 22. We just don't have the numbers yet. So we really don't have a good idea of what was spent in 22 in this Mace code yet. We probably won't until I would imagine, January or so and then I'll have a better idea.

                         Map will show you the country and spending by state. And so we could click on let's click Texas. 18 million spent in Texas, 74 million spent in California, a lot in Virginia. But also keep in mind, just because it's showing where the money is being spent doesn't necessarily mean that that's where the work is being performed. Okay? So there's a lot that goes into this. But I will tell you that most people you talk to in the government don't make purchases. It's going to be an acquisition shop, which means that for instance, I worked in an acquisition office in Massachusetts, but we would routinely buy stuff for people in Florida, in Texas and Nebraska. And so there's a lot of purchasing that happens in other states for troops that are going to be located somewhere. And there's actually a recipient location here too. I don't know how accurate it's going to be but you can click on that and then that I would imagine is going to show you the place of performance. Okay, good. So look, I just learned something here myself. So you can click on recipient location. There's a place of performance and recipient location. So you can use both to differentiate and then I like to go to categories. So for the purpose of this and it's showing me the DOD. So this website actually showing me a little bit. This shows 795,000,000 spent by the Department of Defense over the past three years, followed by Homeland Security at 68 million and Department of State of 45. So you can see this isn't true for every category category, but for most Department of Defense is going to lead the charge for the spending, which again is why I like to focus on that. And then you can break it down into sub agencies. And this is actually pretty accurate compared to the last website I was on.

                         So it shows the army being the top purchaser followed by a special operations command, the Navy and the Air Force. So what do you do with that information? You know that they buy what you sell, they spend a lot of money on this particular category. Well the next thing that you could do is you could go to potentially Sam Gov. And I already ran a search here, but Sam.gov is another government website which is where you register your business as well. But it's also where the government has these public solicitations and not just the public ones. Also you can find a lot of things in here. You can listen to past podcasts for things like requests for information, which is where I like to focus. But for the sake of this I just wanted to, you can see I plugged the NAICS code in so if you go to searchandsam.gov and you can type anything in, I used a drop down menu to select contract opportunities and then I just plugged in the NAICS code 61169 nine just to see what's popping up here. And so the first couple of opportunities, the next one, this is training course for hydraulic control valves. Again you can't predict, well I can teach you how to predict some of it, but you'd be surprised at what pops up here as you're looking at different opportunities. You can see this.

                         The next one says it's an intent to sole source a particular type of training. So a lot of times you'll see these type of notifications pop up in Sam.gov where, hey, we've already picked a small business to put on contract. That's what we teach our students to do at dodcontract.com. So if you want to try to find some of these sole source opportunities, such a great place for you to go. Look at this. Yoga and tai chi instructor. So again, I'm in October. So this was due a couple of days ago. No, this was published a couple of days ago. So what happens if I'm just going to click on this for everybody watching at home, just to see here. So this is an opportunity with the VA, the Department of Veterans Affairs. Okay, so this is an award notice. So this is just telling you that, hey, this was awarded to a company, it's going to give you the company down there, it's going to tell us here this was a set aside. So we talked about earlier how you can actually get the government to set aside an opportunity for certain types of businesses. This is set aside for service disabled, veteran owned small businesses and the VA does that a lot.

                         So if you are an Sdvsb or better and own small business, the VA is a good place to start looking at and it gives you the total contract value. So this contract was for $42,624 for yoga and Tai chi instruction. So that's just to give you a little bit of an idea of what you could potentially be making here. And looking at as far as some of these contracts are concerned, there's a lot out there guys, and if you're interested, I'd love to talk to you, go to Dodcontract.com, drop me a line, you can comment on this and I'll do my best to respond to you. And that's all we've got for today. If you have any suggestions, if you would like us to cover something different in a podcast, if you would like us to string something live going through how we find opportunities or influence them, just let us know and we can incorporate that into one of the future episodes. Alright, well, take care. And that's going to be it for today.

If you enjoyed this episode, you can also check out Defense Contracting Opportunity (For Small Businesses) where you can learn why defense & government contracts are an untapped revenue stream for most small businesses.