Woman Owned Small Business (WOSB) Podcast Transcript

                         [01:13] Richard C. Howard: Hey, guys, Ricky Howard here with Government sales Momentum podcast. Thank you for tuning in. This week we have got a great show. We're going to be talking a little bit about the woman on small business certification. And before I get into that, I just want to let you know we have some great stuff coming up. We have some great interviews scheduled to bring to you and we are going to be restructuring our podcast, our website, everything. We have some big plans in the works, all to deliver a better product for you to help small businesses learn how to sell products and services to the US government. So we're going to be a little bit more focused. We have a direction that we want to take this into and I think you're going to really enjoy that.

                         But getting on to our topic of today, so we are going to talk about the woman owned small business certification. Now there are different certifications that you can get and they refer to often as set asides that your small business could be considered as when you're selling to the government so big picture, right? The government requires federal spending to set a certain amount of their contracts aside. For small businesses, it's usually 23%. A lot of them go higher than that. If you look at the agency breakouts, you can see in the last one I saw was for 21. I'm not sure the 22 numbers came out yet, but you could see each year how they do. For instance, I want to say the Department of Defense really did well getting near over 30% in 2021. But that was just for small business in general. So you have the set aside, the small business set aside. So a certain percentage of contracts that will go to small businesses. But within that you have subcategories, right? So you could be a woman owned small business.

                         You could be a service disabled veteran owned small business. Eight, a hub zone. Now, there's lots of different things that you can click when you register your small business and Sam.gov, you could say that you're a minority owned business or veteran owned small business or woman owned small business. There are certain things you can do but to really be considered and we're talking about woman owned small business here. So if you see an RFP request for proposal or an RFQ and it is set aside for Wosb or maybe it's an RFI and they're just asking it's marketing, right, from the government acquisitions team saying, hey, we're trying to see if there are enough women on small businesses that can answer this call. I could put in a proposal and legitimately solve our problems that deliver the product or service they're looking for to be considered woman owned small business. It goes beyond just checking, hey, we're a woman owned small business. Now you used to be able to do that in Sam.gov and that was fine, right? And so this is good. If you are a woman on a small business, if you registered like five years ago and you registered as Wosb, you are no longer considered a Wosb. So there is actually a certification process that you have to go through now to be considered a woman owned small business. And it is not a simple it's not something you're going to do in an hour. I've walked through this process with clients in the past and right now it can take some time. They're going to be going through your business registrations, they're going to be going through your finances, they're going to be going through a lot of documents that you're going to have to find and it's not a quick procedure. And then that's just getting the application done.

                         [04:55] Richard C. Howard: Once you finally get everything that you need to get that application done and submitted, then it could be even another six months before they get back to you. So again, the timelines are always going to change depending on when you are listening to this, but just going to. For instance, the SBA website. So if you go to the Google machine and type in woman owned small business, you're going to find your way to their woman owned small business program, and it will go through the benefits and improvements to the new certification process. So again, if you originally registered as Wosb, you now have to go through the certification process if you want to be considered when you are submitting a proposal for something that's been set aside from Wosb, now it will go through the eligibility requirements and just reading through this.

                         If you're a woman on small business or maybe you're a married couple wondering if, hey, can we qualify for a woman owned small business? First, is you have to meet the SBA size standards for your particular area. Right. So if you're in cyber security or if you're selling office supplies, you're going to have to go and take a look at your NAICS code and then look at the small business size standards per naked code. Usually those are broken down by either how many employees you have or how much revenue you're bringing in each year. Right. Typically we're talking for something like software. I want to say it's upwards of 20 $30 million a year. You'd have to exceed that to not be considered a small business anymore. In some cases, it's employees. If you have fewer than 500 employees, you'd be considered a small business. But that's going to change whether it's a number of employees or a dollar amount. Those numbers change depending on what your Naix code is, what your specialty is, what your business does. So you want to make sure that first you qualify as a small business. Then the next step here in the SBA checklist is that you need to be at least 51% owned, controlled by a woman who is a US citizen. So whether you're a married couple or whether you have multiple owners, it has to be at least 51% owned by a woman who is a US citizen. of directors, do you have what personnel are in your business?

                         [07:21] Richard C. Howard: And next is a woman has to manage the day-to-day operations and also make long-term decisions in regards to the company. I can tell you, just having gone through the application process, there's going to be a lot of questions that talk about who's in charge. Do you have a parent company that owns your business, do you have a board and these are things you're not just going to be able to pencil with that a lot of cases they're looking for official documents that you are going to submit with this now. And again, this is June 2022. As I'm recording this, now there's also, and I'm not talking about this in this podcast, but an economically disadvantaged woman owned small business certification. And that one's going to have requirements that have to do with your net worth, your adjusted income. And then there'll be some similarities about, again, kind of similar to what you would need to qualify as a Wosb. But you can read through all of that on the website. It's something good to go through because I have encountered a few companies that thought they were good to go with the Wosb certification, only to realize that they did it so long ago that now they have to actually go through this kind of Dust certification process.

                         [08:11] Richard C. Howard: Now, is it worth it? Is it worth it for your company to get that certification? Well, I would say yes. Right. But knowing what it means. OK, so typically I can speak from my experience as an acquisition officer, I've never hired a company because they had a particular step side. So I never hired a company because they were service disabled, veteran, own small business or a woman on small business or a small business. What I cared about was, can this company actually solve the problem that I'm trying to solve? Right? So if I need to hire 30 people to provide cyber security services within my squadron over the next three years, I have a service contract that I need, and I need to hire a company that can meet that requirement. Or if I need to develop a technology, maybe make some improvements on a technology, you name what it is. I need a company that can actually make those improvements and has a track record of doing so or maybe has a new solution that can solve my problem set. That's what I care about, right? But the cherry on top is if you have one of these certifications. So what you can do, what you can use this for, is influence, right? So maybe you're in an industry most companies aren't unicorns.

                         Most companies aren't the only company that can do a certain thing. And I'm going to stick with cyber security. And since I started with It, which is a huge area, right, you get a lot of competition, a lot of different companies doing different things, right? And let's say that one of your specialties is vulnerability testing and an RFI goes out, hey, we need to do something involving cyber security and vulnerability testing. You can reply back to that RFI and say, hey, look, we meet all of the parameters, but we're also a woman owned small business, and we know there are other women on small businesses that can meet this requirement more than one, more than just us and we recommend that you set this aside for a Wosb. What that does is eliminate all of your competition. So if you've convinced the program manager, the contracting team, to set this aside for your set aside, you've just now gained a competitive advantage, right, because they know who you are. Because you responded to the RFI, you got them to set this aside for your particular set aside. And now you're not going to be competing with every other company out there, right? Just those that fit within the Wosb. So, again, that's just something to think about, something to consider. You're probably not going to get hired because you have a certification, but you can eliminate a lot of the competition and increase your odds of winning because you have it. And of course, we'll cover different set asides and other podcasts.

                         [11:14] Richard C. Howard: We just wanted to get into that today. If you have any questions, go to Dodcontract.com. You can send us any of your questions there. If you have a topic that you'd like us to cover in one of these podcasts, we'd love to do that for you. Thanks for tuning in and have a great week. I hope you enjoyed this episode of government sales momentum. If you did enjoy the episode, please 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 and 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'll have access to every course I've created, every coaching session I've ever recorded in every interview with an acquisitions 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.

You can also check out our episode on Military Contracts where I I discussed the difference in selling to the Military vs. other Federal organizations.