While I was out networking. There was a procurement officer, in attendance. She told the entire audience…
We do not have enough minority contractors meeting the requirements to win our contracts.
When you bid and you don’t win a contract, you’ll ask for a debriefing. Here’s what you’d probably hear.
You don’t meet the requirements.
Have you heard that? You’re probably thinking it’s just you, but it is not.
Apparently, if you have this procurement officer standing up to a group of 100 people saying,
You guys are not meeting the requirements. We have opportunities we want to give to you.
What are they saying? Up your game, so you can meet the requirements. We have contracts we want to give to you.
Too many times, I see contractors bidding contracts they have no shot at winning. I don’t know why, but guess what? Today that ends.
Want to watch a video version of this post? I’ve got you covered!
Here’s what I’m sharing with you if you’re struggling to win contracts and meet the award requirements, man up and try this. What you’re doing isn’t working, so just man up, and do something different.
Overcome Requirement Hurdles
Let’s talk about how to overcome the requirement hurdle when bidding contracts.
Stop shying away from teaming arrangements, partnerships, and joint venture arrangements. If you don’t have the capacity to meet the requirements on your own, you’re in this to win, and you’re serious about it, how else are you going to do it?
Stop thinking competition and think collaboration. You can team on projects. You don’t have to give away any of your business ownership to make it happen either. It would be just you and another company coming together to go after a project together. If the other company already has a project and you’re going to perform it together, you’ll have the opportunity to make some money and increase your past performance.
Partnering On Projects
The beauty in partnering on a project with another company for you especially if you’re trying to build past performance and need to increase your capacity is the ability to tap into their resources.
Manpower
Your partner may have more manpower and employees. They have the cash flow that you don’t have so they can float the project until the project can float itself. Your partner has the cash flow to put up for mobilizing and paying the weekly payroll until you start receiving payments on the project.
Lines Of Credit
Your partner may have lines of credit. If you’re in construction supplies or equipment that you may either purchase or rent are usually needed. If they don’t have lines of credit and they have good credit to where they can go out and get the lines of credit to deliver on the project that’s also helpful. I’m talking about places like Home Depot, Lowe’s, whatever supply stories are in your area and equipment rental places.
Increase Capacity
If you’re just starting out, and you’re trying to increase your capacity, you don’t have a lot of experience, well, this is a great way to build experience as well. Until you have enough experience of your own, you get to tap into other companies experience, your partner. What a great way to quickly increase your experience and be able to bid projects you’d otherwise not meet the requirements.
Skilled People
You also get to add skilled people. If you’re just starting out, it’s probably just you working in your business. If you’re lucky you may have one other person, yet to perform on projects you could use more skilled workers to deliver a successful project.
Don’t Let Your Back Office Prevent The Success In Your Front Office
I always so, don’t let your back office prevent the success in your front office. If you need help in your back office, you may have to outsource the work. If you’re just starting out, definitely look for a virtual project manager. You could look for a virtual assistant, but you’ll be amazed at how many people that’s out there who work virtually. Your virtual support could help you with the paperwork while you’re out doing the actual work in the field.
Having Employees Not Required
You don’t necessarily have to go out and hire an employee, where you have to pay workers comp, insurance, and payroll taxes. When you hire an independent contractor, you don’t carry all those extra costs, which will help your bottom line profits, in a good way.
You could add an administrative coordinator to do the paperwork or a project coordinator. A superintendent, a project manager, or tradesmen would be helpful in the field and you’d be adding their experience to your project. Did you know that? Think about those that you could bring on to do the task that you don’t know how to do, depending on what the project requires.
What a great resource to have to increase your capacity and ability to successfully deliver a project.
Meet The Award Requirements
You can meet the requirements by teaming with another company so that you can benefit from their resources. You can add to your team personally, your business team, and not in the sense that you necessarily have to hire employees, just depending on what position they’re holding, but getting the help that you need to be successful and meet the requirements.
When you’re bidding a project, the decision makers are looking at your business as a whole to see if you’re even able to deliver at that level that they’re going to require you to. A lot of times, if it’s just you, the answer is probably no, which means we need to work on your proposal and build up your team.
Take This With You…
Here’s the take away here… I’ve just shared with you ways that you can increase your capacity and meet the requirements for projects: teaming and outsourcing, but always, always, always be looking for resources, not just monetary, but people as well.
Increase Resources
Always be looking for resources, whether it’s people, money, equipment, you may need to build a relationship with an equipment rental company so that when you need to use them you know that you can get that line of credit to get the equipment, as well as experienced people to help you deliver on your projects. So, always be building your database.
Find The Missing Pieces
Have deficiencies within your business?
- The only way to fill those deficiencies is you have to know what the deficiencies are.
You have to know what those missing pieces are and then you have to know how to fill them.
Contact Records Management
You can get you a CRM, which is a contact records management system like a Pipedrive. Pipedrive let you take notes inside the contact. Streak is another CRM and Insightly. Some are free. Some are not.
You can search CRMs and they’ll pop up. Pick a CRM to use and then start building your list with the resources that you need. Start building those relationships so that it’s readily available when you need them.
Going At Contracting Alone
If you need some help. You’re ready to increase your capacity. You’re ready to scale. You’re ready to grow. You’re ready to enter a new market, maybe it’s government contracting, and you need some help with your business, definitely check me out over at https://feliciastreeter.com/nlc, and learn how I can help you.
