Week 2: Resources And Mentors

Why hello, I didn’t see you there. If you’re reading this that means you have once again stumbled into my blog, congratulations. I wasn’t able to post last week due to some technical difficulties with the blog, but all is in order now and I’m ready to continue.

In recent years, the U.S. government has significantly increased its spending on contracts with private companies. The resulting government contracting market has become very lucrative for businesses of all sizes. However, navigating the complexities of government contracting can be expensive and time consuming, especially for those new to the field. Fortunately, there are many government websites and resources publicly available that provide valuable information and data about government contracting. Since my last post, I’ve explored some of these resources that can help businesses navigate the government contracting landscape and find opportunities to grow. These resources can provide both small businesses and established contractors with the information they need to succeed.

Since my last post, I’ve been learning about and working with multiple public government contracting resources with varying success. The primary three I’ve been using are sam.gov, usaspending.gov, and d2d.gsa.gov. At first, I was concerned the archaic nature of some of these resources would stand as a major roadblock in my research. Putting aside sam.gov’s obtuse and unintuitive structure for both finding, viewing, and then cohesively organizing information, some of the sites I was able to find were borderline archaic, like fpds.gov, which looks like a website from the ancient era of the 1990s AD (The text in the search bar has to be manually deleted before a search). Thankfully, I eventually landed on usaspending.gov and d2d.gsa.gov, which are much more user-friendly. They come with extremely helpful graphical representations and sorting methods for their data. While sam.gov isn’t as convenient, I will still be using it in combination with the previously mentioned two, as each one may have information or sort by criteria the other two don’t.

Another topic I briefly researched was the SBA (small business administration) mentorship program. This is a program where small businesses are provided with experts in the field of contracting and given guidance and help them secure deals with much larger corporations. For example, they offer incentives for larger companies to hire smaller businesses for projects that envelop a large variety of fields. While this system can be great for small businesses, some criticize it because it gives larger businesses more control over the smaller ones, and lets them keep them from growing to their full potential and becoming a proper competitor. In this blogger’s opinion, I believed they’d probably be doing that anyway, so giving the smaller businesses a bonus for it can’t hurt anyone.

That’s all for this week, until my next post I’ll be looking further into these mentorship programs, as well as beginning to work with the resources mentioned earlier. I’ll see you all then!