The SBA recently released their 2014 Small Business Scorecard. This is where they rate how well each federal agency met the goal of setting aside a specific percentage of contracts for small businesses, and specially-certified small businesses.
Overall, the numbers showed improvement from last year (along with a few curious anomalies), but there is still lots of room for improvement. The good news for you is that the report highlights a definite need that your business can fill, provided you can find your right customer and focus your contracting efforts.
In this chart prepared by Set-Aside Alert, you can see that for woman-owned businesses, the government’s overall score was 4.68% – less than the 5% goal. When you scroll down the list you’ll see many departments with considerably low numbers (e.g., DoD, VA and NASA). Woman-owned businesses, this is your chance to go find customers – agencies that are hungry for companies that can help them meet their set-aside goals this year.
Service-disabled veteran-owned business? Look at the Department of Education’s low score in your set-aside designation. Time for you to make hay!
The bottom line is that if you have a special certification as a set-aside business, you should be looking through this list and asking three questions about these prospective customers:
- Does this customer have money allocated to solve this problem?
- Can your company solve this problem?
- Do you have the capabilities to win this job?
Go fish!
