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Small businesses should never sit still and marketing should be part of your daily focus if you are a business owner. Here at Frontline, I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to perfect my marketing skills. As I mentioned before, one of the best opportunities for a Federal contractor occurs during the third quarter of each year when government agencies are actively seeking avenues to disperse their remaining year-end funds.
I regularly meet with my team and we examine agencies we currently have active contracts with. Those agencies, of course, are the easiest ones to pursue, but we also take a look at agencies with which we’ve performed work with in the past. Lastly, we take a look at the agencies that have projects in our same industry.
While it would be nice to think that we could automatically be guaranteed new contracts with someone we are currently working with, this is simply not the case. We still must go through the bid process regardless of prior history, but there are some logical ways of improving our chances of being awarded a bid or renegotiating a current contract. For example, we currently have a sign project that we won during the fiscal end of last year. We competed for it through the normal process and were the lowest bidder, so we were awarded the contract. That project is currently still underway, entailing installation of a large amount of signage for the V.A. Hospital here in San Antonio, and that job is going very well.
Realizing & Pursuing Opportunity
Here is where it gets interesting in that earlier this year, during the middle of the third quarter, we attended an event for the Veterans & Service Network here in our region of Texas. It was announced that they had identified a half billion dollars in need of allocation. This announcement really opened people’s eyes with the realization that this money would be extended to all sorts of industries from construction, services, medical equipment, and supplies. We immediately realized this might afford our customer, the V.A. Hospital, with the opportunity to modify our existing contracts and allow for much needed additional signage for other buildings that surround the main hospital. This has been presented to the contracting officer and she has been extremely receptive to our suggestion. Using the same fixed pricing from last year, we are very hopeful we will be successful in picking up another portion of the hospital. Of course, they are free to solicit an entirely new contract package, but even if they choose to do so, Frontline most likely would still be in a good position to win the contract based on the fact that we are the current contractor. However, the first scenario is preferable and I remain optimistic that we can negotiate and modify our existing contracts.
This is just one example of the opportunities that exist right now with the year-end fallout funds. If you would like to learn more about this, I welcome questions and comments.