The administrative nightmare of working with a small business to help them succeed, plus the ultimate time and expense of having to re-compete the contract just a short time later if they fail, is not something that a Contracting Officer (CO) wants to do. Because of this, a lot of COs are leery about awarding to small businesses in general. Proving that you have what it takes to successfully perform their contract can be a challenge. In our previous blog we talked about demonstrating that you have adequate financial resources and the ability to meet the required delivery schedule.
Below are some tips for demonstrating that you are a mature, experienced company, with a well thought out plan, and a track record of successful performance of similar contracts.
Have the necessary organization, experience, accounting, and operational controls, and technical skills, or the ability to obtain them. The larger and more complex the contract, the more scrutiny the CO will give to things such as your quality control program, production control procedures, property control systems, and safety programs applicable to materials to be produced or services to be performed by you and your subcontractors. Have you managed subcontractors before? Give a specific example of a contract in which you managed one or more subcontractors. Do you have an approved accounting system? Tell the CO who your cognizant Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) is without the CO having to ask.
A satisfactory performance record. As a former CO, I can tell you that this is key no matter what kind of contract you are competing for. Here is what the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 9.104(3)(b), requires the CO to consider:
“A prospective contractor that is or recently has been seriously deficient in contract performance shall be presumed to be non-responsible, unless the contracting officer determines that the circumstances were properly beyond the contractor’s control, or that the contractor has taken appropriate corrective action.”
Check out our blog on the Importance of Responding to Contract Performance Assessment Reports (CPARs)/PPIRS. Ensure that CPARS ratings are accurate and clearly depict your satisfactory performance. The easiest way to meet this requirement is to have “Very Good,” “Exceptional” or, at minimum, “Satisfactory” ratings across the board for your past performance. (Nothing will help you win contracts easier than performing very well on the ones you receive!) If there is derogatory information in the evaluation, tell the CO on the contract you are pursuing exactly what the situation was, what happened, what you did proactively to fix the problem, and how quickly you fixed it, minimizing the impacts to your customer.
“Failure to meet the quality requirements of the contract is a significant factor to consider in determining satisfactory performance.”
One thing that will show the government that you are a disciplined, well-run company is to document your processes, and in particular, your quality control (QC) program. If you think you don’t have a “QC process” you do, you just haven’t written it down, or even really thought about it in that sense. Let’s say, for example, that your company “…depends on our staff to make sure that what they do for the customer is correct and we make sure that the customer always has a point of contact in case they have concerns about our performance.” But maybe you actually do more. Do your Customer Service Representatives follow up with the customer to see that they were happy with the service they just received? That’s part of your QC plan. Do you have a website that allows your customer to contact you with concerns and requests through a secure web portal? That, too, is part of your QC plan. Putting this into a written document that gets reviewed by company management and that is updated as additional controls and checks are implemented by your company to improve service or make sure a mistake doesn’t happen again becomes the foundation of your written QC plan which you may need to submit to let the government know that you are a mature, well-run company with a plan for the future.
“Past failure to apply sufficient tenacity and perseverance to perform acceptably is strong evidence of non-responsibility.”
If you didn’t have the business integrity and ethics to do your very best to successfully perform a previous contract, why should this CO trust you to perform his contract? In this era of shared information and communications between government agencies, it’s a lot harder to get away with a lack of business integrity and poor business ethics. Do you have a history of not paying your employees or your vendors on time? Have you defaulted on previous contracts? Have you not paid your taxes? Have you filed bankruptcy in the past few years? If any of these are true, you will probably have a hard time getting awarded a federal contract. No amount of disclaimer, promises or “marketing spin” will get you out of this one.
In the next blog, I’ll talk about what you can do to improve your potential for winning when you don’t have the resources on hand to perform the contract!
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