The federal government has a goal of awarding contracts to small businesses. We outlined these Small Business Goals in episode 324. Government agencies have a variety of tools to hit those goals (small business set asides, direct awards, etc). Another way the government can hit those goals are by having large business prime contractors subcontract a portion of their work to small businesses. The large businesses submit their plan to do so by providing the aptly name “Small Business Subcontracting Plan”. We introduced these plans in episode 339.
Here’s the catch. There is no one version of a Small Business Subcontracting Plan that contractors can apply to every contract. Each plan is more like a recipe than a checklist. In this way, the recipe for a Small Business Subcontracting Plan is like the recipe for chili…it has some basic ingredients that make it “chili”, but there is no one answer to what makes it a “good chili.”
In this episode, we outline the required ingredients for a recipe to make a Small Business Subcontracting Plan…as well as some of the ingredients to make it a “good” plan.