With the President signing the $1.7 Trillion FY 2023 budget, agencies will be pressing to spend the remaining $1.6 Trillion in the next 6 months. That's right - April 1 was the start of Q3 (no fooling) and that means the planning for spending is going into full throttle.
The challenges for small and socio-economic set asides are clear:
There Is Greater Competition
Large IDIQs and MATOCS are eliminating 99.99% of the competitive landscape. This means smaller companies MUST develop relationships with prime contractors if they want a piece of the action.
Making life even more difficult has been the absence of industry days where small businesses can network with primes.
Agencies Are Still Closed
2) The federal agencies are still closed. This means businesses need to get creative about reaching both federal buyers.
Innovative programs like SAMradar.com can help federal business development gain an edge as the system provides leads daily on projects as well as contact information for primes who are winning. Searches can be done by NAICS, PSC, Keyword as well as monitoring specific primes via their UEI.
Program Managers Are Harder To Reach
3) Reaching Program Managers is becoming more difficult. While buyers are able to be researched and connected through FPDS.gov there is no research engine to find project and program managers or end users.
GovBrief.us has been ramping up its research efforts to identify program managers within federal agencies and building on its innovative approach using "Interagency Briefings" to pull in the program side for an educational session.
These sessions are sponsored by industry and provide a direct avenue to federal stakeholders with the added bonus of establishing the industry provider as the subject matter expert.
Currently, GovBrief.us is averaging 130-180 federal program/end users at each session. Compared to normal industry days, that puts GovBrief.us in the top 1% of focused attention for the sponsor vendor and automated follow-up provides dozens of interested agency personnel for Capabilities Briefings.
Top 8 Federal Initiatives for FY 2023
Based on the FY2023 Budget, these are the top initiatives to focus on in FY 2023:
Rebuilding America’s Crumbling Infrastructure
Advancing Clean Energy, Climate Data, and Resilience
Advancing Equity across the Economy and Nation
Strengthening Supply Chains
Bolstering Manufacturing
Improving Infrastructure
Delivering on Our Commitments to Veterans
Ensuring World-Class Public Health Infrastructure
The Word For FY2023 is Get Proactive
With the economy tightening the federal government is going to become more and more important to small businesses ability to weather the storm.
The sooner you begin your federal strategy and pursuit the better and the more you shed the marketing and research, the more time you have to build relationships and get your company known by federal stakeholders.