Intellectual Frontiers Press Fieldbooks

For Government and SLED Buyers

How Small Firms Find Public Buyers Who Can Buy Now

Government buyers publish their budgets, forecasts, and awards. Read them before you write a proposal.

The usual advice to a startup is to register, get on a schedule, and answer solicitations. By the time a solicitation appears, the budget, the forecast, and the request for information came and went. A public buyer also has to clear four gates before it can buy anything from you, and a buyer can fail any one of them.

Forthcoming. The book is in review.

Most small firms answer every RFP they can find. The buyers who can buy published their plans months earlier.

Fernhollow Data, a nine-person company that sells a benefits screener, builds a readiness workforce on the method, building, and running volumes of this series and points it at federal, defense, state, county, and school buyers. It reads what each buyer publishes, checks authority, funding, a contract vehicle, and its own eligibility as of a date, and stops cleanly on the buyers that can't say yes yet.

What you will be able to do

• read budgets, forecasts, board minutes, and award histories as dated readiness evidence;
• check authority, funding, a contract vehicle, and eligibility as separate gates;
• keep your own eligibility record, including CMMC, before any buyer's gate;
• treat primes and government funders as counterparties with their own readiness;
• write procurement rules into what the workforce may and may not do; and
• record a no-bid as a clean stop with a date to look again.