The irony for small businesses about government contracting and intellectual property rights  is that IP can help you when working with the government but the two disciplines can feel a lot alike. The government contracting effort that you might be thinking of starting can be very lucrative, like IP, and requires you to learn an entirely new set of rules, procedures, and habits in order to be effective. The knowledge base required for a small company includes not only the FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulations) and how they impact your specific offering, but also how and in what form those things provide by way of special leverage.

 

Depending on your business’s composition or your current stage of growth there are several avenues by which you can take advantage of government contracting opportunities: small business set-asides within larger contracts, small and disadvantaged business designations (“8a”), or exclusives for women-owned, disabled-veteran-owned, and/or minority-owned companies, among others.These and other statuses available for smaller business provide you with great opportunities to partner with larger companies in much the same way that IP does.  Full execution or exploitation of a contract opportunity may require some of what your small business has to offer. And as with IP-based partnerships, large companies have a financial incentive to form partnerships. In fact, it is likely that there are contracts that they CAN’T get without a small company like yours. And like with IP deal, large companies won’t forego their sense of what’s rational just to do business with you. This mean you need to present yourself as a solid, capable firm with the ability and resources to do what you market your enterprise as able to do. The most basic reason for this is that the work you sign on to do for a particular project under any of the aforementioned award statuses will require you to do so. If you lead in the bid then you are called the “prime.”  And even if you are teamed with the world’s largest company, you really have to lead and ACT like the “prime” to protect your company. As we’ve discussed here on the IN Blog many times, if a company doesn’t believe that you can hold your own, they likely won’t partner to employ your IP and partnering requires an implicit quality in the standard of services.

Another way in which government contracting success and IP leveraging are similar is that they both require constant diligence. The same daily struggle to perfect, refine, and leverage IP rights is good training for pursuing contracts with the government. The sales cycle in the government is constant, and both contracting vendors and actual clients generally take awhile to gain confidence in a new vendor.  In order for either to take a chance on a new partner, they’ll really need to believe that the new vendor can deliver.  The proof that they do need something new and different is the RFP, which acts as a lever to get them to begin making that assessment and allowing you to build what you can offer into a solution.  The requirements and specific needs will be built into each RFP. Without that consistent contact, how can those questions be favorable to you? The key to success in government contracting lies in understand that just like the perfection of IP rights, there is no end to the process.

Ultimately, if you treat your government marketing in the same way that we’ve discussed treating your IP, you’ll get a status and a great brand in the agencies that you target.  That will feel a lot like your IP process, and that’s because it is!  If you have commercial IP that you’ve previously perfected, the process of government contracting can be easier and the upside greater.