Is it worth answering a sources sought notice if we are tiny?

Yes, and it is more valuable when you are tiny. The notice exists partly so a contracting officer can decide whether two or more capable small firms exist. Your response is evidence in that decision. Answer the questions asked, state your codes, your size status and your relevant past work, and keep it short.

Nothing in my code is ever posted. Am I in the wrong market?

Check the award record before concluding that. The most common explanation is that the work is bought as orders against vehicles and never advertised. The second most common is that your code is not the code the buyers use for that work, which the award record will also show you.

How early is too early to contact a buying office?

Before a solicitation is out, contact is normal and encouraged. Afterwards it is restricted to the formal question process. So the answer is that almost nothing is too early, and most firms are far too late.

Should I read award notices for contracts I did not bid?

Yes, and it is the highest-value habit in this module. Every one tells you who the office trusts, what they paid, how many people showed up, and whether the work was set aside. Six months of that is a market education.

What is a notice of intent to sole source really telling me?

That the agency believes only one firm can do this and is giving the market a short window to prove otherwise. If you genuinely can do the work, responding in writing before the deadline occasionally converts the buy into a competition. It rarely works, it costs an afternoon, and the upside is a competition that would never have existed.

Course, module 4 of 16

Finding the work

Most people find federal work by searching today's notices for their keywords. That is the last five per cent of the process and the most crowded part of it. Here is the whole surface.

closer = ends sooner, bigger = larger last award

By the end of this module you will be able to

Tell every kind of federal notice apart and know what each one is asking you to do
Find the four things that are published before any solicitation exists
Set a watch on codes and offices rather than on keywords, and know why that difference is large
Read an award notice and a sole-source justification for what they tell you about the next buy
Understand why an office that appears to buy nothing in your code may be buying steadily

What gets posted, and what it means

Most federal opportunities are posted on SAM.gov, which has been the single front door since 2019. What is posted there is not one thing, and reacting to the wrong kind wastes a great deal of time.

Two things sit underneath the table below and are worth stating first. A notice is written by a human being under time pressure, in the government's vocabulary rather than yours, and its title is frequently useless. And the classification on the notice, its NAICS and PSC codes, is almost always right even when the title is unreadable, because the codes drive the buying process itself.

Keep reading

The rest of this module opens with your name and email

All sixteen modules open on this device for about six months. No card and no password.

Still to come in this module

The notice types
The four things published before any of that
Grants are a separate door in the same building
The part that is not advertised at all
A weekly rhythm that fits in an hour
The words in this module, defined
Questions at this stage