Help Me With Sign Virginia Travel Agency Agreement

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good afternoon everyone thank you so much for joining us today's webinar is blanket purchase agreements should be rather interesting since a lot of people don't really know what it entails those of us who have been in the GSA arena for 30 plus years only understand one blanket purchase agreement and that is under your GSA contract however there's a few other places that you need to know about hopefully today we can demystify where those areas are at any time please feel free to ask a question and I do not mind being interrupted in fact I highly encourage it because that means you have a thought on your mind that we need to discuss so we've got quite a few people today thank you all for joining again and let's get started my name is Michael price and I'll be your presenter today Who am I been around far too long and unfortunately I just can't seem to retire because you can only play so much golf and I'm not into pinochle yet since I left the service in 73 so I've worked on the beta teams for GSA so I know a little bit about he offer and Sam and GSA advantage and a few of the other electronic devices that we now use within the government and why do I do this I actually had to change this slide because I didn't really understand why I wrote it in the first place but I've been giving back to the community for many many years and have helped create some monsters in the industry they did all the hard work I just showed them which direction to go in and basically experience matters over 32 years helping companies like yourselves get started in the government or if you're already started in the government helped you expand the government what we're going to cover today government-wide schedule blanket purchase agreements I'll just call them BPA's from now on how are they different how do you establish one something I learned there are BPA set asides and of course we can discuss open market items and before I go any further if you look at your control panel under view there should be a check mark next to handouts there's only two handouts today and if you have a problem getting them or for whatever reason your firewall won't allow it I don't know what your situation is where you're located please at the end send us an email and we'll make a download available for you so let's keep on moving what is a BPA let's start off with the GSA side it's an agreement that established by you and the buyer and blah blah blah and all the other good stuff it's covered under the far section eight and really to demystify the government lingo what it basically says is if you're working with an agency let's just take Fort Bragg North Carolina for example they're doing a lot of building renovations right now so those of you that are in that area knock on the doors at Fort Bragg and see if you can scrounge up some business if they're going to keep reordering and reordering and reordering as they move from building to building to renovate and I'll give you a live example they're swapping out their incandescent lights for LEDs but they don't do them all at once for economic reasons they order by project by building by Department so that's recurring purchases so we actually have a client that was able to secure a BPA to handle all of the conversions now that was a couple years ago so I no idea what's going on now but basically that's really what a blanket purchase agreement is is recurring purchases without having to go through the order process each time the order is placed the money is allocated in this case I think it was a three million dollar BPA not a bad way to earn a living for the coming year so that's really what that paragraph says what are the benefits for the government that administrative burden streamline ordering think of a check register if you will blank check register first entry is three million dollars it's got your contract number on it with a - zero at the end or - a depends how they decide the number it usually it's a - number at the end and every time they place an order you compare your check register both of your check registers together the buyer will say I'm on - one - two - three and that is ten thousand twenty thousand whatever it happens to be pick a number so from that aspect the order is already there it's just a matter of putting a dash on the end and those numbers should go sequentially as you get near the end or as they say running out of money the buyer can then refill refill the BPA for whatever they need whatever their obligating whatever budget they've got left that's pretty much what the first couple paragraphs are saying the far actually gives preference to establish BPA's because it saves time money ultimately taxpayer money the good news is they don't require the pre obligation of funds they spend it as they have it which is nice unlike a lot of contracts that you go out and bid on and you say I got me a seven million dollar contract and then the government says we have to cancel the contract we ran out of money well you said I had seven million we didn't we didn't get the funding so they can cancel that contract when the BPA works entirely differently because they can move money around from different departments another nice thing about a BPA is that it can be for agency wide for example Fort Bragg is Army there's no reason the Department of Army couldn't issue a master BPA for all of the army bases whether it be North Carolina East Coast West Coast wherever it happens to be happens a lot overseas with our Air Force Army Navy bases overseas then you have multi-agency kind of interesting little twist which I never even explored before but Homeland Security can get together with Coast Guard and border and everybody else and they can issue a master multi-agency BPA no reason why the Army and the Navy couldn't get together and issue a multi-agency BPA any questions so far this next slide is fssi which is something that I didn't really understand before because I never had a reason to get involved with it so it's the program that everybody loves to hate or hates to love I think it means the same thing it's strategic sourcing and it's based a lot on socio-economic participation they actually collaborate with the industry which is something we don't see that much of so fssi is alive well and kicking some of the areas that are used quite a bit in the BPA arena IT and services since professional services were allowed on GSA in particular starting in 1996 and I know this because the company I was working with in Northern Virginia was the first one to get a services contract and I got to tell you that's like getting teeth pulled without novocaine it was painful and brutal we got it done and it's all taken off from there identity protection obviously that's first on the list for a reason and by the way the verbose portion of this is in one of your handouts it goes so much deeper than what I'm going to do today in the 30 minutes that we've allocated and chances are this will be short will end early anyway Salesforce not the CRM as Salesforce software purchase which is I remember back in 1985 84 85 I worked for a couple software companies the biggest problem we had was what's called site licensing but then again - we also had started out and I am dating myself started out with five and a quarter inch floppies which I actually remembered the eighth inch floppies which if anybody's got one I'd sure like a picture then we went to the three and a half then suddenly we're downloading everything enterprise planning or as it's called still haven't figured out what that does so maybe somebody can enlighten me just tell me what you think ERP is I guess the the words kind of tell you what it is but I see it quite a bit I've never had the chance to explore it then GIS is very very popular right now within the government for obvious reasons with all the satellites that are flying around in low orbit space how many of you were in the travel business lodging business transportation business emergency lodging services this would probably slide more under disaster recovery which we're going to do a webinar on that soon on disaster recovery and let me give a quick plug we're going to be doing order level materials next week to be on Tuesday again we didn't do it yesterday because of Election Day shifted to Wednesday seem to have a better participation on Wednesday so we may switch back to Wednesday's after next week I don't the first and second generation emergency lodging services or Els but I guess it was they're hard to believe that since its inception 30 million room nights for hotels and apartments across the country I can't imagine how many that would be in the in the territories primarily the for disaster or I used to live in Palm Beach home of the hanging Chad so without going there you know what I'm talking about there some of the services offered negotiated discounted rates and I almost said the word pre-negotiated and it reminds me of a comedian may he rest in peace George Carlin has said pre how can you do something before you do it so like pre-boarding on an aircraft so negotiated pricing there's even a phone number there if you want to call the gsa office and get a better understanding I'm sure they're going to be helpful there I generally don't refer people to make calls because when they get inundated then they say stop a co-op event for example I go to the veteran small business engagement every year I speak there they've got rooms blocked off and we get the special rate as speakers even some of the attendees exhibitors can take advantage of that co-opt event for discounted rooms and you can add additional users how are scared BPA's different than regular traditional BPA's the good news is that schedule BPA rolls through the terms and conditions of your GSA contract for those of you who have won quite a few of you don't have one as Joan Rivers once said we need to talk on a traditional BPA it's the way it's negotiated and I'm going to go into what I consider to be the disaster of BPA's over the last few years I'll get into that probably right at the end of this slide the advantage of using a schedule BPA obviously because the pricing is already negotiated and one of the facts that I keep neglecting to mention to everybody is that your GSA pricing is a quote unquote not to exceed price it used to be in the beginning the way all this was originally set up was that it was called best value and the difference was you may not have the lowest price but you had other terms conditions and I'll call them kickers in there that you know free shipping or extended warranty or things like that that would help the agency by not having to worry about oh is my warranty going to expire do I have to buy you know after after warranty services or things like that that's not the way it is anymore it's based on your negotiated price and that is a not to exceed for the buyer I got a little ahead of myself on that other slide the BPA terms and conditions flow from your schedule to the BPA and the buyer can alter it now comma quote asterisk whatever you want to call it it's whatever according to the government it's whatever you and the agency agree on if you agree that with the agency or the agency agrees with you and you negotiate that part that says okay because we're giving you such a large BPA we'd like you to ship to us free inside the United States depending upon how big the article is it may not be such a bad deal it doesn't cost you all that much to begin with plus the fact your shipping is probably already included in your pricing very seldom have I ever seen an organizational conflict with any schedule there should never be as we're looking at the third bullet there should never be any conflict between your schedule and the BPA itself if there is you contact your GSA Contracting Officer which in most cases will be your contracting specialist set asides how many of you are small disadvantaged 8a woman-owned service disabled vet vet Native American HUBZone I think I got them all there are set asides for BPA's which this is the part where I'm going to deflect a little bit I'm trying to remember the year was probably I'll say ten years ago had a client that actually did manufacturing of CDs and DVDs we'll just call them glass they manufacture glass with Polaroids name on it for Polaroid only you know if they're still doing it or not we submitted our offer to GSA after we got it submitted we get a notification that they have shut down group 75 which is your media and office supplies and that was the old Office Depot and staples difficult for two years everybody had to buy from those two companies under Master BPA with GSA anybody remember that hopefully you weren't caught up in it however as we were going through the clarification negotiation and award process the contract specialist reminded me that if for any reason this offer gets rejected we have to wait two years they were going to go through and award it we got it awarded they did a lot of business with the government over and above and outside the two BPA's that were issued to Office Depot and staples so it happened again for janitorial supplies about four years ago called Janssen and that knocked out one of my guys service disabled vet right here locally and we had to sit around twiddling our thumbs for two years waiting for the BPA to expire understand they're going to try to do it again but he's already got his contract so it doesn't matter the important thing is never to lose your contract any questions let me read one here really quick how long does it take to get a GSA contract I might've just might as well just post this question is standard I get it every single webinar and I'm happy to answer it because that's what we do and that's all we do depending upon which FSC federal supply class that you're looking at IT happens pretty quickly if you're looking at law enforcement and specialty clothing you know fire retardant suits and you know fire and law enforcement and all that Brenda actually told me a while back it's going to take a year because everybody's trying to get in that particular category so be prepared for a year on that one building supplies I was extremely fortunate when we dealt with our vendor in North Carolina I actually submitted we took them forever to get his contract I didn't negotiate it but we did a modification on Christmas Eve small modification I figured it'd take 2-3 days you know Christmas holiday whatever we were dealing direct with a senior Contracting Officer who has since moved on over to commodity and I'm gonna try to get him to be a panelist on a commodity gsa webinar coming up in the process of planning it now see if i can get him to say yep love nothing more than to get more business driving his way an hour later he approved the mod on christmas eve no there's a dedicated Contracting Officer and it hurt us tremendously when he moved on to a different division but he's been around a while he's that good and the gentleman that he trained to take his place is trying to step right up in his shoes thank you for the question and of course the same question comes back for VA the bad news is VA still works off of a org document you fill in the blanks which could be kind of easy in some cases however it's a pain because when you're finished you don't submit it electronically you have to print two copies put it in a three-ring binder with tabs and as one famous singer said pictures and arrow is describing what each one's about on the back and it takes forever we did one for a client a few years back they lost it well the good news was I just had a hit print and they had it again 18 months to award their contract I read an article not too long ago that said the VA finally hollered uncle I guess they got the arm twisted enough and said they're going to now move their solicitations to a offer which will make it completely electronic which had speeded up hopefully much shorter than 18 months I'd be happy with six months at that point any other questions plays can we take a moment and read this one yes that rumor you heard is correct we will be as soon as I get the time to finish reviewing and approve it and have it looking good we will be starting our own blog and I'm embarrassed to say th t we should have done it years ago but we will be starting our own blog and you will be able to subscribe to any feed that's coming out and it'll be on topic we a lot of times like to pull content from the authority and of course you have to give attribution to the author of it but you will be able to submit comments and begin that discussion so thank you for that question bill next question Oh pricing I just saw the one word pricing let me talk about pricing GSA in particular and even the regular open market procurements when you're filling out preparing compiling a request for proposal which becomes a proposal the government and I always use GSA because I work very closely with that tool that GSA now uses they actually run your pricing and the government's doing this also because they have a site license for the the tool itself they run a comparison against who's out there they not only just look at what's on a contract any number of any of the number of the G whacks government-wide acquisition contracts or GSA contract used to be just GSA now what they do is they're actually looking at open market so if you're looking at IT for example they're gonna look at Amazon eBay and Best Buy and all the big boys just to see what the market or street price is there's a tool we have access to it we paid dearly for the license we're for our client in North Carolina we actually ran his pricing schedule pricing against the tool and came back with where we were in the top five hopefully we were in the top five of all of them of contract pricing he turned to me and said I want you to reduce my pricing and make it a dollar cheaper than the lowest one on GSA that's what took him from now remember this is building supplies Lowe's Home Depot plug sockets light switches you know light bulbs that kind of stuff cheap stuff he was at a million dollars in sales at the time by the end of that year which was about eight nine almost nine months he jumped from a million to two million dollars by just lowering his prices a couple percentage points to get underneath the lowest price on GSA so pricing does matter on GSA it used to be best value not any longer it is now best price because almost all the other terms and conditions are exactly the same thank you for that question Steve we're just about ready here we go what's the name of that pricing tool good question Angela unfortunately you can't get it I work to have it the development modified for us and GSA uses it now and a license if you take it generic the way it is will cost you between sixteen and twenty four thousand dollars a year I'll give you a hint if you want us to run your pricing for you we can do it a lot cheaper and do it not as often or more often whichever and you're with the direct license you are capped on how much you can use it because of the bandwidth because Maranatha the whole government's using it and it's called women minds different it is price analysis no pun intended price analysis but it's going to run you about sixteen to twenty thousand twenty four thousand they may have gone up I don't know and it's a great tool but it's gonna eat up horsepower and if you make a mistake you got to start it all over again and resubmit it so contact me after the webinar and I'll be glad to send you some examples of how we did it we actually did a webinar in fact you can go back and look at our videos on our website you'll see one on pricing analysis and we actually show you sample printouts of what I did with the 3m product line of course they're all dummy prices but you'll get a good idea hopefully they answered your question and I'm saving the best for last we're basically finished but I'm going to give you one opportunity to save some money now that we're in daylight savings time and the holidays are coming we have a special offer for you how many of you actually have a VA con a GSA contract now think about that if you do go to bullet two if you don't and it was interesting because as I sideline very quickly I saw a Google Alert that came through and said we are Sam certified okay what is Sam certified hmm I helped develop Sam years ago what wasn't called Sam then what is Sam certified you register it's like registering to vote are you voter certified you can get certified to drive a car fly an airplane but I've never heard of Sam certified they do not have a contract but they are working under the misnomer that if I'm registered in Sam I'm going to get business there's a reason that we reach out to you every couple of weeks because we do the research to see who has a contract who accept credit cards two three weeks ago we did a webinar on credit cards they're mandatory to do business with the government if you do not accept credit cards you must set up a credit card account you can do some what's called micro purchase thirty five hundred dollars and less and the government does not have to put it out for bid quote competition they can buy from you but they can't do it all the time it does not replace a contract it violates the competition and contracting Act we talked about that in some of our other videos you can look at them right off our website they're all on youtube on our youtube channel feel free anytime we've redone our frequently asked questions so a lot of the questions that you haven't thought to ask you can go look at industrial funding fee service-disabled that woman owned we did a webinar on women owned those of you that missed it watch the replay if you want to get a contract one of the first things you're going to have to do before you get your contract is you're going to have to be able to accept credit cards 65% of the people registered on Sam do not accept credit cards how can you do business that way the government can't do business with you whether its large or small purchase they want to use a credit card get it off their desk let accounting deal with it that's the good news here's one that's worse over 70% of the people registered on Sam do not have a website first thing that GSA asked do you accept credit cards do you have a website can I look at your products kind of look at your services can I learn more about you Sam record doesn't give them everything one piece of advice do not let your Sam registration expire it is really really inconvenient when it expires two things happen number one you need the certified notarized letter the most important two things is the government cannot do business with you if your Sam record isn't active it goes inactive number two you can't get paid you just did a million dollar order yesterday and your Sam record expires today they can't pay you until your Sam record goes active there's the code you can use feel free to send us an email and be more than happy to discuss your situation here's some helpful links for you and in the slides that you can download hopefully you've already downloaded them if not shoot an email and I'll be more than happy to help direct you where you can get them see if you qualify it says for GSA contract pretty much the same thing for VA did you know there's 1300 VA hospitals and they're building more in the country there are 550 clinics which are usually strategically placed in between hospitals South Florida I have Miami VA hospital and West Palm VA hospital but I've also got three local clinics for non-invasive procedures no surgery no things like that and if you need help getting it done more than happy to help you take a look at experience matters which I think you'd be surprised of some of the companies we've helped become very successful in the government we also have the webinar schedule which I've been very remiss in casting out over the next few weeks I'm going to work on that this weekend and we have our video library if there's something you'd like to see for a webinar topic shoot us an email be more than happy to entertain it thank you for attending this is our contact slide and you can get to all of this directly from the slides themselves and if there is no more questions we'll be ending the webinar for all I believe there might be a one-question survey at the end please take about 30 seconds to take a look at it we really appreciate it and next week is order level materials if you've got a contract thank you again for joining us and we hope to see you soon you