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good morning everybody this is jody king from the alaska ptac and let's go ahead and get started i'd like to welcome everyone today uh for this webinar and supersizing your sba profile i have a lot a really helpful information to share with you and we're going to kind of walk through do a walkthrough of the site uh pull point out all of the different things that need to be updated and added and different tips and tricks and time permitting then i actually want to go into the dynamic small business search and pull up a couple examples and show you the good bad and ugly and where we can kind of critique it we're a small group today so i really do want to encourage discussion so with that in mind let me pull your attention to the go to meeting panel uh first thing i want to point out is there's a section called handouts and i do have a copy of the slides in that handout section that you should be able to download if you are unable to download those handouts you can always email me after the webinar and i will be glad to send that to you also i want to let everyone know that this webinar is being recorded and hopefully by the end of this week this newest recording will then be posted on our p-tech website assuming there are no technical difficulties or any of that but this this webinar will be recorded and posted so you can always go back and rescan through the recording if there was one thing that you wanted to recapture in the go to meeting panel there is a attendee box and we have our questions and of course your review is slightly different than what but what i do want to point out if you have any questions you can type them in the question and answer box or if you to be able to ask again i'd like to encourage everyone to feel free to be comfortable on speaking just click the raise hand button and i can unmute you from my end and will be more than glad to go over questions this is the type of workshop that the more questions we have the more what ifs how do i do this should i add this type of data the better the presentation will be for you so with that let's go ahead and get started get a few more people sign in again everybody's coming in muted um but if you do want to talk and ask questions feel free any point throughout the presentation again to either answer the questions in the question box type them you can add them to the chat i will be checking both or just simply raise your hand and i'll be glad to unmute you so we'll be pausing every between every other slide just to double check that i don't have any questions all right so getting started so again we're going to talk about your sba profile the dynamic small business profile it's kind of called a bunch of different things and it is an incredibly important marketing tool that a lot of people really don't take the time to fill out and keep updated and they're losing that free marketing advantage so what we're going to talk about is what is the dynamic small business search what is its value i'm going to give you two different approaches to accessing it and then this last you can see this profile update we're going to go through each screen some of them will only take a two second not every screen has something that we can input and we'll talk about tips and tricks for the three most critical factors for doing and updating your dynamic small business search or sba profile so this is a screenshot of the dynamic small business search i don't think it's changed in a small forever since this has been launched and i just wanted to quick pull out your attention so what is the dsbs so all of the information that's entered into sam all of the businesses all the businesses snakes codes when we're searching the dynamic small business search gathers all that data but when a contracting officer or a prime or anybody that is searching for subcontractors or subcontractors when they go into the dynamic small business search they have the search engine they can kind of filter what they're looking for and the benefit is the results returned are small business only so if you're a small business you've done your sam profile your sam profile is active because if your profile your sam profile becomes inactive you will not show up in the dynamic small business search so we can go in we can search all this all of the results are small business if you have an active sam profile and you are not showing up in the dynamic small business search then there's most likely a data entry error in your sam profile and that system is deeming you other than small and like i said i want to after we kind of go through the sba profile specifically i want to get into the dynamic small business search and just kind of talk to you about why i'm telling you to enter the things that we do and we can see that in practice in the search itself so there's two different ways to access the sba profile the easiest well let me retract that the most obvious is through sam through the sba profile and we've been asking gsa for years to have a link directly to the sba profile from when you first log in sam and for some reason they like to put it at the end of the sam registration so you do have to log into sam click on that existing entry our existing entity find your business save a few pages so you're actually in your sam profile and then you can hop down to this sba profile and once you've finally gotten to this page you click the register update profile and then one of two things happens in most cases you're going to get errors since sba as an agency the small business administrator monitors and takes care of their dynamic small business profile um just keep in mind back early 2000's they were two completely separate websites and you had to log in and update both then it was that central contractor registration then you had to log in into your sam profile or into your sba profile and update all of that so the data is linked and most of it feeds from sam into the sba but because of two different agencies it doesn't take much for them one or the other to break that data link that connects those two systems there's also a lot of browser issues there's different things that if you have a pop-up blocker on because it does open from when we hit this sba update button it does populate a new window opens a new window to the dynamic small business search page and often it's broken so if you get an error sometimes it'll be a system error and it'll let you know like you can see sam did not receive from sba so the errors from the sba side um often what you do is you simply get a new tab new window open and it just says about blank that's actually not broken that it nothing is loaded so when that happens there's a couple of different things we can do usually the easiest thing is try logging on to a different browser i've worked with a lot of clients using google chrome i can never get my profile to open in sam in google chrome so it's to me that tells me it's a system setting where other businesses chrome has worked just fine i've used firefox i've used explorer i've used edge so sometimes just switching to a different browser fixes that and we can do that right through sam so when it comes to the different browser and browser issues check your security settings if you're in explorer it's much easier to set that security setting down to a medium setting for your security uh because they have it preset actually this for explorer i haven't played an edge at all in quite a while to look at that but if you have it help maybe you can work with them and see what it is that this site is being blocked and why why it's not opening again security setting um maybe go in and add it as an authorized website so that it's not a system security with your phone computer um make sure your pop-up blocker is off so if this is the case and it's really frustrating that we've taken the five minutes you know to go through this sam process oops to finally get something and we get here so the second access process and it takes a little bit of time more so because we're waiting for sba to do something um but it pretty much always works so this is sba's general login system uh it's an old system it has been slated to go away for oh gosh i don't know five seven years now but it's still here uh they're slowly moving a few things off the last remaining things off into whatever new web platforms but the general login system and i do have the link here at the top uh what we want to do is go ahead and log in if you've not used it before currently your hubzone application is still sitting here i but if you've not used it before you can come in here and you create a new sba gls account or go ahead and log in if you've forgotten your user id for that password if this is one of these things where you're just having difficulties logging in and you need assistance you can reach out give me a call be glad to help you walk through that in some cases if you used an old email oh that's what i wanted to talk about on this if you click the forgot user id on this and you have it's an old account and you have an old email system then what you're going to want to do is email gls sba.gov and ask them to help you work with you to reset that get them to update your email address from their end and sent you a link to reset your password so once we log in again it's a really old system this is exactly what you see you see a completely blank home page with a few different things across the top so what we have to first do is request access to the sba dynamic small business search and before we can accept do that we need to make sure that your profile is set up so we've logged in we have our blank screen step one you want to click on this profile button it's going to bring down all of your information and i just have a screenshot of the end of that and what you're going to do is make sure that you have your tax id number and your duns number and these two things have to match how you have it listed in your cm profile if you have something in here and it's not letting you update you can always check the box to remove the business click submit it will tell you it's successfully submitted it'll take you back to the home page and then go back into your profile and you can always add or add a new business here and remove so you can but you want to make sure that you do have your tax id and your duns number for the business that we want to access the general login system isn't set up to handle multiple duns numbers again it's an old system so if by chance you have a couple of companies subsidiaries that are different branch locations so you have multiple duns numbers and you keep separate sam profiles and you want to update you are going to have to have a different login for each of those duns numbers so that you can separate them in the general login system unfortunately this system isn't set up to easily handle multiple duns numbers for access okay so once we have our ein number and our duns number listed in our profile box we're going to hit submit it's going to take us back to our home screen it'll still look blank and then what we want to do is we're going to click this access button okay so once i click the access button this is what you see ah here we go five click on access okay so this is what we're going to see we're going to have a list and you can see it used to be about 10 15 different things you could access through and they've slowly been moved off the gls system so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to click on the little folder icon for the pronet dynamic small business search and then we're going to click on this sba supplemental pages so this is what it's called within the gls system the sba supplemental pages and you can see here i just kind of typed over you have a tax id and your duns number so again folder check this box select make sure that this is showing if you are getting just a blank and you're not seeing your duns number then again you'll have to go back into that profile and make sure that that information is added once we've selected this we click on submit uh what you'll do is you'll get a system that says the following rules requested we're sent to the program office for re for approval uh when i had done this originally i had requested both the privileged searcher and supplemental pages and there was a little bit of confusion you had to have this you had to have that and really you just need the sba supplemental pages and so you want to see that your roles are requested for this and usually you'll get an email this is pretty old but it looks similar to this from the sba it security where they have given permission like that old pronoun ccr user system so then you know that you've been granted access back to uh so it only takes a couple minutes to set this up but usually it's a 24-hour wait uh to get a response from sba i found if they were saying you need to do this do you have questions if i just simply replied back to this email i was able to get a discussion and they were really helpful in getting this set up all right so once you actually have this done and then you can log into your sba profile or you log into the gls and you see sba supplemental pages there is a link click that and that opens up into again one of the errors because again gls is an old website if you go to and you've been working in the supplemental pages and one day you log in you click on supplemental pages and you get this error this internal error invalid pass off and it happens to me quite frequently on this uh it's just a matter of going into your web browser and clearing the cookies from that i use google chrome so i'm running into all the time i need to clear that once i've cleared that then i can log back into the gls again and click on the supplemental pages and i have no errors it goes right to and opens it up so whether we've accessed this through cm or we've accessed this through the gls that sba supplemental pages ultimately what we're trying to get to is here so this is what you should see if you're in sam you click that update button you should see a new window open up and it's going to take you to this home page being sva they like lots of lots of text and explanation so you want to skip the orientation help and what you want to do is click on mandatory data because really there's too many pages of the orientation and it's not necessarily helpful so we want to go over here in this left hand and this blue we're going to click mandatory data and then we'll go ahead and get started okay i'm just going to take a quick second see if there's any questions yet okay so i've clicked on the mandatory data screen and this is what i looked at now i know this is really small especially if you're trying to do this from your phone or a tablet but i just kind of wanted to get an idea of the entirety of the page and from here on out i've broken down the screenshots into segments so you can easily see what we're talking about but you can see here now the page is yellow so it actually goes through on this left-hand side and it's going to track the pages on and it's going to show where we can enter so the whole point of updating this dynamic small business search the sba supplemental pages your sba profile again it's called a lot of different things is we want to update our keywords our capability narrative and our references those are the most critical things that contracting officers are not able to pull from sam data and so they really want to one you want to be found and you want to have that information to look for and i'll show you more examples because this really is important so on this very first page um here it asks if you want to have your profile show up in the dynamic small business search now i have a screenshot from my profile and i have no just because it's really not a valid company i have my access for my sam and the dynamic small business search just for teaching so i do have mine completely blocked but you absolutely do want to say yes you do want to have that show get my pens here working there we go erase my drawing get back to my pointer all right they chained my little panel on that and slows me down okay so you do absolutely want to say yes you do want to show up in the dynamic small business search i just want to let you know that government employees whether they're on the program side or whether on the contracting side are taught how to do market research and i've taken the different dau classes where they discuss market research and a considerable amount of time is on using the dynamic small business search for that first point of starting your market research so government employees are taught that this site is where you go when you are looking for information and you're looking for specific businesses so if that tells you that if the government agencies are being directed to go here this is a site that you want to have the most up-to-date and current information because you want to be found you want them to call you you want to be able to start a discussion so being found is why keywords becomes really really critical and i'm going to spend a bit of time on this so these keywords um you can see i just have the one government contracting help i got a little snarky when i was phoning out my page and since i didn't didn't show i felt confident in being a little bit snarky on some of the things i entered but you set these up you can see it's uh comma separated because this is an old again old database so you're going to enter your word and you're going to have a comma separate and your next word comma and you can do up to 50 keywords for a total up to 525 and i believe they've expanded this number a little bit uh but you can have up to 20 characters between each comma and keep in mind a space is considered a character erase my joins again okay so let me go down and get to the next page where i okay so again we kind of talked about this as just a better screenshot so yes you do you do want to be seen all of the next codes all of this data pulls over from sam if you see or don't see a nyx code that needs to be in here you cannot and enter it from this profile you need me to go back into your sam profile enter all your next codes through sam and then after 24 hours of submitting that your profile being reactivated then those makes codes will show up in that dynamic small business search okay so here we are on this keyword screen and i kind of want to blow it up so again you want to list out characters a great test is if you're typing a string of characters and you want to see am i at 20 page at my 20 character limit if you simply click into the space outside of the box i it'll you'll get a an error message you can see here over there if there's you exceeded the character count or if you've in this case i ended with a comma and clicked over so i had a blank field i told the system that i was entering a new key term by entering the comma but then i didn't enter anything so no commas at the end but it's a really handy way if you're typing things out and you're checking your account just click off to the space here it will tell you so keywords serve two different purposes one they're going to make you easy to find in the dynamic small business search and again i'm going to play with that and two keywords list under your next code information in your profile itself and we know looking at the different next codes that the titles can be very very generic especially if you say engineering and so you see that nyx code and it has engineering services and it includes all of the different disciplines of engineering but it doesn't necessarily say that you are a civil engineer so structural engineering or architecture the various different so listing these keywords again makes it easy for you to be found into it helps define why you've listed those next codes and we'll take more i will look at in someone's profile and take a look at that so if you do have a lot of next codes especially if you're hitting different types of industries then you want to have those keywords to help define why you've chosen those nix codes also here you have your small business certification and you can actually go through this profile and just click save next and it does not automatically update the certification date as you can see here i last time i clicked in this box was 2017. so it is important for you to actually physically manipulate this put the new date in here because that last updated date does show on your profile so you want the contracting officers to know that they are looking at current information okay so we're going to enter our keywords we're going to update the date we're going to click on save next it's going to move us to the next page so this is just kind of an insert remember when i had mentioned those keywords one to be searched two i just wanted to show you when they were listing the different things janitorial facility support services is kind of generic here we have keywords that help us show what what all we're doing so i can actually enter keywords from the home page from the dynamic small business search page it does do partial word search so if i just entered the word ground and i have grounds maintenance in my keyword search then i will still be found so you don't necessarily have to have a word for word match like this indoor plant care if you just plant into a plant from your search screen you have indoor plant care then obviously you'll be fined i can tell you and from that search screen when i'm looking for businesses either i'm going to take the time to find the next code or i'm going to simply use keywords to look for those businesses if you've not updated your sba profile you've just updated sam and called it a day and if the majority of people are searching by keywords versus nax codes then even though you have an active sam profile and maybe a small business you're not going to show up in their search so again these are really important so keywords one makes it easy to find and two helps define why you pick these next codes and it gives more information on your business so it's really important that you enter those okay so after i went from here i did my certificate my keywords i updated my certification date i did save next and this is the next screen that you wind up at so i just wanted a quick screenshot it shows you all this information and gray uh is pulled over from the sam profile there's nothing you can do to correct so if you see any errors like an email address is incorrect you'll have to go back into your sam and update that information all right so we're going to hit next on this and this is our next page and you can see right from the blue screen down here where i'm hopping right down so even though this is e-commerce website and you may not have an e-commerce website per se you should still list your full url test that link to make sure it works because you want that website in your profile if somebody has searched on a search in dynamics small business they come back with 25 to 250 results depending how they filtered it and if they're looking at your profile you want them to go from that sba profile to your website to picking up a phone to reach out and contacting you or emailing you however you want to be contacted so you want to make sure that you do have that website so they can continue investigating your company and find out if your potential that they might want to do business with our next page here is we went from sam other web presence or organization and i kind of have a screen broken into a couple so we have the information from sam again gray boxes and if you have applied for hubzone 8a and based depended on your sam profile if you've checked that woman-owned small business and then sub-checked so you check women-owned small business it expands again it says women-owned small business again and it has edwsb listed for that economic disadvantaged women owned small business if you checked those as well and starting october 15th sba is required to do a certification process for the woman on small business certification you will also see being confusing let me back that up if you are a woman owned small business you've checked that data in sam then when you go into your dynamic small business search you should not only see hubzone 8a but you should also see the woman owned small business list here and again yes no i was working with the client and i had seen that on their sba profile but i hadn't seen it on others so intermittent i don't know if they've updated that across the board so even if you're not a woman-owned small business it'll show or if it's populated whether you've checked that in sam or not so kind of wait and see if you have no idea what i'm talking about and you are a woman owned business for the new sam certification get a hold of me or anybody else at ptac we'll be glad to update you on that information so moving forward here if you have done your hubzone certification or 8a certified and it's not showing the correct data here if it's a hubzone reach out to hubzone or you can reach out to the local sba office if it's 8a and you're definitely certified and different things haven't been updated then you want to work with your sba bos the last thing i want to call out and see you can see here and again this is a screenshot from my profile it says no dbe certifications if you have gone through the process with the state of alaska civil rights office and you've done the dbe certification you can email that certification letter to sba and then they can update this in that dynamic small business search so it shows with the dbe certification information in sam itself you can check that box so it shows dbe certified i know the individual that had done that for years has left and i'm still waiting to hear from sva on who that current point of contact is uh but if you do have that dba or i'm sorry dbe disadvantaged business enterprise and you want to add that in just reach out to me let me know and we'll make sure we get that point of contact to you all right next screen so this is now the owner organization updatable by firm so you can see here they have list out you can list the owners this screen is completely optional if it's blank it's blank the more critical component here is these non-federal government certifications so it says include state certifications state-certified native american i don't know about that but necessarily you want your indeed your industry specific certifications so if you're in the construction industry and you've been certified for asbestos removal lead paint removal uh your cpa your engineering any specific industry that is going to help make you marketable it is good to list this again these certification boxes are only 20 characters long so you might just want to abbreviate to the best and then if you click the save next come back over here to the blue the list in blue click on this updatable by firm again oops i'm sorry yeah updatable by firm come back on this page and it will add two more boxes for every time you fill out two boxes save the page come back you'll have another two blank boxes so if you have quite a few specific non-federal government certifications so if you're hubzone certified or small business certified then you don't want to list that here again these are industry specific certifications and even though i did say small business certified if you're just a small business you self-certify it through sam there's no other third party entity or government entity that officially certifies you as small business okay moving forward capabilities narrative so to me capabilities narrative is probably one of the most important things and the biggest reason that you should take the time to go in and update your dynamic small business search some days i feel like your keywords are most important because they have to find you but once they find you this capability narrative is really character is really very critical let me minimize my screen here so one of the things that i want to pull out is you get 350 characters they update it was 250 and i think they've even beyond 350 but you want to take the time and you want to fill this out use keywords to encourage so if you can see here i have 15 plus years in this experience providing in-state and remote because i'm letting them know i'm not you know just anchorage road system only i'm willing to travel and then semicolon and then list and if i have the same listing of words that are the same as my keywords or if i come up with a good word here that defines our company services i want to make sure that that word is also listed in my keywords so if the string of what you do is very similar to your keywords list that's fine again it just helps everybody because we don't know if they used a keyword or if they used a next code to find you on that list but now that they are looking at everybody and reading that capability narrative you want to be able to easily scan through this and figure out what you do so i wanted to show you here so for example uh this is when and i'm going to hop back and forth between these screens i did a search my keyword was food i didn't use an x code and i came up with a list and you can see how text heavy this is and all of us by human nature do not want to sit and read this word for word we're busy we're in a hurry we're looking for something and our eyes are going to zig zag through this list until we see what type of keyword or see what it is that we're looking for so with that in mind this is where when you're building that capability narrative you want to have something that makes it easy for you to read skip generalized company information say that for your website i i don't it's more my personal opinion but in your capability narrative i don't necessarily feel that it's native or it's it's critical to list that you're a native owned firm or that your owners are from alaska born and raised or families started business those general information about us type of comments aren't this is not the place to list those again if we have these big long lists that we're scanning through i have gone to this site because i am looking for a specific need and i want to find the businesses that can take care of that need and i want to do so quickly and easily okay keywords uh i'm sorry capability narrative so let me go back and then we'll come back and talk about special equipment so what i've done is this same search here where everything i just kind of wanted you to see it is a lot of information that dumps out on the screen and it's always random there's no trick like the old yellow pages days nothing like dating myself talking about yellow pages but there's no way that if your company's a1 that you're going to pull top of the list if you did the same search multiple times in a row you're always going to come back with a different listing order since it's all randomized but i wanted to just make a few words i can make these a little bit bigger and not talk about capability narrative so one of the things that i like recommending when we're building our capabilities narrative is to start with a number 15 plus years industry experience when i say industry experience that kind of defines first company experience so if you have a new business but you as the owner have been in this industry doing this work for 15 years 20 years you want to imply that you want to share that information so industry experience providing in the details when you're looking at these big long string and come through here i can guarantee you that the moment you see a number because it's breaking this list from character letter letter letter you're going to pause and read this and if you don't believe me we'll play in the dynamic small business search and when you see these text heavy um absolutely you're going to take a moment whatever breaks that monotony of our scanning back and forth and for some reason numbers in a text heavy is going to do that so starting off with that but if we're looking at the things of to do not to do again we have characters use keywords to encourage list your data or don't list data that can be pre-filtered so let's look at this again so these few companies and i just pulled these out yesterday so here we have the name mallard duck bay enterprises and to me if i only have a certain number of characters then why do i want to put my business name in the capability narrative when you can see ere i have the business name here so if i'm looking across at this and then i have the business name here i'm wasting critical space there's no point in doing that your capability narrative does not need to be full sentences so we haven't they're an sba 8a certified small disadvantage a lot of the native corporations specializing in this is a lot of text that isn't necessarily pertinent for the capabilities narrative now granted in my screen screenshots i have isolated the capability narrative and separated it from my full search but i've done that just so it's easier for you all to see on the screen so again this is more stuff that if i'm searching for someone i don't particularly care about now i know this sounds really cruel but if i was looking for ada certified i could have pre-filtered that so that all of my searches returned companies that already had that eight day certification or if i'm looking for general and then i want to think about it we want them to take the time to click on our profile and see all of that contact information follow that link so to me again it's duplicated there isn't necessarily any right or wrong when you're filling out your capabilities narrative to me this is a lot of my opinion but i've done many many many dynamics on business search and i want to find what i'm looking for and i want to find it quickly okay so the next one so when i did this keyword search all i did was the word food and what i want to show that if i've done this words search for food somewhere i want to see this to know who this company does so we have this company that's a day they're located in the lake peninsula borough of alaska they're subsidia in the anska is a fully qualified small disadvantage okay blah blah blah so if we have an entire capability narrative that nowhere in it does it tell me why when i did a keyword search for food does it tell me what these guys do and all of this information is exactly why i listed don't put the personal information that capability narrative if i want to know more about where they are where they're located let me go to their website let me take a look at their profile and look at their region i want to know who they are what they do and when i say who they are i just simply want to know really let me rephrase that i want to know what they do because i can look at their profile individually to find out who they are okay so moving on again my keyword was food here we have not only does commercial kitchen solutions have an endless supply of products but we also provide kitchen layout design services a lot of text heavy honestly if i'm going to scan through there i'm going to say kitchen design equipment supply restaurant slope okay so these guys are just in the food industry but they don't actually make food what it was i was looking for when i started doing this webinar years ago i was hungry at the time and since then the word food has been my keyword search for every time i do this presentation again moving on to the next management development training professional development training quality assurance training we could have easily said provide training for management professional tighten it up so we're not reading the word training over and over again because after a while it's like yeah yeah you said that i'm moving on to the next one and interesting enough i really had to look and figure out oh they have facility management how does that tie to what i'm looking for for food okay next for example gns again there's really no point in having the business name because it's there in the list you can start right off with that number at the very beginning 30 years experience providing okay here we go business management hvac janitorial window cleaning okay still not really happy move down to the next one superior service adjectives anything adverbs pumping up that your business is on time alaska native not necessarily for uh ethnicity but just because we're born and raised alaska owner operator those type of things really aren't necessary in the capability narrative again the goal is to intrigue me because we have 30 years experience what do you do let me move on so we have specialized in association general custodial full food and up here's the company but right here full food mess i'm in my search most likely i'm going to note that company maybe find a few more but i'm definitely going to click on because they had something that defines why i was looking for him now i realize this is a lot of me rattling on and just going on and on and being critical of other people's information but i want to point out that when you have busy people searching because they have a need and they are looking for contractors or subcontractors to talk to about doing quotes to provide those services you want to be easily found and if i am filtering through a lot of what i feel is nonsense words for this particular definition our capabilities narrative then i am going to start glazing over very quickly and see and i'm moving on to the next individual again my word was search so here we had somebody food service food service okay equipment that's good food service what i'm looking maybe for the word catering provide food the next one and i just kind of split these out so it's easy to see here's another company currently offers the following services to both 8a and not 8a targeted customers do any of you guys care whether you're an 8 a or a non-a day type of customer to me again that's just kind of silly nonsense words that are taking up space that people are forcing me to read before i get down here to what do you guys do okay so they have a pretty good list and things like specialized in error handling just again tighten that down think of back to the days when we actually used to do ads in newspapers again i realized i'm aging myself saying this but when we each character had a cost we want to get something that's really concise these guys right here look at this i can quickly fill through figure out what they do here i wanted to point this out that when you're looking at a list and this is blank this means that this company has never taken the time to go past sam to go into their dynamic small business search to fill out this additional information so from that contracting officer experience if i am going to do a closed bid list i need to have at least two companies respond so maybe i'll find five companies that i'm going to reach out to and say hey do you want to respond to an rfq for me and i have a list of 250 businesses to filter through unless i am simply not finding it it's a unique need i am not going to odds are i'm not going to click on this this company's information and go any further no capability nerd and again the last one we have village located located how far from anchorage operates the grocery store so really this is all i want to know they do grocery store fuel oil the phone number not necessary because again they have the name and phone number part of the search information but here that we have grocery store is it a retail service only do they do delivery do they do drop shipping so a few more words could have really been beneficial for them other than just hey we sell fuel oil fuel and oil we're a grocery store so just things to think about when you're pulling it off questions anybody okay so let me recap again capabilities narrative because when somebody's looking for you you want to have that information you want to be able to scan it easy and you want to find those words that are yep that's why i'm looking then i'm going to click on that and i'm going to go into the individual profile okay so on this page right under the capabilities narrative we have this next open box the special equipment materials this is an open free character text box and to the best of my knowledge it doesn't actually have a character limitation so it is a great free marketing spot for you to add additional information about your company so take advantage to market equipment materials that distinguish you from your competitors and when i say no size limit i'm talking about the character count for that particular box so if you're in the crane industry and you only have one of three of some of the really large cranes uh then you might want to put that in there if you have scaffolds or man lifts or cherry pickers those type of things and you're in that industry that should have it it's not worth listing so if you do painting and you happen to have trucks and some ladders and you know uh pressure washers and i don't list it because really those are the things that we want to assume that you have to be able to operate your business you want to list those things that help distinguish you from your competitors if you are a retailer list some of the distributor information so if you were the only certified distributor of oh i had a few that i was thinking about last night um let's just say like john deere lawn mowers riding lawnmowers or caterpillar you're the only caterpillar distributor in this geographic region then that's the type even though you might sell multiple brands if you're the the only distributor for that particular product line those are the type of things that are worth listening listing in the special equipment materials section okay and i will tell you guys that when i don't see questions i assume because it makes my ego happy that i'm doing such a brilliant job there's no reason to ask questions so if you want me to re state or clarify please by all means just hit that raise hand button i'll let mute you let you know okay so we kind of really heavily hit this capability narrative but i want to point out again this information is really critical this is what's going to make me pick from a list like this and this wasn't even the full screenshot because it lists 25 businesses on one page to then go through and decide am i going to take a look at your company or not okay the bottom half of that page this is we're still all on the same page it was your capability narrative the equipment and then the bottom half of the page here is for this bonding capacity business type and qa standards so if you are not in an industry where bonding capacity is critical it's fine to leave it at zero if you're in the construction industry absolutely you want to get that aggregate and that per contract limit in here these are searchable fields so if i'm looking for somebody using a construction next code that has an aggregate bonding of at least uh 1 million 250 000 i can actually pre-filter to see if anybody comes up with this so these are really critical features and it's good marketing this percent of business type it really doesn't necessarily matter uh if you only do new construction maybe 100 construction or 90 construction 10 service because service would be those repair maintenance again this isn't a mandatory field if you don't fill this out no harm no foul this qa standards these you only check if you have these certifications and in some industries this iso 9000 series is really critical if you're in manufacturing uh you bet they're going to be looking for these mil military qa standard certifications all right next your export profile quite simple either if you're an expert exporter yes you come through you or want to be you can fill this information out and then you have a huge long list of countries i just grabbed a couple um so you can see this was probably only a third of the list but if once you say no on this page that you're not doing exporting you're not an exporter you just hit your save next and move on to the next page okay references good questions all right i'm going to go down the list i have a question from melanie oh thanks melanie just supporting my ego doing a great job gotta love those okay tasha i'm going to unmute you you're if you unmute from your end then you can go ahead and ask a question because you had your hand raised did you want to ask a question tasha oh green mike go ahead if you're talking tasha i am not hearing you let me quick double check my audio so if the error is on my end i do have it let's click play with my audio a second i'm showing that the mic is working um i'm sorry tasha i'm not hearing you at all and it could be on my end if you want to take a moment to type the question or if not once the webinar ends feel free to call me 786 786-7270 and i'll be glad to go over that question they do show that you're unmuted but i am not able to hear you all right sorry about that tasha so i want to talk about references so these are really critical as well and you may or may not notice that when a contracting officer is looking at a proposal in the language that proposals and they're talking about their evaluation factors and they mention past performance there's usually a generic line that mentions that past performance can be considered from the data you're actually providing them plus the contracting officers can look outside of the solicitation package itself for past performance and this is one of the places that they can look so when i start talking about references there's a couple of different ways that i like to think about the why we are entering this reference first of all i want to state that references are not like your resume references where we're talking about yeah they're a great guy they work hard the companies swell they're fast we're not looking at these generic we're looking at actual references of past performance we want to know what kind of work who are you working for we want some information out of that and we can break those down into three different concepts contract specific longevity or scope gosh tasha i still feel really bad that i didn't get a chance to hear your question so let me move forward okay so contract specific so all the stuff in the green boxes this is me adding my content my comments for it and i just made up a reference so that i could give something very specific so when i say contract specific we're thinking one particular activity so here i have listed department of air force and what i did i actually went into fpds last night the federal procurement data system and i grabbed somebody's current contract that was just issued and so i actually listed the agency the way it was listed in fpds so we had department of air force now when we're talking about references let me go back to the blank screen i want to point out that we have character and format limitation for each of these boxes so you see boxes and you see character limitation so when we start completing our references we want to take advantage of these character limitations so the name this is going to be the company oops let me hop back this is going to be the agency in this case because this is contract specific and in this particular i'm using federal agency so department of air force and then in parentheses i'm going to put a little bit of information because department of air force is pretty vast and so i have my title replace active barriers and it was jay baer because it could have been ieltson uh but i just mentioned so replace active barriers j bear alaska and i made sure it all fit within my 80 character so yeah department of air force but what did i do specifically now because this is federal i want to list the actual federal contract number and i listed it this way without dashes because this is how it is listed in fpds i can actually copy this search go right to fpds and i can look up that specific contract so we have agency we have contract number now a lot of people tell me when they're looking at the references they say i don't have federal work yet i don't have any references even though sba has set up this page with government with federal contracts in mind you do not have to list or only list federal contracts so i just wanted to use this to start this off for this example so again agency i did a little bit what we did for the agency because heck i have 80 characters why waste that space i listed the contract number because if an agency is looking at this whether for solicitation for past performance they can then go look into the cpars see if i have any past performance they can go into fpds take a look at the contract our start date in this case because it was a contrac i can take the date executed so this is the date that the contracting officer actually signed and awarded there's my start date if you prefer if you have one where the contract was executed in april but work doesn't really begin till june july up to you the easiest way though is to do the date executed because it's researchable i can actually easily verify this my end date you want to include your period of performance so if this is a multi-year contract you want to list that date in the future again i have all option years and can be a future date so i here we have the value so this is your proposal contract amount for your full contract include option years ooh i'm running out of time and i still have more i got to talk faster and just i want to pull out the contact name you can be the contracting officer it can be the cor the cotr keep in mind that if you that these positions change and so if you're when you're going in and updating your dynamic small business search profile that if these individuals have left make sure you put valid contract and contact information here and of course the display order you want to keep the most current stuff on top so in some cases i list i wrote here think about listing a main number for a specific department instead of an individual if this is an area that has a high turnover all right bear with me let me talk about the last few slides so i mentioned we have contract but now i want to talk to you about references as longevity and you could do this if it was all federal agency and you've done a lot of work and you want to consolidate and show hey look at all of this so if you've done a whole bunch of small jobs per se and you want to roll them together the t to me longevity means that this business did so well that they became my go-to company every time i had that need so for me personally as a consumer if i like a place i will go back to that place as many times because they're my go-to i've built that relationship i can count on them i can rely on them those that's where i'm when i want this this is the company i'm going to and we are implying longevity because we're a good business so again and i just kind of made up these names so bear with me so here we have the name anderson property management again i have 80 characters what have i done for these guys tenant improvement repairs so we can put something in parentheses in contract i'm going to put something that implies continuous ongoing services multiple projects on-call maintenance i just wanted to give examples of what i could put here i have 20 characters this green box here where i had my parenthesis and i wrote 10 improvements i just wanted to give some other examples maybe the whole work for them is on-call emergency repairs on-site handyman i just wanted to give you ideas to let you know we can take advantage of this space so then if we're talking longevity when did we start with this particular client when did you start working with this client that's the start of our services end date because they are a current client and we are still anticipating future work let's not list an end date uh if it's a company and unfortunately we do have those companies that are closed then maybe we can put an end date so if you've done a lot of work in the oil fields with bp alaska and bp alaska has moved on then possibly you want to put it in date if it's been a year or two since you've done any work for that client put an end date let people know that defined range now value and i didn't really talk about this much uh when we're talking contract this is your proposed amount but when we're talking about this longevity as a client you want to enter your gross receipts today how much did they pay you that is their value this company to you for that reference and if you're talking about like here in 19-year window and to me 500 000 is a lot of money um maybe that doesn't say much at all but put in that amount because if they're showing the higher that dollar amount over that time period the more they've used you and granted people reading this may not actively think this way but you are planting that seed that you you have long term clients that have spent money with you you must know what you're doing and of course more contact information the last thing i want to talk about is scope and i apologize i was running over i was really hoping to be quicker this time and play in the dynamic small business search but if you can hang in there with me please do all right so scope is project specific longevity is time in client relationship scope is that singular project so here is an example and i was working with a client that did a lot of work with alaska airlines this is why i kind of pull in this information so say the company's alaska airlines now they're not federal but being alaska residents we all know alaska airlines so it's like oh they're working with a big company we know the name of that company what did we do because alaska airlines has many different areas how is your company fitting into their business need so here again 80 characters i'm saying advertising marketing campaign 2020. in that contract it was specific we're giving them more information of what we did for this company i have a start date i have an end date and i have a value now what i'm trying to point out here is in this short turnaround period i did this dollar of work for this specific project under this program for this company and what i'm telling people the shorter time period large dollar amount shows business capacity it implies that i have a larger staff that i'm ready to tackle larger product projects it means i have cash flow i have managerial that my business is experienced and set up and ready to go where if you came to me with a larger project i would come to you and say well i'm really interested but i gotta hire some more people and i need to up my bonding capacity and um i need to do this and then i need to do that so yeah be glad to do the job if you can wait a couple months we want somebody that's like if we're doing these type of dollar amounts in the shorter turnaround they have the staff here ready to go so this is the type of information that we're talking about and it could be that you do a lot of work for alaska airlines under advertising marketing and you can pull it all together and keep that as an ongoing media ongoing marketing something and have the with no end date and a dollar a month and then again you're applying time but because i want to call out this specific project because again i want to show that i can do large projects questions on any of that and again i apologize um iliador i'm going to unmute you and i guess if i can't hear you then it definitely oh i can hear you hello hi yes hi how many references are allowable oh it's almost unlimited i was talking to one business and she had 20 references and i'm like let's start consolidating and so i was working with her and she had a lot of small projects for the same company so we went back and did that kind of longevity concept because we wanted to show that business relationship i recommend at least three to five references keep in mind for the value of your references for the purposes of past performance they need to be within the last three to five years so if you have a whole bunch of references and all the work was done in early 2000s but you don't list anything current then i don't know if one you were so busy that you didn't take the time to list current activity or two you guys are hurting and you've not done any work since 2001 so you don't want to necessarily imply negative information so references are something that you should stay on top of but yeah you can have an unlimited number and that's where you have this display order you can actually go through and renumber them and hop right down that list uh and keep your current stuff on top thank you any other questions anyone okay i went ahead and muted you again all right so references capability narrative keywords all of those things are critical this is where and i am out of time i apologize i ran so late i keep thinking this is such a short thing but then i forget how much i'm talking so i just want to give you our contact information reach out to myself reach out to anyone in our alaska ptac oh i got to update it we have a new gary broshore left and we have a new individual that started this week welcome craig von holt he's on the webinar today and craig i'll get you added to my slides here shortly and move out gary but reach out to us work with us let me know if you want to set up an appointment and want me to review your capability narrative if you want help walking it through but really that criticality is getting those keywords so you can be found and that you're defining those next codes get that capability narrative so i know i want to look at your business from a string of businesses and get those references in there so that when i actually click on your profile i can see that your company is actually doing work and that i should follow up so real quick i i just wanted to show you i did a quick keyword and i used the word camp you can see it right here where it's telling me what i just was looking for in the anchorage area i used the word camp i came up with 10 companies and i hopefully some point in time i can take more time with you guys individually and we can really talk about how this is used and using the dynamic small business search uh to the best of ability at this point in time i'm going to do a last call for questions because i have over talked and i am running late i want to thank everyone for taking the time to join me today and if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me download my slides just because it has all the little tips and hints on that and again if you couldn't download that then just email me and i'll be glad to send you that uh pdf of the slides so thank you everyone have a fantastic day i'm going to just leave this screen up for a moment and then i'm going to go ahead and close out the webinar