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uh good morning and Welcome to our webinar with NorCal PTAC this is uh marketing to the government my name is James Forrest we also have Lenny bean and Thomas Burns all procurement Specialists from NorCal p-tech um the two of them will be giving the main presentation um tagging off so we're really excited to see what they put together this is a really relevant topic to all of our businesses and our clients and many of you are not our clients are not even on our service area can also benefit from what we have to say here so I'm looking forward to this it's going to be a big benefit to everyone involved so thank you so much for joining um I want to talk a little bit about NorCal PTAC before jumping into uh the main presentation or the hosts of today's webinar as I mentioned NorCal PTAC is one of these lovely acronyms that you get in Government Contracting but we are uh we're one of the good guys we're we're in the northern California procurement technical assistance center and we're not actually a government agency we are a non-profit and we're funded by tax dollars by various government entities um but we are actually an independent non-profit part of a network of centers across the country um here's our service area if you have a business in one of these counties in green these 15 counties here then you're eligible to apply for our services I mean 2021 alone last year uh our clients won more than 500 million dollars so half a billion dollars in government contracts so if you're looking for assistance in any a variety of Government Contracting topics you've come to the right place um so how do we do it how do we help our clients out with three basic core Services first I'll just get out of the way because you it's the third one but you know it because you're here we put on trainings and webinars these are always free and they're free for anyone to join from anywhere um so you don't even need to be in the country um we we hope to reach a bunch of small businesses who are interested in Government Contracting but you know if you're just curious about the thing and you're not in a service area you can join as well um you can find all of our upcoming events at norcalpcheck.org and clicking on the calendar a little bit later I'll be going over some of the upcoming events we have and then jumping back to that first bubble there that really the bread and butter of what we do is one on one counseling so procurement Specialists like Thomas Lenny or myself can meet with you to go over really any topic related to Government Contracting so if market research how to Market yourself preparing your capability statement uh finding solicitations preparing your bid bid review Proposal review compliance really all sorts of things related to Government Contracting not to mention registrations and certifications like Sam and wosby um so the second thing we do is if you are a client if you're one if you have a business in this area and you apply for a client services we can set you up with a service that we pay for but then we offer to you for free and it's really neat it's called my bid match and what it does is it will scrape all these different databases uh local County state federal uh Transportation agencies you name it and it's going to send you a list of bid opportunities that match the criteria that you and your procurement Specialists put into the system so if it all works out and it takes some fine tuning but you'll wake up every morning with an email and then the email may have something zero to 50 or something like that different bid opportunities um hopefully not 50 that's probably too many for to stay on top of uh and and there's a linked list of bid opportunities um and it's really nice way of staying on top of opportunities that are available to you so you don't have to spend quite as much time going on doing the research but which is also good to do so that's how we help our clients like I said everything's totally free you can apply on our website norcalp tech.org it's a pretty simple application if you work with the sbdc center uh you may already be in your system so just give us a call or an email and we'll get you started um if you're not in our service area do not despair there are 96 p-texts across the country including six or seven in California alone so that second link on the page here apptac-us dot org slash find a PTAC that will bring you to uh the national uh registry of different p-tax so you can find contact information for the PTAC in your service area so if you're in Sacramento for instance you're going to be in the California capital PTAC if you're in Santa Cruz County you're gonna be in the Monterey AP attack Los Angeles San Luis Obispo so on so uh hopefully uh that's informative about who's hosting the webinar today we would love to see you as a client if you're in a service area and uh let's go ahead and hand things over to uh Lenny Bean who is our longest standing procurement specialist here with NorCal feed Tech so Lenny I'll let you take it away Thanks James uh yes I'm Lenny bean and I guess my breadth of experience was in is in the federal Marketplace um worked for 35 years selling to primarily federal agencies um and yes as James said I have been around a while there's our little disclosure so today what we're going to do is we're going to talk about first the uh resource of the federal government which I am going to cover and Thomas will then pick it up and uh for local governments and local governments meeting California we're all of our clients reside uh this government marketing research is pretty unique it's a different Market but like any other New Market whether if you're going International or or you're looking to develop a new product or a startup what have you it takes time it doesn't happen overnight and you have to approach the government Marketplace the same way it's going to take some energy to get it focused down to what you want to do in that space so in the federal uh Market of Interest the overall process we're going to talk about is to collect and analyze all that data on public websites uh everything is out there in public websites now um you want to make sure you go to go there's a lot of dot coms which will you know uh obviously um try to sell you their Wares just to help you get government contracts and and that and some of them are very good however I encourage you to stay with dot gov um sites they are no uh free and they're provided by the government for all of their agencies so the first step is to find your Market of Interest what is it you do uh what is it you do best so what are your products and services uh if you were going to do your quote elevator pitch if you will and tell somebody what it is you do what your company does can you can you describe it in a couple of sentences that makes sense um if you already have a presence in the commercial Marketplace you want to emphasize that you want to emphasize that you do have that level of experience for your product or service and if you even startups can go into the government Marketplace that's a little bit more difficult but if you have done your research appropriately you'll be able to Define your Market space and again we talked federal state local government buys one a lot of things so we're going to talk about those public websites um and what we really want to do is get you to really nail down your product or service you're trying to sell and the one or two agencies that are your markets of interest you can't sell to them all even in the federal Marketplace you don't want to have to assume that you can just bid to all federal agencies that is not going to uh you're going to have spent a lot of time in trying to get those connections and then we'll talk about establishing those points of contract who it is you contact First and how do you go forward so we're going to use internet uh searches and by the way um we can help you do this you do not have to uh do this on your own uh you sign up with a um for counseling uh James was saying we are no cost website to small business uh no cost Organization for small business so I'm going to talk about some of the ways you can do federal Market searches USA spending is it's got 10 years of federal spending um you you can search it by your nics code your keywords Etc you can do it by agency by company um and then it gives you information so again so you Trends as well uh if you're an example you're in the I.T business you want you're going to want to see those Trends is it going up because there's 10 years of History here is it going up over the past couple years it's going down who's getting those Awards what agency is buying that that service uh what are the top two agencies that perhaps you should reach out to uh every Federal agency is required to have a spending forecast uh sometimes they you it's a little bit difficult to find but we can certainly help you find those so you can see what they've plan on spending in the following fiscal year um the USA spending you can find out what they did spend this is a forecast of where their focus is to spend their dollars the offices of small disadvantaged business utilization so every Federal agency has an office for small disadvantaged businesses their job is to find small businesses to meet their small business goals that agency small business goals so they're focused on that but if they don't know who you are you need to bring that into Focus so they want you to identify that agency you know to reach out to this office and let them know you exist um so this is the uh if you click on that web archive there's a complete list of all of the offices and small and disadvantaged business uh Federal agency the names of the people are there email addresses Etc so you don't have to go chasing around wondering who to reach out to and I should also mention too that is you find it is not a prime contractors that are also have small disadvantaged business offices as well because as big Prime contractors they have to meet their small business goals in order to get the prime contracts now system for reward management some of you may have already gone here this is where you register to do business with the federal government um but also at this site you can log in you can search for opportunities contract rewards and and uh and and registered entities other businesses you can also search for other businesses that are registered with the with the federal government to do business with the federal government again we're here to help the Sam system we we all struggle with um so feel free to reach out and we'll help you through it the next step is this Dynamic small business search and this contains all small businesses that are registered in Sam so if you're a small business and you're registered in Sam you're going to show up in the in the dynamic small business search Contracting officers small business officers and the public for other companies will can go in here and again this is public information and you can find other companies and your expertise you're in the ACs codes Etc to connect with um when you will talk a little bit more about it of how to go in there and make sure your information so it pulls your information from the Sam registration but in addition you need to put in your capability statement your keywords and some of your non-government certifications you may have a construction license whatever you want to list in there so when those small business offices go in you show up if they go in and they don't see anything about your company that you've put in they'll just move on um next area is that it's called subnet small business administration subcontracting Network in here is where um large businesses they're seeking small businesses obviously to meet their small business goals so you can go in here and search on those businesses you put in your Nas code and see if anybody is is currently looking number one it has opportunities out there or number two you're just looking for those businesses that do business in in your naics codes and in that information is detailed information on the person the email address and the phone number for on those Prime contractors this is probably one of a better way to get in the government business for a lot of small businesses is to subcontract to a business that's already in the door and then build your company's uh presence in the mark Federal Marketplace from there General Services Administration this is uh it's pre-negotiated five-year contract schedules of products and services there is a ton of contracts in this Library it's a good source of information for anybody want to enter the government Marketplace because you can see who got it what their pricing is what's in their statement of work what they they'll have like labor Specialties Etc and descriptions of what those uh positions hold so it's just a lot of information that you can get online to figure out what others have done uh one word of caution the pricing is something that they negotiate with the federal government however that does not mean the federal government will pay those prices they may compete those companies that are already on GSA um so but at least it gives you a guidance to see what's out there and it's a potential source of prime contractors to subcontract to you will find um and so one of the things you want to do is you find some of those Prime contractors in GSE library then go over to the sam.gov Etc and to see if they are actually getting uh getting caught getting business and in which agencies in USA spending look in USA spending once you've defined who that prime prime contractor is look them up see what kind of activity they have and at least it gives you an idea of whether or not it's worth reaching out to them thank you so this is a just a snapshot of the dynamic small business search um in on this one here just want to make sure that you need to keep your information updated uh in the dynamic small business search if you registered um to update it you want to go to the SBA GLS system and we can send out that link if you want it's an eweb.sba Dot gov slash GLS and that allows you to update your information [Music] um that's other than the same information that's pulled over so it has all the same information but you need to put in your filler statement and keywords so that when they go searching for you you show up another thing I encourage you to do is look in you're in the ICS codes look for businesses that are already in here look what they wrote for capability statement look what they use for keywords what makes sense for you um and feel free to use the case method copy and steal everything so this is the subnet I talked about so you can then again drill down by nays coach you actually can go in here and you can click on on California and then dig down to see if there's any current opportunities that Prime contractors are looking for in in your neck of the woods or you can just look at it on the business directory to see what businesses are on this site that are looking for small businesses to reach out to them um it's great information because it gives you the names of the contacts at these large businesses it gives you their email address telephone numbers Etc so it's easy then to find out who you send your information to this is the gsae library I mentioned uh this is where you're starting in that search field and you can see there's a variety of categories there um so a ton of information here um a GSA schedule may be good for your business depending on what you do um but that's something we could talk about when we meet uh to make sure it's the right thing for you to go do but definitely use this to find out okay who is who has contracts with the federal government and what are their pricing what are their uh capabilities um and if they are a potential candidate to to contact it is far easier to reach out to the companies that are already on the GSA schedules than it is to start from scratch they can add you into the mix once they get on been under contract and it helps them increase their sales on the general Services Administration Library not well not least uh V Jack and and James had mentioned some of this our mid-match system uh again it's a no cost service we set up your profile used in keywords and Geographic preferences uh and you get daily emails of opportunities based on your search profile it searches Federal and some of the local government entities it does not do all of the local government entities but it does a lot of those local government entities so we have a tool called gov spend that we have um that we can then search in more detail so we can get more detailed searches in federal state and local government entities um they to go spend the company scrapes every government entity you could think of in the United States so they have lots of information so we can look at Contract Awards we can look for opportunities and to give you a picture of uh but not just Federal but state and local government entities as well so but uh feel free to sign up and use us and we can help you do the uh this analysis and researches so how do you then you make a connection you know you have all this information you have emails your phone numbers now what do you do um so on our website uh Jameson mentioned resources we do have a resource for generating a statement of qualifications we have a webinar and we have a template and in addition we could also send you existing clients um statement of qualifications and it gives you an idea of how they put their soqs together it's essentially it's a PDF document that you can attach to your email it describes your company your past performance your codes naics unspsc which is the state of California uses and some of the Cities use nigp codes Etc uh and gear key players maybe just you but a brief bio of your experience you do business with people not with companies and they want to be able to see who they're who they're working with and if you have any testimonials Etc you can put those on the back side of the document so that they can see what kind of businesses you have been in what kind of accomplishments you have the stamina qualification has been used wow seems like forever and the federal government uh it's recognized in state and local governments as well so then when you have a second I'm going to introduce your company I always request a brief meeting 10 minutes to introduce your company always attach your statement of qualification so you're going to send it into that small business office that's in the department of interior and [Music] um and you introduce yourself attach your stimulate qualifications and ask for a brief meaning you're going to send it to that small business office and then by having that statement of qualifications it's a mouse click for them to send it over to the department heads that may need to use your services or projects watch for and you want you to Define your two or three agencies you're going to go after you've done your analysis now make sure that you track and so you attend their Outreach events obviously a lot of them are online now on Zoom Etc but there are ones being now being held in person and it's always good to to connect with those Outreach events as well and then connect with those Prime contractors that do business in those agencies it's an understatement qualifications because those Prime contractors have to meet their small business goals as well so at this point I'm going to turn it over to Thomas who's going to talk about uh state and local thank you Lenny appreciate it hey good morning everybody I'm sorry if you're picking up the sounds of a fire truck it just passed by okay um yeah so I've been with NorCal pizza for the past two years I actually come from the small business Community I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years and started several businesses failed several times learned so much and now I devote my my work to teaching others uh what I've learned what what to do what not to do especially focused on Government Contracting next slide please all right local government Marketplace so a lot of what I'm going to say is a piggyback of all the great information that leaning just shared just I would just want to under get you to understand first the size of this Marketplace so being in California we know this is such a huge economy I think it's the fifth or sixth largest in the world So within California itself the state there are 233 state agencies they all have their own budgets they all have their own buyers and their own needs and so that alone is is a huge Marketplace that requires a great amount of research same with all of the counties in California so there's 58 of them and within our norcat NorCal Pizza territory we work with 15 of them um and then uh the cities now there's over 400 cities in California but on our website the NorCal PTAC website we highlight 32 cities where we provide a link that goes directly to their procurement page and then within our NorCal Northern California territory there are 24 independent Transportation agencies that includes the ferries the the bus systems the light rail systems and so just giving you an understanding that when you do this research understand that it's it's pretty huge and so you do definitely have to make a choice narrow your focus so you can do quality research next slide please so let's look at the the state agencies and and how to do a beginning way of doing marketing research one of the first things I do with with my new clients is I take them to the State website which is the Cali procure website and we do what's called a Scripps search so the state of California has a pretty extensive database where they track all the spending uh where Lenny was talking about they tracked the spinning on you U.S uh USA spending for like 10 years on the state of California it's about four to five years so they track everything from ten dollars on up to a billion dollars in spending whatever the contract is um and they track it they track it whether it's purchased utilizing like a PO or an RFP RFQ and this provides a lot of valuable information especially for those who have a product or service and they're not even sure if the government buys this right that's a lot of what I get I get a lot of clients who they don't know if this type of consulting or this type of product or this service is really purchased by the government a good test is to do a script search to figure that out also the the next bullet point talks about State contracts so where's the Federal Government utilizes GSA schedules in the state of California they use a variety of different state contracts there's a contract just for licensing of software there's a contract similar to GSA that's called CMAs and the CMAs contract has products and services all across the board for a number of years where the pricing is set and you can look at those cmass contracts and get the same valuable information you can understand their pricing you can understand their terms you can even see who they're purchasing or who they're selling their products to what agencies and for how much uh Master Agreements are similar but they're mostly geared towards larger firms um this is a valuable amount of information that helps you to understand how the state agencies buy what they're going to buy because they don't need to use rfps right there's many different methods that they use and understanding that is very important the last bullet is first policy agencies so the state of California is very aggressive in doing their best to make sure that they meet their goals of delivering or or doing business with the certified small businesses and certified disabled veteran business enterprises dvde and so one of the the tactics that they use is what's called a first policy So currently uh there are 21 agencies within the state of California where whenever they're going to buy anything they first have to look for certified small businesses and certified dbes they they are a good way to start your marketing research to understand their goals understand what they buy um and this link here uh Advocates at dgs because the the list is so I tested the link just a couple days ago and it wasn't really working right so this is a web this is a email that takes you directly to the the state Advocates and they can supply you with that information next slide please and so here's an example of what the Scripps database is supposed to look like and what you can see at the top is you see department and purchase document all of that information is in an Excel spreadsheet so here that's an example the that's the UN spsc code that I used you can also use description you can use any one of those but utilizing your code for your industry is a great way to understand how much of this have they been buying over the last three four years and uh it tells you there are 395 sometimes we'll do a search and it's only 25. you know sometimes we'll do a search and it's like four thousand so depending on your product or service and within that industry this is a good way to see just how popular relevant that product or service has been utilized by the state of California and because this is the downloadable database you can have it as a document that is really helpful for you next slide please [Music] all right so 58 counties in California um similar to State agencies meaning you do business with the Departments you don't do business directly with the county you're doing business with with a department within that County so again it's understanding the County's budgets I mean the the department and what they buy and their their budgets and we mentioned govspin this is one of the the utilize utilizations of govspin that I work with my clients on WE utilize this database to understand what does Santa Clara County purchase um who are what's their what's their budget and govspin is a great tool to help us understand whether or not your product or service is ideal for counties or for cities um by the way I didn't add this into this webinar but I didn't want to touch on it it also focuses on the purchasing for universities and school districts so if your product or service is something that's aligned really clearly with universities and with school districts then govspin is a great tool to help you find those decision makers and understand their purchasing habits over the last four or five years and finally nothing really does replace the phone and email I always Advocate my clients utilize the phone when there's a phone number and then you follow up with that email with the information and of course your your capability statement next slide and again cities so again this is a great opportunity for those who are just getting into Government Contracting I think cities Transportation agencies are a great way to break into the marketplace of government um the the federal government can be very challenging because they really do focus on organizations with past performance let's say you have no past performance I think cities counties and these smaller stuff definitely these smaller facilities give you a better chance to break in and again I utilize gupsman a great deal to help understand the city's needs um again like she was gonna say less competition less red tape it's just it can be depending on your product or service a little bit easier to break into Governor Contracting focusing on cities so if you do your market research it will help to identify what cities are ideal for your product or service and next slide please and here's an example of what might be available on a city's procurement page right you're going to have a list of their current RFP or RFQ opportunities um within those you can click on those that for example it says Aquatic Park Bay Trail even if you are completely different than what that title is right you do um you're you're a consultant you're you're in marketing you're a marketing consultant and you're looking for marketing opportunities but this is something dealing with uh Public Works you click on it what it's going to offer you is actually a contact information it's going to list some buyer or some Contracting officer that could be a Segway into learning more about as an example the city of Berkeley and what their what their needs are what what they're looking to be purchasing in the next six months eight months nine months and so there's information everywhere and just got to be recognizing the opportunity to network and build those relationships which can lead to uh future opportunities within government next slide please and transportation agencies I really like Transportation agencies as another way to break in the the government Market space as I as I show you here minus Barton California high speed rail because those are huge agencies most of these Transportation agencies are fairly small and they buy quite a few things and again utilizing the phone and email to reach out and learn what their needs are is a great way to start the process of building those relationships and Gathering the marketing research you need next slide please and here's a quick example right this is just a AC Transit and on their oh uh go back again there you go perfect and as you can see here they they give you a a somewhat of an overview of the services that they need you know it's it's not clear what necessary Professional Services means but that's an opportunity to reach out and have that conversation what are your Professional Services that you purchase um what kind of equipment do you buy so if this is something that would be of interest to you understanding this leads you into doing more marketing research with AC and other smaller Transportation agencies um next slide please and uh just final thoughts um we're about to wrap it up we're gonna have questions uh time where we can ask well you can ask questions and we can help you with those but just wanted to give you an overview final thoughts on what we kind of presented to you today and and the main thing is it is worth your time to conduct really good marketing research regardless of what you want to do whether it's the federal government local cities counties States Transportation agencies um I don't know where you guys are located but I'm experiencing an earthquake uh it's over now uh next one understanding huh yeah we just we just have what I would say was at least a three or four point earthquake in San Francisco but I mean my screen was moving about four or five inches to the left or right just now I saw that and for those of you who don't live on the ring of fire then welcome to this experience that's a day in the life of San Francisco and day in the life of San Francisco see how we handle it it's just calm no business he's just moving right along you gotta have respect for that yeah um understanding future buying needs right doing the research will help you to understand what that agency's buying needs are going to be also understanding how they bought you know is it really rfps or is it more purchase orders is it more of a relationship where they can just have a relationship and highlight somebody and because the dollar amount is let's say under 50 000 do they need to um have four or five bids maybe they do maybe they don't understanding what cities can and cannot do is very important so doing that research up front helps you to understand where you have the greatest opportunity and again less really is more um depending on your company's size if you have a marketing department of three four people and you have four or five sales people out in the field and you have an operations team yeah there's a quite a bit you can do but if you're a one-person operation trying to break in or you you have a contract and that contract is taking up eighty percent of your time and you're trying to figure out how to get more contracts you're limited to what you can do when it comes to networking when it comes to just doing rfps and and that whole process if nobody has done an RFP that you understand it it can be very time consuming so focusing on less will actually give you a greater opportunity as long as you've done the right research and uh James if you want I think that's the last slide and we can have questions if you want yeah if you uh please enter any questions you may have into the Q a tab um and we'll get to that in a second we've got a good chunk of time for some questions here um first of all thanks I thought that was that was really really helpful uh and you know I've heard it said that when you're getting into Government Contracting a majority of your time should be spent marketing um which I think is would make it probably grossly under by a lot of newbies who are getting into it so this is really some of the most important work you can do as a government contractor especially getting your foot in the door okay so mainly I just want to talk real quickly before we go into questions about the upcoming events for the veteran Small Business Week series that we've got going on next week starts on Monday with a veteran certification overview um all of all the webinars this week are at 10 A.M so that's Monday October 31st that's a Halloween one so come with your best costume I don't think Joe Moore is going to be wearing a costume for that one I'm not sure he's a costume kind of guy um but uh we'll see we'll see we may be surprised yet oh we've got a nice treat for you on Wednesday we're skipping Tuesday there on Wednesday we got a nice treat we've got a whole uh panel of Veteran women business owners who are going to be talking about their experience um on how they became successful as veterans and how that intersects with uh their success as women in the industry um so that that's going to be a nice treat as well some of the panelists I mean these are pretty impressive folks so I hope you join for that uh we've got one sponsored or presented by the California Department of General Services the the dgs I'm dvbe certified that is the disabled veteran business Enterprise certification now what so if you're small business certified or your dvbe certified and you want to know how to do business with the state and as Thomas says that's a lot of different uh it's a big one of the biggest economies in the world and a lot of different agencies uh going on there that accept that certification and are looking for small businesses and disabled veteran businesses to do business with then please take a look at that on Thursday 10 a.m and then to finish it off on Friday we're going to talk about maximizing the OSB sdv OSB that's veteran-owned small business or the service disabled veteran owned small business certification opportunities um and that is going to be presented by Donnie and Williams the the VA so it's going to be a great week a chock full of resources mostly going to be relevant for for veterans so if you're a veteran if you know anybody who is a veteran please chime in um the DVD that webinar number three will be relevant for other folks who are just looking to small business certified as well so don't be discouraged if you're not a veteran so we hope to see you at those like I said they're always free these are all free um so we hope that you sign up and join and ask some questions uh but right now we're in the middle of a webinar still so we uh we would love to hear your questions at the moment and I see some questions coming in so let me get to them uh Phil is asking I sell landscape irrigation irrigation control technology but find it difficult to locate people within agencies who are willing uh qualified to evaluate what I have to offer do you have any other ideas well um I'm not sure exactly what you've done so far but utilizing if if you've done the research to look for those codes for example there's a specific next code or unspsc code for that product or service and if you do the research and you're on USA spending or you utilize the scripts that I I showed that will give you a really good sense of who's purchasing it so I don't know if if you've done those things or not um but but working with the Contracting officer or the small business advocate if if the Contracting officer isn't providing any information or you can't even reach them then whatever agency you've been networking with try to reach out to the small business Advocate and they should be able to give you more information yeah I I would add to that to do some searches to see what irrigation companies are getting contracts in that government Marketplace and and search for those and you may want to reach out to them it sounds like you have some novel approach for Designing irrigation and so that that might be a possible Avenue as well Lenny are you able to start your video so we can see your face here isn't it uh no it's a your great out there anyways um thanks Phil for the good question Bill's also saying it's been a great webinar outstanding thanks Phil we appreciate hearing that um thanks for coming Frank is asking about Caltrans as it relates to the presentation um is it too big or is there another system to log into so Caltrans isn't too big but it is big uh because their budget is is huge right Caltrans is responsible for all of the they receive federal dollars and they're responsible for all the highways all the bridges all the dams there's there's so many things that Caltrans is responsible for but that means there's great opportunity um so it's not just construction um they work with a lot of different service-based firms um so no Caltrans is definitely an opportunity for you if that's what you want to focus on and I would spend a great deal of marketing time time doing some marketing research into Caltrans if that's what you want to focus on just a little tip on the on Cal e procure when you're when you're looking through Skippers and and through contracts it's it's not listed as Caltrans it's listened to as the California Department of Transportation so if you're wondering if Caltrans is somewhere else uh Caltrain does does have a lot of their own websites but yeah they have their own their own data their own websites so I would I would go directly to Caltrans websites yeah definitely they are also listed on Cali procure it's just if you're looking for Caltrans you won't find it all right thanks Frank uh Misha's asking if you'll have access to the webinar absolutely this is being recorded you get the slides as well as video later today in your email it's also going to go to our website um with government credit cards are there any options for soliciting them Frank it has this question for us let me I'll let you handle that one I don't know well I'm trying to understand what you mean by soliciting them yeah well maybe we can interpret the question as saying um how would you go after those smaller purchases that maybe you just purchased by Uh Oh you mean micro purchases yeah well it could be micro purchases in the federal government Marketplace there's really a couple of Contracting officers that can buy helicopters with a credit card on an emergency basis um the uh which is pretty unusual but more and more credit cards are being used for not just micro purchases but for uh basic you know procurement of a lot of products as well as some Services it is much more efficient to do it that way rather than doing the work submitting an invoice and going through that process it makes it much quicker and it puts uh obviously the cash in the hand of the small business quicker um so it I need to say but it depends on the agency if there's a specific agency that you are approaching you know ask those questions of those small business Advocates and ask them what their particular agency is using as uh you know as a rule for credit card purchases but on the other hand too you need to be able to accept those credit cards um and need need um something on your on your phone or whatever to swipe those credit cards or to accept them yeah I would only add you know if you do reach out to one particular city as an example and they say yes we accept we do credit card purchases within a certain dollar amount um it doesn't mean every single city is going to be the exact same way or every single County or Department each one handles things differently so it's about utilizing that phone and email and really asking those good questions yeah it's sort of the with when it comes to local Contracting it seems like it's the it's the wild west every there's different law in every town really you really uh it's in contrast to California the the feds where you know they kind of have unified websites and protocols um even though there's variants within agencies every County every city is completely different than maybe different certifications different procurement process so all right um uh sefula is asking I run a plumbing company any suggestions on the best agencies to connect with first foreign I would uh look at um look at the construction companies that are actually getting business uh on a federal level I would look at the reaching out to a small business office of the Army Corps of Engineers for uh advice they're small business office um as they obviously like you're a very large projects within the Army Corps of Engineers but that would be a couple of places and and beyond that going to the like USA spending and others like Thomas was talking about and just plug in that keyword plumbing and see what comes up uh you want to find out you know who's already doing business with those agencies which agencies you should be approaching um it's gonna even you know you think of it oh I'm just a plumber and that's it you still need to do that research to figure out where you should spend your time and who you should connect with if you're already a client please ask your counselor to help you through that process or sign up as a client him I would only add um I do remember one client and the the keywords that they proved successful was facilities maintenance So within facilities maintenance um that that is something that came up under Plumbing because it's you know it's indoors and if it's usually yeah so try that try those keywords facilities maintenance laughs that's a good tip yeah trying to find the right keywords sometimes you think you know how to describe your own industry but it's not how the government is talking about it so finding those correct keywords is key yeah by the way I don't know I don't think I mentioned it but for our bid match we do have a tool that we can send you it's called I search and you it lets you play with various keywords and to see what the results would be you know for past opportunities so then at least sell to then narrow it down like Thomas is talking about Facility Services that is a is something that uh I would encourage you to uh ask us for is for the I search tool I I use that a lot with clients before we set up our bid match profile so that they can play with it see which kind of keywords is make sense for their business great all right I got a question from Frank I didn't really understand um you're asking about dvbe companies um if you if you want to re-type that in then maybe does organization have a solicit soliciting listing Frank I'm not understanding your questions um we we can help folks get certified dvbe we can help you figure out how to utilize your dvde certification um in the state of California um help you do Network and find other DVD companies and subcontractor I mean you name it if it has to do with Government Contracting we we basically assist with anything yeah all right he's saying thanks explain all right I don't see any other questions for now um if you have any uh lingering questions or anything feel free to sign up on our website for one-on-one Services uh the only the only catches you have to have an established business in our service area which is in Northern California 15 counties you'll find on our web page I'll drop it in the chat right now um and another reminder the slides everything's going to be posted to our website later today so take a look for those uh thank you so much everyone for joining and hope to see you at future webinars you've got our contact information here so give us a call or send us an email if you'd like to hear from us so thank you thanks everyone all right thanks Tom thanks Lenny for all the research and work going into this and thanks everyone for being here today welcome all right bye-bye