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Hotel stay bill format for Procurement

hey guys what's going on derek james here and we're back at it again today we are going to be on beta.sam.gov looking at live hotel and lodging uh opportunities we are going to mix it up a little bit uh we are going to look at some sources saw pre-solicitation and solicitation you know live bids i did set my filters for responses that are due in the future so those will actually be live opportunities that we're looking at today in case somebody decides they want to respond to it on their own um you actually could do that in real time because these aren't anything that are old in the past they are live and and current on beta sam actual bids so uh like i said we will be looking through the different stages of a bid so we'll look at examples of some sources pre-solicitation and solicitation we're going to go through it a little bit more quickly though than what we've done previously like last week we spent five days just looking at bids uh but all of these like i said are all going to be focused on lodging and hotel so you may not even know that the government buys this and that's why i'm touching on this because there's partnerships that you can make with a hotel or usually not motels usually it's hotels and then maybe food accommodations make sure the hotel has conference rooms they're going to give you some sort of requirements and specifications that it needs to have including an estimate number of rooms and number of nights all things like that i'm sure are going to be included in those opportunities that we're looking at today but a lot of people don't even know that the government buys this and quite frankly when it comes to you know working with a hotel or something a hotel is not set up with a cage number and registered in sam to be able to you know go direct to the government so instead small businesses like us government contractors as long as it's you know kind of set aside and it's not a full and open large requirement where the hotel has potential to go directly to it we have an opportunity to provide hotel rooms and lodging and food to uh government customers and they buy this all the time so that's part of the point of focusing on this today i think a lot of folks don't know that's a requirement i have personally won contracts providing this uh for example the army national guard so i thought it'd be a cool thing to to share i want to say hello to uh anybody everybody's who's in the chat uh let me know that you are here i will be bouncing between the chat as well as um kind of sharing my screen like this so um just let me know if you're here in the chat and say hello and good morning depending on where you're located uh actually it just struck the clock just struck noon here for me um but i know folks on the west side of the country it's still morning uh good afternoon to anybody who is on eastern standard time i actually uh planned to do this earlier today having more technological issues we are live streaming again today hopefully the video quality is a heck of a lot better than it was yesterday it certainly is better on my end um so hopefully you know hopefully the quality is better today we're going to get through this guys but we are live streaming to facebook and youtube right now so pretty cool to be able to get that dialed in and hit a few different platforms as we're about to start looking at some requirements on beta sam hello uh lalaku hello uh marcus bizzle hello from georgia you're just uh stayed away i believe um so hello hello good morning good afternoon to everybody and uh if i can get a a mic check uh audio check if everything let me know if everything looks good to you guys before i move in make sure i don't have any uh technological issues here um just still you know getting some of the troubleshooting stuff out of the way guys i'm not gonna ask that all the time i know it's a little bit unprofessional but just let me know in the chat if the audio and the video quality looks good to you so there's nothing i have to fix before i get started building science sounds good okay cool and how is the how is the uh the picture is the picture good or is there an extreme lag coming on on the photo uh i've been struggling with it for three hours this morning um on the phone and everything i think i finally got it dialed in but let me know if the the picture looks good because i want to show you actual bids uh and you won't be able to see them if it's very laggy sims says both are great rohit says looks good awesome guys thank you so much for letting me know that i won't ask anymore i'll assume that things are good and we got all those issues taken care of so it's pretty cool with my new technology here i can share my screen so uh you can see i just pulled some basic info here for hotel lodging you can see lodging lodging is a word that the government uses quite a bit if you're going to try to search by like hotels or motels or rooms you might not have as much success pulling up a search so just letting you know kind of like next codes you have to dial in your parameters the word lodging the term lodging is a good keyword as well as hotel you can see when you type in hotel though it just pulls up just pulls up lodging so if you just stick with lodging for requirements like this it's probably going to help you out quite a bit and you guys are good in the chat picture is great thumbs up beautiful love it that's that's what i want to hear so as i said at the beginning if you didn't catch it we're going to be looking at source assault pre-solicitation and solicitation all related to lodging requirements so we are focused on lodging today if you clicked on this video in the future if you're on team replay let me know in the comments team replay too anybody watching this in the future uh you are with us in the present as well um so this first one is sailor lodging in kittery maine so it sounds kind of interesting sailor lodging is it is it what it sounds like is it lodging for sailors honestly i don't know we have to take a look at it but this is a source of sought this is the first stage of a bid and the first stage of a government primarily is looking for market research to see what small businesses would be interested in responding to this requirement in the future typically your response will consist of something like a capability statement and answering a few questions so they've only given us one document here you can see just this one document sharon hall is the contracting point of contact and there's there's not much to go through so we'll just look at this we'll just take a look at this pws requirement statement of work and see what it has to say i'll zoom in so you can see a little bit better so am i skipping anything okay the port's mouth naval shipyard is seeking sources who may potentially have the ability to fulfill a lodging requirement near kittery main for the below rooms during the period of performance that can meet the specifications so they're letting you know coming up in march like i said this isn't ready to go yet you're not submitting your bid yet but if you wanted to get in at the early stage on this thing which is right now that's kind of the point of looking at source assault and responding to them is to get in on it early um you'll be able to be ready for this thing when it comes out in march so between march 1st and august 31st they need 28 rooms for 184 nights and so i'm guessing when you multiply those two out do you have a calculator in here with calculators i'll just use my phone or actually we can just go to google i just want to do that quick math guys calculator and the 184 times 8 50 152 5152 so that's what they're saying so that's really the total number of uh rooms that they're going to need scaled out over 184 nights and that's what they mean when they're saying 5 152 room nights so just a quick bit of math for us um and they need that between the period of march and the end of august really really doesn't sound that like that bad like most hotels would be able to accommodate something like 28 rooms per night it's really not for 184 nights like that shouldn't be a problem at all which is encouraging it's not like a god-awful number of rooms like oh we need we need to provide 200 rooms a night like what hotel would be able to set aside those many rooms so i'm encouraged by seeing this so far the scope we already know that requirements uss greenville occupants shall not be required to change rooms during the course of their stay unless a physical problem okay i'm going to go through this pretty quickly properties shall be geographically located within five miles within the main routes of portsmouth uh naval shipyard so they want it to be within five miles that's that is a huge narrowing down of the hotels that you can provide i'm sure if you type that into google parts mouth naval shipyard hell let's do it okay located at one walker street could remain let's go to google let's find out exactly where this is guys this is real life let's open this up you can see my screen still good okay this is what we're talking about this is the location cool they need a hotel for 28 rooms over however many nights 184 nights within five miles of here so i'm just gonna type in hotel and see if this thing's gonna go whack on me or what so i see a hotel right here this looks yes we can see it portsmouth naval shipyard visitors so we see right here 125 dollars a night i mean it looks like it's within five miles can i get directions where's the directions thing that's okay we don't have to run the mileage i'm i'm pretty sure this one is within five miles and they gave us these few others up here as well so it looks like we have a few options to choose from potentially i don't know this could be five miles away but uh the scale here is a thousand feet and it's like two inches on the screen so i think i think we're safe i think we have three or four different options here guys that's that's kind of what you would do you know we've got this hotel northeastern motel probably not catherine inn and suites looks okay i guess this one looks really nice though it's probably the one that they would want the water street in but that's an inn we need a like a hotel right how many rooms is it in going to have maybe we just skip over here across the island 160 dollars a night sailor maker's house what is this okay hilton garden in all right put him up at the hilton guys the hilton is guaranteed to have enough rooms okay the sheraton perfect all right this is what i wanted to see we've got the marriott so here it is they're gonna have to cross the island probably you've got three or four different options for a hotel you need to book these rooms out between march and the end of august okay that's you know i'm making it in color for you so uh it's a real thing within five miles of this location so we literally just looked and saw exactly what is there you're not gonna go build a hotel or you're not gonna like do some other crazy thing where you're gonna create 28 rooms just go find a hotel and book it out you know call hotel find out what the pricing is for the rooms calculate whatever your markup is going to be your gna overhead profit all that stuff roll that up in your price on top of whatever this is going to cost um your business expenses i don't know what your business expenses are but you need to cover them if you're going to have some sort of project manager on the job um or if it's just going to be you you know whatever it's going to be these are things that you guys should think about roll that into your cost into your markup let me see here sim has a question have you secured a lodging or leasing contract before yes i have i mentioned it at the beginning when i first started streaming the national guard the army buys a lot of these type of contracts absolutely especially they're called yellow ribbon events so when soldiers are coming home or they're deploying oftentimes a yellow ribbon event will consist of hotel lodging food banquet center something like that and it's a place for the families to come and get education even the soldiers to get education on kind of what's going on and what the future is going to hold with this type of uh you know event where uh soldiers coming or going from home so i have won several of those i'm wondering what my responsibilities would be once i've been awarded the contract that's a good question i can answer that so your responsibilities would be number one you would be communicating with contracting letting them know especially as the event is leading up communication communication is key right let them know that you've got the rooms things are good find out when check in and check out it's going to be all that type of stuff if they haven't even told us here we haven't gotten that far through it but uh you're gonna communicate not that big of a deal right the day of the event or events it's probably good to have somebody on site i've i've seen it done where you don't but the most successful times is you you're you you're gonna be on site once people start arriving or you have somebody who's a representative of your company who is on site during the time when people come in and start checking in especially if it's a large number of check-ins that's going to create some sort of organization otherwise people are just going to start showing up it's going to be bad it's going to be madness they're just going to go to the front desk um and and they may not know what to say that they already have their rooms reserved for them so they're going to start trying to book their own rooms and it can get really messy really quickly so if you have one point of contact designated essentially that's going to be the uh the primary responsibility that you're going to have to make i mean it's just hotel it's just lodging so it's not that big of a deal make sure people get into the rooms and they're happy and there's no complaints um about checking in or checking out and then you know the rest is pretty much on them now if it is a more involved and this is a good question and it very much relates to what we're we're talking about right now um and no worries sim you said uh sorry i missed the intro no you're totally fine i didn't go into any depth like this so um since i got the question i'm just taking a minute because it relates to pretty much all the bids we're looking at today so once you have all that taken care of you're essentially making sure that the customer is happy um and then after the event you can bill you can invoice you can get paid and then if there's going to be another event you know next month or whatever it's the same process and what i was going to say um earlier was just also that if it's a little bit more complicated where there's many rooms sometimes they'll have like daycare rooms set up different food type rooms and uh even like conference types rooms you really do want to have somebody on site because they're gonna be asking questions like well how do i work the projector how do i work the tv you know when is the food going to be served uh you know or if there's going to be some sort of change on the fly you also need to be there to react to that or again have a representative to for your company but um you could probably i mean i probably didn't just say anything that you you probably didn't assume so just assume um what you think would happen with a hotel lodging contract and you'll probably be pretty close aside from that though there's really not much more required so um good question good question sam says uh some big hotels have government pricing reps departments that can handle these kind of requests how can we compete um so if it's going if a big hotel is able to compete on the contract for example a full and open competition bid the answer is you can't compete because they're just going to be a lot cheaper than you and the government doesn't want to work with you so you don't try to compete you just move on to the next one because you can't um if they're opening it up allowing hotels to bid direct there's just no way you can compete if if they're setting it aside for small businesses most hotels are not you know small businesses usually there's these big you know hotel chains they can't compete with you direct so they have to work with a contractor like you to provide you the pricing since it is a small business set aside so that is the answer to that you just have to you know basically do your homework and and and see is it set aside for small business if so you don't have to worry about that usually and if it's a full and open competition requirement don't waste your time because the hotel's just going to bid on it directly right so um yeah i hope that hope that helps good questions guys good questions keep them coming but i'm going to keep trying to push through these since i did pull up a number of those as well um all right chantel i see your question and i will uh sorry i missed it um i won't skip you i'll get back to that in just a minute after i uh go through this one question about nick's codes so we'll take a look at that so um general room specifications okay so they're saying you know the minimum size has to be 90 square feet per pierce per person um must be sanitary clean and safe like come on guys these are hotel rooms the ceilings must not be broken that you know smoke detectors we know this stuff right i don't i don't need to tell you this stuff um and more importantly the you know the sheraton and those hotels we just looked at they're not going to be in this type of shape but the government has to put this in there to cover their butt so um made services laundromat like we know all this stuff the contract is sales tax exempt so um you know this is something that we don't talk about that often so you cannot charge the government sales tax um but that doesn't mean that you get off the hook from paying sales tax to the hotel um what you would have to do is reach out to the contracting officer and ask him or her to provide the sales tax exemption form to pass down to you as the contractor um otherwise your pricing is going to be just you know off the hook for this thing you're gonna your price is gonna be too high if you're building in sales tax um but you also have to look into unfortunately this is not a sales tax and i'm gonna have to do a whole video on this sales tax is different for every state so sales tax is a state thing a state topic so you have to look at whatever state it is you're looking to provide these services how do they treat sales tax sometimes they make the contractor pay it even if you can't charge the government for it in which case you have to eat it and you have to somehow find a way to make up that profit back in your your offer and your bid um but it you have to talk to the department of revenue or do some research on the department of revenue for whatever state you're looking to bid in because sales tax is a very pretentious issue and um it's a little bit slippery because it's different for every single state um how they treat it but they're they're saying the contract is sales tax exempt so i would start out by requesting from the contracting officer for him or her to provide you a sales tax exemption form um you know for your state or or the federal sales tax exemption form and see how they want to treat it um and kind of you know start there but again it ultimately does boil down to the state the state wants to audit you on um you know if you're paying your sales tax and they look at this contract and say oh no you were the consumer of this even though you passed it to the government uh they could do that so you know i'm not gonna get on a soapbox on that but it's just a lot of a lot of information guys and when i see stuff like this i want to give you that information even if it takes me off track a little bit trying to help out as much as i can security requirements there's not any capable vendors are encouraged to submit the following items all right let's get to it what does sharon hall want in a response your name your address your cage code your duns number your phone number pretty standard stuff right that's why we say we submit capability statements during this first stage the source of sought um because it has all that information blasted all over it it's your one pager front and back your two pager or whatever whatever it is for you you have all this information on it and you could submit that as part of your sources sought response you wouldn't do that for a full-blown bid a solicitation response but you can do that again for a source of salt response we're looking at source of stock market research right now are you a property owner or property management company can you provide exactly what is needed so again i usually say in a response it's capability statement and answering a few questions well this is the case statement part and here's the few questions um it's it's pretty pretty cut and dry i don't really want to beat it to death uh is there adequate lead time after the contract to secure the properties can you provide past contracts if you have them um send that to sharon hall by january 14th so if there's anybody out there that actually is interested in responding to the source of saw it's not due let's see for another five days what you would do is provide your capability statement with this info on it and you would also answer these questions probably in a short white paper just like a one pager maybe something with your company letterhead on it that's all that you would need to do now you're not going to win a bid from this but this is going to throw your hat in the ring it's going to let sharon know that your company exists that you are interested if she does have questions she can come back to you it's a great way to market your company and get in at the early stage of the game not to mention responding to source assault can help get contracts set aside so for example if you have a small business set aside like a woman-owned or a hub zone or something if there's a few of you who have that same set-aside who respond during the stage one during source assault then you have a lot higher likelihood that when the the ultimate bid comes out it's going to be set aside for that small business set aside so rule of two um two women on small businesses respond during the source of sought there's a hat there's a high chance that during the solicitation stage um it will be a woman of small business set aside which restricts the pool it gets rid of a lot of your competition greatly increases your chances of winning that's why we spend time to talk about source assault responses um because you know there's that rule of two as well as you know marketing getting in front of contracting all these things are great uh so yeah this is this is the first example um let me see here i'm just looking back at the chat guys chantelle i told you i would be back i got you what next code should i add to get in on these contracts so um one here's one thing that i recommend uh if you're what's going on with my screen here all right we're back um when you when you ever have a question about next codes one super easy way to go about this is to start with the keyword something that you know that you could search by so hotel or lodging and that's what i did with this search and then i pulled up one two three four five six different opportunities i don't know that we're going to get through all of them today but uh what you do is you start there pull up what you you know what's the result of what you plugged in then take a look at the next codes that the government's using right so instead of trying to like go and seek it out and find it and then you know use that to find you know a hotel bid kind of like the opposite way of doing it i always like to work backwards from things and say well i mean i could find the perfect code or whatever but if the government isn't using it it's not helpful to me so instead why don't i go and find what code the government's using and then copy that because i know i'm going to find accurate bids for it so for example this first one i pulled up i can just scroll down and see what next code they're using this is the source of sought that we just looked at they're using 721 110 hotels and motels so it's a very you know kind of short and to the point answer for you and again it's a great question that applies to everybody because we're all always kind of trying to enhance how to find the right requirements for us to bid on and this is a very powerful way of working backwards to find it let me see though if it's different for any of the other requirements that i looked at so here's another next code the second one i pulled up is for 531 110 lessers of residential buildings and dwellings and that's for temporary lodging in san diego okay so that's another nix code let's see if we have anything different this is the same as the first one this is the same as the first one this is the same as the first one and this is the same for the as the first one so you just done a little bit of market research for yourself there that first next code the 721 110 code is primarily what you're using so you can feel confidence in using that code but you can also uh take a look at they have product and service codes also so it's another thing to add to your list psc codes v231 transportation travel and relocation so that gives you a supplementary way to find stuff like this let me see if that's different v231 v231 v231 v231 and v231 so again more market research for your products and service codes now you have a list of three different codes to narrow down specifically on something like this um so i hope that helps chantelle says thank you very much uh you're so welcome thanks for hanging out with us chantal i do appreciate it and uh thanks for engaging in the chat um and thanks for the good question because uh it helps it helps everybody so absolutely sam says i'm not sure if this question is relevant to the session but how can we search for lpta bids which is lowest price technically acceptable bids is what sam is referring to um you can't you can't search by it you have to go through them and extract that key information from the bid so that's why learning how to quickly read and quickly find information like evaluation factors and find the instruction to offers in a bid we talk about that when we're actually looking at a full-blown uh proposal response or or solicitation response that's what sam is referring to here and sam i wish there was a way to search for this it does not exist i can wholeheartedly tell you there is no easy way to go about that there's no filters there's no search all you can do is open them up like we're doing and read through it and find it for yourself that's the only way you can do it um so i i feel your i feel your pain brother um let me see here clay says i hit the like button thank you so much clay thanks for liking the video i appreciate it i appreciate it and uh how about one more sim says derek how do you ascertain your markup is it a 10 or another percentage i understand the part about paying personnel on the ground but outside of that i'm not sure how to gauge your markup well you you know i work through back i work backwards through a lot of things when i do stuff so when you are engaging your i don't even say your markup but your your total bill rate total amount you're going to charge the government you of course you have to start off with your cost everything has to be covered for you you can't take a loss you can't take a hit you have to cover your but on everything including if you have to pay sales tax right so you start there that gives you a number and then you know that includes any gna overhead profit pms stuff that you're saying you you already know about that so yeah you know account for everything including the cost of the lodging you know and then what you have left is your markup and that is what your question is about i always you know i get this question a lot what what percentage what range um it's wildly different for every industry um so i always say take this with a huge grain of salt but a competitive range for a lot of things are the eight to fifteen percent eight to fifteen percent and you know there's a lot of like i said it's huge caveats with that um what type of evaluation factor is it is it lowest price technically acceptable like we talked about or is it best value if it's best value the lowest bid is not going to win it's going to be whoever is most advantageous to the government price and other factors considered or at lowest price technically acceptable everybody's providing the same exact thing whoever is providing it for the lowest markup is going to win the bid that's lowest price those two different evaluation you know methods dramatically dramatically and significantly affect where you're going to be in a range and it could be outside the 8 to 15 range it could be lower than 8 it could be higher than 15. again how competitive are you going to be if you're looking at something like a sole source or direct award where you're not competing against any other companies well and maybe it's the best value and you can go higher than 15 you know so these are things that you have to consider but everybody wants a number everybody wants a range and you know i may regret it one day but that's the range that i give out eight to fifteen percent to be competitive competitive means uh you're being aggressive on your pricing you're taking a lower amount of profit to try and win the contract that's what i mean by competitive so um good question so let's see what else we have going on here we just looked at a source of sought okay that was a source of sought respond with your capability statement answer those few questions that they that they gave you short white paper um get your kind of your hat and they're running there now we have pre-solicitation which is stage two so after sources saw it there's pre-solicitation there's nothing for you to do in a pre-solicitation typically unless they ask you a question or this a site visit or something pre-solicitation is primarily an fyi based on the results of the market research that contracting received during the stage one of the contract so you know people submitted their capability statements and stuff uh answered those questions say 10 companies did it well contracting is going to go take those 10 responses go put them in a room in the back put them on a big table you know put them out they're going to read them you know and then they're going to decide on a procurement strategy hey you know 8 out of 10 of these responses came from a woman owned small businesses well guess what we're going to do guys when this bid comes out again in the future stage 3 we're going to set this aside for women in small businesses they're going to use that type of research to basically create a procurement strategy and this pre-solicitation that we're looking at right now pre-solicitation this is an fyi so when you're looking on beta.sam you have to know what you're looking at you have to look at these here take a look you have to look at these different notice types i'm not just making this stuff up source of sought stage one if you filter by source assault you're going to look at stuff that we just looked at you're not going to win a bid from any of those they're only sources saw next pre-solicitation stage 2 that's what we're talking about right now if you want to look at bids that are getting ready to come out and like kind of watch them and be ready for them you can start setting up some pre-solicitation watches and then stage three which is solicitation and combined synopsis solicitation these are live bid guys these these are things that require pricing or a proposal and you could actually win stage four is the award notice basically a public notification saying the name of the company the amount that it was awarded for and you can see that publicly those are the four stages of a bid so you have to know what you're looking at what you're filtering by some of these other things justification sale of surplus property special notice these are you know a bit miscellaneous and they help to cover some of these other pockets of things that can happen during the acquisition process but these four main things here these four stages of a bid as i call it are what you need to 100 be focused on okay so we're looking at pre-solicitation and fyi temporary lodging in san diego this is a notice to inform interested vendors us that a solicitation will be posted on or around january 11th told you so okay cool so if you're interested in something like this you know to mark your calendar for january 11th the bid's going to come out that's that's what a pre-solicitation is sometimes there's a bit more information but this is literally one sentence and it perfectly demonstrates my point and you can also see down here the history you can see how it started out as a source of sought and then it became a pre-solicitation and then after that it'll become a solicitation you don't always see it down here in the history but when you do see it you're gonna see it in that order there's only one order that these things can go in they are 100 sequential first second third fourth there's no skipping around so when you're looking at stuff you got to know what you're looking at and you got to know what it means this is an fyi let's see so this is a lodging one again department of the army sorry i've been kind of skipping over the agencies today i haven't been focusing on it this is another pre-solicitation we got that 721 110 nix code look what this says guys this is a pre-solicitation only this is a pre-solicitation only why do you think they're saying that they're saying that because they get responses to this thing because people don't know what they're doing of course none of you are going to do that because now you are becoming educated that you don't respond to a a pre-solicitation with a bid you you make a note of it and say cool thanks contracting thanks for letting me know contracting i'll be ready to go when the solicitation comes out contracting thank you that's why they're saying only only but then they're giving you a bit of insight into the bid that's going to come out stage three so that you can be ready so they're saying lodging for 52 service members single room occupancy february i don't know what this is oh so it's okay it's february 11th through february 14th so 11 12 13 14 that's four days details will follow in the actual solicitation please do not submit questions until the solicitation posting is on or around again january 11th this is going to be in santa fe new mexico now again for something like this they are telling us that it's 15 mile driving distance from 7001 huey road santa fe so why not why not uh look at this again let me back out let's put this address in again we've got a new address and this time we've got 15 mile radius so looks like this is a my god this is the photo as it appears let me double let me just double check that that address guys 7001 huey road santa fe new mexico 7001 here we wrote santa fe new mexico well i'm guessing it's one of these i'm guessing it's this or something i don't know but that's that's hilarious that we pull up a uh a map that's in the middle of nowhere based on the address that they gave us but anyways let's see what's within 15 miles i'm just gonna you know looks like there's a town over here and they would have some hotels so looks like we're in in good enough shape and they probably know that so we have the hyatt we have the la quinta in so i'm assuming that those are within 15 miles so again this is this is kind of what you would do i like to demonstrate this just because it makes it feel more real to anybody who is watching it um that this is exactly kind of what you would be doing like we did on the first one says let me see the shortest distance is calculated by this tool lodging service offered must meet applicable lodging adequacy standards based on this defense travel.dod thing is pdf doesn't look like they've attached it i don't know what this is let me see if it'll pull up pages not found thanks government the link you gave us does not work either so if you did have a question about something like this we're not getting into it right now but they said ask the questions when the actual solicitation comes out believe me you're not going to be the only one bidding on something like this so if there's some sort of issue with finding a hotel within the distance everybody's going to have that same sort of issue odds are everybody's going to be calling the same exact hotels the hotel is going to be giving probably the same price to everybody and then you're going to have to go through your whole pricing game and uh provide contracting whatever it is they're asking for in the solicitation once it comes out on january 11th so anybody who's interested in looking at something like this i mean january 11th they said it's coming out so that's going to be on monday so you could stay tuned for something like that so yeah you guys doing good in the chat here let me take a drink sim says what times do you uh go live i'd love to schedule it on my calendar what i've been doing has been going live somewhere around between 11 11 30 maybe even 12 o'clock central time and then you add an hour to that for eastern time so basically in the late morning around lunch time is when i try to go live i don't always plan it which is why um you're kind of just sometimes hey you know derek's going live i didn't know because i don't always know when i'm going to go live a lot of these you know i do um to create the content for the replays also so even if you miss it you can still watch the video on on youtube uh but you know it's like i gotta work it into my schedule but i try to keep everything within that that kind of hour window between 11 central and noon central which would be between 12 and 1 eastern or uh i guess around 10 o'clock pacific time so i try to keep everything within that hour window but honestly the easiest way for me to answer the question um is just if you're not subscribed to the channel subscribe and then they have that you know everybody says it on youtube click that notification bell i mean i don't usually tell anybody to do that you can do that if you want but if you click that notification bell you will get a notification to your phone whenever i go live so um if you want that literally that notification bell would probably help you a lot i'll probably start saying it more often now um if you click that you can get the notification to your phone and you'll know when i'm going live i do would try and schedule it though hour in advance also so it gives you a little bit more time to say hey i'm gonna you know if i'm gonna eat my lunch or whatever i'll eat my lunch while you know i'm watching the livestream or something like that so you can kind of at least have an hour to prepare your schedule for it um but the other thing is uh i do go live on fridays so you can kind of bank on that around that same time so thanks for the question so that was a pre-solicitation that was i guess another free solicitation what do we have here okay so now this is an example of an actual an actual bid so stage three solicitation combined synopsis solicitation uh that's what we're looking at now so if you responded to this you have the potential to actually win the contract you don't have that potential in any of the first two stages that we looked at again this is crtc hsa lodging and it's you know i got to point it out guys it's a lot of the army a lot of the army buys this type of requirement um it's why i say target agencies find the agencies that are buying the most of what you're trying to sell if you want to get into this and you know the army does a lot of it then you should spend more of your of your time you should spend a disproportionate amount of your time on those agencies that are doing the most of what you're looking at so get really good at army stuff if you want to you know look at hotels because they buy a lot of lodging um that's what i mean by find your agency targets and then double down on those instead of just chasing everything this is a total small business set aside so this is not full and open hotels cannot go and bid on this direct unless they themselves happen to also be a small business which means they're not going to be a large hotel chain it would just be a mom-and-pop hotel and though they must also be registered in sam and have that cage code and most hotels don't even know what this stuff is so you probably would not have any competition from hotels for this requirement they tell us this is the rfq request for quote that tells us there's going to be a lot of emphasis on pricing for this this is the minnesota national guard has a purchase of lodging within a 25 mile radius of little falls minnesota i'm not gonna go back to google maps and and pull up little falls minnesota and look at hotels within 25 miles um you could do that yourself uh i think we did enough examples of that it says this is a high priority requirement when there is a high probability that the requirement will not be canceled the project is on the army national guard priority list and funds will be provided for the award one proposal slash bid are within 15 of the ige or icg and funds are made available to the okay so it's kind of like a boilerplate statement saying that this is going to be funded they are going to have uh money for this they have to say that because sometimes they will have a bid guys believe it or not and i don't usually ever talk about this but they will sometimes say funds for this are not yet available which means you could bid on something and then nobody wins because the government says oops we didn't get our money so nobody wins better look next year you know that's kind of what they're saying they're saying there is funding for this and they're saying if you are within 15 of the igce the uh internal government cost estimate which or the independent government estimate ige they're the same thing um which is basically the government says okay we're going to call the hotels we're going to see how much the hotel charges and then we're going to put up a reasonable markup that a contractor would put okay now we have a a magic number behind the scenes this is what the government does for all bids not just these they come up with a number of what they think it should cost they call it cost reasonableness and then based on that number they compare the offers that are submitted right that's how they kind of determine cost reasonableness otherwise if they don't figure out the number for themselves they may overpay for something if a small business just comes in and comes up with a number they can't just trust that blindly they got to have something to compare it to so they're saying they want you to be within 15 of what their number is now we don't get to know what their number is um you just kind of it's your way of like it's like a checks and balances it's their way of putting you in check to make sure you don't put too much profit on something because just know they know what this should cost because they called the hotel also so that's that's what that means there we we only have one document to look at though this is a solicitation rfq as they called it we'll just see what this looks like all right we're still doing good still doing good all right cool um combined synopsis solicitation the anticipated award date is january 28th response date is january 14th so this response is due in five days this is a real one you must provide this within 25 miles of little falls minnesota we know that sarah lifton i'm guessing is the poc and contracting yep same one now they start giving us some of the details again if you're going to bid on this you're going to want to read through these details they're giving us nights march 6th through march 8th also march 19th through march 21st they're giving us um 136 rooms and 37 rooms respectively for those two different chunks and they're breaking it down by 136 rooms in 37 rooms uh kind of in this bit of quantity schedule they want the hotel to have internet no extra charges for parking so this could kind of be the questions that you ask whatever hotel that you're you're interviewing for the job whatever hotel you're looking at providing you're going to make sure they have these things ability to adjust the room quantity without penalty so you'll have to negotiate that in case the government last minute wants to add some some rooms or something like that standard housekeeping queen you know double queen uh double full all this stuff that we can pretty much hey we all have to deal with it when we book a hotel room when we take our families on vacation it's the same stuff it's it's not hard preparing and submitting quote big big old letters here response is encouraged to include past performance information colon other military commercial or civilian companies with whom you have done business so you know it doesn't have to be government past performance that's what they mean by other civilian or commercial you know anything that you've done in your professional life or anything you've done with another business b2b something like that they're considering all those as past performance you don't have to have a government contract all the time something like this it's very clear it doesn't have to be evaluation the government plans toward contract resulting from the solicitation uh let's see most advantageous quotes will be evaluated using price technical and past performance so now you know in your response you're going to have to provide a price technical and past performance in your response and we'll talk about that i'm sure in a minute these are your far clauses here's evaluation here's a bit more information right off the bat right off the bat rather uh evaluation method is the best value trade-off so this is not lowest price this is not lpta this is best value so they're not going to go with whoever has the lowest price basically they're going to go with whoever's providing you know like the best hotel and has the best track record and the best package when they're submitting to ensure that this thing is going to go off without a hitch and that um you know everybody's going to be happy they don't want this thing messed up that's what best value means and they're basing that off of price technical and past performance well we kind of already know what to expect with price and we already talked a little bit about past performance um i want to see if they can tell us more about what they want for the technical but they are kind of defining both here price pass performance got it and then technical vendor must provide a proposal reflecting all the requirements within the statement of work in order to be evaluated so they're they're not giving us much that's kind of the thing that i don't like seeing because they're basically saying hey you tell us how you're going to accomplish everything that we're asking for in this solicitation you tell us there's no specific questions here they haven't asked for resumes they haven't asked for staffing plans they haven't asked for um you know quality control plans or anything like that um they're asking to make sure that you can comply with the statement of work which is all of those details that they were telling us can't charge for changing things last minute can't charge for um and these are your reps inserts guys we talk about these a lot these are the boxes you have to fill out um can't change can't charge for uh what were some of the other things they said i don't remember now but all those specs that they gave us you need to be able to basically write to all of those and sometimes it's almost copy and paste but uh don't copy and paste but sometimes it's pretty close it's your way of saying yes we will not charge for parking yes we will provide internet yes we can provide you know however many rooms for however many nights during the time period that you gave us you know that's kind of what they mean by covering all the bases within the statement of work that's what you would do in a technical response to something like this it can it could end up being up to a few pages long something like that but it's really it's really not that hard though a lot of folks try to go outside and outsource writing proposals you know some of them are hard i mean some of them are lengthy but the stuff that we look at guys the you know the stuff for small businesses contracts that are a million dollars and under even four million dollars and under a lot of them are not impossible to respond to they're just they're just not that difficult so that's kind of kind of what we're looking at um price performance technical respond to this one you have a chance at winning it make sure it's within 25 miles of the location and uh yeah like just another example um let's see chantel says the past performance will hang up a lot of newcomers yeah i mean it it could it could but there's ways you know there's ways to to work with this and i'm not just responding again to this type of bid you know because again i'm emphasizing they they did not ask for government past performance they are asking for commercial past performance so are you telling me that you would be interested in bidding in something like this but you don't know somebody who owns a business that you could book some lodging for and then now you have past performance yeah we booked five rooms for a uh you know a conference um these rooms uh were such and such size they look at the the hotel itself had you know three conference rooms all with audio video hookup and you know there was food um all these sorts of things right i'm just saying these things that they're asking for you're telling me that you couldn't find a business owner in the commercial space and book these rooms for them and gain past performance that's i think that's something that most of us could probably do so obviously other requirements that are are tougher than just like booking rooms it would be harder to take that strategy but not all the time and for something like this you absolutely could gain commercial past performance remember they said commercial or civilian past performance by doing stuff in the commercial world and then bring it to the government world you know and something like this it's quite frankly not that hard and what's the difference between doing it for a business that you don't know versus a business that you do know they don't discriminate so we all know people who own businesses um i'm sure and you know with covet things are going to be a bit tough maybe uh apparently the government isn't stopping so you know that shouldn't stop us either in the commercial space you probably could you probably could do something like that you know i'm kind of asking you to read between the lines here you probably could do something like that um that's still on the up and up that's totally legitimate that builds your companies you know you have to do it through your company if you don't have a company you know well you're you're kind of too uh too ahead of yourself already and again i'm not speaking to you chantel i'm speaking to everybody i'm speaking to anybody who comes across this um i'm sure you could book some rooms through uh your business that is registered in sam and have some cash flows and revenues that way i'm i'm just saying i'm just saying um yeah i got to think out of the box i mean absolutely and i don't even know that it's necessarily out of the box it's just we don't really know the things that we can do and so it's just uh kind of relaxing the requirements on ourselves a little bit and having a little bit of confidence and and saying you know what we we can do that like we all know that we could provide this to the government but if they're asking for you know commercial past performance well okay well what what can i do maybe quickly to bid on something like this to to demonstrate that you know i don't think the government's going to be jumping through a crazy number of hoops to see and verify i shouldn't even say that uh the government's going to trust that you are able to provide this right it's it's a box that they have to check um now if it's some huge like some huge expo and they're asking for past performance that's similar in scope and magnitude and you need to be able to show that you've booked out you know 200 rooms you know every month or whatever okay well that actually is a logistical feat and something like that might be a little bit more difficult to do but something that's on the smaller end smaller quantity of rooms it's just not going to be that difficult we just have to realize um what we actually are empowered to do so yes it's thinking outside the box but it's also stepping into our own confidence knowing you know we can do that and you know if i if i realize past performance is a weakness for me that i can get it and i'm gonna go out and get it and i'm gonna run it through my business that's registered in sam your government contracting business and i'm gonna bring that as a tool now a pass performance tool to bid on prime contracts with the government i mean we just have to think of it like that sam says can you list other work that were done at hotels that are not related to booking rooms as a past performance ie it products um let me let me read that again can you list other work that you did at hotels that were not related to booking rooms as past performance ieit products probably not um just to give you the short answer probably not um if if you're looking at bidding on a contract for providing you know rooms like we're looking at today and you installed let's say audio visual so you installed like the tvs and you know the monitors and the speakers um and all that type of stuff in a conference room at a hotel you could try to get away with it but you probably wouldn't be able to go very far with it so i think with with that example um it's a good question and i've i've tried to do stuff that that way before and sometimes when you don't have anything you just use what you got and so if that's like if that's the case okay well just know that your chances may not be super high because you're you're not very relevant in your past performance but at least you have something and and maybe they will find it relevant enough it's kind of up to them so it's a little bit of a gray area i totally understand and respect that question i've been there i know exactly what you mean and that's kind of what i would say to something like that sim uh says thank you i have to run sim hey absolutely thanks for hanging out thanks for the engagement today um no worries have a great saturday have a great weekend hope to catch you on another live blue las vegas says do you have videos how we can lock the price with a vendor for example if i want to approach hilton how do i convince hilton to do business with me do you have any videos um i don't really have videos on that um because i try to keep things a little bit more general and generic but uh the word convince i mean you don't have to convince i mean you're you're a customer of hilton right off the bat and you're telling hilton hey i have a government customer you know the army the national guard they need these rooms i need to get a price quote so it's the same approach as you would do with anything you're getting a price quote whoever is sitting behind the desk or even somebody higher usually i mean that's how it was with me when i would go to get quotes on hotels um the few you know contracts that i did in this space you know the the manager came out walked me through the whole hotel showed me everything kind of treated me like a king a little bit because he wanted he wanted the business right so there should be no convincing um and like i said earlier if they're bidding on this direct if it's a full and open competition it's not set aside for small businesses they're just gonna say we're bidding on this we're not gonna give you any numbers so it's not gonna be any convincing there either because they're not even gonna give you the time of day but if it's set aside smoke for small businesses um they're really you know it's not really convincing that's not the word you just let them know that you're getting quotes you have a government customer that wants to use their location and this is what they need can you give me a price for that they're usually you know very open and happy to work with you on something like that it's really there's no magic behind behind that natasha what's going on natasha says what strategies do you use to make sure you're not under bidding or over pricing your bid one thing you can do is try to find other contracts that are similar but with fpds kind of going away the federal procurement data system the database that has all the the old contracts where you can look up that makes it a little bit more difficult um but here's here's the thing if you know your business you're probably not going to under price it because you know you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot you're not going to miss anything if you're going to overprice it well it's better to overprice something than to take something for a loss unless you're trying to like do something that we call buying past performance where you go super low on a contract just to win the contract maybe you even take a little bit of a hit on it but then you use that past performance as leverage to go after more contracts and and try and expand your your um your your presence within that particular customer that's a that's one type of strategy that people use for that but to make sure you're not under bidding or over bidding it's not really a strategy uh one thing like i said you can do is you can find what con the contract was awarded for in the past and that's always like the best thing to do if you can find that but what i'm saying is it's kind of hard to find nowadays but what you can do is you can ask contracting if this is a carry-on contract or an incumbent contract who is the the existing or the past contractor what is their name and what is the current value of the contract that immediately puts you within the ball field and then you can run your numbers and compare and say hey can i come close can i be more competitive than the current company if with something like you know hotel and lodging that we're looking at and there's not really an incumbent because like it's just one of those one-off things um then you really just kind of got to know your business i mean you really shouldn't be coming up too high or too low on something like this because the cost the expense you know the you know in business it would be the cost of goods sold but in this case it's the the hotel cost the hotel's going to be giving the same number to any contractor that approaches them unless there's some sort of relationship or something like that they're going to be giving that same number so everybody's just going to be taking that number and putting a markup on it so you may be higher than somebody else but i wouldn't say that's overpriced i would just say that they were less than you overpriced and underpriced kind of alludes to being like big swings in either direction like you were way high or you were way low you really shouldn't be way high or way low on something like this and if you are you're like you got to check your numbers there's not really a strategy to it um but just being a little bit higher than your com your competition again i wouldn't say that's overpriced i would just say that you're you've got a little bit more markup than than what they do so um i don't know if that exactly answered your question i tried to provide some context on my answer to that natasha hopefully that helps eric what's going on eri