@Kamikaze Revy
You mentioned you're company has done some Gov. work/contracts in the past, do yal have any Small Business/Minority Business certifications as well that help to put yal onto various State/Gov RFPs that are coming up in your area?
We don't because I own my company 50/50. Im hispanic and my business partner is a white ex-marine I grew up with.
One of us would have to give up 1% in order to be eligible for the minority owned or the veteran owned status.
In our case, it hasn't been an issue. We got lucky as hell with our first government job.
Long story short, a friend of a friend works for a local government contractor that does program management for the Navy.
That contractor won a contract to conduct training and part of that contract was to create videos to support the training.
The contractor had never done videos and had no clue where to even begin.
The friend of a friend got our information, reached out to us, and we made it happen.
That one job landed us $95k for 8 two minute videos and 2 ten minute videos (that price is a long story in and of itself because they normally don't pay anywhere near that much but after a bunch of negotiating we worked it out in our favor as well).
After that job was finished we registered our company so we could bid directly on government contracts ourselves; the challenge with that is that government wants you to have "subject matter experts" involved in EVERY job. So even if the contract is specifically for videos, we would still need to work with at least one other company in order to be eligible to bid.
If you're interested in the challenge, you first have to set up your business legally (LLC or whatever you decide you want it to be. Mines is an LLC Partnership), you get you EIN number from the IRS for your business, you register you business with you state, get your license, (all the works to be legally in business in The US). Once you have your business in order, you register your business with the government via the SAM.gov website. This is the site where you essentially give the government all your info and tell them you want to work with them. Everyone gets approved and it's an easy process. You just have to get your business details in order first. After you get approved and registered with SAM.gov, you can start bidding on RFP's (request for proposal) via FBO.gov (Fed Biz Ops) where the government posts all the jobs that they are required to put out for bid. Here's the real kick in the balls though. If you don't know anyone at all in the military or already doing contracting with the government, your chances are going to be pretty slim at landing a contract. What we found out really quick through our experience with the past few contractors is that before a job is made public, military personnel have already snuck the information out to their buddies that work for contractors. By the time it hits the net, a lot of contractors have already known about the jobs for weeks if not months. It's SUPPOSED to be a fair process open to all, but A LOT of conversations happen behind closed doors that lead up to who wins these contracts. All that to say, it's not impossible, and if you land one, it will definitely put you in the conversation to do more work, but approach the opportunity with some pessimism because there's a lot stacked against you coming out the gate. I say give it a shot. If nothing else, it's a cool resume booster to be able to say you are a registered government contractor.
My recommendation is to register your business for government contracting like I mentioned, but focus on finding small government contractors looking for training videos, or product videos for products being marketing to the military or local government. Bottom line is get close to businesses and people that are already working with the government and try to roll one job into another that will get you closer to the bigger budget work.
