How Viderity and the SBA’s 8(a) program could make your life immeasurably easier

Okay, here’s what happened. To help socially or economically disadvantaged business owners to develop their companies, Congress amended the Small Business Act to include Section 8(a). This amendment includes a program for federal contracts.

What it does is allow you to contract work directly from the Small Business Administration, using SBA-certified contractors—like us.

The reason this is important for you is because of these benefits:

• Up to $4 million, you can sole-source contracts.
• With no competition, the pre-contract paperwork from technical POCs is massively reduced.
• Which means way lower administrative costs.
• In fact, the whole rigmarole you’re used to having to go through to award a contract is replaced with a single, simple project definition document.
• Which means a hugely reduced decision lifecycle—the time required to award an 8 (a) sole source contract is usually days instead of months (the average turnaround time is just 48 hours!)
• You also end up dealing with way fewer contract protests.
• In the unlikely event you need something we or our partners can’t do, you’re free to add non-minority companies to the contract, for up to 49% of the work.

What exactly does the simplified award process look like? Well, a bit like this:

• Your government program manager (maybe that’s you) develops a statement of work and gets hold of the necessary funding.
• Having chosen Viderity to perform the work, she (or he) then submits a procurement request to his agency contracting officer.
• The agency contracting officer prepares and submits an ‘Offer Letter’ to Viderity’s SBA Business Development Specialist—a helpful fellow by the name of Reginald Walden.
• The SBA processes this and returns it to the agency contracting officer—usually within 48 hours.
• The agency contracting officer then sends us a Statement of Work, and a Request for Proposal or Quotation.
• We’ll then submit a proposal to your program manager and agency contracting officer, to be evaluated (and negotiated if necessary).
• You accept it, and award us the contract.

The SBA doesn’t pick just any firms to be 8(a) contractors

We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that the requirements for becoming 8(a) certified are pretty stringent. Everything is tested against a rigorous set of criteria—from ownership and operations, to financial health and past performance. And once accepted, the firm has to show its continued success annually to remain certified. So we’re extremely proud to have become 8(a) certified in December 2009!

How are you doing with hitting your small business quotas?

All federal contracting offices have small business contract goals they have to meet (you can read more about it at www.sba.gov). You get credit for hiring 8(a) firms—so there’s no way you aren’t doing yourself a favor by contracting with us!

Why not drop us a line at info@viderity.com to discuss your needs—or give us a ring at (800) 690-9170.

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