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Unbound is a weekly podcast, created to help you achieve more as a leader. Join Chris DuBois as he shares his growth journey and interviews others on their path to becoming unbound. Delivered weekly on Thursdays.
0:00
interested in diving into the world of government contracts? Well, today's guest will show you how are you leader trying to get more from your business in life? Me too. So join me as I document the conversations, stories and advice to help you achieve what matters in your life. Welcome to unbound with me, Chris DuBois. Rickey Howard is the founder of DOD contract Academy. He helps small businesses and tech startups break into the enormous yet untapped federal contracting marketplace. Ricky is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who oversaw 82 billion in DOD contracts during his military acquisitions career and as the host of the DoD contract Academy podcast, Ricky. Welcome on, man. Hey, what's up, Chris?
0:44
How's it going?
0:45
Great. And I am ready to dive right into your origin story.
0:50
Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. So you want me to just get into it, man, I can, I could talk for a long time. So you might have to wherever
0:56
you want to go, I'll cut you off at some point.
0:59
There you go. Well, you know, my origin story, I'm from, I guess roughly the same area that you're in now I'm from New England area. And Massachusetts, after college joined the Air Force. And while in the Air Force, flew reconnaissance, intelligence volunteer reconnaissance aircraft for the first 10 to 12 years I was in. And then for a variety of reasons, transitioned into acquisitions and acquisitions is the professional putting companies on contract for the government. So for the last eight years of my military career, I was in Massachusetts. So I came back to where I was from after kind of traveling the world and got to work with a lot of the great companies in Massachusetts and Silicon Valley, you know, in the other areas that are putting mainly technologies on contract for the government. So we were really able to develop a lot of different things. But I was also able to see a little bit of the struggle that a lot of businesses encounter when they're thinking about selling to the government. So there's, there's a struggle understanding how the government makes purchases. And so what you would have to do, and then there's also I would say, another struggle, which was a selfish my personal struggle as a government acquisitions officer, which was, a lot of companies were just unaware that the government, the Department of Defense was buying the type of things that they were selling. So, you know, we worked on a variety of problems, but often we were have to reach out to a company and tell them, hey, you know, the government does buy what you're selling, and we need a solution like yours. So, you know, one is, awareness. Two is the actual process. And so when I retired in 2019, it was clear for me to kind of make that my new mission and help small businesses in particular, sell their products services to the US government.
2:45
All right. So we're gonna open with something I'm sure every listener is just hanging on right now, what is the kind of lowest hanging fruit or the easiest way for, for a small business to get into their first government contract?
2:59
Yeah, so I don't like to use the word easy. And when I'm talking about government contracting, what I will say is this, the average small business makes about $2.34 million a year Last time I ran the calculation, I believe it's a little bit less than that, for companies that are just subcontracting to the government. When we're talking about ease, probably the easiest way to do it is to come in as a subcontractor at first versus a prime. So subcontractor would mean you partner with another company on a opportunity that the government has, and you kind of use their past performance. Because there's there's different things, there's different criteria, a government officer is going to look at when they're going to award a contract. So for instance, if my business had, you know, 20 years of selling to the Air Force, and you want to partner with me to sell, you know, software or training, well, you basically use, you could use my past performance, and you know, what we're doing to help you get on contract with me, now you're building your past performance. So the next one you go after you can say, Well, look, I've worked with a subcontractor on an Air Force effort, and you'll have a little bit more understanding of the ropes. It's going to make you a little bit more competitive when you go for that next contract.
4:14
Right. So it's like a reputation.
4:18
A little bit a little bit Ashman? Yeah. Again, I mean, it kind of depends on what you're doing. If you were developing a technological solution, for instance, let's say you had an idea for something or you had a, we're usually talking about a technology for what I'm about to bring up versus something like a service like if you had accounting services, but you might have an accounting software that's, you know, maybe unique or kind of revolutionary. What you could do is go after something called the SBIR contracts. Now these I, I feel like these have the lowest threshold for getting on contract with the government for the first time. SBIR stands for Small Business, innovative research. And so what the whole point of this is the government Want companies that don't traditionally sell to the government, but may have a innovative solution in mind or something that they're working on, that would benefit the government. And so for this, the government and by the way, I have a lot of clients that go this method, instead of using like Angel investing or having people that, you know, take a piece of their company to provide them funding for development, because here, you're basically getting government development dollars, they don't own your IP, retain your IP, and they're not taking a part of your company, you own part of your company, and the government wants you to sell commercially and to the government. So it's called dual use. So typically, they're looking for a dual use solution. And there's a lot of reasons for that. But your entry for that is essentially, you know, you see a topic that will come out, a lot of them are a little bit broad, you know, might be a one recently was base security, right? So you have a, you know, a solution for basic security, let's say it was like, you know, a retinal scanning device, or, you know, something like that, you could propose that say, Hey, I think this would help with base security, because you could stick these at each of the entry points. And if the government likes that, they'll award you what's called a phase one. And a phase one contract gives you like, 150 200 grand, it's not a huge contract, but we call it your license to hunt, right? you'll owe you owe them some kind of study for that. But really, the point of winning of phase one is to get you on contract. And now the government's going to start introducing you to people. And if it's the military people in the military, that could sponsor you that could say, hey, you know, what we think that this particular technology would, would be great, and we will sponsor you. And if they, if you find a sponsor, now you can apply for phase two, that's usually upwards 1.5 to 1.9 million. And that's more to develop, maybe, maybe the point will be to demonstrate the technology, make some modifications for government use that type of thing. And of course, it could go on from there. But that's, that's actually, if you if you use that process correctly, from putting in a submission to being on contract could be, you know, as fast as four months. So, again, I don't like to use the word easy. But that is an interesting route into government contracting for the first time. Yeah, I
7:12
don't know anything with the government will ever be easy. So yeah. So that phase two sponsorship, is that? Are you talking like, departments? Or like, or is it something smaller than that for, for getting in?
7:25
Well, for SBIR, what, what I like about one of the things I like about this is, you know, if you think about regular government acquisitions, that there is there are very few people that can actually put you on contract for the government, it's less than 1%. And I know you're you're in the military at one point, you know, when I was flying aircraft, for instance, you know, for rookie aircraft, not rookie rookie is for reconnaissance. For anyone that's not familiar with that term. You know, we would wonder how the heck does do we get a new piece of technology onto the aircraft that we could use. And, you know, I think everyone kind of knew it came from an acquisitions office, but the user is usually completely separated from the actual purchasing of anything for the military in particular, but it's pretty much the same for other government organizations. Now, traditional acquisitions, you're usually working with a program manager and an acquisitions office. But with this SBIR program, it could be a user that sponsors you, because that's what's unique about this. So now we're actually we're breaking away from the acquisitions office, and it gives the users of whatever it is that you're making, the ability that they don't normally have, which is to kind of helped direct some of the acquisitions process. And usually they don't have to put their money in either because the server fund, basically, the way it works is agencies have to pay a tax. So every agency that spends over a certain amount of money in r&d each year has to contribute to SBIR. So the Siver office spent, I think it's somewhere between three and 4 billion a year in the civil contracts with small businesses. So you're to really answer your question, you're, the agency itself is not going to be your sponsor, you're not going that high up. You might, you know, whatever, what branch of service, were you in?
9:13
Army,
9:14
you're in the army, okay. So it would probably be a full bird Colonel level sponsor that you'd be looking for maybe a GS 14, you know, for on the civilian side, just depending on where you're at. So now, it might be that the GS 14 or the full bird Colonel or the GS 15, whoever you're getting, and that's what I It doesn't have to be I just recommend that you want to have somebody that has a little bit of authority, right? So the Air Force, who would be like a Wing Commander, or a group commander would probably sponsor what you're doing, but you might be demonstrating that to you know, the master sergeant that actually would use the software suite and he messages that up the chain, and we'll get you know, the approval so I mean, there's maybe we could have a whole discussion about how to get those sponsors right but it is it is a little They're different. And it's a little more exciting to to actually be able to work with the user, which is not your your typical government contracting method. So if
10:08
anyone's looking for ideas, go talk to your just an average inventory unit, and the number of things that they Jerry rigored, find a solution because there isn't a product. Or if there is a product, we don't have access to it through the acquisitions process, or Yeah, opportunities. So you and your company are a great resource for for people to be able to get into this world and kind of figure this stuff out. Are there other things you would recommend people start reading into acquiring like, just exploring in order to be able to do this?
10:41
Sure. So yeah, I mean, aside from the paid services that, you know, we we have for companies that are already selling or you know, just getting in, you know, we offer free resources. So I think that going to our YouTube channel, for instance, that's just at DOD contract Academy. So they can watch videos, we have a ton of free content on there, everything from registering your business, to setting up meetings to like interviews with our clients, and just successful businesses that are selling just to give you perspective, state podcast by the same name, DOD contract Academy. So that's one place where you can get free information. That's, that's real, that, you know, the companies are using to sell to the government and kind of point you in the right direction. Some other resources I would give you, is when I tell you these just know that government websites are no, you know, this, but government websites are usually not the most intuitive. I think that I think part of the frustration in selling to the government stems from some of these websites, right. But everything that the government this is one thing that's nice, everything the government buys, for the most part is public information. So if I'm the Air Force, and I buy something from Chris Dubois, LLC, that's going it's gonna be a federal record of that, that you can look up. So please like USA spending.gov, that's a great place to do research to see if you're asking yourself, Does the government buy what I'm selling? First of all, I can tell you the answer is almost surely, yes. But sure, it was not a word, but you can go to USA spending.gov. And you can get a really good sense of what they're spending. And I mean, everything from the stuff that you would normally associate, you know, like, like weapons and fuel, but you know, most of the spending is on other things, accounting services, financial services, construction, roofing, you know, you name it, social media marketing, we talked a little bit about training before this, you know, obviously, food and clothing and all the products and stuff, but it really goes, in fact, I even saw a marijuana contract, it must have been for lab testing, or something, but you wouldn't think the federal government would buy that. But, you know, it's just to give you an example a piano lessons we've seen. So I mean, if you could think of it, it's probably in there, you just want to understand how much of it they're buying. And to decide if it's worth going after piano lessons probably is not one of those. Right? You know, banking your entire career on that. Right? Exactly.
13:06
So, my assumption is that a lot of companies try to do this all themselves, like for the, at least for the first round, till they realized how challenging it can be, and then they bring someone else in? What are some of those myths apps that you notice? Just time and time again, that most companies aren't gonna be able to solve this? Unless they do bring someone in? Yeah,
13:26
no, you got these are good questions. So the first thing I would say is the way companies the biggest mistake they make, and the reason most companies quit is because they go to sam.gov. This is another one of those websites. sam.gov, by the way, is where you register your business to sell to the government. And one tip is, don't pay anybody to do that for you do that yourself. There's a lot of reasons for that. But you can do it yourself, and you'll save some money and you don't want anyone having that information anyway. But it's also the place where solicitations from the government are going to come. And there's a lot of different types of solicitations. What a lot of companies make the mistake of whether they were watching the movie War Dogs, and you know, cuz they were they were on a website called FedBizOpps. And sand.gov has replaced that. But you know, in that movie, they see these RF requests for proposals, they write a proposal, submit it right, and now they're off in Iraq selling, you know, making bazillion dollars, right, and they get into some trouble. I'm not saying you can't win a contract by responding to an RFP or an RFQ. But the odds of it are very, very low. I think the biggest thing to understand is that when a solicitation comes out from the government, the handcuffs are on the government office, meaning so let's say that I put a training contract together and I something that's perfect for Crystal blah, LLC. Am I saying your last name correctly? Yeah, yeah. Chris Dubois, LLC. You see it hey, this is amazing. This is just for me and you right? A proposal and then you lose. And then you see another one, you write a proposal and then you lose. And now maybe on your third or fourth one, and you notice, not only are you losing, but your competitors, are you this same competitor maybe is winning. And now as you're paying a little bit more attention to these, it looks like it was written for them. Maybe they have certain certifications or a certain technology. And now maybe you think it's rigged, right? So these are some things that, you know, these are some conclusions, false conclusions that companies come to, you know, as they're trying to figure out what this process looks like. But what they don't realize is that the process starts months before that solicitation ever comes out. So solicitation comes out, you ask me a question, I'm not answering your questions, I have to be very careful, I can't give you any preferential treatment once an official solicitations out. But before that I'm in something called the market research phase. And so as it just pitcher, you know, as an acquisitions officer, as a program manager, if I need training, I mean, you pick your training, right, but let's say I needed to do sexual assault training for the entire base, and it was my job to put that on. Well, you know, I'm not an expert at sexual assault training you if that's what your company specializes in, that's what your company does. So I need to reach out to these companies these that have that are credible, and that have done this to figure out what I even am going to put in the solicitation, right? What is there a certain software suite that we should mandate, right, because it makes it easier for everybody to get the training, or maybe there's like a new alerting system that where people can, you know, report incidents, and they could just put an app on their phone, maybe there's, you know, certifications and all of this. So we put something out when we're doing that we put something out called a sources sought or a request for information. And those also come through sam.gov. So my biggest recommendation to people is once you decide to sell to the government, because you validated that the government buys what you are actually selling, you register your business. Now you want to go after sources saw an RFI. So that's where you want to start, there's a lot of variations to this. And there's a lot of other places. But I think a good starting place is start with that Sources Sought. Because now you're because what you want to do is build a relationship with a government office that buys what you sell. So now if you're responding to me, in a lot of companies aren't responding to this, a lot of companies are making the mistake of just you know, starting with the RFP, but now you respond to the sources site. And you can recommend, hey, you use a certain software for training, you have an app, you have a certain certifications, maybe you're a veteran owned business or a woman owned small business, you can also recommend that they set this aside for your type of business. Or if you don't have those set asides recommend that they don't set this aside. Because you know, maybe you can come up, you can recommend anything you want. But the point is you're sending that in, and then what you want to do is you want to follow up with them. And if you can set up a meeting with the office, whether it's even if it's a phone call, anything that any additional information you can get out of that office is going to be good for you. Because you can't the government is flawed, right? It's made up of people. So, you know, if you put a solicitation together for the government, for me, that's a lot of work from my office to put a solicitation together. And it is not going to have like every use case under the sun in there. So what you might get in the solicitation might not have, you know, information that you could get during these meetings, right. So if you meet with me about this sexual assault prevention training, and then realize, well, this, this training is going to be I don't know it Hanscom, Air Force Base in Massachusetts, and maybe, you know Randolph Air Force Base in Texas. And it's going to be presented to you know, men only or, you know, maybe to a certain profession, well, that's going to give you or maybe it has to be done remotely, it's going to give you use cases, and you're gonna be able to take that information. And when you do write the proposal, now you're going to have a certain angle that other people didn't have. So now you might be able to include that you have trainers in Massachusetts and Texas, that special that can do in person and remote training, or maybe you have a trainer with the same background as these type of individuals that can you know, it'll resonate a little bit more, they're used to the same being in the same environment. Also, you could this could turn into a sole source contract with your business. In some cases, if you have something very unique, you know, they may just put you on contract. So that's going to be the rare case. But, you know, assuming it does go to a solicitation, think about it, you're you've met with the office, you've helped them write the proposal with this source of sight. You might have met with them several times. Now the solicitation comes out. You have more information, you write a better proposal, and now the government is reviewing these two proposals, one of whom they know very well, because they've already talked to you researched you. You helped them the other day, or just told they're seeing it for the first time. So again, there's no guarantees in government contracting, but you're much more likely to win if you put all of that work in ahead of time.
19:57
Right. And so I guess separate from us, using like Sources Sought. And some are, there are other things you could be doing to build these relationships in order to kind of get your foot in the door. Yeah, early. Absolutely. Probably one of the best ones is going to conferences. Alright, so
20:14
when you when you go to USA spending.gov. And so this is what we do for some of our I say, higher end clients for clients that you know, have a company that's established, and they don't want to, they just want us to come in, the first thing we do is put a strategy together for them. And you know, what your listeners can do for free just by kind of playing with it and go to USA spending.gov? Start taking a look at first, what agencies are buying what you sell, right? How much are they spending, it's not, you know, it's has a lot of limitations. And there are other tools out there you could use, but just by seeing, you know, some of the agencies like which one of the top three agencies, you can actually on USA spending.gov to if you happen to be like a woman owned small business or a veteran owned small business, you can further use that to look at okay, well, who is actually awarding more contracts to service disabled veteran owned small businesses right now, all of a sudden, that might change who your target agency is, right? So once you had the reason you want that target agency, and what that has to do with conferences, is that once you know your target agency, and you start to get an idea of who you're selling to, now, you can look at conferences that are with that agency, and you can start researching that agency, right, one of the best conferences, and what I will tell you is, and this is important, because there's a lot of conferences out there you are, and there's a lot of conferences out there that are heavy on industry, meaning the coordinators are coordinating them and selling industry. So you get a lot of industry people coming in. And you might have a few government speakers, right? Those are ones in my opinion, to avoid, what you want to do you want to go to there are conferences that are targeted, that are for if you're selling in the military, there conferences that are for the military, right there, I just got back from one in Texas, where you know, the military, the Army has a bunch of them to where you have military personnel that look forward to go into these every year. And to offset the costs, they have an industry area. So if you can find so you want a good way of figuring out if you should go to it, are you outnumbered by the government people that are going to be there? Meaning is industry going to be outnumbered? If the answer is yes, that's a good sign that you have a decent conference, get a booth, if you can afford it. And in you know, just every conference is different, right? But they're probably, you know, somewhere between two and five grand depending on where you're going. Some of them and some of them can go really, really high for if you've been in some of these but and you're nodding your head. So but you know, the benefit of going to these conferences is I mean, you're surrounded now by the users, the procurement guys, the you know, with the right conferences, the requirements senior leaders for start to get people you just wouldn't have any access to.
22:49
So, shift gears a bit, let's talk length of like, I don't wanna call it sales cycle, it's the contracting cycle. How? One at some point, right, this, it gets pretty lengthy, because of all the different bureaucracy and the thing that boxes have to be checked along the way. Are there? It's like a multi fold question. So like, whatever you want to throw at me? Are there ways to kind of keep tabs on where everything is actually at, like within the process? So that you're, you're, you know, keeping in tune with, with everything that's going on? Are there things you can be doing at different stages in order to kind of speed up the sales process? Right, like anything like that?
23:33
So the answer the first question, this is pipeline management, right? So you're gonna have, you know, if we're talking about, you know, and this may or may not, this might be where they turn off your podcast, right. But if you're building a pipeline, really for the government or anyone else, but but for the government, when you're building a pipeline, you need to have several opportunities in there to meet your because a lot of sales executives are gonna have annual quotas, right. Or if you're a business owner, you probably shouldn't know how much you want to make each year selling to the government. But let's just say it's a million dollars a year, right? So if crystal ball LLC wants to make a million dollars a year selling to the government? Well, the first thing we're going to do is ask you what's your conversion rate on these opportunities? Well, you haven't sold anything to the government yet in this example that I'm making up, right. But so if you haven't sold anything yet, we're just going to go with 10%. Right. So that means if you have a million dollar quota, or a million dollar goal, you want to have a $10 million pipeline, right? And you're going to be finding leads the whole I mean, just to make the process like crystal clear and simple for your audience. And we have a book coming out soon that they could use just a journal just to kind of help them with this, but a planner rather but it's find leads, turn those leads into meetings. And then each one of those meetings once you've met with the government engaged in some way each one of those becomes a opportunity in your pipeline that you assign a value to. Now you have to track that it's up to you, you have to track it through the process. And you know, if you're doing this at As a side gig, you know, that means you want to have a reduced number of opportunities, you know, you might, you might not have 100 opportunities in your pipeline, because you don't have time to do that. But you want to make sure that the ones you do have are solid, right? So you might be tracking three to five. And just, you know, once a month, you're reaching out if it's, if it's in the early stages, if it's a source of sought, you're going to know, for instance, when it's a source of site do and you have to manage when you're going to write that afterwards. You know, what I said? Is you want to set up meetings, right? Well, during these meetings, there are certain questions you want to be asking. And one of them is what is the timeline for this contracting action? You know, they might tell you it because you're right. Government contracts. I mean, you know, the federal government, we measure things by fiscal year, this is going to be a fiscal year, you know, FY we're in FY 24 right now. So it's gonna be an FY 24 purchase? Or is it gonna be fy 25? You know, they're going to tell you, hey, you know, no, we're ready to buy in the next three months? Well, that's great, that's a hot opportunity, that's a hot lead, they have the money, they have the requirement, they're in there looking at you and talking to you. That is a, you know, that just went to the top of my list versus, you know, this is something that we want, but maybe they are using something called follow up funds, which I don't know if you're familiar with the term, but basically, so the government, the agencies all have funding to, you know, manage all their programs each year, right. And so, FY 24, so the fiscal year government fiscal year starts October 1. And so at the end of September, what happens around May is the agencies start looking at it. Now I say, agencies I'm talking about, I don't don't just think of like a couple dozen, eight federal agencies think of like hundreds of 1000s of offices within the federal government, they all have budgets, and they want to spend all that money every year, because what they're thinking is if I don't spend, let's say, you have a $10 million budget, if I don't spend the $10 million budget, I'm not going to get $10 million next year. So hey, we're only going to spend we're on target spend $8 million this year? Well, this happens with the big acquisitions officers, too. And so we have $2 million in follow up funds. So around May they start understanding how much they're going to have left. And they start deciding where they're going to spend that money and usually goes to pet projects. So if what you're selling is a pet project, you find that out during your meeting, and okay, well, this is they might or they might not get funding for this. Right. So that becomes a less of a priority, or, yeah, this is funded, but we're not going to have funding till fy 25. So we're looking at a January FY 25 purchase. So these things you want to know, because you want to know that type of that kind of pipeline. And then it's just staying, you know, if it's if it's going to happen this year, you know, they'll probably tell you, we're expecting a solicitation in March. So you know, it's December, almost December right now, as I'm talking to you. So that means that I'm on the lookout for an official solicitation in March, and I'm probably going to reach out to that office once a month going up to that just to check with them, hey, anything change, you know what's going on? And, you know, unfortunately, that's that's work on you to kind of see where you're at in the process. Your chance to speed things up is your initial engagement with that sources site, and, you know, giving the government different ways to put you on contract that might be faster.
28:15
So the actual proposal process or the writing of the proposal, right? Are there things you should be looking for, besides just including everything that they need in the requirements? Are there things you could be doing within that in order to kind of increase your chances of avoiding?
28:32
Yeah, I would say that, you know, fundamentally, there's a big difference between responding to a source of site or a request for information and writing a proposal for an official government solicitation, an official solicitation request for proposal, or RFP request for quote, or RFQ. For the source of site RFI, like I described, you can be artistic, when you're responding to that. You don't even have to respond to that on time. Like, I recommend that you do. Right. But if you send it in a day or two later, most, you know, most officers, government officers are going to accept that. But you're recommending things in there, right? You don't have to answer all their questions and the sources cite your, your entire objective of the Sources Sought is to eliminate competition and set yourself up for like, you know, a contract when and how get as much as you can pack into that solicitation or, you know, make it a set aside for your business. We're talking about a proposal the proposal is excruciating and detail, I would say right, so again, some of them are easier than others. Some of them are long, some of them are short. But when I say excruciating detail what I mean is this is not the place to be artistic. If it says 20 pages and you submit 20 to yours could be thrown out just because you're over more than likely the last two pages will just be deleted. If it says Times New Roman 12 point font that's what you put it in, in, in every and there's gonna be a bunch of things in there. There's gonna be maybe a commercialization strategy pricing In a section of technologies section, all of those are going to be graded, the bigger the contract, you can expect that there's probably a team of people that are going to be impartial grading that proposal. So you might have put a lot of work in right on the the sources site and RFI, got some things added to that solicitation, that does not mean you're going to win that proposal. That means that you should now have a good opportunity to be scored high on different sections, right. So the people that you've been talking to, may not be part of that approval process for who's going to win. So I would say, just know that there are some tools out there that can help you. So if you're writing proposals for the first time, and we are not a proposal writing house, so I'm not taking a piece of this, but you can certainly go to someplace like Upwork and find somebody that can prove to you that they've written government proposals before and one, you can so you can hire somebody to help you. Another thing you can do there are, there are tools out there like us rogue, I do take a PC user, I have an affiliate agreement with them, but use rogue.com. And that's just a great AI tool that is designed for government proposal, writing saves a ton of time. So literally, I can, if you've ever written a proposal, just Just hear me out on what this thing does. So you can and I've interviewed John Farrow, he's the CEO of user I've had him on a few times. So I can opt in, it's getting better every day, I can upload an RFP, or sources. So I can upload anything to this thing. But I can upload the RFP and it will automatically start creating the outline of what the solicitation is going to look like for me, then, like everything that I've written, it's going to remember that and I can put my marketing information in there, you can put you can upload all the data about your services, tech, whatever it is. So when I when you go in, you can just say kind of like, unlike chat, GPT, right? What's your kind of as you have to teach it, right? This thing remembers everything you're doing, and you can just say, hey, what's my, you know, describe the data platform that my that we use for x and it will, it will write it out for you. So, you know, it's not it's nothing's gonna give you 100% But that's going to give you a lot closer, and it's gonna save you a lot of frustration in time.
32:10
That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, if you want, we will grab your your affiliate link, add it to the show notes for the end of this. Absolutely. Sure. Yeah. But, Ricky, this is a very insightful conversation, and got me excited for going against contracts. Selfishly, I'll use all of this. But, uh, I want to move into our last three questions. All right, versus being what book do you recommend? Everyone should read?
32:35
Ooh, that's a good one. And I've got I've got a few that I really like. But I've been rereading. Discipline equals freedom by Jocko lately. That's a good one that I really love. There's one kind of I never remember his name. Oh, Rick Rubin wrote one on creativity. I think it's called the creative act. That's actually, you know, even though we're talking about government contracting, there is room for creativity, especially when we're talking about Sources Sought, how are you approaching the government? How can you how does your solution solve a government problem set? I think reading something like that. It's a night and it's not like a sit down, read the whole book type of thing. But I think, you know, it is nice to kind of read a couple pages in there. And just think about how you can do something different and give you a little different perspective, whatever, whatever your job is.
33:26
What is next for you professionally? Oh, well,
33:30
we got a few things going on. So I'm running DoD contract Academy. Right. So that's our online training and consultation platform, we have a variety of clients we're working with, some of which are doing very well. So you know, there's a few of them, I will probably be increasing my role with them. The next big thing that's coming out with our company is our book that's going to be coming out here in the next month. So that's something that they'll be able to see on Amazon, when it comes out. And again, this is more of a think of a of a planner, right? So like a government contracting planner. So it's a place in there that has some simple instruction, a place for you to put leads a place for you to record your meetings, the questions you want to ask while you're in those meetings, and then your pipeline. So kind of what we talked about going from leads meetings to pipeline closed contracts. That's, that's next for me.
34:19
And the last question, Where can people find you go
34:23
to DOD contract.com. That's our website. That's where you can see you know what we have to offer. If you want to just check us out on YouTube at DOD contracts Academy and same thing with a podcast. You know, it's the same name for all of them should be pretty easy.
34:38
Awesome. All right, Ricky. Thanks
34:39
for joining. Cool, man. Thanks, my pleasure.
34:44
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