Ever wondered about those small contracts? You think that it's unreasonable to go after anything a million to three million dollars? Today's lesson we're going to talk about how to win small contracts with the US federal government. Pay attention, we're going to start right now. Alright, today's lesson we are discussing simplified acquisition methods. This is part 13 of the FAR, which is your Federal Acquisition Regulation Bible or Handbook. You will notice all of your contracts clauses reference the FAR or D FAR's for that matter. Today we're focusing on part 13, which is simplified acquisition procedures, also known as SAP. So if you hear that from SAP, you know it stands for simplified acquisition procedures. Now what is simplified acquisition procedures? As of February 2018, the government bumped up the thresholds for simplified acquisition procedures. They were 3,000 and 150,000 respectively, meaning that anything below $3,000 was considered a micro purchase. They bumped that up to $10,000 and then on the simplified acquisition side, the upper limit went from $150,000 to $250,000. Here is the actual documentation that attest to that. You can see here where it talks about bumping up the limit now. It's $10,000, where it was before it was three. And then the upper limit is $250,000. Where before it was $150,000. So what does that mean? It means that anything that falls under simplified acquisition procedures, all of those contracts must be awarded to small businesses. They must be awarded to people that look like you and I. They must be awarded people who remember the definition of small business. And your next code you fall underneath the annual, the three-year annual revenue or the three-year annual number of employees. So if you fall and those categories, you are eligible for a simplified acquisition procedures contracts. Eric, okay, break it down some more. Now let's talk about that. What does that mean? Number one, when their government agencies are looking at spinning those dollar amounts, they have a different set of rules that they can follow. They don't have to go through the traditional rules of actually putting out jobs for bid and waiting for responses and then make it a decision who to actually give the contract to based on price or based on some more analysis. They don't have to do that anymore. The rules throughout the window. Now a new set of rules applies to contracts that fall in that category. So the beautiful thing is now that they've increased that dollar amount, a lot of us out there can start doing, make it some decent-sized money, working on some decent-sized contracts, and still fall under the auspice of these particular rules. So you better learn how to play the game so that you can actually maximize your potential because they're spinning a lot of money here. And as you see, that dollar amount is going to increase by billions of dollars just by bumping it up $100,000 at the bottom end. All right. Now when using the simplified acquisition procedures, ask for the far regulations and let me pull that up on the screen so we can have it here. Make sure we pull this up for everybody. Okay. And what I did was I highlighted a few points that we wanted to discuss today. Number one, it says that the government or the agency, their primary source for identifying vendors is using SAM. So that means everyone out there must be registered in SAM in order to take advantage of this. Again, this applies all small businesses you don't have to have a certification. It applies to regular small business. It also applies to ADA hubs on women on veteran known as well. But our general small business qualifies on a simplified acquisition procedures. Number two, it says no public display or advertising is required as per section 5.202, which means if the dollar amount of the actual job of the project of what they're trying to purchase falls below the simplified acquisition threshold. They don't have to publicly advertise this particular award. Hey guys, remember all of you out there saying Eric, how come only 40% of the contracts are in FedBizObs? How come they're not putting everything out there? This is why this is one of the reasons why they don't have to actually put stuff on FedBizObs because it falls under simplified acquisition SAP procedures. All right. Number three, they can may solicit from a single source. What does that mean? Soul source contracts and negotiated contracts isn't the stuff that we all want. This is the stuff that we're talking about that takes you from nobody to somebody, from not making any money to actually making money. This is the way to do it. Now, so you know that one, they've got to get people out of sand. Two, they don't have to actually public advertise this stuff. And three, they can actually solicit projects. What more do you want? Well, how do I, so Eric, this sounds very excited, but how do I actually do this? How do you go about doing this is you have to start by what building relationships. You have to know who the contracting officials are. You have to know, they have to know who you are more importantly. How do they get to know you is by you reaching out to them. You've got to put together a capability statement. You have to start soliciting people. You've got to make phone calls. You've got to send emails. If you're not going after them and letting them know it to exist, then you're not going to be in a position to be awarded these contracts. One step further, we're going to look at what happens for contracts below the $10,000 mark. Those are considered micro purchase and micro purchase. And let me just pull that up on the screen for you to see. Micro purchase, everyone out there, I encourage you, if this is something that you're interested in, to read this section within the FAR on micro purchase, it's only literally one, two, three. It's four paragraphs long. So everyone out there can read four paragraphs. The most important paragraph is 13.203, which talks about purchase guidelines. And it says, which I love, and the reason I'm willing to share this with you and read it out loud, it says that micro purchases, again, remember below $10,000 because they bumped up to threshold. Micro purchases may be awarded without soliciting competitive quotations. What does that sound like? They can just give it to you. All right. And under the guidelines for micro purchases, it says that if your costs seems unreasonable, that they actually don't have to verify whether or not it's unreasonable, because we're dealing with such a small dollar amount, the administrative cost of finding out whether or not your price is reasonable, not outweighs actually doing the job. Does everyone get that out there? So if you're $1,000 or $1500 is the difference, they don't even care as per the rules, the rules state right here. And 13.203, number three, the administrative cost of verifying the reasonfulness of the price for purchases may more than offset any potential savings from detecting instances of overpricing. So how can you guys lose with this? I don't see how you can lose. I think everyone out there should be exploring SAP for their respective agencies, for the respective next codes. This is another way that you can break into the federal government marketplace, and you could probably start at a much smarter scale, where maybe you're more comfortable, so build some past performance, build some history, and start working with agencies, and start earning money today. All right. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.