There's a revolving theme that I keep hearing from people lately on Monday's and Tuesday. I've been taking incoming calls from YouTube subscribers like yourself who have some questions spitting about 20 to 30 minutes on the phone with them helping them work through their questions. If you're interested in doing something like that, please at the end of this video, send an email to ericascoreconrics.com or info at scoreconjrx.com and we express your interests and participating in a one-on-one talk with me exclusively for those subscribers who are interested in learning a little bit more about what we have to offer and how can I help you achieve your goals in a federal arena. Today's video, what we're talking about is how do you spend your time? A lot of people ask me, eric, I just got registered in SAM, I have my Dungeons number, I have all this stuff and I'm bidding projects and I'm not winning any jobs. And so I keep bidding projects and unsuccessfully nothing's happening. So what I did was I created this pie chart on the screen and what it shows is the majority of the people who are calling me, this is the ways in which they spend their time. And I'm finding that there's a common theme and so I want it to discuss that in today's video. How are you spending your time? Now, the average person spends the majority of their time bidding jobs. And what happens is when you spend all of your time bidding jobs, it leads to frustration, it leads to getting burnt out because there's a lot of time and effort that goes into putting together a bid, getting pricing, getting quotations, verifying specs, verifying requirements, there's a lot of effort that goes into putting that whole package together and thus if you're spending the bulk of your time doing that, you can easily get burned out. Now what I find is that those same persons are spending very little time in doing business development and networking, market research and other ways that are intangible activities that actually lead to more efficient, more scalable growth. So what we want to talk about is how to take and utilize your highest and best use of the time that you have, which is a limited resource. We all know that time is neutral. It's not good or bad, but how you spend it is really important. Now on the other side, let's take a look at how I've been spending my time with a recent client of mine that I've taken on. We've actually in two months have spent the bulk of our time doing market research, doing business development, sending out emails, reaching out to contracting officials. We've done a lot of actual networking. We've done marketing to people. We've spent time at events and in actuality, the thing that we spent the least amount of time doing was bidding projects. Why? Because we want to put ourselves in a position so that the contracting officials know who we are, they like us and they trust us. We want to put ourselves in position to where they want to do business with us. And that actually takes a special skill set. That takes business development. That takes nurturing, creating, establishing a relationship with the person. If you don't have that with them, then the chances are unlikely that you are going to be awarded a negotiated bid, a Social Source contract, anything under SAP, simplified acquisitions, procedures. You're not going to be awarded anything under the micro threshold. And so that's, you're basically going to be spending yourself around and at Hamster will, right over and over again, and just another vendor out there, another contractor out there, another supplier, just providing pricings to the government. And the whole basis for why I teach federal contracting is so that you're not being chosen, selective, or selected just on the basis of being the lowest bidder. Remember, you want in the federal arena, they choose best value, which a lot of times means you don't have to be the lowest bidder. Again, go back to watching the video that we talked about, simplified acquisitions and procedures. They don't choose the lowest bidder. In fact, the government even states it's not even efficient. You said there are time to determine whether or not your bid is too high. Because why? The amount that contracts that are out there, the size, the scope, the scale, these things that are a million dollars and less are very minute compared to the actual macro picture of what we're dealing with here. Keep that in mind when you're considering how do I want to spend my time moving forward. If you are like the people here on the screen, and you're spending all your time bidding jobs, believe me, you're going to want to change careers, you're going to want to change scope, you're not going to want to do this anymore, you're going to find this more of a maze and more of a puzzle than you started out. But if you start taking your time, learning, studying, taking advantage of all the free resources that we have, taking advantage of all the classes that exist, reading blog posts, and studying the marketplace, investigating who are the people that should be buying your services. If you spend all that time developing those relationships, cultivating those relationships, becoming a past sort of a past to those persons, at least they're going to know you. When something comes up and when something's available, that past is going to be the one that gets the phone call. That past is going to be the one that gets to email. I hope this video helped some people out there today. Keep watching, stay tuned for more. We've got more coming down the right line. As always, thanks for watching, EricuscoreCutch.com. We'll see you next time.