[Music] all right we should be live now everyone Rick Howard here thanks for tuning in to our live session where we're talking about how to start a oneman Consulting business you could do it remotely do it from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection and a little bit of knowledge and that's what we're going to talk about today here now most of you are probably used to hearing me talk about Government Contracting and that's going to be no different than than normal but we're going to focus more on the Consulting side of things today so first uh let's give an overview Government Contracting what is it this is when the US government is buying goods Services products for the federal agencies for use by the military by the country now the US military is the single biggest purchaser of goods and services in the world yet less than 1% of small businesses actually sell to the US government and statistically that number has been declining year-over-year this is a problem we've known about this for a while when I was an Acquisitions officer in the Air Force so that's my background I was an Acquisitions officer that's the profession of putting companies on contract for the government and then managing those programs so and actually if we want to get in the weeds a Contracting officer would actually put you on contract a program manager which is what I was we would lead a group of other program managers Engineers we would get the requirement and the funding we would do the work beforehand to find companies that could do the work and then we'd work with a Contracting officer to come up with the best way to put them on contract and then the important work actually solving the problem that the government has right and that could be anything the government buys everything so for anyone watching the government buys everything from toilet paper and commodities to accounting services landscaping services Legal Services they pay for engineering software they pay for ice cream and beer and uh you know if you name it construction I mean there's if you're in a profession of any of any sort you could probably name one and I could show you and I may do that on this call we'll see we could show you how much the government actually spends in these industries and often that number is billions a year um and you'd be surprised even things that you wouldn't associate with the government like social media advertising right uh millions of dollars going into that so no matter what your profession is what you you may understand or even have a hobby in there's a good chance of the government's making a purchase in that area now uh oh uh thank you uh let's see 1337 company services guys by the way feel free drop your questions in the chat if you have any and I'll answer them as we get to it but when I retired from the Air Force I started helping companies sell to the government especially small businesses because my area of expertise was mainly in technology cyber it different weapon systems um the first half of my career was flying reconst aircraft and then I switched into acquisition so I had a particular specialty but I got exposed to a variety of Industries within the government because they buy everything and so Consulting wise you know my expertise was the process so I was helping companies sell to the government and it is very lucrative and there are not very many people that understand how to sell to the government so here's what I discovered or here's what I found is that I was training a lot of sales teams and a lot of salespeople I quickly maxed out as to what I could do personally right because you know I'm only one person so I would have to hire people to help me with different projects if we were helping companies sell to the government now no matter who I hired someone in the military someone brand new I would have to train them and that training can be pretty extensive right but the point is that there is a niche there's an area here where you have a lot of companies selling to the government you have a lot that could be if they knew that the opportunity existed that very very few people actually understand the process so we're going to talk a little bit about today about what that process is and if you're interested in doing something like that how would you go about doing it you know how would you start as a a oneman business and what I mean by that is you could be a freelancer you could have a Consulting business right um there's a lot of you could even take uh the knowledge of the Government Contracting process and go be an account executive for a bigy you could be a salesperson you could be a business developer those are high paying jobs very high paying jobs and a lot of them come with a commission so there are a lot of people in this field that are really raking in the cash and they're dedicated to it and I also want to I want to put out there Government Contracting Government Contracting is hard Government Contracting takes a long time all right but it can be very lucrative so for companies if you have a company and you have commercial sales you have Revenue coming in selling to the government is something you could then start doing that could be Revenue stream you add but it's going to take some time right you're going to have to have people that actually understand the process to help you do that but if you don't have a company and this is where uh one of the reasons I'm having this video is over the years a lot of people have come to me who didn't have a business or were just starting a business and they're like hey I want to get into Government Contracting I want to start a government contracting business and what I had to tell them is look don't start a government contracting business business start a business right so either if if the goal is government contracts start your business you know program management that's your field provide those Services commercially have some past performance there have revenue and then go try selling to the government so you have Revenue coming in already um you're credible because you've sold this commercially and now you have the time you can take the time the six to 18 months or whatever it's going to be to win your first government contract but if you don't have that if you don't have a business right well then what do you do well this is perfect because what I ended up doing and I started with military is you know I'd have military veterans leaving or retiring and what I told him is look don't start a government contracting business but what I can do is teach you part of the Government Contracting process I can show you how to start a Consulting business and we could start once you have that we could start generating revenue and Landing clients like in a week or less in some cases if we're diligent we're getting leads and I could show you how to do that so um Consulting Freel ing in this space uh can be lucrative and it can be lucrative relatively fast meaning I can sell to a decision maker that owns a business and that deal could happen in the same day okay but you gotta know what you're doing uh let me go to the comments here all right uh so my first question is and this is 1337 company Services Inc my first question is is there an equity spending path that can be fast-tracked to get a company in the category that qualifies as Equity spending the ab ability to land contracts um then you say I'm sorry I wish I could be more specific to give a specific question hence the FastTrack you might already have planned this as a topic I appreciate you is there an equity spending path I I I would need you to Define an equity spending path so I'm not quite sure what you mean by that um so yeah if you could just put that in there um if you mean is there a way that you could subcontract with a prime yep you could do that um you could certainly partner with somebody if if that's what you mean if you uh you could certainly arrange a deal where you have equity in another company if they wanted to give you Equity or you wanted to give somebody else but I would need to know way more information there uh let's see Abe very helpful since I just started a oneman remote Consulting business after being an independent dude congratulations that's awesome uh I by the way I love I love everybody watching this you guys should all have an LLC uh someone said was Elon Musk I I don't I don't even remember who said this but they said uh everybody in America should have an LLC and a spouse that's in real estate as you know because those are some of the best tax shelters and ways to just generate Revenue uh for your yourself so um yeah Abe that's great having an LLC even if you had another job that LLC if you have any kind of specialty and we're talking about Government Contracting today you know having the ability to be able to generate you know a $5,000 monthly uh fee from a client or or even a one-time project you know at I say it will but if you have the skill set to do this you could you know throw an offer out there and almost generate it it will but hey you got a tuition payment car payment mortgage payment all right well I'll go out there I'll find a client I'll bring in some recurring Revenue we'll talk about what that business model looks like uh Christian listening in Arizona oh that's awesome so uh yeah again guys thanks for jumping on here so what is what does this look like first let me give you the model okay before we get into Government Contracting or anything like that let's talk about the model of having a Consulting business and at least what we teach so we teach this at gov close you can go to gov close.com um but you know you might have your own business already like Abe does the way that I approach this the first thing that we do is we want to put together an offer which is a singular project right so this is solving a problem for a business we're always selling to a business and the reason I'm selling to businesses when especially with Government Contracting businesses small businesses large businesses they can write off expenses they have Revenue coming in already so you're targeting companies that have Revenue they are selling they can afford to hire you to do or solve different projects for them so you might perform an audit as an initial project depending on you know what your specialty is you may you know put a a sales plan together for a company you know you may do an initial cyber security check if you're in cyber security there's a lot of different things you could do there like hey we'll do a penetration testing round and it'll take a week and we'll charge you x amount of dollars but the the point is we're going to charge probably less than 10 grand although you can charge more I have but you know five to 10 grand for an initial project with a small business and when you're done with that project that's something that should take you a couple weeks or less right you know if you sell the same offer all the time it could take you a couple hours and when you're done with that provided that you are providing real value and real expertise the next thing you're doing is you're taking that project and you're out brief with the client is hey I found these problems or hey in order for you to sell to the Air Force you need to take these steps well what you're doing next is you're saying I can help you with three of those steps and here's how I can do that and what we're trying to do is we're going from selling that initial project to generating recurring Revenue every month by selling those clients on a recurring monthly service and for us in the Government Contracting space that service fee is typically between $4,500 and $9,500 a month okay now if you're a one and we can talk about Beyond a oneman uh company because there's lots of different iterations on this I've tried a lot of different ones um how many clients do you need a month that are paying you 4555 $6,500 a month to make this at least more profitable than the business you're in or having a salary job now I know that depends on the salary job you have but you know if I have five clients paying me five grand a month right that's 25 Grand a month coming in from that then I'm probably selling two projects on top of that those initial projects we talked about let's say it's the same amount so that could be 35 Grand a month right there now there's a ton of different you know offers out there different Specialties but that is very doable for one person for me personally once I have five clients once I have and doing those proposals and by the way you're running a business you're selling now I got to start hiring people that's when we get beyond that one person business there are also plenty of people by the way that are charging a lot more than that right so you could certainly do 50 Grand a month under the same um under the same structure right it's just what are you offering what kind of value are you providing so you need to make sure that first of all you have a specialty that businesses need and that you can execute when they pay you um and you need a way to find those leads those companies and sell to them right so again that's uh that's something that you can check out at our website if you're looking for more information on that so let me look at uh some of the comments here oh hi Shelly yep shelle was on my podcast by the way so if you guys watch our YouTube channel DOD contract Academy you're on there now and we usually have at least one new video out every week these live sessions have been pretty popular with a clients so I'm starting to do more of them so if you do uh like this um you know or this provides value to you uh to you you can like it um share with your friends Etc and we'll go back and forth so I'm not going to spend every one of these sessions talking about Consulting and starting a business a lot of these we'll talk about Government Contracting and very specific Government Contracting methods um because when we're teaching Consulting business and starting something like this we're taking it from the aspect of first we teach our students how to sell to the government we teach them how you going to help a company sell to the government so and it's very in-depth training and then the backal of our certification program is this is how you start your business this is how you find leads and we combine all that so we give them the skill set and then we give them the um the steps they need to take to start and run a successful Consulting business so um but yes so shelle uh she was a great uh guest she was on our podcast uh probably God I think it's been a couple years now uh okay not to interrupt your topic but I can provide more details what is a good contact path to get further over to you I use the term Equity spending somewhat yeah you can email me just email me rickg close.com and I can take a look at some of your information and provide something more in-depth as a response all right Brett Global ordinance division listening and Tempe awesome thanks Brett Brooklyn New York Rosa awesome I'm in Boston so where you we you best of buddies or mortal enemies depending on your baseball preferences no we're we're best of buddies I love New York hi I've started a company I don't know how to pronounce your name so I don't want to wreck it um I have started a company something Management Group Inc I want to leverage my Decades of real estate expertise into Government Contracting thank you that's interesting we have a student in our certification program now that his job in the government is actually real estate related he manages real estate properties for the government and meaning uh leasing things out he um puts deals together with government property and Commercial businesses I will tell you this about real estate I I know I just kind of got off the The Path I was on here but in real estate there's way more commercial real estate opportunities available in the government that very little as far as uh residential real estate um but you could certainly if you're in real estate I will tell you right now I think the best thing for you to do I and by the way my wife was in real estate I tried it out for a couple months when I first uh when I first got out as I was doing this and and I quickly uh made sure I I got away from that if you can be successful in real estate like the lead generating that you're capable of you apply that to this field you just learn a little bit about Government Contracting and how to write proposals for instance and then you apply your Le lead generating to this and you will have more work than you will ever know what to do with like you will the days of you having to you know all of the you know non-stop followup and Lead gen and fighting all the other agents there that doesn't exist in this space so my my uh actual recommendation is you can use some of that but learn a little bit of the Government Contracting process and get into this as a business uh let's see oh Karen hey how's it going Karen Dylan reconnecting from earlier this year is this provid consulting services to the government agencies or to businesses looking to sell to the government yeah Karen this is focused on business selling to the government so and it's actually good for you to point that out because uh Consulting is actually a service that the government buys and buys billions of dollars of just depends on what your consulting services are it could be anything technology related Financial uh related it could be you know Consulting you could put that on top of a lot of different Industries and and Karen Ju Just so you know we are also having live sessions on the Government Contracting process this one's just more focused on the uh the people that are learning Government Contracting the and want to start a Consulting business and help other companies like yours for instance because you know we've worked together in the past helping these great businesses sell to the government and there's a lot that goes into it picking a niche starting that business and providing value that's what really this is all about so let's get back into the topic at hand here right so once we have our process down we have our specialty we know we're going to sell an initial project and the goal is to then turn that project into recurring income with a client that needs our services right um once we have that there are a few ways that we can take it from there now we can work remotely and and keep that going but while you're working with your clients and this is one of the big mistakes that consultants make or people that starts start their own business is that once they start winning clients well they have work to do with those clients right and so they stop the selling piece right and a lot of people don't like the selling piece and like all right I've got three great clients I'm providing value with them and it takes up a lot of my time so I'm just going to work with them but what happens is in the Consulting freelance Bas these clients although I've had clients that have lasted for years um I think the average LIF span of a Consulting client is three months I read that statistic somewhere I think in govcon it's longer than that it certainly has been for me but you have to be prepared for a turnover and so if you're in a Consulting business you do always have to have some type of lead gen going on you do have to have a way of uh bringing new clients in and that's why doing those you know Standalone projects are very important now how do you get those clients well there are several ways to do this right and it all depends on how comfortable you are with the sales process some of you come from sales right so you know everything from lead generating through websites to uh email campaigns reaching out on LinkedIn advertising those are all ways that you could do it but some of the best people in the government contract Consulting space that I know don't want to sell at all and actually a lot of them come to me because I like to sell you may have gotten that um so what will happen is companies will come to me and say and I'm going to give you real world example hey Rick uh we just wrote a a huge proposal for this you know $200 million thing with the Army and we just want some extra help reviewing it we want to make sure that um you know we want to get a extra set of eyes on it well any government contract question like that like I go to I have and I've had some of these gentlemen on our podcast on our YouTube channel you May check out the episode with retired Colonel orndorf he's a former Contracting officer' 06 fulber Colonel knows more about Contracting than anyone I've ever met and when I say Contracting he knows it from the legal Contracting officer standpoint right so when it's a a legal question about the far about the actual contract I always bring him in and he has produced amazing results for our clients but he doesn't want to sell right so I do a lot of the selling for him and I match him with clients and um he's amazing so you may find yourself in that group and if you do there and I just want to share there are a lot of websites that you can use instead of having to go out and Lead generate you can use websites that will match you with companies that need the product or service you're providing so what are some of those websites and some of you may know one of them is upwork is a freelancer website you can hang your hat there apply for jobs you can people will come to you once you have some credibility and you have some references it's really great too because people could see that hey if you've been paid what kind of reviews are you getting what kind of expertise do you have and then there are more highend websites like catalent where you can they're matching people with a specific skill set uh with different companies and you can apply for jobs that way um there are other jobs I think GLG is one where um and I've used all of these I didn't I didn't use GLG but I believe that's the one that will pay you you know you said an hourly fee so it might they might set up a one-hour call with a company to talk about whatever your expertise is if it was proposal writing or if it was program management you know you might set a $400 an hour fee for something like that so it's really just deciding what you're comfortable with as far as how you're going to lead generate now I want to show now this will be I think helpful for all of you whether you're here you know because you want to learn about how I can start a Consulting freelancing business or if you you have a company and maybe you wanted to check out like Karen said hey I wanted to see Rick if this is about selling consulting services to the government you know where where do we actually start so I am going to let's see here see if I can make this work guys I feel like every time I try to share my screen on here and um here we go it's gonna work F oh you saw my messy uh my messy desktop so right here we're looking at USA spending okay usaspending.gov and I I feel like you know I should get some type of monetary uh you know monetary uh reward for all of the promoting I do for this website I love this website because the I mentioned at the beginning Government Contracting is hard it takes a long time it's not a get-rich quick anything it's a get-rich quick over over the long term right because big contracts take a long time to win you can absolutely do it as a company and you can certainly generate wealth a lot faster as a consultant or freelancer but the here's the thing you the the secret power you have selling to the government despite all of the complications is we can see with startling accuracy exactly how much the government spends on the thing that we're selling who's buying it how they're buying it um and you can do a lot of This research for free you don't have to spend a ton of money on a premier platform now granted this is a government website okay so it's not you know it's not the best in the world but for your purposes for my purposes it's good enough we can talk about you can hit me up uh offline if you want you know oh by the way Shelly thanks for that note but hit me up offline if you want me to give you my my take on the different platforms out there but here at USA spending so if you let's say you're approaching this from the Consulting standpoint and you want to help a company sell to the government they say hey well all right well maybe they found out that you're in the government contract Consulting space hey can you help me the first place you're going to start and by the way companies that have been selling to the government for a long time often have never done this which is we can now see who's buying what we sell how they're buying it so this is USA spending I'm just looking back these are fiscal years the fiscal year for uh 2025 just started it started October 1st so we have this button here fy2 nothing's going to come up here um if it does it's it's going to be minor but I'm going to included anywhere and so just for anyone watching if you want to take a look at government spending I would start there and then I would go down to so what you have here North American industry classification codes product service codes if you click on this and sometimes this website is slow and clunky but here we go it will bring up different um I guess different Industries I guess you could say right because that's how the government classifies things and by the way this is not all- encompassing I've seen Contracting officers use 10 different codes to put the exact same thing on contract but this is a quick way for you to take a look at hey is the government buying what I sell so you can see here residential building construction I can see you know some other things here building equipment contractors uh there's manufacturing if I just clicked on let's click on um residential right so because some people may think well why would the government build residential anything right isn't that just um you know maybe they see oh yeah maybe on a military base they'll do this non-residential but surprisingly they will spend money on residential construction now this website may take you a while but basically what it's doing right here is it's going through the drill of tell thinking about all the different contracts because you could see all the contracts too it's an amazing amount of information you can get from this so what is this telling me here are the contracts popping up over the past few years this is telling me who's doing the buying at the agency level I can also look at so it's saying the dod spends uh in the past five years $2.29 billion just on residential construction um I can look at the sub agency and and it actually goes down from DOD to US Navy now it's saying okay Navy Army all right well why is the Navy the the number one and keep looking here I can sort by year if I want to present to whether it's I'm a business or I'm presenting this to a client I say look there's probably a lot more spending in residential uh construction than this but uh here at a base level I can see 731 million a year um for 2023 666 million for 20 well that's a scary number for 2022 a little bit more in 2021 if you want to see what they're spending money on you can go look at some of those individual contracts and here's something that's interesting I can even take it down and look at the actual spending on small businesses right so or if you're a woman on small business so we saw what did I say and again this is just residential construction right you could do this for anything 731 million spent in 2023 so it's like you know between 600 and uh 800 million here we'll see 2024 by the way is not that number is going to go up because the fiscal year just ended what I've noticed is that there's a a lag in the reported spending from the federal government so just remember the year you're in or you just came from I expect that number to go up now if I go back up here this is what I wanted to show you if I went back up here and looked at just small business spending because the government here's something else especially from a consultant point of view if you're talking to any small business and you're telling them that the largest purchaser of goods and services in the world um H is required by law to spend money on small businesses they all have most of these agencies will have a around a 23% set aside goal for small business contracts that number can change depending on the agency okay but they're they have to award small businesses with contracts and less than 1% of small businesses try to sell to the government and that number is going down so what does that mean for business owners if you're a small business that means there's a big opportunity here the problem is even when they find out about the opportunity it can seem so confusing and complicated that they either give up before they start or they think they've watched a YouTube video and think they just have to write proposals and they're going to win something which isn't the case at all that's um almost complete nonsense except for a few Fields And if if it does Mak sense to be writing proposals on solicitations it's usually proposal by um massive number so here I just want to click search real quick and show you here so I'm going to click that again here so let's see how much was spent on small businesses of that of that huge number okay so now we can see here that that went down but still 92 million 60 million 110 million so a little bit so we could see here with small businesses in residential construction what kind of decrease we saw right so we can dig in here a bit further we could see if women owned small businesses are they winning some of this we could see hey who's actually spending on the small businesses we can see the Navy is still kind of in at the top of the list but national park services uh Federal Emergency Management agency you're basically getting a target for yourself like okay well maybe these agencies award small businesses at a higher rate than some of the other agencies we saw on the list before I did that uh just going back to the comments real quick here oh Los Angeles California awesome weather's probably beautiful this time of year thank you sh Abel uh huge fan of the channel started a contracting business Morgan block Capital LLC no real expertise just started a business it's started submitting bids all right man I mean oh actually hey you know what you should do AEL um even though that's usually not what I recommend is just starting a business and going after things um watch the episode that I just did with John if I'm saying his name right conf Francesco conf Francesco basically with American AI Logistics um they have a tool for and this is by the way the I guess departure because anybody that comes at you and says hey there's only one way to do Government Contracting is absolutely full of it there is it is such a huge space and they buy so many different things the the agencies buy different things and they buy in different ways so there's a lot of different ways to get to the end goal which is we want to create Revenue right we want to create revenue for if you have a business with for my business if you're helping a business you want to create revenue for them and you want to create revenue for yourself right so but AEL check out that episode because what he does is he offers he has this tool where they find leads and this is for products right so you're going to have to write a lot of a lot of proposals need to be generated um for low dollar products especially you're not going to see what I recommend which is finding opportunities early working those like that's how we work larger contracts for things like Services technology but you know he was talking about you know million-dollar toilet paper deals right where companies are basically you have to you have to write a lot of proposals to win these um these bids for products but what they do is they find the bid they find the lead and federal and state and local level and they get the pricing and they write the proposal for you and put it in your uh email box I think it's 25 bucks he has some companies submitting 15 or more proposals a day and winning a lot of those bids now there's a lot more to it than that so I'm not saying that's a way to go about this because the margins are super low it's not the way I I don't teach it I don't I don't do it I I very rarely do I even work with a company that's involved in that game I like looking at uh contracts in a different way but that could be for what you're doing able it might be um it might be good uh oh the chatbot episode good good uh let's see uh would it be useful to take the Consulting course if I am solely trying to grow my business and start selling to the government Rosa yes it would um in fact am I still sharing my screen oh I did oh here's uh here's our website if you haven't if if you don't know anything about us or have no idea what we're what we're doing on YouTube uh we're teaching Government Contracting process we teach that to small businesses large businesses but we also train the workforce I guess you could say that's helping small businesses sell to the government so we're training people that go on to become full-time account Executives for companies we're training people in this process so they can start profitable businesses that's why I named the episode so uh for our students and we have a little over 40 students in our course right now uh I shouldn't even call it a course because this is a indepth uh Community uh what you would do here obviously if you're a company and you want to hire us you could go hire an expert but if you are interested in the course um or in the certification program you could go to the become an expert section and what I would say is if if you have a business and you just want to learn the process what you would focus on is you would just focus on uh the training that we're actually providing so um you know versus let me see if it's on here here's a list of uh some of what we go through now it's it's very Hands-On I personally onboard every single one of the students um and we go through their goal and some of that sometimes that goal is hey I am working for a company and I just want to learn the process better sometimes that goal is I want to start a Consulting business sometimes that goal I want to go I want I want this certification so I could get a job because every student once they get through program I certify them I write them a letter of recommendation I give them a reference on LinkedIn um and then I help them with the process so it's very hands on and they email me all the time we talk about everything from the process to actually lead generating how they're writing their proposals um what you're getting here is you're going through the basics right so what is the process right what websites are we using like we just saw USA spending that's one of them uh H does the government buy what you sell important question right these are all courses they're usually between I say courses they're all like 10 to 20 minute um video instructionals that are students all have to go through set asides how important are they usually not that important how to build a capability statement with examples then we get into developing your Niche now this is super important so whether you're a business selling to the government or your consultant it is critically important for you to start with a hyperfocused Niche so uh for instance some of the students in our course right now they come from a background of selling you know medical devices right and so they combine that with Government Contracting and well now they have a very focused area they can incredibly walk in talk to any company selling Medical Technology Services products because they have that background on the commercial side but now they're certified by us they understand this process and they can help them build their strategy out find leads it can be very very powerful um we also have students that have no background right so uh we have one of our students 27 years old uh just got commissioned in the National Guard closed his first deal he was God man the kids the kids are natural he was uh scheduling consultations before he even graduated the program so takes 30 to 45 days if you're working at it uh but so we go through Niche development I'll try not to spend the whole um the whole course uh this whole presentation on this um let's see here all right uh federal sales road map this is I mean this is one of the offers you know some of you on here I might even have sold this to you if you have a uh if you have a business right so uh meaning what that is is and it's the pro is the biggest part of our certification program is our students learning how to look at Federal data and reverse engineer how how to sell to the government and this takes all the guesswork out right so I showed you a little bit of USA spending like just looking at pricing but I can go in and very specifically find out okay is it the Air Force buying we'll go back to residential construction right and I think it said the Navy was at the top of the list all right well the Navy was at the top of the list but what if I went a little bit further and looked at all right what if it's a woman owned small business well then it might change to the Air Force and okay well if the Air Force spends the most on women-owned small businesses in residential construction who's who in the Air Force is actually doing the buying I could see the exact name the office it might be life cycle Management Center probably isn't it could be the Army if Army Corps of engineering uh something like that um we could see hey do they use GSA do they not use GSA um that is a huge thing um just being able to understand how the government buys and now you're working or you have a business and you're able to know well I have to go through the process of getting that GSA contract if you're a consultant that's something you can help a company with or you can tell them honestly the government doesn't use it look GSA was only used on 2% of the contracts so let's not waste your time and money on this they are using simplified Acquisitions you go that route anyway federal sales road map this is how you sell to the government and we go through everything it's extremely intricate they have to build a federal sales road map and then I have to review it and approve it it's it's the biggest requirement there are several but that's the biggest one um then it's building a pipeline of lead this is not the same as building a pipeline of leads commercially it's just not you got about 20 steps depending on your strategy and you don't even know what your strategy is going to be or what those steps are until you build a federal sales road map right so you know I might be working Abel I'm going to read your comments but let's say Abel uh we did a federal sales road map on his business and we found that he needed a subcontracting strategy primarily because whatever service or technology he provided was wrapped up in larger contracts and by the way you can be a very profitable business at just as a subcontractor um well then he'd have a subcontracting Pipeline with the steps that you need to win uh contracts as a subcontractor and it's probably not what you think so we go into that what is this what is a pipeline how do you find the leads how do you find them early and then we go through some of the different uh processes subcontracting sbir if you're Tech development Acquisitions forecast you guys are probably getting the point here there's a lot there's a lot of training in here the sales process overview um GSA so hold on let me go back to the I got way off track here let's go back to some of the comments um okay I want to leverage my Decades of real estate okay we talked about that um yes I think anybody that has a business that just wants to learn the process of selling to the government as you can see you're you're going to learn a lot in here about how to sell to the government it's not it's not not everything it can't be um is going to give you what you need to focus on to sell to the government and then the last part of it is um you know we get into proposal writing a little bit but I don't it's not a proposal writing course but we give you what you need to know um the last part is if you if you just want to train your salespeople or your a business this is the part you would probably ignore so this is how you build a government contract Consulting business so hopefully that answers your question um I can stop sharing my screen now I think let's see all right let's see here I owe my success to follow oh AEL thank you practical approach for Contracting I owe my success to following your practical approach Rosa yes Rosa we just uh answered your question okay so Rosa is part of a medical practice trying to sell to the government we have a meeting set up with your team oh that's awesome you know what's interesting Rosa is there's I have other clients that have sold medical services medical devices one of them now I just talked to her this morning and we could uh potentially put you guys together and that's this is a a small community right so and that's one of the great things about this whole the whole Government Contracting space once you learn this process once you start getting into it you start selling a lot of us know each other and you start knowing who has different Specialties you know like I saw shell on here Shelly has specific Specialties that I'm going to go to her for col oror I mentioned his Specialties um we're constantly I have uh some that will be on here that have Specialties and things like cmmc not going to get into it just to tell you that it's a thing and it you need to know what you're doing there um but you know we all talk we all talk about the different um opportunities that are coming up and so for the medical one one of our clients is getting into and I didn't even know this existed uh DME she called it durable medical equipment you may know what that is but so now we have uh certification student who just graduated who came from that world and is you know very Adept at understanding that and not only the government sales process but the commercial sales process for things like that so um it's a huge spend medical by the government so I think focusing on that is definitely going to yield results just do it in the right way you know uh let's see Robbie Knoxville I almost thought I had Johnny Knoxville on here I feel that my lack of funding is stopping me from doing this but I feel that my construction expertise and experience in current consulting job would be valuable to start yeah look Robbie um hey by the way everyone our certification course it's not cheap so um I I don't want to present it as as it is you know so it's not for everybody it's also hard um you you're not going to get certified unless you do all of the work so but I will say that our students are having major victories and they're doing very well and it works and this is one of the reasons that we're focusing on it because they're generating such incredible results and they're doing so quickly so um Robbie may not be for you right now if funding's a problem you know don't mortgage the house to do something like this but you know um things have a way of working out so it may be something for you in the future and by the way uh you can jump on these live sessions that we're doing for free and ask questions and see what we're saying we have a ton of free videos that are out there so my bet uh Robbie is that you could take your experience and watch some of our videos and learn what you need to to get started uh Abel I saw a portion of that episode the other day I'll definitely watch again I was amazed to hear that the chat GPT are used to submit bids you would be surprised how often chat GPT is used to submit bids companies are actually putting up out um putting out policy and training to prevent their employees from uploading like company IP into chat GPT because that's what they're doing because they're trying to have chat GPT write the proposals for them now here's the problem if you have chat GPT write a proposal for you on anything any any problem set that the government is trying to solve not products right I'm not talking about like the Standalone products I am talking about hey we uh want to replace our HR system we want to modernize it and we want to include you know technology to help that includes you know people with hearing disabilities and vision disabilities you know that's the type of thing that probably a lot of Technologies need to be combined to solve and if you use a chatbot to write something like that it's just it's they're going to know it these chat Bots use a lot of the same language that's something that can help you write the proposal but I would not rely on that um let's see pre- solicitations are everything getting it early with contractors is best practice yeah I agree in 95% of the time I I agree with that um let me I don't know if I want to share my screen again here I don't think I do only to say that guys what he's talking about is when and this is the core of my philosophy and I shouldn't say My Philosophy anybody in the space that's selling to the government and this is a industry where people are I mean the average account executive working for a company I mean they're doing salaries between 150 to 400 Grand a year um plus commissions I mean this is a um extremely lucrative place to be if you know what you're doing and and by the way like that's without I mean I've seen commission checks come in over a million dollars a year with really talented ACC Executives you have to be working for the right company to generate that um but uh yeah I mean it's there's a lot there is a lot of Revenue to be gained here whether you're a consultant a sales executive a company um let me put this in there let me see hey I'm gonna add this link to the chat I know someone just asked about the cost uh let's see here we go I just put the link in the chat if you guys want to head on over there yourself yeah so right now the cost we have a tiered pricing structure so if you pay up front it's 4,800 it will be that way I was going to raise the price this month but decided not to so it's still 4,800 um if you pay with one of our payment plans it goes up uh just depends you know I think it's uh two payments of 2 200 if uh that's what you want to do and we may have one in there still for six payments but um I'd have to check so anyway that's that's the cost of the program and so Tia says even if you use chat GPT chat GPT is only going to give you information that's on the surface I believe that using chat GPT provides information plans that gives leads to research information in plans that gives leads to research I'm not sure if you're saying that you think chat GPT shares that information so other companies can get it or if it helps you with research but I will say I can tell you I use J GPT all the time I would never just let it write a proposal for me from top to bottom there are tools out there that use a I don't know if it's a rapper on CH GPT or if they develop their own thing some of them I've interviewed on the podcast so you guys can listen to that um but I don't think that I would ever just let a tool like that write the entire thing for me when I submit something usually the best results that I've gotten have been if I've written it top to bottom however chat GT GPT has been able to give me ideas and generate lists for me um you know if I write a paragraph I could give it to it and tell it to reduce the number of words used which sometimes you have to do if you have a restriction on a proposal I might be restricted to 10 pages and I just wrote a 14-page proposal right so now I need to figure out a way to reduce that and so chat GPT is good at doing stuff like that is health and wellness worth getting into prior to getting into Tech I was strength conditioning coach for over a decade yeah it is but uh Christian you need to look at you go to USA spending and start looking at the spending there um if you want one of our guys to to do it for you um it probably would be a cheaper on the cheaper end of a a road map but I think you could go on USA spending and and start looking into it on your own the government does spend money on health and wellness um I know they spend money on you know they'll have trainers come into gyms they often will have especially the military bases they've had I know there were solicitations out for Fitness training apps right but I would I would look at that because I'm not sure if first of all I'm not sure exactly what you offer and secondly it may be very Regional right so if it's actually hiring people to come in and provide Fitness training you'd want to see like what states like really lead in that right so I would imagine that you wouldn't want to be you know selling those Services all over the country but I don't know maybe you would T so the business plan that he creates will include general information that should be included then the person can take that to do research add specifics on their own plan yeah yep absolutely absolutely so um I didn't take a poll uh for everyone on here to see if most of you are looking at consulting or if you have businesses in Government Contracting our next episode will focus more on the Government Contracting process so our next live episode so if you want to come in and ask questions about that if there's something specific you want to see like if you want to see us cover subcontracting as a topic we can do that if you want us to Deep dive on an industry and just hey Rick what what would Fitness look like in for Government Contracting or residential construction mean we can go all the way and I could just spend the entire time showing you exactly how the government Buys in that specific instance and how we come to a strategy like subcontracting or how AA Soul Source contract what is that who is that for us for companies with Ada but you know there's different strategies there um the source of sought method who's that for right is there a way to win Soul Source contracts if I don't have an adaa certification I mean there's there's so many different topics here and which is which is great for everyone on board because if again you want to get into the topic of the day which is how you start a business where you can work remote from home and generate wealth all you got to do is learn one part find the part that interests you GSA contracts writing proposals uh you can kill it you know I'm I'm in my basement right now in the man cave uh and you know wife doesn't have to work and it's it's a very rewarding field and it is also it generates a lot of Revenue so if this is what you want to get into learn the process be able to provide value and you can learn how to run a Consulting freelance business um it's not going to happen overnight it is hard work um but you can scale you can learn how to do this and start winning clients and get this machine rolling you could do that in a coup of months if you you know really put effort into it and I always tell people don't leave your job before you bring those first clients in right so if you are transitioning whether you use our program or not always tell people start your company get your LLC whatever your skill set is start getting those first clients down figure out your sales process start figuring out how you can get people to pay you on a recurring basis right but you need to be able to solve problems for them on a recurring basis so kind of figure out uh what the company's problem set is is and that's probably one of the biggest problems or problem areas I see for consultants and Freelancers is they have a specialty and they want to kind of jam what they want to do down the company's throat and you can't do that you need to figure out how your skill set can solve a problem that they have and the way you guys will guar do that is you have to talk to people right so it's I mean I've done well over 500 consultations at this point with companies um and so they'll tell you you just got to let them talk like what is the problem you're trying to solve and you know some of them it'll be a singular problem you'll do it once and maybe a couple years later they come back to you others you'll solve a problem they're going to love your work and they're going to need somebody and you can keep that work going some of them some big companies um will take your consulting services and then after a few months offer you a full-time position uh some companies will offer you equity in their company to or want to partner on a startup there so many different different things that happen when you have a company like this and it can truly create wealth for you and your family but you got to be dedicated to it so hopefully guys this was worth it and let's see any last questions here I think that I think I gave chat gbt more ideas when it has given me what would you suggest for an individual that has navigated through the system and has dying desire to do something but no real team Tia would have to understand a little bit more is what you're saying that you've navigated through the government contract system and I'm not sure what you're saying there but you could send me an email Rick atov close.com uh you know collect your thoughts tell me what you really want to do is it that hey you want to be in the Government Contracting realm you want to start your own business trying to figure it out um I've got some thoughts arw Solutions well worth it thanks all right guys well hey I enjoyed my time with you today and we're going to have more of these live sessions so thanks again thanks for watching check out gov close.com if you are interested in our certification program or if you're interested in hiring one of our certified students uh they can help you develop a sales plan they can help you lead generate they build pipelines of leads some of them will go on and work for companies full-time if that's what you're interested in there a lot of different areas if you're on contract with government and you're having problems with that hit me up directly because I want to make sure you have uh the Contracting officer extraordinaire Colonel lorf to help you out with that and he has saved some companies a lot of money by fixing some of those problems so just remember uh the real work starts when you're on contract with the government and just because something happens that you don't like it doesn't mean you have to accept it there are a lot of ways to fix problems that come your way with Sears with termination for convenience the list goes on of things that we troubleshoot for our clients but we could certainly help help you there all right all right thanks again guys