 All right, let's see what we got going on today. Who's out here? Welcome, welcome, welcome, Kenny. How's it going? Today's conversation, 1.0 versus 2.0. 1.0 versus 2.0. We're going to actually go through and answer questions that people have. I want to give folks the opportunity to ask a way to clarify any confusion, any misconceptions. How's my sound? Sound good? Cameron's good. Mike's good. What's going on? Urgent labor. Jamal, we're good. OK, thank you, sir. Appreciate you. Kenny, great. C.J. Johnson. Excellent. So yeah, this is actually we're not doing a training session today. We just want to have a conversation with folks out there to ask questions about the programs. I know I've been getting a lot of questions in my community app. We've been receiving questions on the website and as well as on the YouTube channel. So again, I want to basically go through answer questions that people are asking me and then be able to answer all the questions that you guys have as well. What's up, Nikki? Nikki, you don't have to be here today. All we're doing is this. We're talking to folks who have questions about whether they should join any of our programs. How much does it cost? You know, what are they paying for? Where they receive for their money and things like that? So definitely for folks out there listening. Ask questions, interact. Let us know what you think. See if we can clarify some things out here for folks out and make it less confusing. That's the point of today. So let me let me start off first and foremost. Let me go with that. I'll drop a couple of questions in there. Thank you for showing love, Nikki. It's always appreciated. By the way, we just actually finished, Nikki. We did a review of the RFP for Newport today. I just got the phone with your team. So it looks like everything's good. Just waiting on the pricing to finish up that package. So that's a good thing. Before we get started, by the way, again, if you have questions, drop it in the chat. Ah, Queen Lee, you joined up. She said she should join hands down. Good stuff. And you're relatively new, right? You're new to the channel. So that's good. I love it. That's the girl, Nikki, on here. But Ah, Queen Lee, you're new. When did you join up? When did you sign up? Let me know. When did you sign up? Because, again, you've got your name on YouTube. And oh, my man, Josh Pollard. Damn, man. I can see your picture in my face, Josh. Yes, we've been doing amazing. In fact, with that said, Josh, let me go ahead and congratulate some people. First and foremost, Kimala, her construction company, won another $250,000 contract before fiscal. A few weeks ago, congratulations to her. Fiona picked up her second contract this month. Jared, 24-year-old, won his first contract. I picked up three contracts this month. Manny, I just got a message from somebody, Manny, and our group who won a $3 million contract this month. So congratulations to those folks. And interesting enough, I met with some people when I was up in a DC area that bought their house using government contract money. So congratulations to those folks out there as well. And all the people that just signed up, welcome, welcome, welcome to our community, looking forward to it. We've got a lot of exciting stuff coming up in the future. In fact, one of the things, Nikki, that we're doing differently is that I want to incorporate bringing out more experts onto our Tuesday calls. So that's one thing that we are planning and scheduling out for the upcoming sessions. And so we are looking at scheduling out the next nine months of guests to come on and to our Tuesday calls for members to ask questions. In fact, I just finished up a podcast with a incredible woman on business that's gonna be in the podcast. And she already agreed to teach a private session for our students, Nikki. This lady is phenomenal. I literally just, we interviewed her three o'clock today. And she, she actually, it's funny because I'll share you guys a little bit of the story about how people are kind of coming into the chat today. But she worked 75 miles from her job and she had come in 75 miles each day back and forth to work. And she said that a couple of things changed. She did her evaluation. And some of you may know this corporate people, the 360 evaluation, something like that, 360 degree, I don't know, 360 something where they give you a rating on how, you know, where you can strong points are and where your weak points are and her company evaluated her. And one of the things that they said was she's too mouthy. And by the way, she's Colombian. So you know that didn't go over too well. She said that she was too mouthy. But the other thing, which was interesting was that her rating went down and they knocked her language skills because English was her second language. And on top of the commute, she just felt as though, right, corporate world was not for her. She went off into the government world and started her business in 2014. And her husband asked her what was her backup plan and she said she had none, that she was gonna make it work and she was gonna make it and succeed. And funny thing about this story with this guest was that she actually, I told her go, how did you start that? How did you finance it? And by the way, everyone, if you have questions about 1.0, 2.0, drop it in the chat. I'm just, you know, drop it in the chat. I'll get to your questions and we'll keep talking. So I'm just kind of running through a story that I thought was interesting today. And so she left the company without starting her business. And today, she has 9 million revenues, 70 employees. And she does part, one of her core services is language translation services for the government. She is doing phenomenal. She's a service disabled veteran woman on business and she got her A&A. And so she's just been crushing it. And I thought, you know, wow, when people say Maldi, I thought you'd be a great entrepreneur because you're not afraid to go and talk to people. That's the way I liked it, Maldi. But apparently in the corporate world, she had some senior people that were intimidated by her. So just thought I would share that story to kind of kick things off today. Just finished her and I can't wait. And she's gonna be one of the people that we bring into our Tuesday calls to talk to people about what does it take to grow to that level of success. And she's really, really passionate about helping business owners, particularly women-owned businesses at that. So looking forward to having her come on and spend some time with us in our private sessions. So let's talk, let's talk, let's talk 1.0 versus 2.0 folks. In fact, let me go back and answer some questions that people have. I hope Nikki hadn't run you off. I was telling a story just for you. Let's see. All right. This person says, I got my DBA. Do I need my LLC? Yes. Definitely you need to get incorporated. DBA is not a corporation. So definitely you wanna get incorporated. That's just the proper way to do business. In fact, I'll tell you a good story about that. A few years ago, I encouraged Maria, Martinez to get incorporated. And so she did. And then that way people can pay you in your business name and your company name. And then when things like happen with COVID and then there's such things like the eat alone and monies and stuff like that, it makes it much easier to qualify because you've got your financials and everything running through a legal entity. So again, definitely it's gonna make it much more professional and much more in line with business. Plus, if you don't know all the benefits of setting up an LLC, just look on YouTube. There's people that talk all the time about the benefits of doing LLCs. In fact, there are organizations out here. Let me pull some up. I just wanna share some cool stuff that I was doing some research and some things that I want to share. And it's kind of off topic, but because you asked the question about the LLC, I think it actually makes perfect sense. There's organizations out here that receive a ton of funding from the SBA. And these are venture capital firms and venture lenders and things like that. And guess what? They all have LLCs. So if it's good enough for a venture capital firm, it's good enough for us, the small business. Definitely wanna do that. And again, if you have any questions about all of the benefits, tax reasons, liability reasons, insurance and everything else, definitely look on YouTube about the benefits of the LLC. All right. This person says, do you have training specifically on being a consultant? In fact, yes, we do. We have modules on being a consultant specifically. And so yeah, we do, we go over that because a lot of companies, a lot of people are getting started off. That's the way that they start and break into the marketplace. And there's several reasons for that. One is it can be easier if you don't have past performance and you don't have a team and you're not necessarily procurement ready. That's one way an avenue that you can break into the market in advance of becoming procurement ready because one of the things that I see and one of the challenges, and I'll say this, I had lunch with someone at the very, very highest levels of the SBA. I had lunch with them last week and he said to me this, and this is important for everyone listening to this. This is super important for everyone listening to this. He said to me that there's 75, approximately 75,000 small businesses out there that are eligible like in the social economic and basically in that 23% category. And so ultimately at the end of the day, the government already understands that two thirds of them will never win a contract. So out of 75,000 small businesses that fall in that 23% category, two thirds of you right on here will never win a contract. And so that's why it's so critical. It's so important that you do have training, that you do have mentorship, that you are in an organization that is helping advance the mission for small businesses, encouraging the government to use small businesses, supporting laws and policies that are in the favor of small businesses and it's just being in that type of environment so that you can increase your chances for success. And so again, with this question, consulting is a route that if you, I don't have the stats, but I've been meaning to look it up. All of the people who retire from the government become consultants. That's just standard. People leave 20 years of service, 30 years of service and go out and work for Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Northroom Group and they become consultants. So that is something that is widely used in government and commonly used. All right. Let's see. Two weeks ago, we watched the free stuff and continue to binge on YouTube material. Yes, I mean, I have a lot of videos on YouTube so you can't go wrong, bingeing on that stuff and we're gonna continue, for all those who are wondering, we're gonna continue to put out YouTube videos, we're gonna continue to go live, we're gonna continue to share this information online. We're gonna do it a little bit differently on the YouTube stuff, but for now, everything's gonna be the same. Until we change over. But when we change over the structure, we're gonna make our videos where only people who are subscribed to our YouTube channel as members will have access to ask questions. And so while you can watch it on the broadcast, you won't be able to ask questions unless you are a member. But let's see, but we're talking about the course today. Can I start getting, can I start with a DBA, DUNS, et cetera? Again, I think we do trust that. I would recommend starting off the proper way over the LLC or some other form of corporation. I would not recommend starting a DBA because again, you don't wanna start wrong. Like there's no hurry, the government's not going anywhere, the opportunities aren't going anywhere. It's not that likely that you're gonna win something immediately. And so again, set it up the proper way because it's just, it's such a headache to go through the process and to only have to restart it and to do it differently. So again, I would just start off the right way in the beginning and then that way it's smooth sailing and you can move forward without being interrupted by having to change the name and to redo all of your stuff in the material. All right, free haul. I just bought Lifetime yesterday. Oh, that was you, that bought that. I saw someone bought the Lifetime yesterday. Congratulations, excited for that. By the way, with that Lifetime, don't forget, there are, and I don't know the numbers, but there's some calls with me, so make sure to set that up. So good stuff. Can't wait to meet you in person. Eric Harrison, the Eric that it's got his name spelled wrong. What's up, brother? Come on, about to sign up now. Okay, this is a good question. So what type and or amount of insurance is needed for a consultant? You know, we, there's no type of insurance that's required to be a consultant, right? Because ultimately you are gonna be doing all the same things you do for your business for another company. And they're the ones that have to have the liability insurance coverage. So there is no requirements that are required. There's no insurance requirements that the government imposes on you. Now, if your state or your local or to be able to be incorporated, if that is a requirement that's posed by like say your local government for the fact of being in business, that's something different. But for the purposes of doing government contracting, there's no insurance requirements that are imposed on you. What's up, Mark? How's it going? All right, Craig, Eric replied today that going consultant, I don't have to have a niche, but find someone that has a niche. Do you recommend sticking to one niche or doing multiple niche? I always, this goes for everyone out there. And my podcast guest said this today. She has three things that she does well. Three. Three. We, for some reason, as small businesses believe that we could do all of these things really well. And I know that we're optimistic and I know that we're talented and we're smart and we're great people, but the government is going to discover that you cannot do all this stuff because the level of commitment, the level of expertise that they're looking for, the quality of work, the level of the proposals and things that you gotta produce. This person writes white papers, respond to sources sought, the amount of effort that that takes, you cannot do that for five or three or maybe even two areas really well. It's, you know, what we're doing is we're solving problems. We're helping the government, we're meeting their needs and it's really important that you understand what their problem areas are. And that takes really getting to know them and getting involved and understanding that agency in and out, meeting with the program managers, knowing the contract folks, who's putting out what, when, how, all of that stuff that it's really difficult to do with multiple niches. And the example that I'll give into that is again, one is my podcast guest. She does three things. Three, that's it. And she does three things really well. In fact, let me see if I can pull it up because it was really, it was just, it was, she does language services, workplace culture assessment and business support services. That's it. That's it. And I asked her, I said, well, why don't you do construction or IT or a sexy thing? She goes, she says because as small businesses we're chasing, she says shiny objects and we've all heard about shiny object syndrome. They're trying to follow the money instead of following their passion. This person gets up excited to go to work every day. She's, she has a work-life balance. She says at five PM, she shuts down and she was able to build a very strong, successful company in five years and focus in on three, what I would say are three like very niche areas. So I just wanna caution anyone out here who's thinking I could do two things pretty good, pick one and then go all in on that. And that's gonna be increase your odds for success. Remember, 67% of small businesses win no contracts, none. Two thirds of you are never gonna win a contract out there. I'm trying to increase your odds of success through my trainings, through my teachings, through all of my content. So I just wanna say that. My man, Mark says, hey, hold on, wait, Mark. Two clients meeting scheduled this week. Good job, Mark, I love it. Mark, you're gonna nail it, brother. I already know it, you're gonna nail it. Mark signed up for a 1.0 recently. All right, if your contact agent of a solicitation have a number that doesn't work, what do you call it instead? If the contact agent of a solicitation has a number that doesn't work, what do you call it instead? Well, if you must call someone, then even if the number doesn't work, you can easily, there's a database. If someone is an employee of the government, you can pretty much Google their name and the agency and there'll be a number that'll pop up. GovWin used to allow you to do that. You used to could search like FedMind. There's some other tools out there that you could just type in that person's name and their agency and phone number and it comes up. And you could look at the, you could start off with the, what do you call it? Help me out, help me out. The organizational chart. So the organizational chart for that particular agency. So let's say Dibs. So Dibs is DLA. Find out which, where in DLA? Cause they have DLA like land and maritime and they have DLA aviation. So depending upon where they're at DLA, you could narrow that down to the organizational chart and get their name and number. Ooh, Anne says facts, work for homeless care as an analyst, 14 years in transitioning into government contracting, sweet. Rodney from USICS, did your course link you with mentors? No, we do not link anyone with mentors because we don't know you and we don't know your capabilities. However, as we get to know people, as we get to know you and your business and your capabilities, I do suggest there are certain episodes for people to watch. And as an actually SAP 05, this is a really good question. I'm actually happy you asked the question because one of the people that I met with last week said to me, Eric, why don't you have a, and again, this is this person not knowing what I have available, says why don't you create a program where you train people and you build them up? And then once you get them to a certain level, then you can have them start working with people like myself on our entities once they've built up. And so interesting that you asked this question because so many of my podcast guests wanna partner and work with small businesses, but they also wanna make sure that you're competent, you're capable and you're ready, specifically procurement ready. We're gonna use that word a lot today, specifically procurement ready in order to receive opportunities. So while I cannot match you up with mentors because what I can, based on your own knowledge and your skill sets in which you're trying to do, I could recommend you for a podcast guest to listen to. And if you have your capabilities, what we've done in the past is I have, and I could show you, we have had different guests look for small businesses to meet certain requirements. And so you might, if you're on my email list, you've probably seen us sent out an email asking for people that have these certain requirements that then were requested by some of the people who are mentors. So we do do that very often. We do make introductions for people, for example, for guests of ours. But again, it's not matching you up with mentors exactly the way that you say it. But if you come into the group and you're part of the Tuesday calls, you're gonna find mentors. We have students that are telling me that they're mentoring other students there. So it's just more of a, we don't, I don't do it because I don't know how people work together, right? And I don't know what, I don't wanna get in the way of maybe you and someone else not gelling, but we do put you in a setting to where you can have access to mentors and where you can actually you yourself can reach out to those people and see if they will be willing to mentor you. So that's what we do give you. Currently still in the US air reserves, what's going on? So awkwardly, yes, we did have quizzes at the end. People weren't doing the quizzes, believe it or not, right? So, you know, I don't, it's really, it's hard sometimes trying to pill the folks out here. So Eric Canales, welcome back. So we did have quizzes, people were not doing the quizzes. However, like I said, we are reshaping everything. And so even though you don't have the quizzes, you're about to get a whole bunch of new stuff that you don't even, you don't even miss cause you didn't know it was coming, but it's coming. So you're about to get a whole bunch of new stuff and you're probably gonna be mad at me for adding new stuff because your progress is gonna go from whatever you're at now say 20% to back to like 5% when we add in all the new content. So, but if that's something that you want, I'll definitely, you know, take that back to our team and make sure we put it in there. Well, the virtual office work when I'm applying for my cage number. So interesting, that's a very good question that you asked. The government actually recently, and I said recently like in the last six months, maybe even a year, they started requiring that you had to have a lease in order to get approved in SAM. So you had to give them a lease agreement in order to get approved in SAM. And that's something that they changed recently. So again, while a virtual office, I'm not saying it's not gonna work, but you've got wherever your office is, there's gotta, you gotta show a lease agreement. So however you've figured that out, because for example, I know that a long time ago, we used to have those, I think Kelly office this week. Does anybody remember that? It's the equivalent of we work now. We had a, I had a we work office, but it wasn't we work, it was a different entity back in the days, like 10 years ago. It was Kelly offices, I forgot it was, but I had essentially, it was like a virtual office. So I would pay to have my office and like a Texas address because I was pursuing opportunities in like Texas. And so when I would go to Texas, I'd have meetings and they would give me access inside of the boardroom. And I could, so I could have people in there and some nice building and things like that. However, they did give me a lease and a contract that went with it. So wherever your office is with the virtual office space, you just gotta be able to show a lease in order to get approved. Kenny says, no, it won't work. Right. All right, 3M's pop. Eric, wondering what your thoughts on starting as a vendor for my Look at Miss Powell to start my dealings with the government. I do landscaping and snow removal things. Landscaping and snow removal is a very niche market and that's great. And funny thing, I'm glad that you asked this question. I asked my podcast guest the same thing. I said, well, why did you go straight to federal and not start with state and local because that seems to be the common theme that people are asking about. Hey, we wanna go to state and local first as opposed to federal. And one of the things that she said was the reason why people actually go to state and local as opposed to federal is a lot of times to build their past performance. And I've had several guests of mine who we keep telling people this, as long as you have done the service for someone, right? It doesn't matter if it was your grandmother. It don't matter if it was your cousin or your church. If you've done snow removal services and landscaping services for the church, I don't care even if you did it for free, right? You still did perform the services, right? You still have a customer. You still have past performance. She, and I have to get this right. I'm gonna go into my notes. This is back my notes from my call today. My customer, I'm sorry, my podcast guest, she said that for a translation services, she actually, because remember, she left the company. So when she started, she had no past performance. So what she did was she started doing birth certificate translations to build up or to start incorporating her business and she started doing birth certificate translations to build past performance. With those birth certificate translations, and again, that's hospitals and things like that. So she said they're like 50 bucks a piece and she used that to build past performance. Now, when she bid on her government contract, she had done these services, provided that translation services for an actual entity, whether it be a hospital or anything like that. The reason why I always tell people about the state and local is because, in my opinion, it's a race to the bottom and it's much more competitive. And yes, for something like a landscape or snow maruvel, there are opportunities out there, but when you start to compete on price and when you have to be the low bid, that's where they start eating into profits and we're not doing this for our health. We have to make money. I've never had people that come in and start off and like my student here, there's so many ways that the federal government has created these avenues through joint ventures and teaming and using the past performance of yourself and mentor protege, all of these different vehicles and A&A and services disabled and women, they've created so many pathways for us to be able to get money. It does it to me. It doesn't make sense to go to that other level because the government has created all of these pathways and all these opportunities and they basically put all of these things in here that are little loopholes so that we can, as a small guy, can get started and start winning. The state and local are still like straight and narrow. Like they're still like dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. And so they are not flexible. They don't care. They're not creating as many avenues for you to move. And on top of that, when there's a low bid, and this is my biggest biggest, again, you can go to my video, why I hate state and local contracts. It's a low bid situation. How can you, you've got a minimum nut that you've got to meet, right? So we've all got a minimum nut. We got to crack to hit profitability and to be break even. If you were in a low bid situation and someone else has bidded landscape services against you and let's say, I don't know, let's say it's you're cutting out acres and you say you cut for 50 bucks an acre and this guy is charging 25 bucks an acre. Can you come down to 25 bucks an acre to win a contract? That just don't make no sense. And what happens is as small businesses, as minorities, we get frustrated because we're saying, oh, you know, and again, listen, I hate to paint a blanket picture because all municipalities are not the same. There are programs out there that maybe they're stronger than others, but it just seems to be the common theme amongst local contracting is that they're not letting people make real money. And the areas where they're letting people make money is the areas where there's not a lot of competition. And so you've got to basically go and cater your business to that. On the government side, 3M's pop, I can tell you one of my students sold a snow plowed machine to the government. That was her first contract. She sold them an actual machine. So think about this, if you do landscaping, you do snowmobruval, you also know where to buy the equipment from, what type of equipment they need. So you can look at opportunities like that in the federal government because you already know, because you buy the equipment so you know what equipment is good, you know what kind of equipment works, what kind of equipment is bad and guess what, you can use that same expertise. And this is the difference of my thinking and this is my experience share with folks out here. And again, someone's asked about a mentorship, this is me experience sharing with you folks out here. Watch this. So now you take your same expertise of landscaping and snow removal, you know all the equipment that's involved in that. And when you start looking at when the government has a situation that comes up, for example, they have a disaster or things like that, you can tell to them about the type of equipment that they should be purchasing in order to fix that. You would have been better suited to receive that opportunity for the type of equipment because they don't know, they're not the experts. They're not the professionals, you are. You can tell them why they need this equipment, what kind of equipment, why they need this kind of blade, what level they should be at and things like that. That's gonna give you an advantage that again, at the state and local level, they could give two craps about that. But the federal level, they wanna hear from you. They want you, you're solving their problems and that's what's important. They wanna know that. And that's why for me, I say you don't need it because if you've already done landscape, you're doing snow removal, you've got past performance, take that past performance to the government, figure out who's buying that stuff in your services, make friends with them. And I guarantee you, you could probably do a much better job than the person that's there now because the person that's there now just happened to decide to do government contracts. That doesn't mean they're good at actually doing landscape and snow removal. All right, Erica Dallas. Hey, Erica, I'm still working again, I started to consult in Michigan, but from what I hear, my old car repatriation for then DOD money has dried up for aircraft and wheeled vehicle system upgrades. Again, I don't know about specifically that area, aircraft and wheeled vehicle system upgrades. But I do know that within the government, money flows. So yes, while it may have dried up for aircraft and wheeled system vehicle upgrades, whatever was associated with that, there's gonna be still money for those areas. So for example, if they're not doing the upgrades, that means they're buying new systems. Does that make sense, Eric? If they're not doing the aircraft system upgrades, that means they gotta be buying new aircraft. But I can tell you this, we have a student that Maria just interviewed for our podcast, who did 94 transactions, a million dollars last year, and all he sold was aircraft parts. They're using dibs, I think someone earlier asked about dibs, using DLA and dibs. So I don't know about the upgrades, but he did sell aviation parts to the government because he's a pilot and he actually owns multiple planes. And that's what kind of what I was telling the last guy about owning the equipment. This person who's a pilot who flies planes for a living understands the equipment of a plane. So he was able to resell those parts to the government. You understand the equipment of a snow machine and landscaping, government is buying those parts every single day. So while, no, you may not be able to provide the services just yet you can, but maybe it's an easier approach to sell them the parts and equipment. And he did a million dollars in sales last year of that. In fact, he would have done more, but he didn't have the capital to actually build it out further. He probably could have done two million if he had all the capital to buy all of the orders that they were asking, requesting from him. So that's what I would say, Eric. Look at, again, look at ancillary businesses that are picking up as a result of these other ones trying up. Why not focus on grants versus contracts? That's a great question. A several reasons. In fact, there's a video. Hey, what's up, Tamri? I just saw you join the room. Because the grants are not designed to make you have a business. Grants are not designed for you to actually grow your business and hire people. Grants are based on temporary happenings. Contracts are long-term. Contracts, once you've opened up your pipeline, once you have broken in, they continue to, essentially in a federal arena, I'm not gonna say another, in the federal arena, they just essentially continue to flow. And with contracts, you can get them without bidding. You can get them by negotiating. I have someone right now who's providing, a student who's providing water to the Afghan refugees that are coming now. He's actually sending a lot of stuff to the border where you guys are, everyone's watching on TV about the migrant crisis with the Haitians. He's actually, I know because I was, if you're on my IG, you probably saw me requesting some trucks to go down to the border. He sent a couple of trucks down to the border. Saturday, he sent a couple of Sunday, delivering fire extinguishers and other supplies down there. I have another student that's been providing food, catering food at the border. So once you get into the contracts business, they just, and they like you and you deliver, the government continues to feed you and feed you and feed you. And actually there's a video. In fact, I think I have it here. Let me see if I can find it. I think I have that video here for you to watch from my man, Matthew Lesko. Anybody know Matthew Lesko? Anybody knows Matthew Lesko? The guy at the question mark guy? He actually has a video that says why contracts are better than grants. I'm trying to find it. Let's see if I can find it. Covered contracts for small businesses are bigger and better than grants or loans here. I'm gonna drop that in the chat. Anybody cares to watch it? That's a good one. Awkwardly, I jumped ahead to the proposal right and it looks like I'm working on it. It's a little different. So I did it myself. Can I get you to want to critique what I've done? Actually, Awkwardly, Maria, we actually just trumped some proposals in there, some new ones that we added, I think a week ago. So we'll, Maria, if you send it, if you send it to services.govcon giants.com, it goes actually that goes to our whole team. All of us get forwarded. So send it to us and we'll take a look at it. We'll critique it. We don't have a problem with that. Listen, one thing about me, I'm gonna tell everyone this. If you're trying, I will help you, but you gotta be trying. I'm not helping people who are asking me questions about things that we already teach. Yes, on YouTube, that's fun. But if you're gonna be successful at this thing, you have to put in forth the effort. It was funny because I was actually, I was listening to something right before we jumped on and the person said, did I write it down? I hope I wrote it down. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. I think I have it on my screen here. No. Oh, it says, people emulate the end result, not the process. And I think that's very important is that people are not, no one wants to go through the process. They want the results. And while, yes, we celebrate all the people's contract wins, Manny has been with me for a year now. And Manny has been on many, many, many of our calls or on our Tuesday calls. He's asked questions, he's engaged. And that's why when he asked me about looking at his proposal or things like that, I knew his name. I know our Queen Lee. I've never met this person, but I know because they're constantly commenting on my YouTube videos. So I know this person already. If I don't know you, and there's nothing not saying I'm trying to know everybody, but if you're not asking questions, that means you're not doing anything. And if you're not doing anything, chances are you're probably not getting any results. Now, I hope you're not asking questions because I explained it so well that you understood it, but it's probably not the case. So let's just get real. I want people to actually do the work so that you can ask me the tough questions. I want to get to the tough questions. I was helping someone recently, Chris, one of my students, he had a billing issue on his contracts that he just completed that were over a million dollars. He had some issues with how to submit the bills to the government for the task orders. And so again, I don't mind talking with him about that because why? He got to the point where he did a million dollars in task orders. You get to that point, your boy, Eric's all in. Don't look, you don't have to worry about it. I've been saying that forever and I've done it because guess how many people take me up on this? Very few. I can name them. You like that, Eric Canales? Good, I'm happy you like that. All right, sexy symbol. Yeah, I hope you got that video, that's sweet. So actually, yes, if you are in the 2.0, we actually have something that we just did on capability statements and we literally have four hours. We did two sessions this past year where we reviewed students capability statements like on our Tuesday calls. So they stepped up and they volunteered to show us their capability statements and we just went through and we reviewed it and we suggest it changes. And we did that for about two dozen people, right? And so that's actually another question someone else asked me, which is interesting. I've seen people pay for capability statement reviews $2,000 and $3,000 for people to do their capability statements and we did that for our students at no additional charge. If enough people in a group to answer your question, if enough people in a group want for us to do that again on a Tuesday call just to review capability statements, we will do that. These are your sessions and we cater them to you. And so again, whatever the needs or the people are, that's what we're gonna do because if the majority of people say, hey, I'm new and I want to review my capability statements, we have no problem with doing that. But we do have right now four hours of content just on capability statements where we actually looked at and evaluated dozens of capability statements like of students like yourself. All right, free, yes, study course. And then don't forget free, I owe you a couple phone calls. Trying to decide to pull the trigger and start LLC but in Texas, veterans don't pay taxes, company starts on or after January 2022. But David, I saw this thing, it was a meme and what I liked about this meme it says, it was a guy holding a book and he said, hold on. And he was holding a book and he says, I finally decided to pull the trigger on buying a house five years later. But now the houses that were once 240,000 and now 700,000. So now you gotta save more money to do that. What happens, there's a lot of things that can happen between now and 2022. And my opinion, and again, I'll go back to my podcast guest today. She said that she prepared for a year and a half, right? While she was waiting for her to get her 8A, she was preparing and developing and cultivating the relationships so that when she got her 8A, the people ready to give her a contract. And within two months of getting her 8A, they gave her a contract. By the way, starting in the next month, month and a half, we're gonna start offering certifications. So we will start helping people with their certifications, veteran on a hub zone, 8A, we're gonna start offering that service for people out there because we've got an overwhelming demand and I'm tired of sending people to other folks out there when you could come to me because not only can we help you get it, we can show you how to make use of it. So a lot of great tidbits. In fact, this lady really today, I can't wait. I think she's gonna be one of my first experts that we bring on a Tuesday call. All right, great job, AS, from finishing the free course, awesome, awesome, awesome. A lot of people forgot we have a free course. We do freegovconcourse.com, feel free. We still will continue bringing the value. NK, listen, you're welcome. I enjoy this and I continue to tell people that I enjoy this. I have a lot of fun. Anyone that knows me in real life says, like this is all I talk about. And so I'm probably pretty boring to people in real life because while you are all excited to hear about this, when I go outside of the doors, people don't care about government contracts. So I'm actually just as happy to spend this time with you because this is like what I like to talk about. And so when I get out of here and people want to talk about, I don't know, love and hip hop or whatever that show is, locked up on an island or love island or paradise, I don't know. I don't know anything about that stuff. So unfortunately, I can't talk to you about the latest and greatest like TV shows or movies. I know 50 Cent has some show that's out. I've never seen Power. I've never seen a single episode of Power. I know about Power because I like 50 Cent. In fact, I've got two of his books behind me. The 50th law, I thought it was behind me. And so I like him as a business person. I like him as a music but I haven't had a chance to watch his shows. But you got to give and take. People are looking for an arena to get into. There's a lot of opportunities supporting wildfires. My man Tyler, who's up there. Yeah, in fact, Tyler, we have our podcast guest Mark Masters and that's exactly what he does. He supports wildfires. He fights wildfires. He supplies them with people, helicopters. In fact, he does wildfire prevention training for government agencies. And he was at my meet and greet event that we had in Dallas last year just before COVID happened. So Mark Masters, if you haven't seen the podcast, that's what he does exactly is fight wildfires. Thanks, Tyler. Yep, that's true. They're not going anywhere. And again, that free says don't worry, I'm boring too. I don't even have a social media. No, free. Look, I have a social media only to post content not to actually review people's content. I can't, I don't know anybody's birthdays. I don't know what's going on in personal life. I don't know who had a baby. I don't know who got married. I don't know any of that stuff. So don't be mad at me. If I don't know, if I don't say happy birthday or congratulations on your wedding or some, you know, your accomplishment because I don't follow that. I make content. I don't have a chance to put the content on. By the way, listen, make sure to give us our video a thumbs up. There's 52 people watching this. Give us a thumbs up. Hit the like button because we need more likes. We need more shares. We need that. And so definitely I want to encourage people. Hit the like button. I see only two thumbs up. Where's like, yo, my regular people out here, you guys know how this social media stuff works. If you don't hit the thumbs up on the bottom or hit the like button on YouTube, then the social media people are going to think this video sucked and they're not going to promote it. So boring is good. Yes, it is. David's a wild and firefighter. I can help. David, make sure that you, I would say look at Mark Masters video that we have. You too. Let me find it for you guys. I'll drop it in there. The podcast that we did with Mark Masters. Keep, keep, go ahead and keep posting. I'm going to find it. Okay. There it is. I'll just drop it in there. That's the interview we did with Mark Masters. Take a look at that one. And again, Mark Masters, he does the same thing. He fights wildfires. So, all right. This is about the old one point. It's still upgraded everything. Mixboy, that's a really good question. So it depends on when you bought the 1.0, right? Because at one point we did have the 1.0 that was a lifetime, right? That was a lifetime for everything, but that was discontinued last year. So I don't know when you bought it. That would be a great question to send an email, service at govcongiannis.com to Erica and let her look at when you signed up, the membership level. And one thing I will say that I do, that I learned from one of my early mentors when I was doing business. If I told you that your price included unlimited upgrades, I still honored that. So at that time you bought it. That was included. And yeah, I still honor it. Do you have training using Unison Global? Yeah, I don't have training using Unison Global because it's not something that I actually do. And it's not something that I recommend as a strategy for building a long term successful business. But Unison Global is pretty easy. There's really nothing. You don't really need training because all you're doing is giving them a price on a product that you're providing to them. So there's really no training required because all you do is you're quoting prices, right? So if they ask for 1,000 pens and you pay 50 cents for a pen, you tell them to sell it to them for 75 cents and have it delivered. That's it. So there's really, Unison Global, there's no training needed for that. It's pretty straightforward. It's just like if you were doing Amazon selling or something, it's just a bid board. So you go on there and see what bids are available. You get the prices of what stuff costs and you tell the government what you're willing to sell it for. And then sometimes they'll do a reverse auction where you could keep bringing your prices down. So let's say you start off and you pay 50 cents for these. You could get them for 50 cents. And let's say you tell the government, I'll sell it to you for a dollar. And then they'll have like this reverse auction where you can bring it down. Let's say you bid a dollar, somebody else bids 90 cents. And then you could go to 89 cents. And then somebody else goes 88 cents and then you go to 87 cents. Then somebody else goes, but the reason why I don't like it, as you could see, is because what are they doing? They're driving you to the bottom. And like, what's the point of that? The objective here is to make money to be able to buy yourself time and freedom to do the things that you wanna do. The objective is not really to give the government some cheap goods and services so you could say that you want a government contract. That's vanity, that's not sanity. And it's definitely not profitability. So again, you hear a lot of people here talking about they want a contract, they want a contract, but how much money did it really make? And that's why it's much easier, in my opinion, to actually learn the strategies that it takes to be successful at this for the long haul. Just kind of what I think. No problem, Tyler, I got you. Kevin, Landa says you can self-certify at SPH-free online certification process is live. Yeah, again, I don't know what, when I'm talking about self-certify because the WSB and EWSB, they've gone through so many changes. So, but yeah, we show you all the time, we tell people the certifications, everything is free. Everything is free. However, what I've come to realize is that even though I tell people it's free and I send people to the places, thank you, Kevin, for posting that. I want people to go that some people just feel more comfortable having someone else review and look over the information to ensure its success. And so we wanna be able to offer that value. We just, I don't wanna send people to other folks that I don't know, I don't trust and that could potentially harm or take advantage of my students and my people. So, yes, Kevin Williams is right. Here's the information for you, Landa, so that you can go to the right places and attempt to do it. All right, Aqualini says, if anyone wants to practice small talks, let me know, I'll be happy to practice with you. Maria, do you have the name of the person that Eric mentioned and so parts of government? Yep, Eric, yeah, Maria has that information. The podcast is not out yet. So we just recorded it, but it's not out. It's actually not posted at this point. All right, it still says unlimited upgrade now. I don't know what you're mentioning. Which one, what says unlimited upgrade? Eric, I'm not American, but I've been learning about government contract through your course. Is there any way that now you can say this could get involved with government contracting? That's a great question. Hold on one second. Oh, that's a great question. Actually, what's interesting is that, oh, you know what? I just realized my screen, let me change my window. I'll put myself up a little bit higher. Is that better? Let's take that off. Okay. All right, good. That's better. All right, yeah, because my head was getting cut off. Actually, interesting enough. So the government does contracts all over the world, all of these countries, all of these nations, and we work with non-US citizens all the time. That is part of doing government contracts. I think that when people ask these questions, they're not actually looking at what's happening around the world. How do you think that we get stuff done and Barbados and Haiti and all these places? We use local workforce all the time. In fact, the government has a process for if you're a non-US citizen, was it say, or even if you're, forget non-US citizen, if your business is based in another country, you could still get registered for SAM. And that's a process. We have people that are registered for SAM in Italy and we have guests on our podcast that helps do that. So we've had people that are registered over in Iraq and Iran for doing contracts. We have contracts that we do in South America, Central America, Brazil, I mean, all over the world. So not only can a non-US citizen get contracts, a United States corporation can get contracts. And so I think a lot of times we have to stop and think like, wait a second, how do we do contracts over there? It's not always American companies working in Africa. We're using local labor. In fact, that's a lot of the requirements is they want local people there working on the contracts because they understand the land and the layout and everything like that. Your type, 2.0 has a type of $89. I wonder where you're seeing that at? Send it to me, I wanna see that. Since 1.0 has upgrades, I want you to send me, hold on. Send me that information you're talking about where it says that, because that's not true. There is no unlimited upgrades for that. So I don't know where you're reading that, but definitely send it to me. And then in 2.0 where you said it's $89, I wanna send that to me. Here, let me give you my email address. Send it to me there, the errors that you found so I can look at what you're talking about. Robert, what's going on, Robert? How's it going? How would a small trucking company make use of government contracts? We actually had a small trucking company that we spoke to recently and they watched one of my videos on working with Crowley and they reached out to Crowley and Crowley gave him a subcontract to work with them to run some lanes. So that's one success story that I can give you. What's up, Robert? Actually, I met Robert at an event this past week in Virginia. Can I hire someone to find cross contract for me if I don't have a lot of time? Also, will I still make money? I'm in transportation. Yeah, you can hire someone to do anything. I'm sure there's people out there that'll be happy to help find new contracts. Will you still make money? Well, I'm not really sure if you'll make money, but you can hire people to find new contracts because making money involves much more than just winning a contract. And thank you, by the way, for having the courage to ask this question. Making money involves actually not just winning the contract, but delivering on time, giving the customer what they want and making sure you price it well so that it makes sense. A lot of folks that I know, their first couple of contracts, they lose money because they didn't know how to price it properly. And so they've been thinking that they were gonna be the low bidder. They lost 10, 20, $30,000, maybe even $50,000 on their first contracts because they didn't know how to bid it correctly for what all the requirements called for. And that's something that's common, not just with small businesses, even with large organizations that are not used to doing this type of procurement work. You know, maybe you're used to, so I'll give you an example to read. One of the things that we just mentioned was I had a student sending stuff down to the border. Well, he called a company to send some trucks down to the border. And this particular entity sent trucks, right? But the requirements said that they had to have, like their hazmat certified some trucks and they needed two people, like workers to actually offload and unload stuff. So they sent the trucks out there and they didn't meet those requirements. Well, if that was your contract and you lost money, somebody had to pay for that stuff for them to get out there and make that happen. So someone lost money on that deal. So again, it comes down to understanding the contract, knowing the requirements and making sure that you put in a price sufficient enough to cover that. Canatria, I hear correctly stated, one of the requirements to be registered in SAMHSA to have a lease agreement. Yes, Canatria, I've seen where people ask for virtual offices and they change the requirement to ask for a lease agreement. If you know of some other rule, then definitely that's changed since that time. Let me know because it's not something I do regularly. Once I register in SAMHSA, I'm really pretty much done. But I have no people who are trying to do virtual offices. That was a requirement that they had in there. There you go, Jeread. That's Tam's answering your question about hiring someone. They charge 10K a month. I think that's fair. I mean, for me to do that for people, I was charging 8K a month. So I have people that pay that. I will be on the West Coast November the 8th, 9th, around there, remember 8th, 9th, somewhere in that area. Yeah, one of the things, and I guess a lot of people answer your questions. One of the things that's interesting that the person that I just, I literally interviewed today, stated to me was, she was actually on part of her business. She was using consultants to help her. And I think this goes to your point, Jeread. She was actually using consultants to help her and part of her business in fulfilling like contract requirements. And what she realizes, if that's an area that she was gonna be in long term, she said she had to build up her bench, meaning the people that she actually took from being consultants to putting on payroll. And what she did was originally, for this particular services that she was offering to government, she started off using primarily consultants to help support that. And then as you, it became more of a long-term game for her. She started adding people. So then she went from 100% consultant to 80% consultants and 20% staff to about 50-50. And that's where she's at today is about 50-50. Consultants and staff because the 50% of the staff could support all the ongoing work. And then consultants are called in on an as needed basis or to scale up when some of the requirements cause for them to scale up. So there's different, there's no one way to skin a cat, as they like to say. There's multiple ways you handle it, but that's one recommendation that one of my students, I mean, my guests just mentioned to me a few moments ago, so. If I want to live in Gambia and government con, how do you search businesses is still the same procedures? Yeah, I mean, all the things that we do are all online. So unless Gambia is a nation that's not allowed access to the United States tools, all the tools that we use are tools that are widely available online on public sources. So I don't see why that's a, why it would be an issue unless you're like a, one of those countries that are America and Tam Reed probably wouldn't know that better than I would, unless you're one of those countries that are a threat to our nation, then I don't see an issue. Don't be an impaired pair, just caught joined by your non-citizen speech, big guy. Yep, just saying that non-citizens are allowed to do government contracts. I will say this though, there are, if you're gonna be an IT arena, there are some citizenship requirements for working on IT systems. And they're not really even citizenship requirements, they're more of Tam Reed help me out. It's more of a, you've got to be able to get like a, some sort of like, especially like a background and security type. You have to be able to get like a, to a security level if you're working an IT. So that would be the only area where I would see some issues of being a non-citizen is the government letting you work on some of the IT stuff or any of the like secure things that we do. But other than that, and even if you're an IT, you could still do state and local. But other than that, the government hires, we work with non-citizens all the time and non-US based companies. Oscar Jones, I'm selling, trying to sell a FEMA and a big disaster contract. Yeah, we had someone, one of our students just picked up when the last hurricane hit, he did over about a million dollars in sales when that last hurricane had hit two months ago. Definitely it's out there. Jury, yeah, we have coaching now that we offer. So yes, we do have coaching out there. If you want that, that we can, again, if you're willing to pay for it, I mean, we can do it. I have a team of people that work with me to support it. And we can, yeah, sure. We'll be happy to support it. Oh, there it is. US Citizens and Clearances for, again, that's IT. So, oh, and when she says, you got your hands on the keyboards, US Citizens and Clearances. Love it. Make sure if you just join us, hit the thumbs up on your, whether you're on Facebook or on YouTube, hit the thumbs up, please, please, please, please, so that we can share this information. I'm entering conflict space with transportation. It would be difficult to get into areas of contracting, such as IT. Quan, we mentioned this earlier today. Definitely I always tell people stick to one, stick to one area. It's just, it's so difficult right now. It's so difficult. Just the government is huge. They're humongous. And even if you look at Tamry, she mentioned earlier about doing DevSecOps and this IT stuff. There's, it's just, you know, one of my podcast guests, they're, you know, for IT is a different animal than logistics. They're different contracting people, different program managers, different programs, different vehicles, different budgets, different ways that they buy. They're two fundamentally different arenas, completely different. And for anyone to try to comprehend and have that, the level of detail and knowledge to be able to penetrate that marketplace is extraordinarily difficult. You have to be almost a savant. And I don't say this in the terms lightly. You have to literally be a savant to really be able to dive into two totally mutually exclusive arenas at the same time. I mean, they could be more diametrically opposed than logistics and on IT, especially if you're, you know, doing a cyber. I just, again, I think that it's really, no one's gonna respect you and look up to you. If you're a small guy starting out and saying, you do IT and you do logistics, they're gonna take you for a joke because the moment that they start spitting out acronyms, and I'm sure Tamri could rattle off a bunch of acronyms in this post, and she probably will, because I'm asking her to, once they start spitting out a bunch of acronyms and you don't know what they're mean, they're gonna be like cold turkey. And they're gonna really figure out really quickly that you're not the one. So in fact, if you wanna test yourself, Quant, to see how much you know about IT, take a look at my last YouTube live. Matter of fact, I'll drop it in here for you. Take a look at my last YouTube live and see if you understand any of the stuff this guy's talking about. And if you do, then maybe you could give it a shot. But chances are I would take that bet, but you don't. Definitely, I would say both, you could be successful at one of the spaces and then as you start to build up your capabilities, go into the second one, but I frown upon that. Do you still, this is a good question. So now what we do is yes, 2.0, we do stuff with lifetime access to all the tools. However, 2.0 is now built on an annual basis. So it's an annual subscription basis. So as long as you continue to subscribe, you will have all of the upgrades included as we add more content, as we continue to have calls with experts, all of that stuff will be at no additional charges to you. So yes, that will happen. Drewy says the company name is Long Capture. I'm gonna go ahead and put my man Quazira out there. He said, does any students in Michigan in a subcontracting, I'm a small cleaning business, trying to get my foot in door government contracting. And again, if you're a small cleaning business trying to get your foot in door and you should be talking to successful companies that are already out there winning these types of contracts that you wanna do, that would be the first step is subcontract. Go online and find out who recently won contracts that are in your area. And then instead of putting it in the chat here, put it out there to the folks and let them know what you can offer them in terms of services, product price, delivery and things like that. And I'm sure Quazira people will give you a shot. We're always looking for good people to be able to come in and add value. Yes, you do receive a certificate after the completion of the courses. Yes. Is it found upon a change or a NAX code if you start it with one? No, it's not found upon a change or NAX codes. In fact, no one ever actually knows that you change your NAX codes. However, I will say this B, if you decide to change your NAX code and then afterwards you decide to register for a social economic set aside. Then at that point, it may be frowned upon depending upon who's reviewing it when changing your NAX code because I've heard of instances and particularly this is what SBA 8A programs that they want you to have experienced that NAX code for a certain length of time. And so if you decide to then change your NAX code a year later and then because your business is doing well you start winning contracts, you get 8A. At that point, it may hurt you a little bit depending upon who your BOS is and your SBA rep but typically no one cares. They don't even notice. They're gonna do any contracts dealing in diamonds or jewellries. So my most famous video is does the government buy what I sell? It's also in our free course and it's a way that you can actually look it up yourself and figure out whether or not the government buys the services. I don't know that if the government buys diamonds or jewellries because I've never looked that up. So I would encourage you to figure out what is the proper PSC code, product service code or the NAX code that covers diamonds or jewelry and then you could do the research in FPDS or on USA spending and figure that out yourself. And here's Tam putting in all of the words that a man wants to go into IT, zero trust, observability, Tanzu, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, ISE, cloud security, IAS, PS and a new one, brewing sky computing. There you go. So if you know that stuff then I would say yes you can go into IT if you don't maybe stick to transportation. Good stuff, Sean. Congratulations on that. Great stuff. The new Sam switched up and had a different look. How do you navigate this new look? I've updated profile to add capability statement, your audio book is awesome, your capability is two, excellent. Yes, the new Sam, they switched up the look but again, Sam was always changing up the look. In terms of adding your capability statement on your SBA profile, that is the same look as always. So you can add all of the information from your capability statement on your SBA profile. That has not changed. Even though Sam has changed, they merged Sam with beta.Sam. And if it's all in one now, but yes. Putting your capability statement on is the same place and the information that goes there. Managed Silence has decided to start my own company after watching the GovCom videos, low dynamic and I just won our first contract. Congratulations, Sean, good stuff. I love it, I love it. And some people can do that. Some people from our free content can go out and win opportunities. We do give out the information. I think a lot of people, what I've noticed and I will say this and I will say this and I will say this is people watch, I'm telling you because I have the statistics. People watch two minutes of the video, five minutes of the video, six minutes of the video and it's a 45 minute video. And then they go off and they say, well, I know how to do GovCom, I watched all your videos. Two minutes of that video, what if the key thing that I said was at the end of the video? That's just really, what I find is that folks are watching this much of the information and then their takeaways, like for example, doing the market research. That's a 20 minute video. If you watch three minutes, you didn't understand the whole content of the video and you don't really know what I said at the end, that might've been that nugget that you're missing to go from actual information to practitioner. Where do I go out and find contracts in military based in Africa? Again, go back and do your research, figure out who's issuing contracts in Africa. And then from that, I always tell everyone, my answer is always the same, go backwards. Find out from your research, who's actually been issuing contracts in Africa. And based on that research, you can ask them how to, under what vehicles and under what procurement means, do they issue those contracts? All of what I teach starts off with research. We're strategic, you have to be strategic. This isn't throw it all up in air and see what sticks. This is laser being focused strategy and you have to be strategic. So you can't just, even if there's one website that you found that posted contracts in Africa, let's say the Department of State, that might not be the only place. You may find 10 sources where you can go out to research contracts in Africa. But again, it all starts with doing your research. Clamshell Lake Paving Project for Corps of Engineers. Oh, Sean, I know who you are. I think you sent Maria a message. Yes, the paving guy. I'm pretty, I think that's you are, right? Aren't you the guys sent Maria the message, Sean? Ah, yeah, see, that is you. You see, I see, now it's your comment at the bottom. Yes, Maria might be on podcast till I learn from you. Yep. You see what Sean says? I watched hours and hours of the videos all the way through. That's the difference. Remember, if you've been on here since I first started this today's live broadcast, I said, if you're doing something I know about you because you're asking for help. Do you notice how I know Tam Reed's name? Did you notice how I know it was Aquilene Lee's name? Do you notice how Sean, who said he won the contract? Now, when he told me what it's for paving, and I said, oh, I know you sent Maria a message. Why? Because he reached out. That's why. Because if you're doing something, you're letting me know because you're asking for assistance. Now, Sean won that contract and he needs some additional assistance. And Maria reached out to me. I then gave the information to Maria who then passed it along to Sean. And so Sean was actually smart because if he sent me the message, I probably would never got it. So he was smart to go through Maria because he probably gets 10% of the messages that I receive. So he was actually, that was pretty genius Sean to send it to Maria instead of me because I probably would have never seen it. Used to be a union labor and wanna utilize them for manpower, do you recommend? Yeah, I use union labor all the time. We used, in fact, up in Rhode Island and the Northeast where we're working in Boston and we're working in Newport Naval. I'm working in New London, Groton, Connecticut. I use union laborers all the time. Our carpenters unions we use all the time. So yeah, that's a great strategy. In fact, the reason why I like it is because you can actually take, and with union labor, it's easier for you to scale up people, right? Manpower. So I actually think that union labor is a great strategy because our, all right, Antonio, which are surprising for one-on-one coaching. So we have actual coaching plans and our coaching plans are on our website, govconndryant.com slash coaching. In fact, let me see if I can pull it up. All right, so here I'm gonna drop it in the chat. There's our coaching plans that we have currently now and interesting enough, and I'm glad you brought this up, Antonio Freeman. We actually have five right now, five coaches at this moment, but something happened. All right, but what's interesting that I like about Antonio asking this question is that in terms of the one-on-one coaching, okay, all right, thanks, I see that. In terms of coaching, one of the things I will say is if you have a consulted client or if you work for a company, I always say why don't you recommend that they pay for this, the course, they pay for the coaching on your behalf. It's like Jaree said earlier, she has more money than she has time. Why not have someone like that pay for your education so that you can learn how to do this stuff and that way you get the knowledge. Everyone knows knowledge is power. So let someone else who has more money or more resources who is interested in doing this let them pay for it to support you. One of our students, Mo, he did that. His company actually paid for him to take our trainings. He learned the trainings and then he started to become really successful, so successful that his company didn't pay him all his full commissions and he was an employee, right? Because they say he didn't deserve it. So he left the company, went out, did it on his own. Now he's running his own business and his own organization. And so again, but they can't take away that knowledge that he then has. So if you're considering this and you're considering consultant or you're working with someone, let's say it's your cousin or your friend or somebody who you're trying to help get into this business, let them pay for it. Have that to mean it lets them show their commitment on how serious they are and really wanting to get this done. And maybe that's even a strategy to get them to do it. To get someone to help you to pay for this. It's like, hey, I'm interested in learning how to do government contracts. I'm willing to help you with the knowledge that I gained from taking this course. If you were willing to pay for the course for me to do it. The information I learned, I'm gonna actually do the steps, do the techniques. I'm gonna use that to help your business, right? With the information and the knowledge that I learned. So that's something that I've seen work time and time again, especially people who are working at companies and organizations, I've seen it, it just makes sense for me. I'm in a tech community, last text I received asked for a number so I could be called. I've phoned, I don't know if you guys call or not. Cause our, so that, yeah, I saw that in there. And again, I don't know cause we have, again, that text community, several people can respond to it. So if you did drop your number in there then Erica will reach out to you. Is it true that you have to renew your SAM every couple of years? Yes, that's true. You do have to renew your SAM registration every so often. I don't know on what, how often, but you do have to renew it every so often, yes. By the way, make sure to give us a thumbs up, thumbs up, thumbs up, thumbs up. Ah, Eric, I'm in using the VA program, I learned that from you last video. Thank you Antonio Freeman. I'm so happy that you did that because I tell people I give out free game all the time. If you watch the videos, if you watch it till the end, stay till the end, these, like Maria literally, and somebody was talking about grants today, Maria applied for one of those programs and she got a grant that is, she doesn't have to pay back and it was $5,000 that she doesn't have to pay back. We continue to share things that we learn from people that are in our communities and we give it out freely to folks who are interested in taking advantage of these programs. I want you to get all the free money and free resources that exist because I want you to save your money for when you really need a mentor, when you really need like Antonio coaching, when you really have a problem that you need to help execution on, that's when it's time to spend your money, pause your checkbook. But for all this other stuff, I want you to save your money when you really need it to invest because again, it doesn't do me any good if you go out there and you waste $2,000 or $3,000 on this, $2,000 or $3,000 on that and then you come to me and want me to help you for free. That don't do me no good. So again, I give you all the free resources I could possibly give you throughout the videos and my books, all my lessons. In fact, here, all of these websites, this book is 10 bucks, 10 bucks, 10 bucks. I've got a hundred and so places that you can go out to start doing all this stuff, $10. Okay, my other book up here, I think it's $12, go call lunch, 12 bucks. So for 22 bucks, here you go. That's it, 22 bucks. Bunch of free websites to go to to learn how to do all this stuff. This is the things that I went through step by step and everything I did. I tell you, it's here, the information is there. I'm not trying to hold anything back. For $10, really the price of McDonald's, Chick-fil-A, like, I mean, it's $10. Again, I don't make any money off of this stuff. Listen, I have that book on Amazon. You know Jeff Bezos ain't come off them billions to come let, look, Eric makes some money. Y'all already know Jeff, what Jeff Bezos said. Look, thank y'all for sending me to the moon or sending me to space, right? I thank all the people in Amazon for sending me to space. So Amazon has given me a little bit of cut. It about, hold on, let me show you how big my cut is for Amazon. Let me show you. That's how much Amazon give me out the book. I don't even know if it's that much. It might be, and more like this. This is what I get. Amazon get the rest. So Jeff Bezos ain't letting nobody make no money. So I'm not making money. Don't think I'm getting rich off a book. I think I make $300 a month. I don't even cover my light bill. So trust me, it's not about making money. It's giving people the resource and information and having them pay a little bit of something for at least for the cost of me to the printing and at least what it cost me to do the design. I mean, hell, the design of this book cost a couple of thousand dollars. So, yeah, I know Jeff Bezos ain't come off that money. Don't even play. All right, what else we got out here? What else? What else? What else? All right, truck driver, learning government contract business with a cargo van, would you suggest? Okay, buy the books. Yep, buy the books, watch the YouTube videos. So, you know, that's the best thing I'm gonna do because again, when someone has a cargo van, I don't know if the course would necessarily be for you because you just have a cargo van and really the truth is, again, I really, I promise you, I don't want to take anybody's money who I can't help, service, support in any kind of way. So, the government really folks out there are looking for people who want to come on and create real businesses, real industries and make a difference. They want folks to come out here and do millions of dollars in business. That's really what they're looking for. So, if your intention is to have just a cargo van and that's where you're gonna stay at, then I don't think that the federal car contracting is right for you. Now, if your intention is to have a fleet of cargo vans, then buy my program. So, it just depends on really what your intention is, not where you're at, it's where you want to go. And that's the way I look at all of you out here who are watching our content. It's not about where you're at now because we all start off with nothing because I know what everyone looks like and I know we all grew up on the other side of the track. So, given that most of us on this call grew up on this side of the track, we all start off with nothing. So, again, it's about where you want to go, not where you're at. And based on your question, you're telling me where you're at, not where you're headed. And so that's why I kind of gave you that answer in that manner. Yeah, I'll quickly listen. This is my personality. I tell people the truth, because people be out here like really trying to like, talking about like $12 is going to kill them. But, you know, they stand in line for the new GZs. So, or Yeezys, whatever you call them, Yeezys, GZs, whatever, but they act like my $12 is going to kill them, but they can go get Beyonce new Adidas fit when she put it out, or Rihanna's lipstick or perfume as that comes out. But my $12 is going to hurt somebody. So, yeah, I'm telling y'all because that's the truth. This is what I have to deal with. This foolishness that people be telling me when I'm trying to change their life or change their future, so they could go to dinner with Rihanna and Beyonce and Jay's, all these people, instead of sitting around and just watching them on TV. Yes, I said it. So, all right, what else? Because we got to get, we got to answer some questions. Y'all got me here sweating now. I had someone ask me, they could bid for contracts without a permit residence card within the United States. I wasn't sure. We just talked about that. It has nothing to do with residence card. We've said it three times. It doesn't matter if you're a citizen or not. The government is buying from companies. What do people not understand? There is no, this ain't voting. There is no citizenship test on companies for contracts. They're buying from corporations. That's why you have to incorporate and not be a DBA. They're buying from businesses. When they buy from a business, they don't check your immigration status. You could be an illegal immigrant and still do contracts because they're buying from your business. If your state lets you set up a business, that's who they're buying from. My personal name, it doesn't matter. My immigration status has nothing to do with my corporation. Now I would not recommend you go on the military base and try to get a badge if you illegal, but send people that are legal in there under your company name and that you're fine. So it has nothing to do with whether or not you're a citizen or not. Your corporation is what's doing the business with the government, not you, the person or the individual. Does everyone understand that? Please, this is such an important topic because people keep, I think we're forgetting like common sense stuff. So it's like, again, and by the way, AS, I'm telling you, I had people who went to, I'm just telling you, look, nobody here because y'all ain't that silly, but I've had people go to the bases, truck drivers, and had outstanding child support. Please don't do that. Because you might be a legal citizen, but you got outstanding child support or you got a warrant. Don't go to the military base dropping no products off. Please don't, don't do that. Just some words of wisdom. I'm saving y'all right now. Please, words of wisdom from Eric Coffey, GovCon Eric, do not go to the base if you got outstanding child support or warrants for your arrest, anything like that. Don't drive to that military base. Don't try and bring them no products. Tell your boss you can't make that order. Don't make that delivery. But again, they're buying from corporations. They're not buying from people. Are you still doing bid on IT contracts? The good research for white label products are various types. I don't understand the question about white label projects. Gov is pushing the vet and 100K companies and the supply chain. Tim, you got to tell me more about this. Oh, Tim, I like that picture of you. You got to tell me more, Tim. Good night, Jerome. That's right. Eric, is it true that you can't get into government until you've been in this for two years? Absolutely not. That's a false. That is a myth. We have people that, again, the government, that's not true. I'm going to say it that way. No, that's not true. You do not have to be in business for two years. I don't know where you got that information from. I just told you and I just stated that my guest left her job and started her business and started winning contracts. What the person is referring to is there are certain certifications that you do not qualify for in order to, unless you're within business of two years. That has nothing to do with contracts. That's for a particular type of set-aside or certification. However, those certifications are only in the single-digit percentages of all contracts. So 86% of all contracts have no certifications associated that socioeconomic designations attach to them, 86%. Which means that's open for any and all people. So you, without having that particular socioeconomic designation style, you qualify for 86% of all opportunities with the federal government. I think that's pretty much everything. Should I change my ammunition tax code if there's a national ammunition storage? No one can find ammunition within the USA. Well, Louis, you could change your ammunition tax code if there's a shortage, but I guess are you saying that because they can't find ammunition that you won't be able to sell ammunition? Is that really your question? I'm not really sure. Is that what you're saying, Louis? Is that because they're, make sure, by the way, everybody give me a thumbs up if you haven't already done so. Are you saying that you're gonna do something different? I'm not really sure what the question is because even though there's an ammunition shortage, there are still people providing ammunition because the government, we're a United States of America, which is the largest military industrial complex in the whole world. So we've gotta have ammunition because that's how we protect America. So I know that the government is still buying ammunition, whether or not you can find it and provide to them as another story, but I know for a fact that they're still buying ammunition each and every day because I do have one of our students whose brother makes components for bombs and a lot of the same components that go in ammunition and the same components that go into the stuff that he makes as well and manufacturers. So while there is a shortage, there's still a need and the need has to be fulfilled regardless of the fact that if whether it takes two months or three months extra, the need still has to be filled because the United States has an insatiable appetite for ammunition and weapons systems. That's why we call it military industrial complex. Thoughts on going to site visible potential subcontractors for them to give you an estimate and then you as a prime ad prof, Mario on top of a price construction project. We do it all the time. Every time we go, I don't think there's another way to do it. In fact, if you go, if you are bidding a construction project and you don't take yourselves and you try to get a price, you are putting yourself at great danger at a detriment of potentially losing money on that project. So in fact, not only is it thought encouraged, I would almost say to the point where if you do not do that, you almost have to write up your, whatever agreements that you have with them to protect your interests. You've got to probably add some additional margins on top to make sure for any deficiencies or anything that was missed that they didn't cover. Because again, if they didn't see it, then they could always come back to you and say, Bazooka that, hey, I didn't see that because I didn't go to the walkthrough and you can't see it based on the drawing. So they're likely to squirm out of honoring their price if they fail to go to the site visit. So I definitely highly recommend it, highly, highly, highly recommend and encourage. And in fact, if they don't go, I might just not even bid the project, just me personally. Just came across, your info's past week is great. So happens to my mother, aunt retired from duty procurement, writing proposals, study far text and hope return course. Awesome. If your mom and your aunt retired from duty procurement writing proposals, then you've got, you already have a head start. So that's a good stuff. Jamal Leo, I want to start as a consultant my therapist interested in finding counseling services. Do you know the market that would be able to make that work? Counseling services is needed. I do know Jamal because, remember, think about this. All of the veterans coming back from war, PTSD, right? We have a huge, even with COVID, right? There's a huge crisis happening in the United States where people are suffering from anxiety and depression and mental health illnesses as a result of the pandemics as a result of all these natural disasters as a result from hurricanes and earthquakes and think about New York and the flood. All of those things trigger people's anxieties. And so mental health and counseling services is on the rise, particularly in everywhere at USA where the government has hospitals, clinics, installations, that is something that, in fact, one of my podcast guests that you can look her up, Roberta Moore, I'll grab her info. That's an area where she worked at, was in providing healthcare services. Hold on, let me grab it for you. She, that's what she, an area that she worked in, Jamal, is in providing the healthcare type services, doctors and nurses and staffing, those kind of people. And she did it, she was based in the US, but she provided them overseas at military bases that we were supporting overseas. So great question. All right. Style law, I just got to this live stream, 2.0. So 2.0 you have until the end of October to continue to buy 2.0, so you're fine. 1.0 ends in three days, but 2.0. And by the way, yes, just for anyone who's thinking, if you buy the 1.0 before it ends and you need to upgrade to 2.0, I'll just charge you the difference. So the 1.0 is $5.97, 2.0 is $4.97. You pay the $4.00 difference and we'll upgrade you. So just, if anybody's wondering that, yes, you can upgrade to 2.0 after the fact. So we don't mind, we'll just charge you the difference. What's the real recipe from the kidnapping clown? So apparently they didn't like the clown style. A lot of people respond, I got a lot of bad emails and messages of people saying that I was destroying my channel and providing all this content and taking it away with booty shaking and whatever they call it, I forgot the word, putting a clown up there. So a lot of people didn't really like the clown. So I don't think it went over well, but I love the creativeness that my son did in putting it together. I just think it was a little harsh. But again, I didn't wanna stop you as creative juices. So I let Brent and Freely do that because one of the things that I have found, Stilo, is that while I do give all this great content and I put all this information out, my packaging is obviously not great because there are people out here who say, this is how you do government contracting 101 and all they do is tell you about Sam and Dunn and Cage and they get 100,000 views. I tell you all of these strategies and I get 1,000 views or 100 views or 500 views. So what I realized is that I have to do a better job of packaging my material so that people can actually get to the meat and potatoes and the content and really do some, I get some actionable steps happening. So that's why I'm allowing him to explore it because believe it or not, the silly stuff is working on IG and we've increased our followers on IG like triple than what we've done over the last six months since he got started. All right, what else? What are some ways to go about securing contracts from the US, my companies in Canada? Again, it doesn't matter what your company's based out of. That's irrelevant because we buy goods and services. In fact, if you watch the video Wesley, the 16 year old, how does a 16 year old provide contracts to the government? Why? Because they don't ask his age. They're not asking you, are you in Canada? So what does it matter? If you set up a corporation and you're in Canada, let's say you set up a corporation in New York or you set up in Maine or you set up a corporation, like why does that matter? The research and everything, all the tools that you're looking at are online. So that doesn't make a difference. But I would say if I were in Canada, I would be looking at opportunities in Canada because if you're studying for me and you're learning this stuff, you have the unique advantage of actually going after and having like the expertise and now you're competing with companies that don't necessarily have all the training and the tools that you're learning as much so as someone who's in the United States. So we have a lot more training and tools and resources available as citizens than you would as a Canadian. But you could still take and learn this information and then really capitalize because why you are in Canada. And in fact, Judy Bratt, if you watch any of my podcasts, I don't see her book, I'm looking for it. I don't see it in my within arms reach. Judy Bratt is actually based out of Canada. So if you remember Judy Bratt, she's based out of Canada. Any boom and max skills that anyone can do and get started? Yeah, we discussed that earlier. Really, I think that just chasing max codes is a really ineffective strategy. And like we said, and if you're just coming on out of the 75,000 small businesses that are eligible to do government contracting, two thirds will never get a contract. So 67% of you ultimately will never get a contract. And part of that is chasing the shiny object syndrome. So instead of focusing on their strengths or areas of expertise or people that they know have expertise in certain areas, they chase shiny objects. But unfortunately, the contracts and the money that's the biggest and the largest also have the biggest and baddest competitors that have the most money and the most resources and everybody's attacking those areas. Again, another nugget I will drop you because you guys have stayed on for hour and 47 minutes with me, one of my guests said to me that she's in West Virginia. And one of the things that she learned was that hey, West Virginia, if you guys know is West of Virginia. Virginia is where all the government contractors supposedly gurus are at. The problem with Virginia and DC is there are hundreds of small businesses that are trying to work with the SBA. And so the ratio like teacher to student ratio maybe 60, 70 to one. If you go across to West Virginia and you're a small business working with SBA, the ratio is eight to one. So that their SBA reps can actually respond and get back to you in 30 minutes an hour and also to support you in winning contract opportunities. So again, as opposed to looking at the money why not look at where there's more opportunity and less competition. That's what I would call a booming next go as opposed to booming in terms of dollars and cents. Yep, I just said that if you get 1.0 can you still create 2.0 after October 31st? Ooh, Antoine, that's a good one. I like that. That's a good question. If you get 1.0, yes, you can still upgrade to 2.0 after October 31st because you will be a, well, hold on, let me think about that. I haven't thought about that one. My immediate answer would say yes. Yes, I'm gonna say yes, because if as long as you're registering your role in one of our programs, I'll let you upgrade. So yes, you're good. As an owner of a very truck driver, be good and get a broker's license that when you land a government contract you'll be able to broker out loads of contract. Errol, I can't tell you that because I don't know your business well enough. I can say if you send an email to services at govconjines.com, there is someone, Sharon, from World Girl One Truck that I would encourage you to talk to and she could probably better answer that question. I don't know your business to that level of expertise to make that recommendation. Robinson, who don't like the clown? Yeah, a lot of people don't like that clown. I'm sorry. You know, I don't know. I think because I was so serious, like my content was always so serious, but to me, also me being so serious in my content is why I don't get all of the views and allowance because I'm not controversial. So you may see some more controversial type of content come out where I might start clowning on some other people who pretend to be Govcon gurus. People, so I don't like that where there's some sort of like something polarizing and I was just straight given content and information. So I'm gonna say that clown caught my attention. No, Antoine, I love the clown. I thought the clown was hilarious. I mean, it made me laugh, but some people just, you know. Yeah, I think Robert, I mean, I don't know. I think people like, you know, they just different. Yeah, people like different stuff. How many hours do you dedicate your business now? How many people do you have running a construction company? So Angel, I don't do my construction company anymore. What I do do is I partner with a construction company. They pay me to consult with them and to help them win contracts. And so we have a full staff working to support that. I have, but because I don't deal with all the staff, we now have layers of staff. So the people that report to me are project managers. And so I deal with the project managers who do all my estimating and they're the ones that handle my projects from start to finish. And then, so they're the ones that then get a chance to choose who they want to be the superintendent and manage the contracts and manage the jobs. So for example, one of my project managers today was at a kickoff meeting for the Bunker Hill Monument that we just started. If anybody up in Boston, if you've seen that Bunker Hill Monument, we're actually just starting that project. We're gonna go around there and redo all the fencing. And so I noticed that there was three other employees that were on that call, I mean, on that kickoff meeting. So, but again, I don't deal with that. So I just deal more at the managerial level at this point now, Angel. How many hours do we work on this? You know, depending upon the season, right? So right now we've been putting in, I probably put in about 20 hours a week at this point. About 20 hours a week. The 16 year old was successful because he used his brain to think it through and came across his sharp. That's very true, correct. I'm a service able veteran, I got you one put on course. I like to try country as a different career choice. I'm hoping to kind of help me get there. Excellent. Definitely, hey, look, if anything else, you're gonna learn something. And one thing that I will say that this has happened, I've had people that took my course and they never want a federal contract, right? And say, well, that's not successful. Well, the guy doubled his income. I think that's pretty successful to me for 600 bucks, a double your income. So if you're at 40,000 a year, now you go to 80, I think 600 bucks is worth it. I'm just saying. So for me, that's the way that I look at this. I've had another student that and again, you go to my IG, you'll see it in my reel. She decided that federal wasn't for her, but she used some of the things she learned to pick up state and local contracts. Is that worth it? Sure, why not? So one of the things also that I wanna share that I think that people, sometimes we don't realize or maybe we forget, any organization that you wanna be a part of, any organization you wanna be a part of, where is it at? Did I, where are they at? They all have fees associated with them. Let me see if I can share my screen, all right? So for example, let me just, okay, share this. This is the National A&A Association, right? So again, if you got A&A, I would recommend you join National A&A Association. Well, to join a National A&A Association, membership is 350 a year for 2021, 352 and 22, to join a National A&A Association. Now, let's say you go out and get HUBZone, right? Well, membership, the joint HUBZone application, if you are zero to 3 million sales, 395, 36 million, 595, and so up a thousand bucks, and it goes up 1195. So if you wanna join the US Women's Chamber of Commerce, right, 200 bucks for news annually, or supplier membership, 400 bucks for news annually. So it doesn't matter where you decide that you wanna go and who you wanna work with, we have to be able to support, bring it on speaker. By the way, thank you, Tamry, for that, I really appreciate it. I appreciate the love as well. Thank you for that. I really do appreciate it. And so what I want people to understand is that this is your business, you have to make an investment in your business. What do they say? If you want your business to pay you like a business, you gotta treat it like a business, which means reinvesting your money back in. And for me to be able to bring on speakers, for me to be able to bring on coaches, for me to be able to bring on trainers to train folks, I gotta compensate these people. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of people that liked me out there, but they don't like me that much. So just something I definitely want to share and what folks out there. Free said, I like the clown, I like to dance and it felt it was fun. Yeah, Free, I thought it was fun too. And I think, you know, I think it was just rough. I mean, I think for him it was rough in the beginning. See, you love Judy, layers and players, five government personalities, you didn't know. Yeah, that's Judy Bratt. I think, again, people don't realize, Judy Bratt to go on webinars, you pay $150 for a webinar with Judy Bratt. I brought her on here five times for free. I didn't charge anyone anything. I didn't put her behind a paywall. I freely give the information out because, you know, that's my heart. That's what I feel like. What's your experience in dealing with subs and construction? You know, the good thing about having subs and construction is if they don't do what they say, then you don't pay them and they have to deliver. But at the same token, you got to be careful. And one of the things Antonio that we discussed, and it's really, it's funny that you say that, it's not widely watched, but how to choose a subcontractor. I went through that and made that video because it's such a, okay, a lot of folks watching right now, they're only thinking about getting that contract. I'm thinking Antonio about fulfilling the contract. That's the difference. I can already see you, Stylo, getting the contract. I can already see Freehall winning a contract. I can already see Lake and Lincoln winning a contract. I can already see the original 13 winning a contract. I can already see Antoine winning a contract. I can see Aqua Lee winning a contract. What I don't know about is how well they're gonna be able to fulfill that contract and deliver. That's where I don't know. I can see all of the people on here getting a contract. I don't know how well they're gonna be able to deliver, perform and fulfill it. And so I think we all missed that point of are you procurement ready? Meaning that if I were to give you a contract today, could you do it? Do you have people, money, credit, supplier credit, vendors, can you perform? Can you execute if I place an order with you today? And that's a question you gotta ask yourself. And so very great question here, Antonio. I want people to understand is, yes, we wanna make sure that's your procurement ready. And that's what we try to do because that's why the first thing I say is get yourself some vendor credit, get supplier credit. Get that in advance of trying to pursue a contract because I wanna make sure that your procurement ready. I wanna make sure, I say, look, go out and talk to partners and subcontractors now before you get a contract. Why? Because you're gonna need these people to execute when, if and when you win a contract. And so my experience is only with subs is that you gotta be careful who you pick and you gotta be very selective and make sure they can actually execute and perform not just the cheapest guy. I have picked more expensive subcontractors because they let me sleep at night. I have picked a guy, I say guy loosely, I picked a company or entity that was 40% more expensive. But, and I've even recommended to Maria because this company is a 10 million dollar company as opposed to the guy out the back of the pickup truck. So if I see somebody, if I got a sub and he pulls up in a pickup truck, right? And it's the bumper is falling off and it's you can hear it kick it and you see smoke come out tailpipe. I ain't, he not working for me. I'm gonna tell him to go home and drive back. And I ain't no knock on him in his truck, but if he's not showing a professional and his people not wearing uniforms, those are all red flags. I can't have them on my government contract and job. And I'm gonna piggyback this on something else. I have a contracting officer right now who texts me this message, okay? I'm not gonna post the message. I want you to try to zoom in to it, okay? And this was someone that I recommended to do some work for them personally. And you know what they said? That person could never work for me and the government contracting sector because they don't do professional quality work. And so I'm saying to you to say, I say that to say this, the kind of people that are home remodellers, the kind of people that are handyman, they may be good for working at your grandma house or auntie them house and the properties that, you know, people are not very critical, but the government is, they're gonna go through with a fine tooth comb. And I just would be very cautious and let people know that and that's the expectation. And then once you set those ground rules, then if they can do it, they can do it. They're not, they can't. And then also there's a lot of paperwork. If they can't do paperwork, they probably can't do this. They're not gonna be able to support you, so, yep. I'm looking at this, let's say Sam said I'm requesting roll access to get control, attachment documents, how to get past this step. I've seen where it says request roll access. And they let me download the forms anyways. So try to download it even if it says request access. If it still doesn't let you download it, then on the previous FBO, you just have to prove that you've got your register in Sam in order to get access control documents. But there may be, if it's IT or something else, there may be one other step that you have to go through, but all of that information should be there to tell you what that step is and what you'd have to do to qualify. Can you briefly speak about the benefits of PTAX? SAP, so PTAX are particular technical assistant centers all over the country. They're in every city, major city in the United States. And they help you for free to get started in your business. And so something I recommend to people, I've got a video of 12 questions to ask for PTAX. Definitely, I recommend for everyone to start off with the PTAX first, great place to start, hold on. In fact, I've got two videos on it. Nope, I've got three. So I have one that's free government service for minority businesses, PTAX. And I have an interview with a PTAX person, which is episode 82 of my podcast. And then I have 12, here it is, 12 questions to ask for PTAX. So I actually have several videos already on the subject of PTAX that you can look at on my video channel that will give you any and all things that you need. How do you write past performance letter? So typically there's no such thing as a past performance letter. It's usually past performance questionnaires and C parts ratings. So again, I think that doing a little bit more, spending a little bit more time with the content, watching some videos and looking at, you will learn, and even going through some of the solicitations and seeing what some of the requirements, that would be my recommendations for you, is pull down some RFPs and look at the lingo that the government's using so that you don't say things that don't line up with the way that they're buying it. Because again, I've never seen them say past performance letter. I've only seen them ask for past performance questionnaires. And again, I could be wrong, but make sure that whatever industry that you're in or the type of services you're trying to provide, pull down some RFPs, look at the requirements and see what they call for and then go from there. All right, Antoine, be good, sounds good. Looking forward to it. Thank you, Tam, for the culture and some snacks. I appreciate you for the culture and yes, some snacks. I can get, oh, I got some snacks in my, I'm not gonna say it here, but yes, I get some good snacks with that, Tam. Have you been involved with NATO, UN contracts, Bazooka? Yes, I have looked at UN contracts, but nothing with NATO, no. Hey, which video covers NAX codes and how to know which ones to go for from a financial standpoint? Yeah, from a financial standpoint, it's the video on choosing the right DUNS number. Just first to put on, good job, Kwan, good stuff. Looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday's calls. Judy's dope, yes she is. This one is the video on choosing the right DUNS number, Robert, but really it's just based on, it's still, again, it's choosing a DUNS number based on what you know, but for example, when it comes to like, say, construction, as opposed to doing two, three, eight specialty trade construction, which will limit you to, say, 16 or 18 million, you do two, three, six, which is general construction, and now you're at 34 million potential. So it's the DUNS number video that you're looking for. Yes, very good answer, Lakin. I see you winning and delivering. Folks, pay attention, winning is one thing, delivering is number two, so definitely look at that. You can execute, I love it, I love it, I love it, let's do it. Yes, all you guys are named, amen. Delivering kind of the most important aspect to me, yes, that's correct. And if you have that attitude and you carry that and you drill that into your team, you're gonna be really successful, excellent. There you go, deliver, perform, execute, they're gonna love you. I'm telling you, these people are gonna love you all. All right, Louis, I love the truth, I love the honesty, which holding back is not the great information, is fear of failure, I'm tired of calling, getting rejected from my age experience, anybody's trying to get past that. So, excuse me. I don't understand how you're getting rejected for your age and experience because when Wesley was able to call and talk to people, he said they never asked him his age. So when do people ask your age, Louis? I've never had any government person on the telephone asking my age, never, not once. I've never had a supplier on a credit application, on a supplier application, on a vendor application, on a membership, I've never seen age asked anywhere, not in an email, not on a phone call. So I'm not sure, Louis, what you're talking about. You, but this sounds like to me, mental roadblocks that you're putting up for yourself because if, Louis, tell me how old you are. Tell me how old you are. So put it in the chat, what's your age? Because if Wesley did it at 16 and I have a student of mine, Gerard did it at 24. And Mebs was before he went to Africa was one of our other resource specialists. Mebs did it at 23. Louis, I wanna see, you better show me, tell me what age you are. I wanna know. All right, I'll come back to you. Antonia, 1.0 did help me learn research market and who's buying it's a great investment, get classes. 600 bucks, I'm telling, I don't, look, I just wanna, I just wanna, honestly, the only reason I'm even doing this for the 600 bucks, honestly, is really, I wanna have a clean conscience. When I go to my $8,000 program, you don't understand, there's people out here that want me to do this $8,000 program and they want me to abandon everyone else. And I just said, I can't do that because that's not the kind of person I am. But they're like, Eric, if you sell 10 $8,000 programs, that's $80,000 a month. I'm like, yeah, I know. And he goes, you actually are at the 25K level. I said, yeah, okay. So I just wanna have a clear conscience and know that I did right by the bulk of people and I gave everyone a chance. So again, that's just me, that's just me as an individual, me being raised up in a Christian home and a Christian background and my mom always saying it's better to give than receive. So again, I really, if my payroll to run this is 20,000 a month, that's what it cost me. Cost me 20,000 a month. Yes, you see me, there's a whole bunch of people behind me, a whole bunch of software, a whole bunch of tools, a whole bunch of everything that's behind this, that's powering all the things that we do. I'm spending 20,000 a month. So I just don't wanna keep paying 20K a month for people. So I can't continue to give away for free, for free, for free of my time and my energy, my effort because it's taken away from me and my family and all the things that we gotta do. I could be, look, for 20,000 a month, there's a lot of places I could live, a lot of things I could do other than being out here with you guys. So I just wanna be able to support the team that's behind all this stuff and be able to continue providing value to folks and not letting it deteriorate. And so that's what I'm saying. Lewis, where's your age at? I'm still looking for my man Lewis to put his age in there. I'm still looking for my Lewis to put his age in there. Lewis, where's your age at? And by the way, Lewis, if you're in our programs, we have a guy, Colin, he's in our group and Colin, in fact, if anyone signs up now and you go to the 2021 membership calls, if you go back a couple calls, Colin actually was on one of our calls and going back to what you said, AS, is that he said he was with me for two years, two years and he was emailing, emailing, emailing folks, emailing contracting people, emailing government people. And I said, Colin, you gotta call people. You can't just keep email, you gotta call. And he said, you know what, Eric, I'm gonna try it. And within two weeks of calling, he picked up his first contract. And then that first contract, it was a micro purchase. It was just a test to see if he could to fulfill the requirements. And from that, they gave him a one year contract to provide that same service. Today, and he does graphic design. And today, they renewed that contract for an additional year and for him to go on to bigger contracts, they told him to go get registered for these different programs and then that will allow him to compete for even bigger opportunities. So again, he'd be a great person to list that I would first tell you to talk to. If you're in the programs, I would first tell you to reach out, I have Colin speak to you because he'd be a great person to talk to about overcoming your fears and what a difference it made in his life. And now he bought his first home in DC which, you know, Washington DC is super expensive. He just bought his first home in DC and he thanks me for helping him because he used the money he made in government contracts to do that. So just thought I would share that with you, Lewis. I still didn't see where you put your age at and I'm still waiting for it. And no, Gorilla Guru don't solve everything. See? No, I really, and I agree with you. You set the bar for folks and tell them when they're not cutting out. Yep, speak to the contract people. I was introduced to the score of your Eric and P-Tech in Wayne County, Michigan. Great. And again, that's, that's, start here, 12 bucks. Start here, 12 bucks. Or I think maybe notes. I think this one's nine and this one's 12. Start here. Great place to start. Look, NorCal P-Tech is only a bit bright. They got a good info just in case you wanna see how one works. There you go. Quan, I call my little P-Tech and they won't deal with me until I'm coming to years old. But Quan, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not, that's why, again, I tell people to start there because what happens, Quan, is a lot of people come on and they'll post in the comments that you could get all this free information out there that all these people are giving you and look at your experience, right? They tell you, oh, Quan, go to your, and so I just wanna make sure that I'm doing right and I'm telling you all the resources to go to that are free, right? So start with free. And once you get past that, then you can come to me. And again, I give out a whole bunch of free stuff which includes P-Techs. I don't want someone to think Quan, though, that I'm trying to hold back and not tell them about these things. Like, oh, Eric's trying to keep us a secret so he could buy their program. That's not me. That's not who I am. Anybody who watches my content knows. I've freely been giving away this information because I want you guys as partners. I need you to be built up to the level where we can partner and do deals. I don't need you to be at this level down here where you've got no value to me. I wanna build up people to where we can start partnering and going after deals because that's where the money's at. The money's not in $600 courses. The money is in $6 million contracts. Trust me, okay? When you get on a Tuesday call, I can show you profitability. I can show you what the contract was, how much we charge, how much we make it. That's where the money's at. So while, yes, these courses pay for my coaches and support the whole YouTube mission, it doesn't pay me. I make my money on government contracts that pays me to live where I live, in the city, downtown, walking distance to all the restaurants, walking distance to the beach. My government contract money pay for that, not the courses. And yes, PTAC has pro-state and local versus feds. Grat saw you down, VA online, can put the great work, explain how to get these contracts based on that. Yeah, in fact, so I wanna bring up something because someone said this to me. They said, go to the SBA before you pay for anything. And yes, that's a wonderful thing to do. However, I wanna show people something. I don't think we realize that the SBA, they actually don't train or teach you. They pay money for organizations to support and train you, but the SBA themselves actually don't train and teach you government contracting. They pay for people to teach government contracting, all right? They pay small business development centers. They fund organizations that support and teach government contracting. But all of this stuff is still only informational. It's not tactical. It's information, which again, it's like giving you a roadmap without giving you the shovels and how to actually dig or mine for gold. So if you get a roadmap to a place where the gold is at, how do you actually get the gold? That's the differences. But I wanna address this because someone said to me, hold on, I wanna share this screen. Someone said to me, where is it at? There it is. So someone said to me about going to the SBA first and to prove my point, I wanna show you this. On October the 15th, small business, does everyone see it? Can everyone see? At the top, U.S. Small Business Administration Event, Massachusetts Small Business Government Contracting Workshop. Right? Hold on, let me pull it up. All right, I wanna make sure I can see it on my screen. All right, let's scroll it out. If you scroll it out, in fact, I'm gonna take my picture off so you can see it. All right, current registered buyers, U.S. Corps of Engineers, Methune Construction, Local Sales, G-H-C-D, Colts of Manufacturing, Babson College, Military Defense, Friday, October 15th, Event Agenda, 8 a.m., Networking, 8.30 a.m., Welcome to Marks, 9 a.m., Matchmaking, 9.30 a.m., Diane Dempsey, Small Business Director of BAE Systems, 10 a.m., do you see what it says for 10 a.m.? I'm gonna highlight it because maybe y'all can't read. Okay, SBA, U.S. Small Business Administration, Eric Coffey, GovCon Giants. When people tell you these things, they're speaking a lot of times out of ignorance. They don't really know what they're saying. The SBA reaches out to experts to provide the training. The SBA paid for an organization, SBDC. SBDC then brought me in as a speaker to teach you. So now you don't have to go through that, you're getting the direct source. So why not if these people are now bringing on my students, which I can show you, because I have students that are now teaching or brought in as professional speakers who learn from me, you're getting the information from the source. When people say, oh, go to SBA before you buy something, the SBA doesn't do teaching and training. The SBA provides funding to other organizations that do provide training. The SBA coordinates events, they bring on people to do the training, but the SBA themselves do not provide actual training. They create programs, they support programs, they spend billions of dollars to help train small businesses, but they do that through the use of experts and professionals, such as myself. I just wanna say that because somebody kept putting my thing, go to SBA, go to SBA before you buy anything. So I just wanna show folks, that's right, Charlie, no, the receipts. Exactly, receipts. Lewis, 24. So that's what I'm talking about, Lewis. 24, there you go. All right, what else? I gotta get out of here, man. Eight o'clock at night. I gotta go, I gotta go. Okay, my man said the book was $9.95, $10. And Amazon getting seven of that, so I'm getting $2.95, I think. Bought the books, thank you, appreciate it. My man Lewis says 24, all right. Graphic design, look at that. Hey, so once you get inside the courses, talk to Colin, Colin is a big fan of ours. If you're not in a program, can you still join a Zoom call? So right now, Jay, you cannot join a Zoom calls. However, and what we're doing is, I'm going to, for this upcoming fiscal year, what we're gonna do is, when we start bringing on experts, I'm gonna make it into a webinar and I'm gonna charge people 75 bucks. So if you wanna join the call for that particular expert to hear them speak, we're gonna make it to a paid webinar for $75. So let's just do some quick math for folks out there, right? So let's say, okay. So if I do a webinar at $75, right, and I bring on a speaker once a month, that's 75 times 12, that's the same price you would have paid for the course. And that doesn't include the actual lessons, the modules and all the other sessions that we have. But we will make that available for Jay, because I do understand that everyone doesn't have the money and I'm totally okay with that. Make sure by the way, everyone give me a thumbs up, give me a like on the thing, on Facebook, wherever you at, give me a like, make sure you have thumbs up on this. So yeah, Jay, but we will make some of the trainings available via webinar. You won't be able to sit in the Zoom call, but what I will do is probably create a separate webinar where you can actually listen in and send your questions to people on the Zoom call. I'm gonna reserve that for members because they paid to be there and they could be in the room and actually talk to our guests and interact with them. So, and yes, awkwardly, where are you at, Lewis? We're here to support you. Lewis, we're gonna support you no matter whether you're in the program or out the program, that's fine. You keep coming to YouTube lives and participating. I'm gonna support you no matter what, because that's just what I do. Free, no problem, appreciate you. All right, what else? I'd like to strike a good balance on my keys of being selfish and not having your best interests at heart. Thank you, I appreciate that. Thank you, Angel, I appreciate you. Love it. Yeah, I would hope so. It's just that sometimes, and I know that this comes with the territory, but it's hard for when you make 500 free videos and then you ask somebody to pay for something and people say, oh, now he's a sale, sale, sale. And I'm like, no one complain when I make 500 free videos that I put out publicly. No one ever said anything. No one ever knocked me for making 500 free videos my time. How much time did that take? So do I have a compassion or any type of empathy when you say, Eric, I can't watch all those videos because it's a lot of stuff. I made them, I know. I took the time to make them, record them, think about the content, learn the content, regurgitate the content, share with you the stuff and then turn around and be able to edit it and produce it. I'm just, and yes, original 13, this is the best comment that you could have put. There are so many agencies willing to help newbies. There's so many agencies willing to help newbies is an understatement. It's an understatement. There are people that look like you, that talk like you, that come from where you've come from that are sitting on the other side of that that wanna give you a chance and you're not allowing to give you a chance because you're not qualified, you're not capable and you don't know what you're talking about. Give them an opportunity to help you but you gotta help yourself first, become procurement ready and then when you get to them, show up and know what you're talking about and they're gonna wanna help you because they identify with you. They know how hard it is because they sit behind a desk and they're wondering the same thing like could I leave my nine to five job and do this? People out there appreciate that. All right, I got another challenge coming up when you contact the contact officer what should be said, receive case goes from my first bit. Yeah, we talk about that in the course, 18 lucky. There's different things that you can say based on your scenarios and what you're asking for. So again, there's a lot of stuff you can say to contact an officer but are you in the market research phase? Are you looking at forecast lists? Are you responding to a source of saw? Are you responding to RFP? Are you looking to talk to an Ostebu? There's probably six or seven different scenarios that I could think of. So depending upon the scenario that you're in depends on what you should say. Can I submit all the paperwork? Do myself the one in contract? Do I need a few employees? You can absolutely submit all your paperwork to win your first contract. You don't need a few employees at all. But I would say you should probably have someone that you can talk to to look over what you're doing that can just make sure because I don't want you to lose money. And so I wanna make sure that what you submit is the right thing. So even if you don't have any employees you should have someone who has experience in this area looking at what you're doing. And I don't care where that person comes from. Find someone in your local area, if at the very least who's done this and who's willing to help out the next group, the next generation of Gulfcon students and have them look over your stuff. There are a lot, listen, I'm not the only one out here willing to help. I know that I have the biggest voice because I'm on YouTube and you see me all the time but I'm not the only one far few in between. There's been a lot of success stories that I've heard from people reaching out to my podcast guests. Now, when you reach out to my podcast guests, don't call them and say, I wanna know how to do government contracts. You sound like an idiot. Repeat after me, do not call them and say I want to do government contracts. You sound like an idiot. When you call them, you better know what you're asking for. You better have a request and you better know a little bit about what you're talking about in terms of your space and your industry and have done some research. Do like my man, Sean. Go back and watch my videos and prepare. So that that way when you call them, you say, hi, so and so. I understand that you work at the US Aviation Administration and you do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah for them. I saw you on Eric's podcast and I just like yourself would like that is the same type of client that I like to have. However, my business is complimentary to your business and I think there might be some strategic alliances that we can create and form based on the market research that I did in that space. Would you be interested in talking to me? Yeah, big difference. So again, don't not, most of us are, like I said, we're already defeated in our mind before the world defeats us. We're brainwrestling with ourselves. So again, I just want folks out here to know, to understand there's a lot of people like, hey, Sean, have a good night, brother. MJ, yes, you're the contents. You're welcome, Sean. You know, the thing is, there's just, there's a lot of people I heard that willing to help, that want to help and they'll go out their way to help small businesses. They want to get back my pot. I had two podcast interviews today. They both said the same thing. They're so blessed, so fortunate to be in our situation. In fact, I'm going to read to you a quote that one of my guests put on her, she actually has this quote on her wall and I wrote it down and here it is. And she said this to me and she said, this is why she helps small businesses. Her quote says, I still remember the days when I prayed for what I have now. I still remember the days when I prayed for what I have now. And because of that, that reminder on her wall, she continues to give back to small businesses, to help small businesses. And that's why I want to bring her on to our Tuesday calls so that she can talk directly to the women who have small businesses who wanted to get started and encourage them and support them because that to me tells me a lot about this person, their character, who they are, what they stand for and I totally agree with that. And they have great energy. In fact, their energy is contagious and I want that for all of you. And so I want to make sure that she's one of the very first people that I invite and I told her today on our Tuesday calls to come in and she even said to me, she's hiring two more people, senior executive people. And once she hires them and she's going to be able to have a lot of free time to do all the other stuff that she wants to do, like give back to small businesses. So there's a lot of people out here that are willing to help. You just got to go out and look for them. Can a PTAC counselor overlook your proposal? Some PTAC contents? Yes, a lot of them, no. And I'll tell you why some of the PTAC counselors say that they don't want the liability of reviewing numbers and proposals. So I would try it though. Look, you ain't gonna know if you don't ask. So hey, have your PTAC person look over for you. Yes, there's definitely templates in the courses on proposals, there's templates in the courses. I actually use an IDIQ proposal. We have Maria's proposal, that's one contracts. We have all of that stuff inside the course. You're welcome, Marcia. By the fact, Marcia, you're welcome. I actually, I saw your message in the community chat. I think it was, and see, there's not no people reach out to me. I saw your message, Marcia. Somebody's name starts with a D, is it Daniella? I already sent it to Erica to reach out and give you a call. So Erica should be giving you a call tomorrow. Correct, don't waste the resource. All right, listen, I gotta run 828. I've been out here two and a half hours. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Listen, if you have any more questions, give us a call, 786-477-0477. Thanks guys, look forward to talking to you soon. Appreciate it. Also, if you need to send an email, cause you're afraid to call us here, send us an email and we'll be more than happy to help you. Thanks so much. Take care and good night.