 Hey GovCon Giants family, Eric Coffey here. Let me answer some questions from our guests and hopefully I can answer for you and clarify issues or questions that you've had. These were sent in to me over at the email service at govcongiants.com. If you have a question, send it to us over at servicegovcongiants.com and hopefully we may have a chance to answer your question on the next episode. So today we're going to answer a couple questions from people. This one, dbass27andchimo.com, is there any way to get around the fact that your company is not two years or older to get an A&A certificate? I might have the wrong certification, but you know what I mean. Absolutely, this is a very commonly asked question whether or not your company needs two years to be an A&A program. Two years is not a requirement, it's a standard. There have been people who have been awarded the A&A certification earlier than two year period of time. However, it's not something that I recommend. Remember the A&A is a nine year program. Go back and look at some of the videos that we have discussing A&A. In fact, let's pull up on the screen. Here's one video where we talk about the A&A certification and waiting for it. Here's another video here on the screen where we discuss why it's important to get A&A and some of the reasons why having your A&A certification too early is cause for failure. So again, I don't want to discourage anyone out there, but if you've only been in business for two years or less, it's probably not a good idea to get A&A. The rule of thumb for A&A certifications is wait until someone asks you if you have A&A. So by the time that you're doing contracts and you're winning, you're doing all the activities and someone says, hey, debask, by the way, do you happen to have A&A? When you get that question asked, it's the right time to go out and start getting A&A certification. Or when you find yourself needing to partner with A&As to go after contract opportunities, that also is a great time to look in and explore the potential of getting your A&A certificate not beforehand. I hope this question, I was able to answer your question for you today. Number two, if I get a contract and they want to see your body of work, but I don't have any, how can we prove you have body of work or work when you're just a middle man? So again, going back, this same person asked a question about the A&A. Now they're asking about not having a body of work. So listen, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, dogs and cats, I don't want to screw me against anyone, having a, not having body of work, not having experience. First of all, you should not want any type of certificate. If you don't even have a contract or any body of experience, I would not even encourage you to go get your state certificate or a local certificate because the first thing that any of us have to do is learn how to work. So to answer this question, if you're trying to be a business owner and you have never done a contract before, then I don't think business owner is the route that I would take given that set of circumstances. I would go out and learn how to do business. Well, Eric, how do I do that? Well, you can work for an organization that's already doing business that's in the field that you want to. So if you want to get into, let's say, the painting field, you can go work for a painting company. If you want to get into the IT field, you can work for an IT company. And then as you are learning how to actually do work and do contracts, they don't have to be federal. Okay? That's not what we're saying. We're just saying as you learn how to do work and do contracts and activity, now you can take that and now you've got some experience on how to price jobs, bid jobs. It doesn't matter if it's commercial or not. You learn how to do the work and the activities first. So hear me out. First of all, you've got time. There's no rush. There's no reason for you to go out there and jump out there and make mistakes because believe it or not, I'm going to tell you a secret. I put their ear to the window, I'm going to tell you a secret. People lose money in government contracting. Yeah. They do. Secret. Reveal. Why do they lose money? Because they don't know how to bid a job. If you don't know how to price the project, if you don't know how to do the work, it's really easy for you to lose money. Because the government's not going to come in and make up for your mistakes or your downfall. The government's not going to come in and step in and say, hey, we realized that you underpriced yourself and we're just going to want to help you out and supplement what you lost. It's not what they do. So the government's not going to teach you how to do your business. You have to already know how to do your business in order to do good business. And again, I want all of you out there doing good business and making a lot of money. I wish everyone listening to me could go buy a big old, huge, mungus boat and drive your boat down rivers that they don't belong on because you've got so much money that you're going to put your boat on this river and you're going to pay the fines because your boat don't belong in that river. That's what I want for everyone. But you can't do that not learning business and not learning contracting. So again, I want to encourage everyone, if you do not know how to run a business, then it's probably not for you to go start off doing federal contracting and not know how to run a business. Now, if you don't have a business or you don't know how to run a business or you're not interested in starting a business, that's okay. You can become a consultant. Which is something that we teach over at GovCon EDU. So we talk about this and I have some of my most popular videos is on becoming a consultant. Right? So we want to talk about and teach you how to become a consultant. You learn the federal contracting arena, right? So you learn to learn, go to the jargon, all the buzz words. You learn the people who you should be talking to. So you learn all that stuff to be such yourself to become a consultant. And then you get paid for your expertise in government contracting while the business owner does the business. But you can't have it both ways. You can't not know, learn a contractor or not want to learn a contractor and not want to learn how to run a business. Sorry, it just doesn't work like that. So hey, listen, thank you for the questions as always. I appreciate it. Looking forward to answering more questions just like this.