 Today I want to talk about how to grow your business in a federal marketplace. I've got some ideas of my own that I like to share with you because I see some hesitancy, I see some reluctance, I see a lot of people actually stepping back and being afraid to put themselves out there. Let me demonstrate to you an example of what I mean. We're talking about taking your business right and going from zero to millions of dollars in overnight success through the federal marketplace. The reason why you're having a hard time, the reason why I believe that you're struggling out there is because you're trying to do it all on your own. And not only are you trying to do it all on your own, you think that you can come into this place, this market, and start right by being some small firm and then automatically, you know, over time grow and build credibility, right? And then at the same time you expect that to happen in a fast succession. The problem with that model, the problem with that approach is if you think that growing strategically over time is going to help you achieve the success that you want, you're sincerely wrong. And you're wrong because the government cycles are so long that the opportunity that you're looking at may be gone for the next five years. And therefore, you have to wait another five-year window before that opportunity exists again. What do I mean? When a lot of the contracts that you're looking at, they may already be put into BPAs, IDIQs, MACs. They're already set aside. They're already tied up and locked down for five years. So if you think organic growth is going to help you achieve your ultimate goals, then you're sadly mistaken. Organic growth only works if you're building some sort of product, if you're building some sort of revenue generation model, if you're building a subscription-based service, something to that nature. But when you're looking at the federal marketplace, you need to take advantage of whatever opportunities exist right now, why you are active, why you have the energy, why you have the motivation, why you have the passion, why you have the commitment, you need to pounce on all the opportunities that are in front of you today. How do you do that when you're a small guy? Easy! You become a consultant. I am going to focus this entire video on why I believe that the only route for someone that is starting out, that someone has no experience, is to become a consultant. So let's talk about that. Become a consultant. What does that mean? I haven't been a consultant, but we're gonna talk about in macro level terms. Becoming a consultant means you, right? You know, Larry Dick, Joe, Joshua, you know, Stephanie, Monica, Monique, you out there will have a client, right? A high-ticket client. We'll have a client out there that's a successful business, that's working, they're making sales, they've got staff, they've got employees, they've got money. You find a client out there and that client, you're going to represent them in the federal marketplace. Now, when you represent them, their capability statement is going to have your information on it. Their SAM profile, again, it's going to have your information on it. You're going to be a point of contact for all of the jobs, all of the bids, talking to all of federal agencies. You're going to approach that person, you're going to agree to work with them in exchange for a commission, right? Some people may want to get a consultant fee up front, some people may want to get a monthly stipend, but at the end of the day, you want a part of the action. So make sure that whatever deal you structure, you get part of the action. Now, once you've agreed to have someone work with you and you've agreed on whatever that split is of how you get part of the action, whether it's a small piece monthly and then a larger piece on the back end or the reverse vice versa, maybe you get a no monthly stipend and a larger percentage of the contracts, maybe you get a small monthly stipend and a smaller percentage of the contract. Whatever that deal looks like, however you make that arrangement up, the point is this. You want to get an arrangement with someone who's already established. You want to get an agreement in place. You want a team, remember a mentor, whatever you want to call them. You want to have someone on your side that has past performance, that has experience, that has team members, that has quality people, that has resumes, that has capital, that has all of these things that you lack. You want this person to have. Why? You are going to compliment that with your passion, your drive, your energy, your excitement, your vigor, your personality, your time, right? Because the people that have all this stuff, they don't have time. People that have money, what they spend their money to buy back time. People that don't have money, spend their time trying to obtain money. So you are going to bring the time element. You're going to bring the element of the renouncement, right? You're going to go out there and charge hard and heavy at pursuing the federal marketplace. You're going to study all the videos. You're going to study all the classes. You're going to read all the documentation. You're going to read all the elicitation. You're going to know who buys their services, right? You're going to put together your package for this client. You're going to call on their ostoboos. You're going to do all the things that it takes to get them in a position to land a contract. And guess what? The best part of it all is when you show up and you're talking to someone about this person, you know that they're going to perform. You know that they have the ability to execute. You know that they have the financial wherewithal, the resources and things like that. So let me show you on the whiteboard over here an illustration of what I mean and why I believe this is the way to go. By the way, before we get to the whiteboard example, there is a homework assignment today that I want you to watch a clip from Dan Pina. Dan Pina is a guy who did $50 billion. You can look at him up on YouTube and he gives talks and seminars and things like that. But Dan Pina uses very exact same model to grow his business right when he only had $800 in his pocket. He's the same consultant model going after the federal government. In fact, I'm going to play a clip for you right now. So I thought to myself, who are the stupidest people in the United States to do business with? And I automatically said the federal government. Without a doubt, they're the stupidest. They pay $600 for a bolt, $2,000 for a toilet seat, et cetera, et cetera. I can go on and on. Now, how do I get in the knickers of the federal government? Legally, morally, professionally? I didn't know about the minority angle. It would have been easier if I had thought that through, but I didn't know I was a minority yet. So I went and I found that they bought and sold jet fuel and I decided I convinced the refinery named Marion Refining. First concept, how do you create instant track records? I went to an established business that had been in business for 50, 60, 70 years called Marion Refining. How did I have a rapport with him? He was a retired general, former army officer, no genius, names Garcia, names Lopez, even if they shouldn't, they probably do business together. Okay, I went to them and I told them that I'm going to get you a contract or I already have a contract to supply jet fuel. He says, doing business with the government is too much of a hassle. Too much paperwork, et cetera, et cetera. I said, I'll do the paperwork. I went to the federal government saying, now I have a refinery that'll do jet fuel and I acted merely as an intermediary. That's all I was. How was that clip? You see what I mean? So that's just a little sample tidbit of Dan Pina and how he grew his business. I strongly believe unequivocally, this is the fastest, absolute fastest way to grow yourself in the federal market and achieve whatever your financial goals are. Let's go to the whiteboard. All right, well, we're at the whiteboard and the reason we're at the whiteboard is because I want to show you a visual example of people, when they talk about growing organically, this is what they think of their mind. This is what they picture. This is what we've all been programmed to believe is the way to successfully grow a business. You start small, you grow up here to the top, you take your time and you start to learn a business and build. And that's wonderful. That's fine and dandy. The issue that I have is when what I'm teaching people is I want everyone out there to achieve $5 million in revenue. The problem is, for a lot of you out there, if you try and take this approach, you're not going to end up with the result that you're looking for. There's a couple of problems with this model and we'll talk about that briefly as I go through the example. One is and how I got to this conclusion was very easily. If you look at, say, Malcolm Gladwell, his Outliers book where they talk about 10,000 hours to become an expert, to become a professional, right? 10,000 hours breaks down to about five years of time. So that puts you here. Now, the 10,000 hours in five years is because it's 40 hours a week. Well, a lot of us out there have other jobs. We've got other things that we're going on in our life. This is not really paying the bills. So this is something that we're kind of doing in the back burner part time on the side. So you're not putting in 40 hours a week. You may not even be putting in 20 hours a week. So you're not really putting your undivided attention in it. So if you take and you still have to achieve your 10,000 hours, you're probably at 20 hours a week is going to put you out 10 years. And that's much more realistic. The other side of the coin is not only are you not putting in the full 40 hours a week, business doesn't grow this way because you're not taking account for down terms, right? So business grows. So you start here and you go up and then you go down and you go up and you go down and you go, let's say you go up a little bit more and go up, you know. So I mean, hopefully over time, right, you're going to grow. But every one of these dots gets a year of your life going, right? And everyone misses the same thing. We're going to go up and down and up and down up and down. But again, you want the line to be progressively going upward. So again, it doesn't go stair steps all the way to the top. Like, but you know, when we take and we factor this in. So at the end of the day, the reason why I wrote it in this fashion was because one, we want simple math to be able to explain the concept today. And two, I want to show you a different approach. And that's what we're going to get into in Y4. By the way, if you don't like math, do not fret. This is going to be some pretty simple math. All right. So don't worry about the math part. I'll show you very easily how this comes together. This is definitely worth watching. Make sure you stay till the end because at the very end, we're going to show a video clip from Dan Pina, Dan Pina, the $50 billion dollar guy. And he did exactly the same thing to grow his business in the photo arena back in the 80s. So stay tuned and make sure you watch the end of this video. What's important is that I knew, first of all, I created an instant track record. Because then after I got the $20 million contract, I went around the other side of the defense fuel center through another door, same building, and said, I've done business with the federal government. Oh, you got an instant track record. He says, and then I got $30 million worth of business, and that's how I did $50 million in business, my first year. One employee, my wife would help me fill out the paperwork, I mean, which was this deep. Okay. But the important concept that I learned was joint venture. It was a lot easier doing business with somebody else, allowing, they looked at their financials, they looked at their ability to perform, not my ability to perform. So let's do some math. All right. Now, most of people, like I said, they want to do small contracts, because that's where their brains tell them, because of fear, they don't have courage, they're not comp, you know, whatever the reason may be, people told us we should start. So if we look at this example, we started $25,000 contracts, and you know, we take the first year, and let's say we get lucky, we get two contracts, $50,000 for the simple math purposes, let's say you make 20%. 20%, it's a fair number, right? 20% you make $10,000. Yeah, not a lot of money, but hey, it's a good start. You know, so now you're rolling, you understand the marketplace, you've got some experience, the next year you double that, you do $100,000, all right, put 20k in the bank account. It pays some bills, but not a whole lot, not enough to change your lifestyle or make you even walk away from your job, right? $20,000 in terms of an annual salary, about $10 an hour. So that's why I put these red buttons here, you're still, technically, you're still in the red. Now, again, we're grooving, the train's moving, and we kind of got this thing going, you know, we've got some past performance, people know who we are, so now we need $250,000, you know, put $50k, right, you take home $50,000, all right, you're in the yellow. The issue though is we're not here to teach you how to make $50,000, you already, a lot of people can already go out there and get a job working for the government making $50,000 a year, so why would I want to tell someone to walk away from their job to replace it with a $50,000 heading? Because at the end of the day, if you're doing all this for $50,000, it's just going to be a big headache for most people out there. So I would much rather see you go and become a government employee and sit around and take a coffee break and stuff and give me contracts while making a $50,000 salary, that's just my opinion. So now moving on, we're going to say now, you know, you got the groove of it, we're moving into year four, right, and now 20 contracts, $25,000, $500,000, you're taking $100,000. Now you're in blue, $100,000, okay, $100,000 is a good salary, a lot of people out there, they strive to make $100,000, that's kind of their benchmark of making, but do you realize that 20 contracts, that's a lot of contracts, that's two, almost two contracts a month, that's a lot of work to make $100,000, grant at the $25,000 level. And then we're going to go ahead and fill in the blanks and it's at a million dollars, right, now I, oh sorry I didn't math wrong, now you're taking in $200,000 and at $2 million, taking at $400,000. Now $200,000 puts you in the top 5% of people in the United States, that's where you want to be at, $400,000 puts you somewhere, depending on what state you live in, probably putting the top 1%, the low $400,000, high $300,000, depending on your county and the criteria, but these are things, these is where I want you to be at, this is the goals right for the people out there, this is where I want to put my students at in a $200,000, $400,000 in their pocket range, right. Now as you see going up the chart organically stair-stepping your way up, you're, you know, you're talking about five, six, seven years out, maybe before you could hit those numbers, assuming all of this stuff went well, assuming that you built your team, you didn't have any problems with your supplier credit, you paid all your bills on time, you didn't get audit by the IRS and tax evasion or, you know, someone in your office, they still money from you, someone to default on a project, assuming that all of this stuff went correct, you know, hey now you're, you're getting somewhere, that's one way of looking at it. Now let me show you the approach that I took and the approach that I, that I want to teach the people out there who are the rhinoceros, the people who are really to charge it hard, the go-getters, the people that really want to accelerate their lifestyle, accelerate their earning potential. Let me show you the consultant approach. Now let's look at the consultant approach. Let's say we have a client, I have a client right now, that this client does 20 million a year in business. The client has 5 million to 15 million bonding, which is their capacity, and they're looking at projects between one and five million dollars, right? So let's say your client is looking at products one to five million dollars because this is their capacity. Guess what? We, as a consultant, we're going to choose clients who've already done all this stuff. So the client that we're talking about has already done everything in here. They've already surpassed this area, right? And so now that they've surpassed this arena, you are going to find them up in here somewhere. So they're going to be somewhere in this range, one million, two million dollar jobs, or maybe your client's here, five million K and up projects. Okay, no problem. So again, let's say your client is up in this arena. And what is the strategy we teach? We want to, again, we want to be a win-win-win for everybody. So we don't want to take too much of the money, right? We want to just take our fair share. So we talk about taking 25% of the profit, right? That's profit. Because at the end of the day, if the client doesn't make any money, they can't pay you, you know, no one makes any money. So we're talking about 25% of the profit. But guess what? When we start up here at this level, we skip all this back here, the profit is $200,000. So 25% of the profit here is 50K. And if we go up to the five million dollar level, right, the profit on five million is what? One million dollars, 25%, 250K. So now you're playing in a league of two 50,000 to 250,000 dollars. If you learn the federal arena, remember we talked about you learning everything and you got it going down here. If you learn the federal arena, same skills, right, same stuff in your brain, same contract forms, SF-18 forms, SF-1448 forms, standard forms, the government forms don't change just because the numbers get bigger. Same forms, we call them the same master boos, you're being with the same contracting officers. In fact, I had a contracting officer I met with that told me he only does contracts over a hundred million. Same form, same document, same contracting people, the same guy, right, same type of people. Now, instead of you dealing with 25,000 during this range, you're dealing in this range. Now, yeah, you're not making all the money, but for every job, every contract that you're pursuing, you know, you're gonna make between 50 and 250,000 dollars in your pocket. And furthermore, you once you get the contract, the company here, right, this company, they already know how to do all that stuff. They got, remember, they have the team, they got the people, they got the resources, they got suppliers, they got vendors, they're going to get the credit, they're going to execute the project, they're going to perform the job. If it's buying a thousand computers and networking all the computers together, they're going to buy the thousand computers, they're going to network them together, they're going to run a fiber that connects to the building, and they're going to turn over the keys to the owner to get their check. And that's what I teach. So when I started out the same way like you guys, down here with zero experience, I jumped up to this area and automatically the company I was working with, we were putting it, we're pulling two million dollars, right? So I, because again, I did a little bit more of the work, I was, we were splitting up 50% of probably because I was helping with the jobs and stuff like that. I helped actually participate in more. So we're splitting 400,000, I was putting 200,000 dollars in my pocket in the first year. So why would I, if I knew that happened to me, why would I want to teach you guys to grow this way? And you know, this time that you guys can spend, if you spend five years doing what I did, and you're putting 50 to 250,000 dollars in your pocket, right? How much money at the end of five years are you going to have saved up in the bank account, right? What are you going to have saved up? Five years, you're going to have somewhere between five, six, seven, eight hundred thousand dollars in the bank. That's the bottle that we teach. This is what, this is the bottle I'm trying to push people to. I want you guys to get this and you have to understand this. Watch this video two, three, four, five times if you have to. Please, because again, remember the government cycles are so long that a lot of times, and we're, I mean I'm experiencing the same thing out here, a lot of times they've already got contracts out and placed with companies established for five years windows. So you can't break in for five more years. Well, five years, you're down the road. Listen, in five years I can guarantee you, if you don't get contracts, you guys have already given up three months, you've given up. I know people are emailing here, you've been trying for two months, and they've given up. So I can't expect anyone out there to stay on this long, right, taking this approach and still be out there, still passionate about it and pursuing it hard and, you know, doing more than just kicking the tires. However, if you go out and find a high ticket consultant client that you can work with that's willing to pay you, then you can start off here and now all of a sudden within the first year or two, right, you're bringing a hundred, $150,000 a year. Very easily, right, piggybacking off of this person's work, their history and everything they did, and they're happy as well because what? Who's not happy if you are, again, we're looking at our money, but look at this guy. Who's not happening if you're putting a million bucks in his bank account? Who's not happy about that? You know, who's not happy if, let's say, we do, my goal was 10 million, right? Who's not happy if they, okay, they're going to get $2 million additional going back into their bank account and they're going to cut your check for $500,000. They still have $1.5 million that they didn't have before. All right, so who's going to tell you know that? Who's going to tell you know they don't want to initial $1.5 million in their bank account that they didn't have to actually go out and earn that someone came and brought it to them. People pay people to go out and do this kind of stuff with no expectation of return. You're going to go out and work out arrangement where you're going to go ahead and put this whole thing together and you're going to do all the work and at the end of the day everyone's going to make money. Hey, listen, I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope it makes some sense to some people out there. I hope it's going to change the mindset, the thinking, the mentality. Stay tuned. Watch afterwards for the clip on Dan Pina to see how he grew his business with the same model. Hey, thanks for watching as always. Eric Hoffing, we're out of here.