 I know a lot of times they say, well, Eric, you know, when I when I reach out to one of these large organizations like a GD, for example, they say they'll put me on a list and then nothing happens. Is there something that they should be doing differently? How can they distinguish themselves? This is the advice I always give to small businesses. I think that this is a relationship based business. And the best thing you can do is number one, nurture our relationship with a decision maker in the in one of these large businesses and kind of attach yourself at the hip and to that person and just constantly, not constantly, but, you know, every couple of weeks be, you know, have lunch with them, reach out to them, nurture a relationship with them. So that way you are at the top of their mind when it is when a contract is coming out and they need to fulfill a requirement, they'll they'll remember you. And that's typically not someone, I mean, it could be someone from the contract side, you might want to work that angle, but you might want to consider also working the angle of someone who is dealing with a large volume of proposals that they have to deal with, whether it's a business development person or a capture manager who's working a few different deals. So you might want to do that instead of going wide and trying to hit, you know, GD and all these other companies, why don't you just pick a few that you think you could be successful with too, depending on your size and and nurture a couple of relationships within within there. And then the other suggestion I would say is bring your client relationships to the primes. So if you can nurture some customer relationships in the same way that of customers you ideally would want to work with, and you can say, hey, I can make an introduction introduction to, you know, customers so and so. And I hear that this opportunity is coming out, you would be a great pride, be a great fit for a prime and we would love to partner with you on it. That's kind of a slam dunk way to do it in my opinion. That's how I would do it if I were Oh, I love that, Jennifer. I really do. I'm I'm my wills are already turning in my head and some things I'm looking at. You know, we've been to the Navy and one of the clients that I represent does about 20 million. And they said that their projects start at 20 million. And so that we need to bring a large prime to the table. But I like that idea is we have the relationship with the client and they're happy to work with us. But unfortunately, they just didn't have any projects that were of that size magnitude that we could handle. So I love that. And I can imagine that the majority of the people that you know, I work with, they're in the same situation. What I found recently, and I don't know if you've had the same experiences, I've noticed that even though they're setting aside a large portion of the small business dollars, the contracts are getting larger. And so it's making it more difficult for the small companies to to to jump in and get started. And that's what I've seen, just, you know, reading reports from the 809 panel, and looking at data from some of the other GAO reports, that's kind of like the analysis, that's what I kind of saw from the data, what is suggested. So they definitely need a way to kind of get into and engage into the process. But I like that. So they should basically bring someone to the table. I think that to me, makes the most sense. Now you're saying nurture relationship with the business developer, or the capture manager, but how would someone find that person? Well, you don't need to find that many people. But one way you can find it is through word of mouth. And you can also find it through networking events, or you can find it through LinkedIn. I mean, you can do searches of LinkedIn for company, filter it by company, by role. And then you can see the list of people that are in, you know, business development role at a certain company. And you can start looking at their profiles and see which ones are working with customers that you would want to work with. And then when you approach them, so here's a mistake I see a lot of small businesses do. A lot of small businesses, I can't tell you how many will reach out to me on a daily basis. And they'll say, hey, we're doing business with you guys with an X, Y and Z agency. Would you like to have lunch with me? And so we can talk about where we can, we can work together. And to me, that is, they're not giving me enough information to why would I want to have lunch with them? It's not that I don't want to have lunch with them. Don't get me wrong. I'd like meeting people. It's just, I don't have enough time to meet with every single person that reaches out to me. It says they want to do business with me because they're small business. I know a lot of small businesses. So if they reached out to me with what we were talking about earlier and said, hey, I'm a small business, I'm a service disabled, veteran owned small business. And I heard about this great opportunity with the Navy from customer so and so. And we're really seeking out a large prime to partner with on it. And we think that your company would be the ideal fit. Are you guys looking at this opportunity? And if so, can I can we set up a 15 minute call to discuss who I could discuss our capabilities and set up a longer meeting after that? I think that is the best approach because 15 minutes most people can spare. You've already articulated what your value is. You're bringing a customer and you've identified an opportunity which they may or may not already be aware of. Hmm. No, I like it. I like it. I think that thing, you know, part of the idea behind this is giving people who are listening actionable steps and practical steps. And I think that was very like spot on for activities that people can leave from here listening to us have this conversation today and take back it implement right away. Any what other type of mistakes do you hear or you see the small businesses make anything else that you could think of with small businesses? I think that small businesses get very, very tactical and reactive when it comes to business development in general. I think that most small businesses use the excuse that, Hey, we're small business so we can't have a process so we can't have a strategy. And instead of having a strategy of, Okay, this year I want to go. These are the accounts that I want to focus on. These are the customers I want to focus on. These are the opportunities at the beginning of the year and build a pipeline. And instead of doing that and then assigning resources to it, I see them more kind of waiting for the chasing the next shiny object or waiting for the next opportunity and completely overextending themselves and not actually engaging with customers or engaging with those partners that they could work with the other large businesses or even small businesses. I think you said earlier, they go wide instead of deep. Yeah. That's what I see is the biggest mistake for small businesses and growth. Interesting. Someone has said something similar in the market, which is when you said chase the shiny object, I actually wrote an article on the shiny object syndrome, which so it touched on. Because it's something that a lot of entrepreneurs have. So the same traits that make you entrepreneurial also, they can work against you in some of the ways where you're off to chasing the next shiny object. And it's interesting because I've seen where in particular, like 8A firms, if someone needs an 8A, they go after, if it's like say a metal building and then it might be a security job and then it might be to sell some furniture, but they never really focus on building a business. And so at the end of the day, when the 8A program is over with, they're left and they don't have a business and they don't have relationships and they don't have customers because they didn't go deep. They went wide. So I think that's great. I like that. And it's funny that you said that also about they make the excuse not to actually put together a process. And that's why I asked you that because I've actually never heard of this like a formal process, the way that you described it before. So I think that I've never heard of that before. I mean, we have a process in terms of like he said, assigning persons to work on the proposal. But you seem to have something much more structured and organized. Now, the guy that you, the person that you interviewed Eric, what's his name? Eric Gregory. Okay, I noticed that you referenced him. He was part of APMP, the Association for Proposal Management Professionals. Right. Is that something that you recommend that small businesses that are getting into writing proposals for the DOD? Is it something they should have maybe someone from their office become certified or go through this process? How do you feel about that? I think APMP is a wonderful organization. In terms of the certification, I think that's a great step. But joining the organization, I don't think costs that much money as an individual. It's a good networking opportunity. They have a conference every year and they, you can learn about all the proposal best practices in some of those processes. Now, the person we were talking about, Eric Gregory, he was a CEO of APMP a couple of different times. And he's also part of an organization called Shipley Associates, which is a pretty well known. They sort of created the industry standard in our industry, in terms of putting together a process and methodology for proposal management, capture management, and the whole BD life cycle. So they offer training courses as well that individuals can take or companies can take. So that's always a good option too, in terms of learning what the process is. I understand. Okay. So we'll make sure that we definitely have some of the links to those websites and information and the show notes for this, just in case anyone's interested in pursuing that. No, when I read the article, and you may want to just touch on the article briefly, what it was about. And it looks like you did an interview with them and you wrote that on LinkedIn. You want to share some of the takeaways from the article? So what one of my hobbies is to write a blog and a vlog and film a vlog every week on LinkedIn. I don't have my own website yet or anything like that. But I wanted to do that because, A, I thought that there's a lot of people in my profession in my industry that are interested in capture management topics, tips and tricks, capture life, professional development, those kinds of topics. And I'd like to write, like you said, I'm a journalism major and I enjoy doing that. So that's kind of my hobby. And so in doing that, I don't always like to make it all about myself. I was really interested in how capture management has evolved over time because it's a fairly new profession and it is a niche profession. And if you go outside of the DC area, generally, people have no idea what a capture manager even is. So a friend of mine who is... Wait, time out. In fairness, Jennifer, I didn't know what it was until I met you. That doesn't surprise me at all. That's very normal. So in fairness, I don't want to be like, I'm the A student here. I had to look it up and research it when I saw that. And I was like, what is a capture manager? And again, I've been doing GovCon for 12 years now. And I've never heard the capture manager. But again, we've never worked with any of those large DoD contractors either. So... Right. So a friend of mine who is actually an APMP made the introduction to Eric for One My Path because I wanted to... I know that he's an industry veteran. He's actually been in the industry for over 40 years. So that was kind of the impetus of my interview. I wanted to know how the profession had evolved over the last several decades. And he gave me a great overview of that. And obviously, he's impacted a lot of people's lives because a lot of people commented on the article and said, hey, he was one of my mentors. He taught me everything I knew. He was a legend in this industry and on and on and on. So clearly that definitely struck a chord with many of the readers. So it's happy.