Competition sets up savings, opportunities for small business

October 01, 2019

By Alison Kohler

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A series of heads-up efforts by GSA Heartland Region contracting officers have set up years of good pricing for American taxpayers and contracting opportunities for small businesses in certain socio-economic categories. 

“What we did was a new approach this year,” said Danny Talbert, GSA contracting officer.

Talbert used an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracting vehicle to reserve small business construction contract awards for a pool of small, disadvantaged businesses, HUBZone, Women-Owned, and Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned small businesses. The IDIQ pool was aimed at helping Region 6 sustain success of supporting small business without sacrificing pricing, time or market competition.

Massive marketing

Talbert and other teammates also used a massive marketing effort to find the largest amount of qualified construction service vendors. Now GSA Public Buildings Service contracting officers can solicit and award task orders for repair and alteration projects at GSA-managed properties in the target geographic areas: Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, as well as Kansas City and St. Louis in Missouri.

“The level of marketing that went into this resulted in the tremendous response rate -- 96 proposals received in the five geographic areas. It was an extraordinary marketing effort, and the results speak to that,” said Shawn Starostka, branch chief, Heartland Region PBS Acquisition Management Division.

“The first thing we did was go out to the small dynamic business search engine we have from (U.S. Small Business Administration) and punch in criteria to search every vendor,” Talbert said. “We also published a sources sought (to gauge interest) on (the legacy government opportunities site); then reached out to 500 vendors via email to let them know about the procurement and drum up some business for it. From there we had an outreach effort we coordinated with SBA, where they came to (GSA Region 6 headquarters) to let contractors learn about the upcoming opportunities.”

Continual competition

Talbert said language included in the base contract required contractors to competitively bid on 50% of future task orders, or the contractor would be subject to GSA not exercising its option to renew the yearly agreement with them. 

“This was our way of giving ourselves options to remove folks who don’t show interest, so they provide us with competitive bids. Our goal is to get competition on every order,” Talbert said.

The hard work wasn’t over after the marketing phase finished. The process to evaluate the many proposals was daunting, but Justin Panasiuk, team lead and contracting officer, used an efficient process to prepare collaboration tools and make the source selection panels’ job easier.

Savvy sheet set-up

Panasiuk set up separate sheets for each panel member to input their technical evaluation comments and then the panel reconvened on each proposal. A team of contracting officers and project managers then reviewed the final report to make sure the evaluations matched up with the solicitation. 

“It was quite the undertaking. We had to evaluate every proposal individually; then meet as a group to determine a consensus rating for each evaluation factor for each vendor, but the hard work was worth it,” Panasiuk said.

“I would give Justin kudos on that. Nearly every team member came to me and said this was the most well-thought-out source selection they had worked with. Justin built out all of that, other than the scores, and he had it prepped in a way that made it super-efficient for folks,” Talbert said.

Building benefits

Talbert and Starostka predicted all-around benefits.

“It helps us as a region by giving us access to 12 contractors in a competitive manner for the socio-economic goals and assists the contracting officers in fair and reasonable pricing when it’s not in a sole source environment,” Talbert said.

“What it means to the American taxpayer is hopefully GSA PBS Region 6 is able to realize more favorable pricing. Over time we are able to achieve favorable pricing on all of our orders, thus saving the taxpayer money,” Straroska said. “For the building tenants, they can be proud of the work when they walk into our facilities and know we selected high-quality vendors to do high-quality work too.”