If you have recently completed your SAM registration (or perhaps several months ago), you might be wondering if your listing in the System for Award Management needs to be renewed. The answer is yes, but the exact time when you need to renew SAM registration might surprise you.
SAM registrations must be renewed every year, and once your initial registration is approved, you will receive an email from the government indicating the date when your registration expires, which is one year from your approval date.
However, you will need to renew your well before this expiration date. For instance, if your registration expires on September 1, don’t wait until August 30 to renew SAM registration. In fact, it’s best to start thinking about renewal two or three months before the expiration date.
Government agencies are allowed only to work with active government contractors. If your SAM registration expires, an agency can no longer work with you as your status will be marked as inactive. Therefore, if you bid on a contract, but your registration is just a few weeks from expiring, you may lose out on that government contracting opportunity because the procurement agents for that agency will be hesitant to award a contract to a company that might not renew its SAM registration.
Another reason to renew a few months ahead of the expiration date is that it can take several weeks or longer to have your SAM renewal approved, depending on how busy the Federal Service Desk is at the time. The Federal Service Desk is the agency tasked with handling SAM registrations and SAM renewals.
Currently, this agency has been overwhelmed with SAM registrations and SAM renewals, and many businesses received extensions this year because the Federal Service Desk simply cannot handle the influx of renewals and registrations. Even if you are one of these businesses that received a notice of a 120-day extension, it is still wise to renew SAM registration well in advance of this new deadline.
Why Renew SAM Registration?
If you’ve won one or more government contracting jobs, you probably are eager to renew SAM registration, but if you’ve not yet won that first contract, you might be wondering if government contracting is worth it. We encourage you to stay with it and try a few new strategies to help increase your chances of winning a contract.
First of all, if you’ve only been signed up with the System for Award Management for a year, it’s important to know that most government contractors don’t win their first contractor during the first year of contracting. It can take up to two years to win your first contract on average.
Learning about the different types of government contracts and how to bid on those contracts can be tricky, but some private companies offer seminars, workshops or classes that can help. Additionally, there are private companies that also help you find contracts and win bids. Obviously, these companies charge a fee for their services, but it can be one way to break into government contracting and learn the ropes.
For companies that qualify as a small business, the Small Business Administration (SBA) has many helpful aids for new government contractors. Many government contracts are set aside specifically for small businesses, which are simply called “set asides.” These include set asides for woman-owned small businesses, service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses, HUBZone businesses and companies participating in the 8(a) Business Development Program.
HUBZones are “historically underutilized” business zones, and these include areas where the government hopes to improve the economy of an area. Sometimes these are located in impoverished urban areas, sometimes in rural areas and sometimes there are temporary HUBZones in areas hit with natural disasters to help build up the economy again. All Native American lands are considered HUBZones, as well.
The 8(a) Business Development Program is open to many small businesses that are majority-owned by a person who belongs to a historically marginalized group. This would be a group of people that have faced discrimination based on race, creed, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation or other factors.
8a contracts can be quite lucrative, so if you qualify, we highly encourage you to sign up for this program. Even if your small business is not eligible for these aforementioned set asides, you can still sign up with SBA and bid on contracts and your designation as a general small business can make it easier to win certain types of contracts.
The SBA has its own government contracting search engine just for small businesses at https://web.sba.gov/pro-net/search/dsp_dsbs.cfm. This is called the Dynamic Small Business Search, and you can search for government contracting jobs in a variety of ways, such as by location, set asides and more.
If you are a smaller business, we also encourage to consider you to think about subcontracting. The government awards huge, lucrative contracts to large Prime Contractors every year, and many of these contractors are required to use small businesses as subcontractors to win a job.
No matter what size business you own, we also recommend that you learn how to market yourself to the government. Create an amazing capability statement and build a page on your website just for government contracting. Sign up with your state procurement agency, as well. Not only are there many government contract jobs at the state level, but many states also hold events for contractors where they can meet with agency representatives and learn about contracting in general.
Let Us Renew SAM Registration
We encourage everyone to consider renewing SAM registration and continuing to take a change on government contracting. If you aren’t sure when you need to renew SAM registration, just go to our homepage and click on the Status Check tab, fill out our quick form and we will complete a status check for you and email the results in about an hour.
SAM renewals aren’t always as complicated as the initial SAM registration, but many companies simply hire a third party to handle renewals and save time. If you would like to hire us to renew your SAM registration, simply head to our homepage and click on the blue Renew Registration tab. Then just fill out our quick contact form, and a registration specialist will be in touch as soon as possible.