If you are interested in government contracting and qualify as a small business, you may be eligible for 8a certification through the Small Business Administration (SBA). This is a business development program exclusively for small, disadvantaged businesses, and there are many 8a certification benefits.
Is Your Business A “Small” Business?
If you want to enjoy 8a certification benefits, the first step is to ensure that you are considered, by the U.S. government, to be a small business. Many businesses with hundreds of employees qualify as well as those small Mom & Pop shops with just a handful of employees.
To check and see if you are a small business, head to https://www.sba.gov/size-standards/. This is the SBA’s Size Standards Tool. It will ask you several questions, and you must be able to fill in your NAICS codes. This stands for North American Industry Classification System. These codes describe the goods or services that your business provides to clients. To find your codes, go to Census.gov and you’ll find a downloadable guide that lists all the NAICS codes.
However, we also can help you discover which NAICS codes are the best fit for your business as well as your Product Service Codes, which are similar and used by government agencies to search for contractors that match their needs. But we’ll explain our services further down in this blog.
Do You Qualify For 8a Certification?
Once you determine that your company qualifies as a small business, you will need to see if you meet the other 8a qualifications. On its website, the SBA list the following items in its eligibility checklist.
• The business must be at least 51% owned and controlled by U.S. citizens who are economically and socially disadvantaged
• The business must be owned by someone with a personal net worth of $750,000 or less
• The business must be owned by someone whose average adjusted gross income for three years is $350,000 or less
• The business must be owned by someone with $6 million or less in assets
• The owner must manage day-to-day operations and make long-term decisions for the company
• The company principals must demonstrate good character
• The company must show potential for success and be able to perform successfully on contracts
While the first five are fairly straightforward, the last two are somewhat ambiguous. When the government says that a company’s principals need to demonstrate good character, they aren’t following you around to ensure that you don’t litter or jaywalk, this refers to your business dealings. Do the principals have liens against them? Have they been convicted of fraud?
The government wants to ensure that your company and its officers are in good standing and do not engage in unsavory business practices or illegal practices. This is a concern that government agencies have with companies of all sizes, and not just small businesses. After all, government contracts are paid using taxpayer dollars, so if your company principals aren’t trustworthy then taxpayer money might be wasted or misspent.
The last point, about showing potential, basically means that you need to be able to show that you have some past performances that speak to your abilities. Past performances, in government terms, are simply former clients who might be able to attest that your services or goods were high quality and that you are a dependable vendor.
What Are The 8a Certification Benefits?
By now you are probably wondering if signing up is worth the effort, but we urge anyone that qualifies to attain 8a certification. Benefits include having a Business Opportunity Specialist assigned to your company to help with government contracting and you can receive management and technical assistance. This could include training, executive development, marketing assistance and more.
While those are helpful, from our perspective, the best 8a certification benefit is that you enjoy is that you can compete for set-aside and sole-source contracts. This gives you an important edge in the world of government contracting jobs.
Every government agency is supposed to “set aside” a portion of its yearly contracting budget just for small businesses. There are several types of set asides, as they are known. For instance, if your business is owned 51% or more by a woman, you might qualify for the Woman-Owned Small Business set aside and there are several others, as well.
When you are bidding on set-aside contracts, these might be competitive bids where you are bidding against other small businesses or you might be able to acquire a sole-source contract. This is a contract that is awarded without a competitive bidding process. This might be because the items needed are available from just one source or it might be because the agency doesn’t have time to deal with a competitive bidding situation, such as in the case of a natural disaster or other emergencies.
How Can I Sign Up For 8a Certification Benefits?
There are two steps to this process, and the team at Federal Contractor Registry can help with the first step. The initial step is to complete your System for Award Management registration (SAM registration) and get approved by the government as a government contractor.
Once you are approved, you can to Certify.SBA.gov. After you have signed up with SBA, you will need to go into your SAM account and update your business profile to showcase that you are 8a certified. If you aren’t sure how to do this, just give us a call and we can help.
The only catch is that SAM registration can be extremely difficult to complete. It can 10-15 hours to finish the application, and many people become frustrated with the whole process and give up on government contracting. Rather than forgo those lucrative government contractor jobs, you can hire a third-party registration service to complete the process for you, such as Federal Contract Registry.
At Federal Contractor Registry, we handle hundreds of SAM registrations and SAM renewals for businesses of all sizes. While we do charge for our services, we can handle the whole process very quickly, so that you can be approved and bidding on contracts as soon as possible.
If you are unsure how to complete SAM registration or you’ve started the process and become frustrated or confused, give us a call or click on the New Registration tab on our homepage. In addition to completing your SAM registration, we can help you determine if you qualify as a small business and for any 8a certification benefits.