mynameismonkey

Follow the RFPs he would like to work on, see who wins them, call them, pitch product/service. Bring along certification of small business and make the small business vehicle the pitch, not the product/service.

Let's say I need data analysis. Thousands of companies can service this need. Very few have the specific certification for the fed agency/state/municipal requirements du jour. I have no solid way of searching all holders of all these certifications by service line.

So, I search online, I call peers, I dredge for vendors. Vendors who approach me and can quickly communicate their contract value with small business/minority-owned/women-owned whatever, and can demonstrate their knowledge of the particular market the RFP is for means they know and are ready to be added to a larger RFP and can document their claims.

For me, this saves me time and money, and brings value.

The federal government is not a for-profit corporation intent on profit. Consider it more as a social service mission driven non-profit. Federal contracting is mission-driven by specific regulation, whether it be defense or health or transportation or whatever. The US govt. is not about end results, it's about process which hopefully leads to end results. The US, as a people, through the voice of the elected federal government, has determined that taxpayer dollars should not fund tropical hardwoods but should fund the growth of minority-owned businesses. Agree or disagree on the goals, that is the mission of those tax dollars.

As a contractor seeking to spend those tax dollars, you are effectively signing up to help execute on the US population's stated goals as a people, not achieve the best business result for a government agency. Until you understand this, government contracting is not for you.

As for disruptive start-ups, in my 15 years working on state and federal contracts, every single agency that has requested "innovation", "disruptive change", "modern technologies" in fact means "please do this 95% of the way we did it last time, but add some shiny magic so we can feel good about progress".

As with any customer, your goal should be to give the customer what they want, while educating them about what they need. At the end of the day, you need to make your customer happy, and for a federal agency that often means don't fail, don't get their name in the paper. Which generally comes from doing it in a predictable fashion with incremental change.

It's not ridiculous, but it can be costly to document and certify in a non-standard method that upsets your routine workflow. In a larger entity, you can soak the hit and assign it to someone to deal with who maybe has some spare time or a pool of time spread across a few staff, in a smaller start-up, you may not have this flexibility. Legal adds up pretty quickly too, if they're dealing with compliance issues.

Edit: and that's just one part of a larger process for one state. I just had to have an independent contractor working in the UK apply to be registered as a valid sub contractor in NYS, and certify that he (a sole proprietor) carries adequate worker's comp... Multiply by 50 for states, throw in municipalities (I'm looking at you SF/NYC) and the feds and then add in different agencies, everyone has their own idiosyncracies. Unless you target one state, one agency, you're in for a world of pain on compliance.

We run a data/dev shop inside a non-profit 400 person company that is mostly gov contracting. _We_ will come courting. Most of our contracts require us to satisfy some percentage from five to 20% small business/woman/minority-owned. This could be services, consulting, pencils, you name it.

We. Cannot. Find. You.

The small businesses we know and love are not suitably registered with the fed/state certifications. We routinely have to document what we did to try and find adequate set asides. We'd love to be doing more business with small businesses, but yes, the paperwork is a hassle. But if you sub contract, you can negate 90% of the problem, let the prime contractor deal with it.

They really don't. Here's a bunch of A/B test results:

http://exisweb.net/menu-eats-hamburger and followup http://exisweb.net/mobile-menu-abtest

http://conversionxl.com/testing-hamburger-icon-revenue/

http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/04/08/ux-designers-side-drawer...

http://www.adammcfarland.com/2013/10/24/responsive-mobile-ui...

Anecdotally, I don't use a ton of mobile social apps, and the first time I encountered this icon I thought it was some weird play on an equals sign. Never occurred to me it was a menu. Now my own dev team is using it and for some bizarre reason I cannot convince them to stop.

As an employer, if I had ten employees who all thought FHRITP was funny, and one of them got drunk enough to pull this stunt on television, I would consider that one out of ten had a serious judgement problem and nine had some semblance of socially reasonable judgement to not do such a thing.

I don't need my employees to think like me, act like me, or or like any particular brand of "acceptable" as defined by me or the company. I do not need to know nor care if any of my employees thinks FHRITP is funny.

I absolutely _do_ expect all of them to not go on television and demonstrate this level of bad judgement. By extension, I would now have two issues: first of all I'd question what other bad judgement comes into play in that employee's work product, secondly I'd be aware that _my_ judgement now comes into play as the responsible hiring manager.

I'm extremely sensitive to separation of work and family life. I demand the same from my employer. But I am wise enough to know that no matter what I do in the privacy of my own home, once I take that on a television news broadcast, I am in effect representing anything and everything the viewing public can now associate me with, whether it be my cycling club, my church, my darts team, my family, or my employer. (I only have the last two of those five, I'm straining for examples as I don't go out much...)

In short, where the conversation seems to be "OMG corporate thought police" it is in fact "seriously, keep that to yourself".

noun: judgement - the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions.

>It's sad that people's alcohol fueled idiocy -not crime,but idiocy, becomes public and has repercussions in real life.

I'm not sure I have this thought out well enough to write down but I'm going to try. I love the Internet, I love the Web. I love the new communications these technologies allow and empower. However, I have long been worried about the perceived anonymity of the Web, from both perspectives of (1) "hey you really shouldn't think you are anonymous" and (2) "wow, you are a complete moron when you think you're anonymous". I have also witnessed an inexorable degradation of personal content and personal speech on the Web, largely due (in my opinion) to this perceived anonymity.

Maybe it's my British upbringing, but I for one would welcome a few more people being held to account publicly for that which they say in public. For many of us, there existed a world before this one that was less generally rude, more consequential. As a child and a young man, I knew that the people around me might see me acting in a given unsociable manner and report to my parents/aunts/uncles/cousins/whomever. This seems to have been forgotten online.

I'm not certain how far to take this thought, but it seems to me that it wasn't all that long ago that in smaller, more defined communities, more people were similarly held to account by their community for their speech and actions. Our collective community has grown from village and town and city to worldwide, is this not perhaps simply the social mores and expectations finally beginning to catch up? If so, is that entirely a Bad Thing (TM)?

Could it, should it lead to a more polite, more respectful online community of humanity?

Because for Swiss people like you, Welsh people like us don't like doing business with Bavarians who call us English. Maybe if you weren't Austrian, you'd understand.

My read is that the fund managers created an additional $2B in exceeded expectation/value, then billed 97% of that created value. In other words, stay home, don't use these guys, don't pay them $2B, get the same returns. That's how I understand the point.

http://billadvocates.com/ http://hospitalbillreview.com/ http://thekarisgroup.com/

lots and lots of these

Anecdotal evidence of course, but I am happy to confirm I have ingested all four ingredients on numerous occasions and am still alive (as of the time of this posting).

Better to petition them to use the term "malicious hacker".

"The gaming world is a cesspit of maladjusted, comically aggressive, emotionally (and maybe actually) adolescent males who have a deep fear and distrust of women. The problematic gamers are, naturally, almost exclusively male – and no doubt skew towards the young side. No-one’s surprised by that. I’m not surprised."

We have such members. We expect them to abide by our clearly written community standards. We are gamers. They are gamers. We act as a community, which involves not leaving everyone to fend for themselves as an individual.

"The gaming world is a cesspit of maladjusted, comically aggressive, emotionally (and maybe actually) adolescent males"

Sure, the preceding paragraph makes a pass at placing this in context, but this is clearly baiting language. And the problem is apparently so bad that OP doesn't want to even be called a gamer, lest he be lumped in with this cesspit.

Again. For the record. I am a gamer. I'm a lot of other things, too. But I'm a gamer, and so are my slightly maladjusted male and female compatriot guildmates.

The biggest problem I see here is parents letting children play M-rated games. Anecdotally, and with no facts whatsoever to support my theory, I believe this would remove 90% of the problem.

The entire OP is anecdote.

I'm a gamer. I'm in a guild. We have female members. We all, regardless of gender, have at some point been the target of idiots trying to bully. While it is impossible to deny the existence of the cesspit, I take umbrage at it being perceived as the majority of we gamers. It is a problem, yes. But please don't lump me and my entire guild into the same bucket.

Because silent dissent is a great way to not let people know you have a differing opinion.

In your previous comment, you took the view that your sentiments reflected a global representation, and you short-changed the person who replied to you for being so silly as to think you were talking about the USA when in fact you were talking about the entire planet. Now, in this thread, you hearken to "traditional families". You speak of a country that has "tax deductions". May I ask you to hone your platform and let us know from what level of generality you wish us to perceive your commentary?