If You’ve Got the Right Stuff, Your Business Could Be Just What DHS is Looking For.

By Steve Cooper

This year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is celebrating its five-year anniversary. Like other federal agencies, DHS is looking for small businesses to step up and help with its efforts. Last year DHS awarded roughly $3.9 billion to small businesses. Talk about a security blanket.

Larry Orluskie, a spokesperson for DHS, says, “Anyone who wants to do business needs to get a handle on the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR). Getting an understanding of how the federal government does contracting is one of the core processes.”

To get started, visit the FAR website at acquisition.gov/far and download the voluminous PDF manual. Next, head over to the Open for Business section on the DHS website dhs.gov/openforbusiness.

“Open for Business is our one-stop website for businesses,” says Orluskie. Here, visitors will find information on grant opportunities, points of contact, event information and much more.

One of the first links you’ll want to click on is “Contract Opportunities” in the left-hand navigation. “We do a forecast of opportunity. We reach out to the different components of DHS and say, ‘Tell us what you’re going to be looking for in the future,’ says Orluskie. “Then we look at it and say, ‘That may be a good thing for small businesses, something to set aside.’” Set-asides mean that a certain percentage of a government contract is reserved, or “set aside,” for small business.

Clearly, reaching out to small businesses is a priority for DHS. Last year, of all contracting dollars awarded from DHS, 32.5 percent went to small businesses. Women-owned small businesses received roughly $790 million of that money.

A great opportunity to make initial contact with DHS is to attend one of its events held throughout the country. The Open for Business site lists details of where DHS representatives will be waiting to hear from small business owners. Their Vendor Outreach sessions allow business owners to set up a pre-arranged 15-minute appointment with DHS officials. Orluskie notes that one of the biggest challenges business owners face is grasping the federal procurement process. He says these free events are the perfect opportunity to get your specific questions answered.

If you’ve got the technical chops, Orluskie says a lot of DHS’ success with small businesses has to do with two large IT contract opportunities: EAGLE and FirstSource. EAGLE, which stands for Enterprise Acquisition Gateway for Leading Edge Solutions, is a department-wide platform for acquiring IT service solutions in five areas, including software development; management support services; engineering design, development, implementation and integration; operations and maintenance; and independent tests, evaluation, validation and verification. The goal of FirstSource is to provide DHS with a variety of IT products like networking equipment, imaging products and wireless technology.

If you’re worried about competing with the big guys, don’t be. Even when a contract is awarded to a big company, Orluskie says DHS works to partner that company with small businesses to fulfill the contract. DHS has even created a Mentor-Protégé Program to assist in just that.

At the time of print, the national threat advisory level was “elevated” (yellow). That means DHS has more needs—and if your small business can help with those needs, you could be seeing green.

Steve Cooper spent over six years at Entrepreneur Media, most recently as managing editor of Entrepreneur.com. He now runs his own business, Hitched Media Inc. (hitchedmag.com)