VIDEO: Dissecting OASIS+ for Marketing Communications Firms

On Friday, we sat down with our friend Marina Goren from Smart BD Consulting to speak about the highly anticipated OASIS+ contract and how it applies for marketing communications. Please watch the video presentation below.

Transcription:

Mike Kapetanovic - GrowthLab:

Happy Friday, everybody! Looks like we are getting a lot of attendance for this, so more and more by the second. So thank you guys for joining us. We've got a pretty interesting and exciting chat today on OASIS+. Given how much money has been running through OASIS SB Pool 1 and how many of you have asked what is OASIS Plus and where does marketing communications fit into OASIS+?

Hopefully that’s what we're going to be talking about today for the for the next, give or take 30 minutes. And then we'll do a live 30-minute Q&A to answer specific questions.

Real quick by way of introductions, I'm Mike Kapetanovic, founder of GrowthLab. Basically 20 years in the marketing communications arena. Had a digital agency sold, said digital agency to the largest independent ad agency here in the DC Metro. Ran that for a few years. Jumped out in 2019 to start GrowthLab and working with companies on both state and federal public sector business development specifically the marketing communications arena. So going through the attendee list at a lot of friendly faces and close friends. So, thank you all for joining.

For those that aren't familiar with GrowthLab, Growth Lab is exclusively working with marketing communications companies on all things public sector, business development state and federal. That includes pipeline development, go to market strategy, capture teaming, market intelligence, competitive intelligence, etc. The other thing that we do quite a bit is sizing out graduation strategies. So, think of 8(a) companies graduating, mentor protégé consulting. And through my own personal experiences of M&A, doing quite a bit of buy side and sell side M&A advisory. So really excited about this conversation.

And, really excited about introducing everybody to my friend Marina. Marina is a close industry contact that I've had the pleasure of working with countless times on countless bids of just continuing to strengthen client proposals and increase p-wins. She's got a wealth of experience and has helped many, many clients earn their spots on very similar GWACs such as OASIS+.

So, Marina, you want to say hello and let's kick off?

Marina Goren - Smart BD Consulting:

Absolutely. Thank you. My great introduction and thank you for inviting me today. I appreciate that. And as Mike has mentioned Mike and I have been working together for quite a while now. Our individual companies bring very complimentary capabilities. While Mike is more of the upfront leader, business development, identifying opportunities, helping clients grow at a bigger scale, more strategic scale my company does more tactical stuff, the closing of the deal proposal support, and we do a lot of these GWACs similar to OASIS+. I have been personally in business development and proposal industry for many years. And I also do various presentations as part of APM.

It's my pleasure to, to speak with Mike today in front of you all. I will say that I have my own company, Smart BD Consulting. We have over 80 federal government contracting client, and over 20 billion in client wins in the past over 10 years that we've been around. And we've had some very large single award wins around 2 billion and such. I will say my client base is a little bit broader than Mike's. I know some of my clients are here today as well. Mike specializes in marketing and communication segment, and so today's conversation will be about OASIS+ and we'll start a little bit generic about OASIS+, but we will focus specifically on the domain applicable to marketing companies.

With that said, why should anyone consider bidding on OASIS+? Well, first and foremost it is, it is a pretty hefty contract. It is valued at potentially 130 plus billion. And it does have a fairly long period of performance of over 10 years. It is a scorecard-based RFP. And so, what that means is they give you Excel spreadsheet that is essentially a scorecard. And for every response you earn a score. And these types of proposals are different from what I call solution-based proposals, where you have to actually respond in a detailed narrative or provide a solution or capabilities or do a lot of writeups, right? This is not, there's some writeups, but it's not a lot of writeups. There are a lot of similar recent examples that are very similar proposals. Some of you may have already worked and they were CIOSP4, Polaris, Alliant, etc. There are a whole lot of these types of RFPs that are coming out that are more and more prevalent. There are scorecard types of RFPs. One cool thing about OASIS+ is they tell you what the passing grade is. So, you get to take the scorecard, score yourself based on it, and if you reach the qualifying threshold point, guess what you won. So then the trick becomes and improving to them that you scored yourself accurately and correctly. It does offer, once you win it, it does offer broad marketing opportunity across federal government. And that includes not only competitive awards, but direct awards.

You can get direct awards in targeted procurements under OASIS+, for those of you, they're joining us that are part of small businesses. If you do grow up small, grow out of the small business standard, or if you are an 8(a) and you graduate from 8(a) program, this may give you a little bit more runway. You may be grandfathered under this for a couple of more years, assuming there is no re-certification requirements on specific at the task order level. Finally, mostly for small businesses, if you are planning an exit strategy, if you are planning to sell your business, having a GWAC vehicle is very attractive to buyers. And then some companies even just look just to purchase to kind of split off and purchase that vehicle on its own.

So that is something also to kind of keep in mind. So those are all some really great reasons, compelling reasons, at least in my book, why you should seriously consider bidding on OASIS+. So really quick some highlights overall highlights on OASIS+. The first draft of the was released November 15th in 2022. And the government really collected a lot of questions. So, they spent a long time getting through those and addressing the answers and drafting the second draft, which subsequently came out on March 6th. And the final RFPs currently expected, end of April, beginning of May. It's an estimate. That estimate has been put out there before and moved. I'll just say that hopefully this is their final estimate. So in other words, it's really any day now.

Any day now we may be getting a final RFP and they did say the GSA will give us 90 days to respond on the final RFP. So that's the timeline that we're looking at. It is going to be a multi-award, IDIQ. So there is no limitation on the number of awards. And there are multiple, multiple pools set up for it. So there is an unrestricted pool that's for large business for, for any type of businesses really. There's a small business pool. There's a woman-owned small business pool, an 8(a) pool, a service-disabled veteran-owned small business pool (SDVOSB), and a HUBZone pool. So those are all different pools I mentioned before. Period of performance is 10 years. So the minimum guaranteed amount is 2,500. And they do have a minimal contract sales requirement, $250,000 by year five.

So if you don't get at least $250,000 in awards and task order awards by year five, you could lose this vehicle. That's what that means. So currently they're not requiring any pricing submission, not even rates at the contract level. So when the final RP comes out, you have 90 days to respond. There is no pricing required. All pricing will be submitted at the task order level after you presumably get the award and the task orders will start coming out. They're also saying that at one point after they make all the initial awards, they will open it for open on ramping, meaning at one point they'll just going to open it up. And those of you who are familiar with GSA schedules like Schedule 70 or the MAS schedule, you can kind of decide to obtain that schedule at any time and sort of can put an application in at any time.

So, something to consider if you are not quite getting to that point threshold right now, but you may be expecting new work to come in over the next year or two, don't worry, there is going to be another opportunity for you to get on this vehicle. And they are allowing joint ventures and contracting team agreements, CTAs there is a requirement on the scorecards to get points for company certifications such as ISO and CCMI and such and certified systems like accounting system, procurement system DCAA and DCMA certified, and also experience and projects. And it could be either in the name of the joint venture or joint venture partner. So again, if you're not scoring enough points on your own, that's an additional opportunity for you to form a joint venture or CTA with another company that has complimentary capabilities, so to speak. That will get you additional points on the scorecard to get you to get you across that threshold.

All right, so it does have multiple domains to, so the task orders will be issued in each of these domains. And essentially if you decide to go after more than one domain, you can. The domains are management and advisory, technical and engineering, research and development intelligence services, environmental facilities, logistics. And each domain has its own NAICS and PSC mappings. So, the one domain that we'll be primarily focused on today going forward is management advisory, because as we mentioned in the beginning, this is mostly targeted towards marketing and communication segment because that's where most of the folks in today's presentation come from that segment. But there are all these domains. You can choose which domains you want to go after. You can qualify for more than one domain if you choose to put forth more, you know, if you choose to go after it.

However, if you are going after a specific set aside pool, meaning if you recall the set aside pools from the previous slide, if you are in a small business pool and you want to go after two domains, not one, you can only use projects for once per domain, per set aside pool. So, you can use it in that particular domain only once, but you can also use it in a different domain once per set aside pool, if that makes sense.

So, we talked about if you have a joint venture or CTA agreement, you can share sort of the responsibility for having company certifications or certified systems and things like that. However, project experience and past performance, you can do a prime subcontractor teaming arrangement and you can share that across the whole team. You can't share things like corporate systems or clearances that has to be either the prime or the joint venture, but project experience and task performance could be some prime themselves.

So, if you do decide to go after this, what are you going to be expected to do in terms of the proposal? How big of a lift it is? What is the, what is the current draft that are fee asking for? Well, there's a general section and it's reps and certs pretty standard. It's not a big, not a big push there. We talked about, we started talking about qualifying project experience. So you do need to come up with projects. And in the further down slides you will see what that means, what those projects are, what are a qualifying project experience. You do have to have experience in the domain you are going after, and you have to demonstrate that experience. And depending on the attributes of each project and the number of projects, you get certain number of points on the scorecard, they do give you extra points for federal prime contractor experience.

 I also mentioned they give you points for having certified systems, for having clearances for those types of things. And they also check past performance. The difference between qualified projects experience and past performance project experience is showing them that you have projects, you have done projects, or you are working on projects that have similar scope to the domain. Past performance is where they see how well you are doing on these projects. Cause you may have a project that's very much in line with the domain scope, but you may be getting very low scores for that project, and that's, that's going to be a non-starter, right? Depending on how low the scores are, it's either a non-starter, you don't get the extra points. And finally, there is a responsibility section and RFP, and it requires professional employee compensation plan, uncompensated overtime, policy, financial resources, and cybersecurity and suppliers chain management plan.

So those are all the different things that are required by the second draft RFP, part of the proposal contents. Now we do not expect these to change greatly in the final RFP. And that kind of gives you an idea of if you want to go after it, what kind of a proposal effort are you looking at? And we said no pricing is required.

Okay, so you heard me say words qualifying project a few times now, so I thought it would be a good idea to make sure. I know there's a mixture of folks here on the webinar who may not have seen the RFP. So what is a qualifying project as the RFP defines it? So, it could be a single contract, it could be a prime contract, it could be a subcontractor, it could be a commercial contract, it could be a single task order under like an IDIQ or under a BPA or under BOA or under an FSS contract. Or it could be a collection of multiple task orders under all these vehicles as well. So all of those things could be a qualifying project. Each qualifying project must or exceed an average annual value. That value is not a single number. That value is based on the domain and on the pool that you're going after. So specifically again, we said that this presentation will be more targeted towards the m and a domain. So, for the M&A domain, the minimum annual values are $500,000 for small business pools and $1 million for unrestricted pools. And again, that's an average annual value. It's not the overall contract value. Each project must be either ongoing or it must be complete within five years of the final R F P issue and date. And finally, you cannot have a completely negative record of fast performance. So, they give an example if, if past performance is being judged on the point scale of five, you have to, you cannot, you cannot have average scores below three.

So, with that said, I'll turn it over to Mike for a couple of slides to talk a little bit about how marketing communications fit in.

Mike Kapetanovic - GrowthLab:

Hopefully that help was helpful on the background on OASIS+, what it is timeline, sort of what's in scope and what's out of scope. So going back to sort of my opening remarks, the question that I'm asked most often these days is, well, where does marketing and advertising fit in? I'm a PR firm, I'm an ad agency, I'm whatever I am.

Where does that all fit in? Because I keep on hearing that that's phase two. What does phase two mean? The short answer to that is it's tricky. Near term in phase one phase one contains both management advisory domain, which Marina has talked about and that includes specifically the NAICS 541611, 541612, 541613 and 541618.

And knowing many of the attendees on this webinar, many of your awards are in one of these NAICS codes, which is great. So, all of your communications contracts under 541611 as long as they qualify to what Marina just outlined, the previous slide for sort of that qualifying project suffices. And then as, as you know, 541613 is also where a lot of other contracts are in our marketing communications world. Fantastic. That also qualifies.

That's phase one, phase two the marketing public relations domain is anticipated. It is anticipated to come out in phase two. What that means, I don't know of when that'll be. As we all know from working with the government, that could mean anything. They say that it might be next year is it next year? When is it next year? Not exactly sure, but that presumably in what they are, what they have been saying from the very beginning in all these drafts in these drafts are fee docs are that marketing and public relations is going to be a domain. It is going to come out in phase two. We could either go near term in phase one or we could wait in phase two, and Marina will cover that in a bit. The other thing to note is that the HCATS IDIQ where much of the human capital and some recruitment, some change management, some of those types of capabilities will not be getting recompeted. That work is going to be moving to OASIS+ as well, which that's yet another domain that is anticipated for phase two.

The million-dollar question is obviously I called out 613 and 611; most marketing contracts if they're not in 613 or 611, they're in 541810. So, what do we do about all of our work that is that's classified under that NAICS code?

Marina Goren - Smart BD Consulting:

So, if your projects do not map cleanly to one of the NAICS codes that are within phase one or if you have commercial work and they don't map to NAICS at all, you can still use your projects. All you need to do is provide the proof of what's called relevance. So, this is exactly from the RFP. Proof of relevance could be as an example, an award form, as long as that award form describes the general scope, nature, complexity, and purpose of the services. And it has to have enough detail to map to the scope under this domain. It could be statement of work performance, work statement, statement of objectives, anything.

Basically, it describes again, a general scope, nature, complexity, purpose of the services. It can be section B supplies and services. If it's a federal contract, it could be any other verifiable contractual documents. And some of the examples listed are SROs SF 30 letters of technical direction, subcontracting plans approved invoices. Again, as long as these things, contract deliverables award fee documents, etc. as long as these are verifiable contractual documents, and you can determine by looking at them the nature of the work that you are doing on this co on this project. And it maps to the domain scope that you're going after, which in this case it's the M&A domain that we're specifically focused on. So what you have to do is have to take these documents and you have to tag specific written passages in this contract documentation from the list above, and that the tagging has to support the, the relevance document of determination.

Now, I keep talking about the scope of the domain and I promise on one of the next two, like this next slide or the slide after, I will show you what that means. So hold that thought, don't ask that question just yet. If the contract documentation alone cannot demonstrate relevance there is a project verification form that's provided with the RFP and you have to fill it out and get it signed by the customer, and you have to include a narrative statement, clearly explaining the project scope. I think it's up to 750 characters.

So, this again is directly from the RFP. This is basically the scope of work that is within the M&A domains specific to the RFP. So, what I highlighted in orange here is the scope that might be relevant to, again, the marketing communication segment of companies. The highlighting is just sort of my own guess and guidance. So as you are tagging your contractual documents or describing the work that you do on your project, it has to align to any and or all of these bullets that are on the page. So not necessarily just the orange ones, this is just the ones that I thought would be most relevant, right?

But you can pick any of these bullets. So the rule of thumb, it could be as many bullets as, as you see, it could be as view. There's no rule in the RFP that says you have to hover cover at least 10 or at least half or all of them. Nothing says that currently, right? But you always want to cover as many as you possibly can, right? And at least, you know, I would say a couple for sure, but as many as you possibly can, because the less bullets you cover, the more risk that the government when they do review your proposal though, that the bigger the risk that they will say is not relevant. And then they'll take points off from your initial point of determination.

Mike Kapetanovic - GrowthLab:

Real quick point on this is that you're probably, many of you are probably at, okay, where's the ad campaigns? Where’s the marketing, where's the graphic design? Where's some of the content production? Looking at the attendee list, a lot of you sort of fit into the, the short answer is it doesn't. It's like you've got the marketing PR domain anticipated. If you go after phase one, which is sort of what we're talking about, management advisory, it's going to be not exactly one to one. So like some of these things, some of you guys are doing change management, some of you guys are doing leadership and organizational assessments. All of you presumably are doing some sort of str strategy development or stakeholder requirement like or strategic planning. So it's like you just have to maybe think a little less linear on sort of how to map some of your experiences in, in the, in the absence of the marketing PR domain, which again, phase two and, and might or might not come out next year.

Marina Goren - Smart BD Consulting:

Excellent. Thank you, Mike for that clarification. I appreciate it.

So, what if it turns out that you try the scorecard and you don't have sufficient score at this point to get you through, through to get you on OASIS+? Well, you could team, and again, you could consider both joint venture type teaming and CTAs as well as the more traditional prime sub relationships. And these are just some of the things. So there, this is not an all-inclusive list by any means. It's kind of high level and it's, it's fairly straightforward and obvious. But some of the things that you should consider. And so one of the things is, you know, does your potential teammate have complimentary project experience to yours based on the checklist requirements? Do they have proper NAICS codes, or can they map for joint ventures, you may be looking for joint venture members that have complimentary corporate systems that have been audited or corporate certifications, perhaps a clearance, anything that would increase your score, right?

So the bottom line is the addition of the teammate and or their projects on past performance ultimately should add to your score. That is your ultimate sort of overarching guidance as to whether or not you should team versus, you know, try to go after it yourself. But as you're thinking about those obvious things, you also should be thinking about, well, this team may be corporate and helpful during the proposal effort. And, and this is important. Even though you're not writing a whole lot of solutioning a whole lot, they will need to provide contractual documentation. They may need to go back to their clients and get their sign offs. There's a whole bunch of things you're going to be asking them to do. So, you definitely want to make sure they're going to be responsive, they're going to be timely, they're going to get you all the data that you need, and you can rely on them to do that.

Now even though the pricing is not required on, you know, in this initial submission, it ultimately will be required under the task orders. So, you should always be thinking about will this team be priced competitive, right? Again, it's proposed award determined consideration, but you do want to make sure that you can bid on the task orders competitively together, right? And they're not going to actually, ultimately drive your price up. So, these are some of the things you should definitely consider.

And the next couple of slides is the overall analysis of the scorecard.

I mentioned that there is a scorecard provided with the RFP and it's an Excel based type of scorecard, and it, it's a science points for everything, right? So basically here it's, it's a visual representation of that. So, starting with a small business set aside pool and, and this is really for all of the small businesses, this is kind of generalized across small business, 8(a), SDVOSBs, all of those socioeconomic different categories are summarized on this slide other than unrestricted.

So this is everybody other than unrestricted on this slide. So, for minimal average annual values for projects for small businesses and other socioeconomic categories, typical minimum was $500K for the facilities and environmental domains is $250K. The total possible credits for all of the small business set asides is 50, and the qualification threshold is 36. So, if you score 36 or higher, and the government, the GSA, you know, in their evaluation, you know, basically believes it says yes, they have assigned these points correctly, then you get on OASIS+. That's what this means. And then again, if you look at the visual representation, the blue, the biggest lines are qualifying projects. So, if you look at the qualification threshold, and that's 36 outside of the r and d domain, you can technically get two OASIS+ without any of this additional you know requirements, right?

You can get to adjust with having maximum qualifying, getting all the maximum points up close to the maximum points on the qualifying project alone. The stuff in orange is federal contracts and multiple award environment contracts. Past performance, that's how well that you are doing on your projects. And finally, the stuff in orange is company clearances, certifications, and corporate systems, having them like audited and approved. So you see that the split up is different for domain, and it logically makes sense. So, if you look at the R&D domain research and development, the government is a lot more interested in having proven concepts in the federal contract arena rather than the commercial arena. And so that's why, for example, the project points credits alone won't get you won't get you an OASIS+. So, looking at the M&A domain, you can certainly get there just within the qualifying projects.

Again, you just need to get 36 out of 38 and you should be set. And then you have five possible points for having federal contracts, multiple award contracts and things like that. They're all full within the federal arena. You have three possible points for past performance rate ratings, and you have four possible points for company clearances, certifications, and systems.

And then going to the next chart, it's the same type of chart but only for the unrestricted pool, right? So I will you can look at the visual representation here while I point out some of the difference in the minimum average annual values and as to be expected, they're higher. So for qualifying projects, under most domains, it's the minimum average annual values, $1 million. The enterprise solution domains, those are very large, like very big, spanning across multiple types of scopes. It's 50 million and that's an annual minimum value.

All right, so I think I'll go over these really quickly. Mike and I both have some service offerings around OASIS+.

And so, one of them is initial preliminary assessment, and that’s basically designed to feed into your bid, no bid or teaming recommendations. And it's taking sort of like interviewing you, understanding your capabilities as a company, looking at potential projects that you would be using, and coming up with an initial projected score. And obviously that will answer the question of would you be able to go after it by yourself? And if the score is lower, then the minimum qualifying threshold, it's providing some recommendations to your team, what else can you do to get your score higher?

The next offering that we have is what I call complete external assessment. And that's if you are already going down the path, you've determined that you do want to go after OASIS+ that you'll get the minimum score. You started putting all of the documentation together, you've done a whole package, and you want an external assessment, which is similar to a color review, which would be like a color review on the, in the regular proposal world. And that's where it is at this point. It's reviewing all of the proposal documents. So if you have statement of works, they're tagged, if you have write-ups, all of those parts and pieces, reviewing all that and confirming that the initial score that you've assigned yourself is in fact the valid score. And it, then that assessment includes the final projected score based on all the artifacts that we have reviewed that you have provided to us.

And then if you are looking for a full sort of proposal management and proposal development support, somebody to come in and help you do the whole thing, soup to nuts we have that on T&M basis.

And finally, the submission of this proposal is very tricky and very different and very unique as well. It's not just emailing the proposal to an email address or similar, there's actually a tool called Symphony. And that tool has been used for multiple other similar scorecard bids. And it's very complicated. And I will say I personally have not done a Symphony upload, but a lot of the folks that work for me have, and I have heard them speak about it, and I have heard 'em do demos and my brain went, poof <laugh>. So it's a very complicated tool, and sometimes you have to upload something and it, it creates like a form and spits it back out at you, and then you have to like fill out that form. So it, it really like is a multi-step process that actually takes hours.

So those of you who are not familiar with Symphony, I want to make sure that you take this, this piece of knowledge away from this conversation if nothing else. So definitely recommend you either you have somebody who's familiar with Symphony helping you and you set aside a lot of time to, to do that, and you do a lot of that in advance. So that's a very definitely great recommendation.

Okay, so those are some of the OASIS+ offerings that we have. And finally, my final slide, and I'll pause so you guys can all you know, take a picture of it or scan the QR code. This is how you all can find Mike and I after this, if you need help or have questions or would like to hire us for any of these services, if there's anything else we can do to help. And with that said, I will turn it back over to Mike.

Mike Kapetanovic - GrowthLab:

Thanks Marina. This is this is great. Hopefully this was very helpful for everybody.

As Marina alluded to when we opened up, I think her and I are very complimentary of one another where I provide a lot of the sort of strategic services strategy, pipeline capture, teaming, all of that stuff, especially in the marketing communications arena. And Marina is my go-to resource for many live proposals. As many of you know we don't do too much proposal writing. We sometimes do reviews, we sometimes do proposal management, but oftentimes that's with and through Marina.

Let's take the slides down. We've got some questions in here, so let's just go through, if you've got questions, feel free to type away and we'll get to as many as we can in the next in the next 20 minutes.