Set-aside offers leg up for women
A federal program to help women-owned small businesses secure government contracts is finally in place nearly a decade after it was created by Congress.
The Women-Owned Small Business Federal Contract Program went into effect on Feb. 4 and will be implemented over the next several months. The program allows the government to set aside federal contracts for certified women-owned small businesses and economically disadvantaged women-owned small businesses within certain industries where those types of businesses are underrepresented. The U.S. Small Business Administration expects the first contracts awarded through the program to be released during the fourth quarter of 2011.
In announcing the program, SBA Administrator Karen Mills said women-owned small businesses are among the fast-growing sectors of the economy and that this program will help them sell their goods and services to the federal government, which purchases more than $425 billion worth of goods and services each year, according to the SBA. “Federal contracts can provide women-owned small businesses with the oxygen they need to take their business to the next level,” Mills says.
Maine’s women-owned businesses received $14.6 million in federal contracts during fiscal year 2010, which ran from October 2009 to September 2010, according to Keith Waye, the SBA’s procurement center representative in Maine. The program should help more women-owned small businesses in Maine secure federal government contracts, says Jaci Hancock, program manager at the Maine Procurement Technical Assistance Center, which helps businesses navigate the often confusing world of government contracting.
This set-aside program is a long time coming, says Waye. Congress passed a bill in December 2000 that on paper created the program. At the time, it also established a goal of awarding 5% of all federal contracts to women-owned small businesses. How_ever, that goal has never been met. Nationally, in 2009, 3.68% of federal contracts went to women-owned small businesses, up slightly from 3.40% in 2008. “[At the beginning] they said we needed to start looking at women-owned small businesses, so they give a 5% goal to the contracting officers,” Waye says. “The problem is they never made it a set-aside program. It was a goal, not a law.”
Contracting officers that put out requests for bids and determine contracts now have a tool in place to allow them to meet that 5% goal, Waye says.
To be eligible for the program, a business must be at least 51% owned by a woman who manages the company’s day-to-day operations, has the highest officer position and works full time at the business during normal working hours.
To be considered an economically disadvantaged women-owned business, the owner must have a personal net worth of less than $750,000, an adjusted gross yearly income of less than $350,000 (averaged over the prior three years), and the fair market value of all her assets should be less than $6 million. “I don’t think there’s many women who own small businesses that can’t meet those requirements,” says Ann Yahner, owner of Penobscot Bay Media in Rockland, who has already filed her paperwork to be certified as an economically disadvantaged woman-owned small business.
However, not all women-owned businesses in Maine will be eligible for the program. According to Waye, 261 women-owned small businesses in Maine are active in the federal government’s Central Contractor Registration, where all companies that want to do business with the government must register. Of those, 225 offer a product or service included in this set-aside program. “There’s a lot of small, women-owned businesses in Maine, but not all have a product the government is interested in buying,” says Yahner. “On the other hand, they buy everything from toothpaste to tires.”
The SBA chose 83 industries and/or products — each represented by a North American Industry Classification System code — where women-owned businesses are underrepresented. Contracting officers can set aside contracts for WOSBs in 38 industries and for EDWOSBs in 45 industries. The program also requires at least two active WOSBs or EDWOSBs are able to bid on a contract before the set-aside program can be used. The contracts that are set aside can’t be more than $5 million for manufacturing or more than $3 million for other work.
The contracts that can be set aside for WOSBs and EDWOSBs include such diverse industries as “fabricated structural metal manufacturing,” “flight training,” “tax preparation services” and “surveying and mapping (except geophysical) services.”
The latter code is the realm of Claire Kiedrowski and her company, Kappa Mapping in Bangor. She says women are vastly outnumbered in the field. In early April, she attended a seminar on airport mapping standards where only four of the 50 attendees were women. Kiedrowski says the program will help her company get a foot in the door with the federal government. “It levels the playing field,” says Kiedrowski. “It’s a way of entering ‘the good old boys club.’”
But Hancock from Maine PTAC warns that the program does not offer a quick, easy or sure-fire way to sell products or services to the government. It still requires a lot of hard work, she says. “We see this as positive for women-owned small businesses in the state of Maine,” Hancock says. “But we need to temper the enthusiasm with the reality of the program.”
Yahner, owner of Penobscot Bay Media, already counts the federal government as one of her largest customers, counting for roughly 85% of her business. So she has plenty of experience bidding and securing federal government contracts, and she says it’s not easy. She hopes the program “will open some doors for women-owned businesses.”
Most Recent
Most Recent
Comments