Most people who come to us about government contracting have already been told it is a huge opportunity. What nobody has told them is the order of operations. So they register somewhere, wait, hear nothing, and decide the whole thing is a scam or a club they are not in.
It is neither. It is a process with a sequence, and the sequence matters more than the effort. You can work very hard on step six while skipping step two and get absolutely nowhere.
Here is the sequence we walk clients through.
Step 1: Decide what you actually sell, in the government’s language
Before you register anywhere, you need to know your NAICS codes.
NAICS is the classification system the federal government uses to describe industries. Every solicitation is tagged with one. Contracting officers search by them. Primes search by them. If your codes are wrong, you are invisible to the people looking for you, no matter how good you are.
Two things to get right here:
Pick codes that reflect what you can deliver right now, not what you hope to deliver in three years. A code you cannot perform under is a lead you will waste time on.
Check the size standard attached to each code. The Small Business Administration sets a revenue or employee-count cap for every NAICS code, and it varies a lot. You can be a small business under one code and not under another. This is also what determines whether you qualify as small at all, which matters for everything that follows.
Do not skip this to get to the exciting part. The exciting part does not work without this.
Step 2: Get your UEI and register in SAM.gov
SAM.gov is the federal government’s official contractor registration system. You cannot be paid by a federal agency without an active registration. This is the non-negotiable entry point.
Two things to understand going in:
It is free. Your Unique Entity Identifier (UEI) is free. Registration is free. There are companies that will charge you several hundred to several thousand dollars to do it for you. Some are legitimate service providers. Many are simply charging you for something you can do yourself, and a few are outright predatory. If someone tells you a UEI costs money, that is your signal.
Entity validation is where people get stuck. SAM has to confirm your business is real by matching your legal business name and physical address against third-party records. If your Secretary of State filing says one thing, your bank says another, and your utility bill says a third, validation will fail and you will sit in limbo. Before you start, make sure your legal name and address are identical everywhere.
Budget a few weeks, not a few hours. Plan for at least one round of corrections.
While you are in there, complete your representations and certifications honestly and fill out your profile properly. Most people rush this section. That is a mistake, and Step 3 explains why.
Step 3: Make your profile findable, not just complete
Here is what almost nobody tells new contractors: registration does not generate opportunities. Registration makes you eligible. Those are different things.
Contracting officers and prime contractors perform market research. They search databases for companies that can do a thing. What they find is whatever you wrote in your profile. A registration with three NAICS codes and no capability narrative is functionally the same as not being registered.
So:
- Write a real capability narrative, in plain language, with keywords someone would actually search
- List every NAICS code you can legitimately perform under
- Keep your point of contact current, and make sure that inbox is one you check
Then build a capability statement: a one-page document with your core competencies, differentiators, past performance, company data (UEI, CAGE, NAICS codes, socioeconomic status), and contact information. This is the single most requested document in the industry. You will send it constantly. Make it good once.
Step 4: Start where the competition is thinnest
New contractors make a predictable mistake: they go straight for the large federal opportunities they read about, lose to companies with fifteen years of past performance, and conclude the system is rigged.
The system is not rigged. They picked the hardest possible entry point.
Better places to start:
Small-dollar federal buys. The micro-purchase threshold is $15,000 and the simplified acquisition threshold is $350,000 (both increased effective October 1, 2025). Below the micro-purchase threshold, a government purchase card holder can often buy directly from you without competition. Between those numbers, procedures are dramatically simpler than a full competition. These are real contracts, they produce real past performance, and most of your competition is ignoring them.
State and local government. Lower barriers, shorter cycles, far less competition, and many states run their own vendor and small business programs. Critically, this is where you can build past performance while your federal presence is still new.
Subcontracting under a prime. Any large prime contractor on a federal contract above $900,000 ($2 million for construction) generally must submit a small business subcontracting plan when subcontracting opportunities exist. That plan carries separate percentage goals for small business, veteran-owned, service-disabled veteran-owned, HUBZone, small disadvantaged, and women-owned businesses. Primes have to report against those goals. Register in their supplier portals and find their Small Business Liaison Officer.
The strategy is the same in all three: get a first award, perform well, get evaluated, repeat. Past performance is the currency. Everything else is preparation.
Step 5: Learn to read the market before you chase it
Once you are registered, spend time in SAM.gov’s contract opportunities section and in federal spending data. You are looking for three things:
- Who buys what you sell. Which agencies, how often, at what dollar values.
- Who is winning it now. These are your competitors, and also your potential teaming partners.
- How it is being bought. Full and open? Small business set-aside? A specific socioeconomic set-aside? Off an existing contract vehicle?
That third question is the one that changes your strategy the most, and it leads directly into the certification question we cover in a separate article.
Also look at agency procurement forecasts. Agencies publish what they expect to buy. The companies that win did not find out when the solicitation dropped. They found out months earlier and spent that time building a relationship.
Step 6: Talk to humans before the solicitation exists
This is the step that separates people who win from people who bid.
Once a solicitation is public, the rules limit what anyone can tell you, and often the agency already has a good idea who can do the work. The time to make contact is before that.
- Attend industry days and agency small business events
- Contact the agency’s Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization (OSDBU)
- Respond to Sources Sought notices and Requests for Information, even when there is no contract attached. These responses are how agencies decide whether to set an opportunity aside for small business. Responding is how you influence that.
Answering a Sources Sought notice with a solid capability statement is one of the highest-leverage things a new contractor can do, and it costs you an hour.
Step 7: Bid selectively and comply exactly
When you do bid:
Be selective. A serious proposal takes real time. Three well-matched bids beat twenty scattered ones. Ask honestly: can I perform this, can I price it, and do I have anything that makes me a better choice than the incumbent?
Follow the instructions literally. Proposals get thrown out for page counts, font sizes, missing forms, and late submissions far more often than for weak technical content. Build a compliance checklist directly from the solicitation and check every box before you submit.
Ask for a debrief when you lose. You are usually entitled to one, and it tells you exactly what to fix. Most losing bidders never ask.
What a realistic first year looks like
Let us set expectations, because unrealistic ones are why people quit.
Months one through three: entity validation, SAM registration, NAICS research, capability statement, initial market research. Mostly paperwork, zero revenue.
Months three through six: state and local registrations, prime supplier portals, Sources Sought responses, agency outreach, first small bids. Still probably zero revenue.
Months six through twelve: first small award or first subcontract, if you have been consistent. Possibly not. Both are normal.
The businesses that succeed treat the first year as pipeline construction. The ones that fail expected a contract in ninety days and stopped when it did not come.
The honest summary
Government contracting is not hard in the way people expect. It is not about knowing a secret. It is about doing an unglamorous sequence in the right order and staying in the game long enough to build past performance.
The market is real. Federal agencies awarded about $179 billion in prime contracts to small businesses in fiscal year 2025, about 28 percent of eligible prime contract dollars, and roughly $273 billion counting subcontracts. That money goes to companies that were registered, findable, positioned, and patient.
Start with Step 1. Do not skip to Step 6.
GERC Consulting helps businesses nationwide navigate government contracting and grant funding. If you are not sure which step you are on, that is usually the first thing worth a conversation.