Women Business Owners Seek Better Access to Federal Contracts (NYT)

Women Business Owners Seek Better Access to Federal Contracts

By ELIZABETH OLSON

WASHINGTON — Christine Bierman, a small-business owner, has been to the Rose Garden and met President Bush. She has received awards from the federal government for how she runs her company.

But after 28 years in business, Ms. Bierman says, she has yet to win a six-figure federal contract that would catapult her company, a distributor of industrial safety supplies based in St. Louis, into the higher-earning ranks.

And she is not alone in her frustration. Last year, female small-business owners were awarded only 3.4 percent of annual federal contracts — even though the latest statistics show women own almost half, or 10.1 million, of small businesses nationwide, and generate about $2 trillion in revenue.

Women have spent years trying to open up the system of awarding government contracts. The Women’s Business Ownership Act, which laid the groundwork for women to participate in government contracting, is now 20 years old, yet women are still getting only a sliver of the contracting pie.

In 2000, Congress directed that female small-business owners receive 5 percent of federal contracts each year, now estimated to total $435 billion. But putting that mandate into effect has been a continual battle between lawmakers and the Bush administration.

This week, the Small Business Administration posted the final version of the rule meant to deal with Congress’s order. The rule said the 5 percent set-aside covers contracts in 31 industries, an increase from the agency’s original proposal to include only four industries, which Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, the ranking Republican on the Senate Small Business Committee, called a “sham proposal.” Still, the new number represented less than a third of the 140 industries eligible for government contracts.

Ms. Snowe was among the 16 female senators to write to S.B.A. last week to urge a better remedy for the shortfall in contracting opportunities for women.

The push for more contracts for female-owned businesses comes as increasing numbers of women are running their own companies and looking for ways to expand. Many women, including Ms. Bierman, argue that a lack of defined guidelines for contracts for female-owned businesses — along with complacency, inertia or just the inconvenience of switching suppliers — have reduced the opportunities for women.

“I’ve knocked on doors for 20 years,” said Ms. Bierman, whose company, Colt Safety, sells products including safety glasses, masks and respirators. “But procurement is a confusing and time-consuming maze that’s so difficult to get through.”

Organizations like Women Impacting Public Policy, a bipartisan group representing about 500,000 businesses owned by women, have started programs to help women navigate the complicated contracting system.

“Federal government contracts are an enormous opportunity for women to help increase their revenues by billions each year,” said Barbara Kasoff, president and chief executive of the group. “Right now only 67,000 women-owned businesses are registered with the government, which is less than a quarter of the total number.”

Her group’s program, called Give Me 5, started with Open, the small-business service of American Express. Give Me 5 provides a comprehensive brochure, seminars, events and online education to women business owners on how to register, qualify and identify their areas of expertise for federal government contracts.

The United States Women’s Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Women Business Owners also offer assistance. And last May, the S.B.A. began running an online discussion and offering an online course to encourage women — more than 8,000 signed up — and other groups to participate in the contracting process.

Still, many women remain flummoxed by the system.

Laurie Simon, chief executive of Ombrella Consulting in Seattle, which helps companies like Microsoft introduce new products and systems, said she was ready to compete with big companies for contracts but was not sure how to go about it.

“We’ve taken the first step — registering on the C.C.R.,” Ms. Simon said, referring to the government’s Central Contractor Registration database, which requires information like the company’s taxpayer identification number from the Internal Revenue Service and determines the firm’s areas of expertise under a system of six-digit codes.

The new Give Me 5 program offers a checklist with all the registry’s requirements so that small businesses can assemble all the financial data needed to complete the process more smoothly and rapidly.

Mary Schnack, president of Mary Schnack Media Services in Sedona, Ariz., enrolled in an early version of the Give Me 5 program and said it pushed her to “get my financial house in order.” That made registering easy because she already had obtained items like her company’s unique identifying number from Dun & Bradstreet. And now she is moving on to search for subcontracting opportunities for her public speaking and media training service.

“In the past, I had looked at federal contracting, but I felt my business was so small that I wondered what was the point?” she said. “I could spend the same amount of money on business I really had a chance to get.”

But in the last five years, she said, she has been looking harder at government contracts as a way to expand her business. When she meets other female business owners, she said, “We all talk about how difficult it is to track down what’s available and to know exactly who you are competing against.”

Ms. Schnack recently sat down with Ann Sullivan, head of government relations for Women Impacting Public Policy. Ms. Sullivan helped her figure out which government codes applied to her business, who her competitors were and how to go about combing through fedbizopps.gov and other online sources to find contracts that she could realistically bid for.

Female business owners said one of the stickier points in the contracting process was figuring out whether to be certified, which means accumulating certain detailed financial information and dealing with an on-site visit from the certifying agency. Groups like the United States Women’s Chamber of Commerce certify female-owned businesses. The National Association of Women Business Owners plans to start a certification service with the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council.

The government’s central contractor registry allows small-business owners to certify themselves, but some have raised questions about whether all such entries are legitimate. The women’s chamber of commerce group issued a report last week that said 27 of the 50 firms owned by women listed as the top recipients of government contracts had male chief executive officers. Margot Dorfman, the chief executive of the women’s chamber, said that finding undercut the credibility of the self-certification program.

The key, Ms. Kasoff and others say, is for Congress to pass new legislation specifying firm guidelines for federal government contract awards to firms owned by women.

“This is the area for growth, and we need to understand it,” said Ms. Kasoff who said that in the next year, the new Give Me 5 program was seeking to double, to nearly 150,000, the number of women registered as eligible for government contracts.