Has anyone here bid for a government contract?
Carthell
was one of the people who voted for this group in hopes of some civil,
focused discussion on our culture and community. It seems that the
discussion has drifted away, and that's sad.
Anyhoo:
I was watching 'The Big Idea" today (6/17) on CNBC. The program's
topic was about how to go about
getting into the business that you want to be in. One of the signs for
wanting change is constantly being envious
of persons not in your situation. I've been working in the customer
service arena since college
and beyond over the space of (wow) twenty years. The experience has
been a real *grind*. One of my best
assets/interests is being an answer man, finding all about a topic and
presenting my carefully backed-up
findings to an inquirer. The only problems:
1) There's a significant fraction of the customer base that does not
want a truthful answer, they want
appeasement regardless of how unethical, illegal, or inappropriate the
request is for the problem
presented;
2) The employer (and this is for any organization that has more than,
say 100 people working for it)
will have just enough personnel to keep everyone busy. So busy, in
fact, that requests which
require input from multiple departments for a proper answer get
resolved sometimes.
So, I'm listening to the television program. The gears start turning
in my head: how can I use my penultimate
asset, assembling and troubleshooting computer systems and equipment,
which many of my co-workers,
family, and friends have appreciated (but no employer has seen fit to
hire me for, which is odd)? So, I look on
the 'net. Not for jobs, but for bidding opportunities.
Now, I've only done a search for bidding opportunities once before,
when I thought about the resources needed
to fulfill a local government's need for fleet vehicles. There were
certain requirements that I could not meet easily.
This time, I'd look for bids that I could handle. I found one
recently: a local university wants six Dell
mini-towers. Small businesses were being explicitly solicited. Yeah,
I'm thinking, I have the credit and
resources to pull this off. I have a brother whose looking for extra
money because of a slowdown at his
job, a U-Haul is a short walk away from my house, and I can take a day
to dedicate to fulfilling the
bid.
There's just one problem: Dell's rules concerning resellers. Web
orders: THOU SHALT BE A END-USER.
Resellers: THOU SHALT NOT SELL TO AN EDUCATIONAL OR GOVERNMENT ENTITY.
Pop goes the balloon.
Of course, it is possible to negotiate other favorable terms. But
that takes time, and the bid expires twelve
hours from the time I found it.
Has anyone here spent time fulfilling bids? Could you describe your
experience?