Recognizing Best Practices in Increasing Federal Opportunities for Small Businesses
 
Over the past eighteen months, the SBA has worked closely with the community of Directors of Offices of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization through the Administrator's Small Business Procurement Advisory Council. Among other things, this collaboration has included efforts to increase the reliability of small business contracting data in the government-wide database, and enhancements to the Small Business Procurement Scorecard, the tool by which Federal agencies' performance against contracting goals is evaluated. In working more closely with OSDBU's, we are finding a number of best practices in making more opportunities available to small businesses - especially to women owned small businesses, service disabled veteran owned small businesses, and HUBZone-certified firms.
 
Over the coming months, we plan to highlight some of the successful efforts of other Federal agencies. We will do this by posting such efforts to our web site, and by publishing them in our newsletter. By placing best practices on the website, we are sharing information among agencies with the intent of encouraging adoption of successful strategies at the national level. By sharing them with field staff, we want to encourage collaboration between Government Contracting Area Offices and District Offices that will lead to replication of best practices at the local level, especially with the help of our resource partners.
 

Examples of Best Practices:

• Department of Agriculture’s Women-Owned Small Business Program
• Department of Homeland Security’s Efforts to Promote Opportunities for Underserved Markets
• Department of Veteran Affair’s Efforts to Promote Veterans in Business through Collaborative VA Partnerships

Contact Information:
To learn more about this initiative contact Gregory.Hall@sba.gov
Submit an Agency example for consideration to goaling.email@sba.gov.