OASIS+ Marketing & Public Relations Domain Explained

GSA has officially added Marketing & Public Relations to OASIS+ Phase II, opening a major new gateway for advertising agencies, PR firms, media shops, and digital consultancies to access federal, defense, public health, and civilian agency work.

Mike Kapetanovic and Marina Goren discuss OASIS+ for marketing communications firms that want to understand whether — and how — they should pursue OASIS+ as part of their government growth strategy.

If you sell any of the following to government clients, this session is for you: Branding, creative, public affairs, digital marketing, media buying, influencer programs, reputation management, content, UX, or integrated communications.

Here is the full, unedited, transcript:

Mike:

All right. Hey everybody. Thanks for joining us. We got a lot of interest in this one. We've been talking about Oasis Plus for what feels like ever. So here we are, finally glad to see it in our inboxes. So a few years ago we got together talking, many of us got together talking about Oasis Plus in the first phase. There wasn't a marketing and public relations pool there. It was largely management and advisory and a bunch of technical services. So Marina and I did a webinar going back a couple of years ago. Through that, most marketing comms firms opted to hold off on participating and bidding for Oasis Plus until the marketing and PR domain was released, which here we are. But there were quite a few. I think there were about 10 or 12 that still made it through and submitted for the management advisory domain.

So this is going to be new for some folks, new for others. So wanted to get together, talk about Oasis Plus for marketing agencies, what it means, what this is, and why you should be looking at this as sort of a best in class vehicle hygiene item for your firm. So without further ado, wanted to introduce Marina real quickly. She'll talk about her background, but joining me, Marina from SmartBD Consulting, who is a very longtime partner, close friend, strategic ally with Tommy and I over at GrowthLab. So without further ado, let's go. For those that don't know me, I'm Mike. Long story short, 15, 20 years in the advertising business running various agencies and now running GrowthLab with my partner, Tommy, really focused on working with marketing communications firms and ad agencies on public sector, business development, state, federal, and especially lately global, given some of the volatility that we're seeing in the federal marketplace.

In addition to business development, do quite a bit of mergers and acquisitions, companies that are looking to buy into the government space or sell off either their contracts or their businesses in the governmental space. Growth lab works with each of these companies on organic and organic growth, pipeline development, capture, teaming, strategy, Intel, all of the things. This is probably very familiar with many of the people on the line. If this is new, happy to talk more at a later time, but we work exclusively with the marketing communications arena on business development. So let's get to the topic at hand. Marina is, as I said, a close close friend, close ally, close partner in all of this. We first did that webinar a few years ago for Oasis Plus. She and her team did a phenomenal job working with, I think over less bullet, 40 bids on Oasis Plus.

I think over 10 of those were with Growth Lab clients, Growth Lab friends at 100% success rate. So she knows what she's doing. She's an expert in her craft. She's really good at the scorecard vehicle. So instead of me talking about Oasis Plus and how to get on the thing and how to dissect the thing, let's bring in Marina, the expert in this, and she can impart some of that knowledge and know- how for everybody on the line. So Marina, you want to take it away? Thank

Marina:

You, Mike. I appreciate it. And welcome everyone. It's so great to see that we have such great attendance and so much interest and for a very good reason, I would say. So everyone here who is interested in Oasis Plus, you're in the right place for the right reasons. And it's kudos to you understanding how important this is. And I'll get into that in a minute. I'll take the first literally two minute less than that, 30 seconds to introduce myself and to reintroduce, again, myself and my company. I've been working with Mike for quite a few years now. I love the word ally. I definitely think of Mike and his company in that way. We're very complimentary. The things that Mike does is not the things that we do. And the things that we do, we focus on the proposal side, which wasn't on the previous slide, is what he comes for our help with.

So we are very complimentary in nature. Between the two of our companies, we provide a one-stop, full, comprehensive shop for anything you need to win more new work. With that said, my company, SmartBD Consulting, we have over 80 federal government contractor clients, and I have a portfolio of over 250 consultants.

Over the years, not only do we specialize in any kind of proposals, but we start specializing in this IDIQ government-wide acquisition vehicles DWAX, and there are quite a few of them. And quite a few of them are based on a scorecard, which is what OASIS+ is like. So they're kind of unique that way. The approach to them unique, it's not a regular proposal approach by any means. And I have a separate set of consultants who are experts at that. They've done a lot of them. Mike has mentioned that in phase one, we've helped over 40 bids get awarded on OASIS Plus already. So we have a ton of expertise and it's very, very important in this conversation because it's a very different, unique and niche type of bid. So with that said, enough about me.

All right. So why should you consider bidding on OASIS Plus? I will say Mike mentioned that we did a similar presentation a few years back when Oasis Plus first came out with phase one, and we'll talk a little bit about the timeline and history in a minute. I had a similar slide in that presentation for those of you who are here again, but it was different. And so the very first thing I want to point out, there definitely have been a lot of changes over the past year, as most of you know. One of those changes, there was a big FAR overhaul that is driven by the current administration for federal government contracting specifically. So in the FAR overhaul, part eight, they explicitly direct agencies to use what they call best in class government-wide vehicles, and it stands for BIC, so that's what BIG stands for best in class.

So OASIS Plus is best in class. So basically anytime they feel a contract can go in a big, it should go in a bit. What does that really mean? And again, specifically for federal government contractors or folks who are interested in federal government contracts, that's really, really important. I'm going to give you an example from my personal area of expertise. One of my areas, so Mike's area of expertise is marketing NPR. One of my area of expertise is NASA work. And I personally have worked with NASA government contractors for many years. I know a ton about NASA and working with NASA. Historically, NASA has always done their own RFPs that they issued on SAM.gov. They had very comprehensive and robust and structured procurement departments. They would never even consider using GWAC, so having someone else run their procurements. As of this coming 2026, to give you an example of NASA Goddard, one of NASA centers, they're looking at exclusively using OASIS Plus.

It is such a 180 change from anything they've done ever since I remember, and I've been doing BD for a really long time. And so obviously it's not something that they just woke up and decided they wanted to do. It's something that's being driven by the current administration from the very top, and they're not the only ones. We see a huge, big push towards OASIS Plus, and therefore now that they've reopened phase two, there's a lot of interest. For the past two weeks, I feel like my full-time job is fielding meetings, and some of you have met with me one-on-one, just seeing some familiar names on the participant list. So I've been fielding meetings with companies, and I have to keep this big long spreadsheet now of everyone who's interested. The interest I'm getting for phase two already within the first couple of weeks of just dealing with it excuse me, supersedes the interest we had in phase one.

So this is something that people are seeing across the board. Oasis Plus is going to be a very important part, at least through the remainder of this administration, if not further on. I will also say one other thing, while I'm meeting with these companies, I'm getting a lot of questions. One of the questions that I commonly get, well, what's the difference? Should we get on a GSA schedule like a GSA Mass or there are others or Mobis? Or should we get an Oasis Plus? What's better? What's the difference? Well, well, there's definitely a difference. They're different. Agencies will be looking to put their task orders on both. Some agencies will go this way, some agencies will go that way, and no one can predict where they're going to go or which agencies or which customers are going to choose which vehicle for what reason. There are a lot of nuances there.

So my recommendation, if you can get both, you should get both because you don't know your current, as an example, incomplete recompete contract that you got completely outside of a GWAC or vehicle before, could go to recompete on one of these either OASIS Plus or a GSA schedule, and you better be prepared. So my recommendation, whatever you can qualify for and get, you should absolutely go for it. And it's going to be really important, especially over the next few years.

Mike:

And I think we saw that a little bit last year for all of the marketing firms on the line. If you looked at the CDC health marketing BPA, very healthy BPA historically out of HHS, we saw as that BPA started having lesser and less revillability, and who knows if that thing is going to end up being recompeted in the future, we started seeing those task orders from various CDC centers actually using Oasis Plus and some of that incumbent work going to these other vehicles. So if nothing else, I think the underscore Marina's point, it's a good hygiene item to have and just get on as many of these best in class vehicles as popular. And for those that know me, I've talked a lot about the Forest Marsh case study of how Forest Marsh has grown exponentially over the years. And I think one of the pillars of their strategy has been getting on as many of these contract vehicles and best in class vehicles that they can.

Marina:

Yep, absolutely. So another interesting ... Oh no, I'm still on the previous slide. Sorry, I want to highlight a couple more things. Another interesting thing about Oasis Plus, it doesn't have a ceiling value. So there's no ceiling, there's no limit, and I think that's another sort of telltale. They're expecting a lot of work. They don't want to limit themselves. Now, there are several other GWACs, and I can't quote them off top of my head, so please don't ask me. I apologize. But one of them obviously is Oasis. So there's an Oasis, the previous Oasis, the previous vehicle that's going to now turn into OASIS Plus. There are a couple of others that HCATs and things like that that are merging together for sure. And historically that value of the vehicles that are emerging together is over 130 billion with a B. Now that's just historic numbers and they're going to grow.

So it is definitely a big, big deal. There's going to be a lot of work coming down the pipe. One of the things I like about Oasis Plus, it's not competitive. What does that mean? It does have something called a scorecard that every company, every bit is being measured by, and every scorecard has a winning threshold. So for example, the maximum points to get is 50 as long as you get 36, and this is just an example because every scorecard is different. If you get 36 points, you know you get on the vehicle. What I like about that personally, there's no guessing game. As long as you do everything right, you score yourself right and then you justify the scoring. And of course that's where the art and science comes in, the devils and the details. You have to justify the scoring and make sure the government can confirm your scoring.

But if that all happens, you are guaranteed to get on the vehicle. There's no guessing game, you're not competing with anyone, you're not putting a bid forward, hoping to win against all these people. I personally like that a lot. A lot of my clients do as well. And one last thing, if you are planning to sell your business ... Oh, I have two more points I want to make. I don't know how many of you guys are small businesses versus large businesses or eight days, but this does give you, for smaller businesses or eight days, it does give you a longer runway. So typically once you get on it, you have to certify at the time of submission. Obviously, once you certify your size standard for specific NACS codes and specific CLINs, you keep that. You keep that for the next five years. They will make you recertify again five years down the road, or if you have a qualifying event such as a merger, acquisition or whatnot.

But outside of that, most task orders, and actually far overhaul has helped that, and it's no longer requiring the CEOs to recertify at the task order level. So you'll be able to ... So for example, if you're growing out of your size standard within a year or two, you'll have that extra runway. OASIS Plus will give you on task orders to continue being a small business or an A- day or whatever. And then lastly, if you are looking at potentially getting sold or an exit strategy, having these vehicles definitely helps and definitely adds value to your business. I am not an M&A expert like Mike. I'll be the first one to say, so it's the only thing I can tell you, but I absolutely know. It definitely adds value. It's a good thing to have. I'm ready for next slide, Mike. Okay. So what is OASIS plus a few highlights?

I mentioned it's a multi-award IDIQ vehicle. It means it works on task orders and it has no limitation on number of awards. As long as you qualify, you get on the vehicle. For those of you who are familiar with GSA schedules, in some way, it's a little bit similar to that with the way that part works. It does have six pools. They're calling them pools. They're separate solicitations actually. There are minor differences in no solicitations, but they are largely mirrors of each other. They're very, very similar. And the six pools are aligned to socioeconomic statuses. So one is unrestricted, that's like for pool and open large businesses. One is small business, one is woman-owned small business, one is A- A, one is service-disabled, veteran-owned, and one is hub zone.

Within those pools, there are functional domains, and we'll talk about them in just a moment. The period of performance is 10 years. However, there's a however there as well. Let's say you do get on OASIS Plus and you are in year 10 of the overall OASIS+ period of performance. Let's say you get a task order awarded on year 10, and that task order that has its own period of performance and that's five years. Well, now your overall OASIS Plus is prolonged by another five years, so you could potentially have it up to 15 years, if that makes sense. And that is why when they ask for pricing, they ask for pricing for a 15-year period. So just something to keep in mind. Place of performance is going to be specified and individual task orders can be anywhere. There's a minimum guaranteed amount of $2,500 when you get on the vehicle, and the vehicle does allow both joint ventures and contractor teaming agreement CTAs as well as more typical or more traditional prime sub-relationships as well.

The prime sub-relationships are really limited to small businesses and it has to be similarly situated, small businesses. However, once you get the vehicle, they have answered multiple times. They have to answer the question that when you go after task orders, you can add additional subs in the future. So when you're thinking about teaming potentially to get on the vehicle, it's really in the interest of getting the vehicle itself as far as competing for task orders that can come in the future.

If you are applying as a joint venture ... Oh, going too fast, sorry. If you are applying as a joint venture, it's based on qualified projects. And so qualified projects can be submitted from either the joint venture itself or any individual member of a joint venture and combination of. Now, for the small business, for SBA certified mentor protege joint ventures, a minimum of one project has to come from either Protege or the joint venture itself. So that's really important. Also, we talked a little bit about small businesses and needing to certify proposal submission. They do need to certify, and this is sort of a new update with the phase two and the final RFP amendment that came out on Monday. Small businesses need to certify their size based on NICS votes. So for each specific MAX code, some of them, they may be certified small business, and with them they may not qualify.

So now they're making it be based on NICS both size standards and different quiz. And we talked about rerepresenting the size of the five year mark. Go ahead, Mike.

A little bit more RFP highlights and things like that. So I mentioned there were different socioeconomic pools and different solicitations, six different associations aligned to those. There's also different domains. So within each of the solicitation/socioeconomic pool, there are different functional domains. Functional domains are aligned to functional areas. So for small businesses, there are 12 domains. For large businesses or unrestricted, they add another enterprise domain that has to do with bigger jobs, enterprise-wide jobs, and that makes sense for the unrestricted part. We mentioned there was a phase one several years ago, and the phase one was closed out and submitted and largely awarded, although apparently they're still making additional awards, so I don't know how many are still outstanding, to be honest, so they're still working on that. We are now on phase two. Now, phase two just opened up with official final RFP amendment that was released on Monday, and we'll talk about the overall timeline in just a moment.

In phase one, there were seven domains. And on that slide, you see the names of those domains from management and advisory to logistics to enterprise that is for unrestricted pool only. In phase two, they issued five additional domains, at least one of which I believe is most interesting to all of the ... Or most of the attendees here, and that's the marketing and PR domain. So in phase one, the closest domain that could map some of the functions to the marketing and PR companies was management and advisory. And as Mike mentioned, there are few joint clients or Mike's clients that we've helped back then to get on Oasis Plus in that domain. But now the marketing and PR domain, and we're going to take a look at the scope of that domain in a little bit, so you'll see specifically what that domain scope stands for, is so well aligned in my opinion to everything that or a lot of things that you guys do that from the scope and experience-wise, it just makes sense.

It makes sense not only because you'll have experience to support it, but it makes sense because it covers all the scope of what your clients are going to be working on going forward. And there's a good likelihood a lot of that work is going to go on ERASIS Plus. A single offer may qualify for one or more domains. And oh, by the way, a single offer, if they're a small business, can also qualify for one or more socioeconomic pools. For example, you can be a woman-owned small business that will qualify for the woman-owned socioeconomic pool, as well as small business socioeconomic pool. It is really important to apply for everything that you qualify for. Why? Because when task orders are issued, they're going to be issued in a specific pool per domain. So you want to make sure, again, you cover as many bases as possible, and you give yourself in the future as much runway as possible to go after these task orders.

Each project can only be used once per domain per pool. So it sounds a little restrictive, but when you think of it, it really doesn't. Again, if you're a small business as an example, and you're going after small business and women-owned small business in a single domain, you can reuse all the same projects because there are different pools. If you are an unrestricted business and you're going after two different domains, you can reuse some of those projects as long as the scope maps to both domains because it's separate domains. You just can't ... For example, if you have a joint venture and you're a small business, you can't use the same project for the small business pool under the same domain and for that joint venture under the same domain under small business pool, if that makes sense. Okay. Finally, last but not least, project experience and past performance can be from a prime.

It can be prime past performance. It could be subcontractor past performance. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That's not what this says. So rewind. So project experience and past performance can be either if you do have a team that you put together, it could be from a prime or a sub, and the team makes sense only for small businesses allowed only for small business awards or any small business set asides. And then the corporate systems of clearances, which you can also score points from, has to be in the name of the offer.That means either a prime or for a joint venture that means joint venture or joint venture partners. So if you do qualify, what does it take to get an Oasis Plus? How do you put a package together? It is not a typical traditional proposal. So there's no solutioning, there's no management approach, there's no technical approach, there's nothing like that.

However, that sadly and unfortunately does not reduce the complexity of what you have to submit. In some ways, in my opinion, it actually makes that complexity more difficult.

So you do have to submit contractual reps and certs. The big bulk of your submission is project experience. It's called qualifying project experience, and we've talked a lot about that. And typically it's about five projects per domain that you have to submit. And the problem is the way the scorecard is laid out, the way the score is calculated, there's so many different attributes. First, you get a big bulk of points for having the five projects that map to the scope within a certain timeframe, et cetera, et cetera. That part is very easy unless you start looking at commercial experience and then you have to document it because with commercial experience or subcontract experience, things get a lot more nuancey and even proving the value of the contract is much more difficult than doing for a federal prime contract. So you have to have a lot more documentation and things like that.

Now then you get score for having more than certain number of labor categories on a project, and then you have to document that. And then there's a form that goes with that, and that form has to be filled out properly. And sometimes you have to get a letter or some kind of proof from your customer, and that proof has to be ironclad, otherwise you get picked out for that. And then you have to submit it all in their symphony submission system. And in that system, for each part, for each form, for each, everything that you're approving, there's a ton of different checkboxes and fields. And if you don't fill that out right, you get kicked out because they use that system to do at least a partial evaluation of those bids. So it's all automated and computer based and computers are very black and white.

I did hear a story of at least one, not my client, I want to say not my client, but one company, and they actually came to one of my consultants to help them fix it, but they got kicked out because a proper checkbox was not checked in symphony. And that's like for that little thing, they got kicked out because the computer is evaluating these things. So qualifying project experience is not just project experience, but you have to make sure you have all your paperwork together. And on top of that, you have to take a statement of work or PWS performance work statement, and you have to annotate and tag it properly and make sure. So there's no particular writeup, but all the tagging and all the keywords and buzzwords literally have to be tagged properly to align with the scope of work that you're applying for.

So that's a little bit of an art and science in itself. So they do look at the federal prime contractor experience. There are certain things you have to submit for that experience as well. They do look at fast performance. There are PPQs, past performance questionnaires that you have to submit. If you do have systems that are audited and certified, they look at that. If you have corporate certifications, they look at that. If you have facility clearances, they look at that. So you have to provide, so for all the things that you may have, now if you don't have those things, it's not the end of the role. You can still get on the vehicle. I want to be clear. But if you do have that and you're claiming those points, you have to provide proof of all that and you have to submit a form with everything and it has to be done just right.

There's a little bit of a writeup involved. It's very contractual-based write-up and it's called for responsibility evaluation and things like professional employee compensation plan, uncompensated overtime policy, the financial resources available to your company and things like that. In some cases, it's literally a paragraph, but it's just things that you have to document and showcase. And finally, there is pricing and rates that you have to submit. They do provide labor categories. You have to provide rates for 15 years, and I explained why 15 years and not 10 earlier, but you have to provide the rates for those labor categories. They actually give you a range for the rates, so they give you a low high range. So they recommend and we highly recommend you get it within that range. If they say that if you go outside of the range, you can provide justifications. I will say none of my clients in phase one has gone outside the range, so I can't tell you ... First of all, I don't recommend it.

Second of all, I can't tell you how well that works or not works, but that is there. And then you have to provide a super brief, short, a few paragraph write-up of how you build up your rates, how you calculate a GMA and fee and things like that. But outside of that, there's no price cost volume. There is not having narrative stuff or anything like that. So that's the proposal contents. Let's go to the next slide.

Mike:

Marina, real quick, one of the things that you and I have talked about offline multiple times is how arduous, and I think you just alluded to it on the Symphony portal. In your experience, how long should companies plan to spend uploading their ... Is this a 30-minute thing or is this a six-hour hunker down and just start working through it?

Marina:

What a great question, Mike. I appreciate it. So I'll preface this by saying that I do have proposal managers who are literally experts. They've done a ton of these uploads and they've learned so many lessons doing it. I have not done one personally, so I'll preface by saying that I will say one of my proposal managers ran a training webinar for my clients on phase one on how to use Symphony, and I sat in, I was an attendee, and my mind kind of went poof. And then the first thougt going through my head, thank God, I have these people, and thank God I don't have to do it, because it was fairly complicated. I will say they went ... So what they did is they had to go through GSA training, and GSA does provide training on the Interact website for Symphony. So they went through a few hours of that over the course.

And by the way, Symphony has also changed. So it's a separate contract and a separate company that has developed it for GSA and continues to maintain it. And as any computer system, it continues to automate things and change and change interfaces. So for phase two, there are additional changes now that are made, additional training out there. So it's not just a single training thing, you have to keep up with all the changes. So that's point one. So you have to be trained on symphony. You can't just start using it. So that's point one. Point two, it depends if you're doing it for the first time versus you've done it a lot. So the statistics I do have is from my proposal managers who have done it a million times and they now know, okay, you don't check this chatbox or if you check this chat box in order to go to the next screen, you have to attach that and then mark it up and connect it here.

And if you don't, it's not going to let you go to the next screen and then you're going to be stuck and why isn't it doing it and now I know how to do it kind of thing. So with that said, it takes them two to three hours. What I also like to do, like I said, because you can get rejected just by not forgetting to click a checkbox. I actually like to have a second proposal manager do once everything is uploaded. So you upload into Symphony, you set everything up, you answer all the forms. At the very, very end, you submit everything. So before you submit, you have an opportunity to do a review in Symphony itself. So you can go and make sure everything is uploaded right, tagged right, connected, right, checkboxes are right, filled out right. So I always like to send a second proposal manager to do the second set of eyes because we're all feminine and even the biggest expert is fee minutes and make a mistake.

So that's what we do for our appliance. So I would say two to three hours for experience submission to do all the prep work and then probably another hour or so or an hour and a half of somebody else be checking it and then we submit it. So that's how we do it.

Mike:

And one other question that coming into the chat and we could advance to the next slide real quick on the qualifying experience, we've all seen obviously contract pullback and DOGE and terminations and everything else. With so many of those clients, contracting officers, et cetera, no longer employed, what are your recommendations for getting sign off or getting confirmation that those qualifying projects are in fact qualifying and are relevant? Yeah,

Marina:

That's a really hard question. And I've been getting so many of these exact same questions through meetings with the clients for the past couple of weeks. So first of all, everybody's having this issue across the board. Second of all, it's a brand new issue that we've never been ... Even in phase one, we didn't have this issue. This issue was a result of what happened last year and a lot of retirements and people leaving and stuff. So there is a way around, there's an explanation you can provide in writing and my proposal managers for experts at this know better. So this is where it's great, but I do understand from them there's a way to ... So if you absolutely cannot get a PPQ or cannot get to your customer at all, there's a way to provide an explanation. And so my belief and their belief is that GSA will be mindful that they will understand that this is like something, a situation that's affecting the entire government contracting market and all the agencies.

So they will see that time and time again. So this is like the absolute, if there's nothing else we can do, we'll provide this explanation letter and hope it works because we haven't done it in the past because we didn't have this situation. Before we get to that part though, there are things you can do. And I've seen clients do. For example, if you have a contracting officer or a customer who's retired or left, somebody else has taken over for them, perhaps reach out, have a personal conversation, explain the situation. And to me, this personal conversation part is important rather than just an email if you can actually call them and talk to them, explain the situation and see if they are willing to help out and talk to you. I had a customer who needed a PPQ pass performance questionnaire from their client and their client moved on to a different job altogether, but they had a personal relationship established and they reached out and they still did a PPQ and they said, listen, this person used to be whatever, a CEO at, I don't know, CBC, I'm just making it up, but now they work here, but they've known us for four years and managed our performance for four years and here's the PPP from them.

They just don't work there anymore. So that's another option if you have that personal relationship established. So I think depending on the situation, again, if I had one of my proposal managers working with you, they would provide your recommendation depending on specific situation and what options you may have, they would brainstorm those options. But it's definitely a challenge or a challenge that virtually all companies are struggling with. And I am sure, I'm certain GSA is very open eyed to that challenge. And I also wouldn't be surprised. So now the people's people submitting questions now that the final amendment is out, just like usual, I wouldn't be surprised when they start releasing Q&As, they will address that as well. And if and when they do, we'll have further guidance. But until then, that's sort of the best we can do right now.

All right. So we talked about phase one and phase two a little bit. So several years back, we had phase one. I mentioned it was closed out. It's mostly awarded. So now, and even back then, they've talked about opening it up for phase two. So phase two, December 18th, they released a draft scorecard that now contained five newly added functional domains that we just talked about. It also has the original phase one domains as well. It's also keeping all the socioeconomic pools from phase one, just like we talked about. And so the scorecard was released. And then this past Monday, January 12th, they released what they're calling it the final amendment, but like I said, it's like a final RFP. So now they're opening it up for submission. So the window for submission is open and the difference between phase one and phase two for phase one, you had a deadline.

Just like a typical proposal submission against a typical RFP, proposals were due on such and such date. Now they had a lot of questions and they had to do some amendments and it got extended. Again, for those of us who are dealing, especially with federal government contracts, but also state and local, it's a situation we're pretty much used to. It's not a rare situation. Now, phase two is different. They have what they call an open submission, so there's no deadline. You don't have to submit by February, whatever, or March, whatever you can submit today, you could have submitted yesterday, you can submit tomorrow, you can submit in September. It's very much like a GSA schedule. The windows open, you can submit whenever. So with that said, I have some personal recommendations on that front too. If you qualify, you should do this as quickly as you can.

Why? Well, the sooner you submit, the sooner you get into their pipeline or their line for evaluation and award. As I mentioned, I still hear companies are getting awarded phase one. I don't know how many are remaining for them to evaluate from phase one, but they're still evaluating those companies. So there's definitely some type of a pipeline. The second thing I already told you guys is there's a ton more interest for phase two because of the far overhaul and because of the directive to go and big. So OISS Plus is one of them, and all the companies are learning that there's going to be more bids and more interest. And now there are additional five domains, so that's generating more interest and more bids. And even though a lot of the steps are automated, and I will also say, I don't know exactly how they're doing their evaluation, they're automating with Symphony as much as possible, but there is also some manual steps that they have to do.

And just like any other agency, GSA is short staffed. Last year they lost a lot of people. I suspect that highly suspect that their evaluation cycle is slowing down because they don't have as many people as they used to. So with all that said, it's going to take them time. And a lot of people ask me, "Well, how long do you think it's going to take?" I don't know. And if anybody tells me anything different, they're making this stuff up. Nobody really knows. For one, even GSA doesn't know because GSA doesn't know how many bids they're going to receive and when they're going to receive them. So there's really no true way of estimating that.

If you really, really, really make me say something, I would say at least six to 12 months, but I really don't know. It's really such a guess. But what I do know for a fact, the sooner you submit, the sooner you get into their pipeline, the sooner you get the award. Until you get that award, you can't go after task orders. Task orders are already coming out today for phase one awards, so task orders can come out at any time. So if you qualify and you know you want to do this, you should do this as soon as you can, is my personal recommendation. So the other thing I want to clarify before we move off the slide is that not only can you bid on the five newly added domains, but it's also there's on- ramping open for phase one domains. So all 12 or 13, depending if you are unrestricted or small business, all 12 or 13 domains are currently open to put bids on.

And of course, all of the pools are still open depending on socioeconomic standing. So one other thing I will say is that GSA, when they released that final amendment on Monday, they did say it's open submission, but they did reserve the right to close the window at any time. They said, "We'll give you a notice." They didn't say how long the notice will be. So what they said, "We can close this window." So nobody knows how long this window will be open, and it's not guaranteed that it's going to stay open for the full open period of performance process plus. In fact, if I had to guess, it probably won't, but I don't know. We don't know how long it's going to ... And honestly, again, I don't know if they know. It may highly depend on the interest that they get and how many bids they get.

Who knows? I don't know. But they definitely left it open and flexible for themselves. I know that. So we can go to the next slide now. Fantastic. All right. So we talked about a scorecard already and we talked about qualifying projects. And I want to say the scorecard does have other things on it. We'll look at the analysis of it in a moment, but qualifying projects is the biggest part of a scorecard. So qualifying project can be a single contract. It could be a prime contract, it could be a subcontract, it could be commercial contract. It could be a single task order under an IDIQ or under DPA, or for one example, for one example, it could be a collection of task orders.

So there is a threshold of value and it's average annual value. What I mean by that is you take the total value and you divide by the period of performance and years and you get average annual value, and it's different for different domains and different socioeconomic pools. It's all different and nuanced. But I will also say in general, if I had to generalize most of them ... Oh, I'm sorry, specifically for the M&A domain, not M&A domain, actually, marketing and PR domain. Sorry, that's the left there. For marketing and PR domain, it's 500,000 average annual value for small business set aside and one million for unrestricted. That's what we're looking for, marketing and PR domain, minimum annual values. And it has to be either ongoing or completed within the five years of proposal submission date. And for any new work, it has to have at least six months of performance also as of proposal submission date.

You also get judged based on past performance ratings, and that's like CPARs or surveys, and you have to do PPQ past performance questionnaire. So obviously it's kind of obvious, but I feel like I should say it anyway, you can't have negative record of past performance. So you need to make sure you have a good past performance record for those projects too. And typically we're looking for five projects to qualify. If you don't have five projects, not the end of the world. If you're a small business, you can team for the additional GAAP projects. All right, let's go to the next slide. Okay. I mentioned to show you what the scope of the marketing MPR domain looks like. I am not going to read these bullets. This is straight out of the RFP. I'm going to pause on this slide so you guys will take a quick look.

And the next slide in a moment, just let's pause on this for a minute. Next slide, we'll have a list of NACE throats that they map to this domain. I will say just from my personal limited experience, a lot of the companies I know that are here will be doing work in this specific scope of work. So I think it should speak to a lot of you. And I don't know, Mike, do you want to add anything else on the scope

Mike: Part? No, I think that's exactly right. I think if you're receiving our weekly emails and it looks just from a quick scan on the participation list, you all should fit in one or many more of these bullets. So I think you're in the right spot. The one thing that I would, going back to the last slide of the previous slide, one thing that I would encourage some folks to do, especially some of the larger, small business or more of the large businesses on the line, reexplore the M&A domain. The purpose of this webinar is strictly for the marketing and PR domain, but we did see some work come out of the M&A management and advisory domain on Oasis + Phase one. So that might be something for some firms on this call to reconsider, especially around some of the strategic planning, strategic communications, et cetera.

That there wasn't nearly as many bullets as this, but there were five or six, which was just big enough of a window for about 10 to 12 marketing communications firms to get on management and advisory previously. Okay,

Marina:

Very good. Thank you. Can we go back for one second? I'm looking through the questions and I want to answer some of them. So when you're looking at qualifying projects, you do not need to have a qualifying project hit all of these bullets. You want to hit at least one bullet, the more you hit, the more score you can get, but definitely not all of them. In fact, you probably won't have a qualifying project that hits every single one. You might, but probably not. So even if a project hits one of the bullets, you can use it. So it's point one. Point two, as far as task orders coming out in the future, any task orders that do one or more of these things can be on this domain. And honestly, it's really up to the agency customer agency choice. If they want to put their work on the races plus and it loosely maps to this domain or the description here, and honestly, the contracting officers have even more leeway than that, they can just put it on here and that's it.

So let's go to the next slide super quick. The next slide has a list of NACS codes that's mapped to marketing and PR domain. I won't pause here as long because I believe Mike is going to make these slides available after the fact so you guys, and it's part of the RFP as well, and we're happy to email this out. You'll be able to look at it at your convenience. So things to consider for teaming. Again, it can only really count teammates on the small business side, so you want to make sure they have complimentary project experience. So if you have gaps in that and not enough points, that's what you are looking for. Now, it's really important to make sure your teammates qualify for the same NexCo size standards because they will evaluate that across the team. So if your teammate is larger than you and you're going for some NICS codes and quints that are smaller size and they're larger, they will knock you out of that.

So that's really important to know and understand. So bottom line, when you are evaluating Teaman, you need to make sure that your Teammate adds to your score and not subtracts your score. One of the other things that we need to think about is are they going to be cooperative in this process? So as you're collecting documentation, putting a proposal package together, make sure obviously they're going to be responsive and things like that. Let's keep going. We're almost at the end and we'll do questions. Okay. So I did a quick analysis of the scorecard. This is a small business set-aside tool and really all of them, HubZone, RUNO, all the small business ones for marketing and PR domain specifically. And what I want you to understand, so it's total possible credits you can get is 50. The qualifying threshhold is 36, which means if you get 36 or above and you do everything right, you get an OASIS plus.

What I want you to understand looking at this graph, this orange bar is qualifying projects. So if you get the maximum number of points from qualifying projects alone, and by the way, and then additionally, you have this past performance project, past performance for it, you see, and this is how well your customers evaluate your performance. That's what that is, how well are you performing on those projects. But if you don't have breadth across the federal agencies or multiple award vehicles or facility clearance or any of that, of corporate certifications, you can still get on this vehicle just based on your experience and past performance. Let's go to the next slide.

Mike:

I think the thing that it's a fine line because you want to obviously score as many as you can on the qualifying projects, which to Marina's point, if the qualifying threshold is 36 points, you could conceivably get there on qualifying projects alone if you have nothing else, but you're drawing a very thin line to make sure that you get full points on those qualifying projects.

Marina:

Yeah, that's true. So this is an analysis of a scorecard, same domain, marketing clear domain, because that's what we're here for, but this is unrestricted tools. So this is for large businesses. So the first thing you see is the minimum average annual value we talked about that goes from 500,000 to one million and notice and then the qualifying threshold is also higher. Used to be 50, now it's 42. All of this makes sense. The companies are larger, they should have more work, there's more pressure on bigger, more projects, that type of thing. I will also say if you look at the difference in the barge, there is more emphasis on things like having other multiple award vehicles, having breadth of experience across federal agencies, company clearances, certified systems and corporate certifications. So you have to have some combination or some points coming from that to help you get over the top.

So there's definitely more pressure on the larger companies as to be expected.

So this is the final slide before we go to contact us slide and questions. And these are the offerings that we have. We have a set of offerings. As I mentioned, I think the most important part is that we've done this. We've done this in spades. We know what we're doing. When I say we, it's really the team of experts that work for me. I know enough to be the talking head at this point, but are answering some of the high level questions we'll attempt to do in a moment, but I don't have hands-on in- depth expertise that my experts have. So if I can't answer a question, we'll get you the answer after this webinar. I'll have to call in a friend. But the first thing we do, and we highly recommend is an initiative preliminary assessment. This is where we're going to talk to you about five to seven projects we're going to evaluate and priororitize for you.

We're going to go through and scrub the scorecard specific to you. We're going to talk strategy specific to you, how to maximize this force, how to prioritize all the projects you have. See, do you qualify? Do you not qualify? If you qualify, out of the seven or eight projects you have, which five should you use? I give you the highest four. We talk through what documentation you will need or what risks you may have around which areas. And finally, if you're not quite there instead of 36 points, maybe you have 33 or 34, they give you very specific map of recommendations on how to team or what to look for in teaming in teammates and additional projects to get you there. So that's one of the things we do upfront. It's the very first offering that we do. The second thing up to that, assuming you qualify and you want to move forward, we do anything from the a la carte support to an external assessment, a single external assessment if you want to do things in- house and attempted in- house with in- house resources.

But majority of our clients at that point, they trust us, they see how complicated this beast is and how much expertise we truly do have, and they just purchase the full OASIS package. And that's basically helping put the entire proposal package together. For submission, it also includes one additional external review. As I mentioned, second set of eyes is really important on this from one of our additional proposal managers, and then the full upload into Symphony as well. And the final service we have, if somebody wants to do their own package and everything, we do Symphony upload on its own, and the final document review is that final step. I will say vast majority of what we're getting interest in and signing agreements for right now is that initial assessment and the full license package. And that's pretty much probably the thing that gets you the most value and helps guarantee you being able to get on the scale, what you want to do, and you want to do it as quickly as possible the first time around, ideally.

Okay. So this is mine and Mike's contact information. We have a few minutes left. I'm happy to field any questions. I know people haven't been putting them in the chat and I've been trying to ... I know Mike's been fielding them as we've been going. I've been trying to field them little bit as I was talking, and I will say also we can answer some offline as well. Let's see. I'm scrolling through them. State contracts can qualify as a qualifying project. Let's see. We talked about the scope areas that you don't have to hit all of them. It could just be one.

Any kind of projects could be out on the marketing domain that fall within that scope, or it basically depends on the agency customer what they want to put under this contract. GSA is not going to turn down work or screen it or say, no, you can't put this contract on Asis Plus. So I think there's going to be across federal government, it's open to every single agency. You're going to see a lot of DOD is definitely going to be using it heavy, going to see a lot of agencies. I use NASA as an example because it's near and near my heart. I may have mentioned CDC as a random agency. These are not specific examples. They're definitely not the only agencies that are using this vehicle at all, but I will say it's definitely going to be very broadly used across all agencies. Option years of contracts will not count as a separate QP qualifying project, a qualifying project.

Everything that you have a single contract number for can be a qualifying project, so you can't split it by option years.

Mike:

Marina, what are your suggestions for ... We've got a couple of questions on the 15-year pricing exercise.

Marina:

Yeah, that one I have to take offline. And the reason for that is I have to take a look at how ... They provide a spreadsheet template for it, so it's very structured, and I haven't looked at it. So I can venture a guess. I think there's probably a tab for each year or a column for each year, and then you can do some kind of escalation. That's my guess that you can apply escalation and project out, and that's what they want you to do. I'd have to confirm that, but that would be my high level guess. That's typical. But yeah, they're going to want you to escalate and project, and that's what you'll have to do is apply some sort of a percentage factor. What else? I'm scrolling through. Also, Mike, if you see anything you want me to answer as I'm scrolling through, as you scrolling through, just let me know.

Mike:

You're rejected and not awarded a spot on Oasis Plus. What have you seen and what are the options for companies to remediate?

Marina:

Yeah, I've seen it twice, and I've heard of a third one that was not my client. So one of the things I've seen in phase one is one of the teammates of our client did not certify SMA as a small business under the size standards, and so that was rejected. Another client of ours did not submit their SAM.gov registration or updated or something in time. All of those things are sort of outside of our control. So you have to make sure you're doing all the other parts too. It's not just submitting a package. The third thing I mentioned was not a client of mine. It's anecdotally. I heard it from one of my consultants that company came to them directly asking for help for resubmission, but they literally missed a check. They didn't even know why at first, but when they did the analysis, they missed a checkbox on symphony of some sort of a checkbox.

So those are the three instances, the only three instances I'm aware of. Not that it's happening actually quite a bit, but a lot of it had ... I mean, thankfully not to my clients, so I don't have the details. Let's see.

So I don't know anything about legalities for 15-year pricing requirement, but I just know in my experience of doing business development federal government contracting, I have definitely seen government asking to price things for 10 years to 15. I've seen them. There was one unrelated at all. We had to do a pricing volume for a 30-year project on this really big massive, massive undertaking. So I think it's fully legal, but I'm not a lawyer, so I will leave it at that. The costs for our assistance, so this is not something we're going to widely answer here. I will say if you are very interested, reach out to me or Mike. What I do is I set up an initial meeting and like I said, some of you have been to that. I set up for about 45 minutes. It's the initial consultation's completely free. The first thing I do is I want to make sure it even makes sense to get started, and most of the time it does, and I will be asking for those, making sure you have those five qualifying projects that we talked about.

That's my little litmus test. And then I can provide you with ... You already saw the services that we offer and I can provide you with the pricing at that time.

Submission is conducted. You do have an opportunity to correct and submit. That is correct. What else? Am I missing anything else? I've been scrolling up and down. Currently, there is no timeline for resubmission. As long as there's open submission timeline, you can resubmit right now. Let's say somebody gets rejected, they can resubmit the next day or a month later. And it also depends. For example, I don't know, let's say they just qualify one of your projects and you have to wait to fill ... I don't know, I'm just making things up. It's never happened. One of my clients, thankfully, depends how long it takes you to fix something. Now, like I said, they did say they reserve the right to close that window. So I think the worst case scenario you submit and then you get rejected and the window's closed, I don't think you'll be able to resubmit.

But right now it's an open window. There's no way to tell how long they're going to leave it open. And if somebody tries to tell you they know, please don't listen to them. There are a lot of consultants out there that try to sound like they know things and sadly make up information, I'm not in that category. I will say, I think GSA is going to see how many bids they're getting, how quickly they're getting to the pipeline of reviews, those types of things. And I think that's going to play into their future this decision. I don't think they've made this decision now into their future potential decision of closing the window or not. So I don't think GSA knows right now. So anyone else that tells you that they think they know, start guessing. They're just making things up, quite honestly.

Mike:

Well, it's two o'clock. If anyone else has any questions or wants to get in touch, you hopefully have Marina and I's contact information, feel free to reach out at any time. But Marina, thank you, thank you, thank you. This was very helpful for me, hopefully very helpful for the hundred or so people that were on the line today. So thank you so much for that and for everybody that attended. Thank you for joining and talk to you soon. Thanks guys.

Marina:

Good. Thank you everyone. Have a great weekend. Bye-bye.