By Geoff Fein
The Program Executive Office for Littoral and Mine Warfare’s (PEO LMW) efforts to open up contracting opportunities for small businesses is showing significant gains as Navy officials are giving those firms major roles in the acqusition process, according to a program official.
“You will see a multitude of small business contracting throughout the PEO where we did not have resources in a traditional sense to go procure, but we were able to leverage a SBIR idea to bring in that technology and, in some cases, have a regular acquisition strategy built around that SBIR which is non-traditional,” Anne Sandel, PEO LMW, told Defense Daily recently.
Smaller component and technology buys coupled with limited financial resources means PEO LMW officials need to be able to harness the buying power and technology insertion of small business to their benefit, Sandel added.
Victor Gavin, executive director PEO LMW, has focused across all the program offices, in essence going door-to-door, asking officials to point out where their technical challenges exist and how they are integrating small businesses into the fold, she said.
Gavin matched up companies with programs, watched how that worked out and then set up Small Business Research Innovation (SBIR) Phase I, II and III efforts, Sandel noted.
When Sandel and Gavin came into PEO LMW almost two years ago, they had a goal as far as where they wanted to see SBIR Phase III contracting opportunities go inside the office.
“At the time, we were doing a fairly good job, about $30 million went into small business. We wanted to increase that,” Gavin recalled.
He and Sandel recognized the value small companies bring to the table including innovation and the acquisition benefits derived from using smaller firms.
“We set a modest goal, I thought. We thought it was pretty aggressive at the time, of tripling that by fiscal year ’10, to a goal of $100 million,” Gavin said. “Here we are in ’10 and we well exceeded that goal.”
Although Gavin said the PEO is still calculating the numbers to see how much it has increased its investment to small businesses, he noted it is almost twice what the goal was.
“We are putting small businesses in the acquisition process, giving them a major role, to lead some of these projects from mine warfare to identity dominance,” Gavin said. “Our acquisition strategy is built around small business and the SBIR program.”
For Gavin to get the program manager of Identity Dominance to adopt an acquisition strategy that has as its foundation small business contracts is very forward leaning, Sandel said.
When she first took over as PEO, Sandel recognized the agility, flexibility, the ability to take on technological challenges and the contracting responsiveness of small companies.
“They are willing to assume more risk because they don’t have as much infrastructure, they don’t have a huge DoD partnership, which is typically risk adverse,” Sandel said. “That’s where a lot of the dollar and policy requirements come from within DoD. You don’t want to have something go wrong. When you are small, you don’t have a lot of risk.”
The flexibility of small businesses is very appealing to PEO LMW, she added, particularly because of the small resources the PEO has.
But Gavin and Sandel both noted they are not adverse to working with the big prime contractors. On the contrary, they said, the large defense firms add a lot to the table.
“The big guys bring a lot of power, leverage, structure, learning, and experience. They have multiple DoD partners, they have Hill presence, and they have the ability to help us go places we couldn’t go by ourselves,” Sandel said.
“There is a nice medium there between the large and small industry partners. We are trying to find our middle. What we have been able to do with our industry partners, the big guys, is bring in more small business partnerships. [The big companies] weren’t initially excited about [that] but now they see the benefit, because there is no business case for them to go forward and take risk on a $10 million effort.”
But the big primes are willing to let PEO LMW go forward with these efforts and then see if it comes to fruition, Sandel said. Those companies might then perhaps take those smaller company efforts on as a larger acquisition strategy, long-term for procurement. “I think they are getting more comfortable and we are getting more comfortable where that middle ground is.”
Gavin also noted that at many of the small business conferences PEO LMW does across the country throughout the year, they have panels with representatives from big companies.
“We invite our big business primes to those conferences to talk about opportunities to get involved and reach the business model Ms. Sandel just talked about,” he said.