Name: Women-Owned Small Business Contracting in a Changing Federal Landscape
Uploaded: 2026-04-23T19:31:02.932Z
Duration: 51 min 48 s
Description: Women-Owned Small Business Contracting in a Changing Federal Landscape

Transcript for "Women-Owned Small Business Contracting in a Changing Federal Landscape": Hello everyone and thank you for joining today's webinar, Women Owned Small Business Contracting in a Changing Federal Landscape. Before we get started, I would like to share a teeny bit about, who Deltek is and how we support project based businesses. Deltek is the leading global provider of enterprise software and information solutions. Our industry focused expertise powers project success by helping firms achieve performance that maximizes productivity and revenue. So if you'd like to learn more about our offerings, I would encourage you to visit deltek.com. Also, we're on our housekeeping slide. A few housekeeping notes to run you through before we get started. For the best webinar experience, please make sure that you are using Google Chrome or Firefox. If you have a question, please type it into the Q and A box. You can type it in any time during the presentation. I am trying to address questions and answers at the end of the presentation. If I do not get to your question today, I will do my best to take it offline and get back to you personally. Resources, including the presentation slides, are available for you to download in the resources panel on your screen and you will also receive the on demand recording of today's webinar via email within twenty four hours after the webinar concludes. So today, I'm gonna review the Women Owned Small Business program, go through how it started, what it has achieved, and what your qualifications are to be certified as a woman owned small business or an economically disadvantaged woman owned small business. We'll also take a look at some spending over the years and how fiscal year twenty twenty five looked and how fiscal year twenty twenty six is shaping up so far a little bit. I'll also go over the elephant in the room, which is the impact of the new administration. We had Doge at the beginning in q one of fiscal year twenty twenty five, executive orders regarding DEI, and also just a general changing of the federal contractor landscape right now. I'm gonna go over Deltek's opportunity outlook for women owned small businesses. I pulled our potential requirements, that are expected to come out in the next eighteen months. So we'll sort of take a broad view there of what we can expect and then narrow down a list of some of our highest valued opportunities that we expect to come out in that time period. Finally, I'll leave you with some recommendations of how to navigate the new landscape and where you can focus to make sure that you keep your business moving forward, growing, and winning contracts. The Small Business Administration executed the Women Owned Small Business program in 2011. The purpose was to help provide a level playing field for women business owners. The government limits competition for certain contracts to businesses that participate in the women's contracting program. The contracts are for industries where women owned small businesses are underrepresented. Some contracts are restricted further to economically disadvantaged women owned small businesses and the Small Business Administration maintains a list of those eligible industries and their NAICS codes on their site. For any of you who are unfamiliar with the NAICS code, you may be new to the federal contracting space, a NAICS code is assigned to each federal contract requirement. It sort of helps to categorize what the contract is going to be for. So you'll see NAICS code that cover everything from janitorial services to IT software development. The list goes on. But, the importance of the NAICS code for the socioeconomic group is each NAICS code has a specific qualification for what would be considered a small business under it. So a NAICS code will have assigned to it either a specific, revenue amount that that company would have to fall under that revenue level to be considered a small business under that NAICS code for that contract, or, full time employee headcount also can be considered instead of revenue. So the federal government's goal, is to award at least 5% of all federal contracting dollars to women owned small businesses each year. This has not changed. There's been some other changes I'll go through, but women owned business has stayed at 5%. So if you join the women's contracting program, it makes your business eligible to compete for federal contracts, that are set aside specifically for that program. You can, however, still compete for contract awards under other socioeconomic programs you qualify for as well. So if you are, I'm gonna talk about this in a little bit, but Economically Disadvantaged Women Owned Small Business has the same financial requirements as the eight a program. You may qualify for both. You could compete for either or whichever you would like. And, obviously, even if you are a woman can certified as a woman owned small business, you could still compete for regular small business set asides or even full and open competitions just knowing that you're going to be competing frequently against midsize and larger businesses as well for those full and open sections. Currently, there are over 22,600 women owned small businesses and over 7,499 economically disadvantaged women owned small businesses according to, the Small Business Administration's Dynamic Small Business Search. That's a huge jump. When I first started doing this webinar series, probably, I wanna say five years ago or so, five or six years ago, the number was 8,000 women owned small businesses and I think it was only a thousand economically disadvantaged. So the program has grown exponentially. There are a lot more women owned small businesses that are getting certified and, working in the federal space, which is awesome. Also, these overall numbers include something called a joint venture. I wanted to talk about that a little bit because joint ventures do account for 16% of all women owned small businesses. They are a route for winning business via a woman owned small business set aside because you can create a separate vendor entity with a woman owned small business by combining several parts of other companies. So a woman owned small business could combine with some other set aside or a different kind of small business and form a woman owned small business joint venture. And it works as long as it meets the qualifications to be classified as a woman owned small business. The way that they qualify a joint venture for that is you have to have, the combined annual receipts, or employees of the concern entering into the joint venture have to meet the applicable size standard corresponding to the NAICS code assigned to that contract. So that's what I was referring to earlier. The NAICS code for the contract will have a specific number, be it revenue or employee headcount that you have to fall below to qualify. Also, the economically disadvantaged or woman owned small business participant in the joint venture has to be designated in the central contractor registry as such. Then they can enter into a written joint venture agreement, which has to contain a few provisions. The woman owned small business, which if it if I'm speaking separately about something about economically disadvantaged specifically, I will call that out. Otherwise, I'm just I'm not gonna say both. I'll just say woman owned small business, which includes in the umbrella economically disadvantaged as well. So you have to designate the woman owned small business as the managing venture of the joint venture and an employee of the managing venture as the project manager responsible for the performance of that contract that you're going out for, stating that not less than 51% of the net profits earned by the joint venture will be distributed to the woman owned small business, specifying the responsibility of the parties with regard to contract performance, the sources of labor, negotiation of the woman owned small business contract, and requiring the final original records be retained by the managing venture upon completion of the woman owned small business contract performed by the joint venture. So in short, you have to make sure that the woman owned small business is at least 51% responsible for it and then that joint venture should work. So to be eligible to fall under the woman owned small business, category, you have to already be a small business and you have to be at least 51% owned and controlled by women who are US citizens, and you have to have women manage day to day operations and also make long term decisions. To qualify as an economically disadvantaged business within this program, because all economically disadvantaged women owned small businesses automatically qualify as women owned small business, they don't, it doesn't go the other way though. So to also be economically disadvantaged, you have to meet all those, all those requirements. You also have to be owned and controlled by one or more woman, women, each with a personal net worth of 750,000 or less, be owned and controlled by one or more women each with 350,000 or less in adjusted gross income averaged over the past three years and you have to be owned and controlled by one or more women each with 6,000,000 or less in personal assets. Your personal net worth standards for economically disadvantaged individuals have been aligned now between the eight business development program though. So economically disadvantaged women owned small businesses and eight a business development program participants have the same personal net worth threshold and funds invested in an official retirement account are excluded from the assessment of an economically disadvantaged individual's personal net worth, in both programs. You can get a preliminary assessment over whether you would qualify at the Small Business Administration's, WOSB, women owned small business, .certify. Sba dot gov website. Before any firms can compete for women owned small business federal contracting program set aside contracts, they must apply for certification through the WOSB certify.sba.gov or they have to go through an approved third party certifier, which I'll discuss very shortly. Both of these methods require that firms use that WOSB certify site though, so even if you're using a third party certifier, they can certify you but you still have to go through the process on the website. The website's great. I recommend this all the time to people. I mean, you can attend these Small Business Series webinars and stuff like this, but, the SBA has a great website where you can access different checklists that can provide you a lot of guidance prior to applying to the program. You can explore your own company's eligibility. They have lots of Q and A documents on there. You can even request information from some small business administration experts about stuff. You can even create an account if it looks like something that you do wanna do and get started with your application. Firms do need to update their certification information through the dynamic small business search database, once a year to maintain your status with the women owned small business federal contracting program. Also, this is kind of old news now because this was back in 2023 or 2020. There was a long time ago that you were able to self certify as a Woman Owned Small Business. That has been gotten rid of. You cannot do that anymore. You either have to go through a third party or you have to use the SBA's own, certify.gov site to do it. The third party certifiers, so there's four of them. There is the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. They're located in El Paso, and, they're probably a little bit more relevant to those who are based in more of the Southwest area. Their mission is to continue to be an advocate in promoting the success of small minority and women owned businesses in the El Paso region, by providing resources, information, and education, while promoting the awareness and the preservation of the Hispanic culture. We also have the National Women Business Owners Corporation. They were started more than twenty years ago. I think they're our oldest, of the four and became one of the first organizations to create a national certification program for women owned business. They claim that they're more than just a platform though, that it's a powerful network of resources for business development and access to new opportunities. There's also the US Women's Chamber of Commerce. They help women start and build successful businesses, gain access to government contracts, grow as leaders, and prepare them for a secure retirement. And lastly, we have the Women's Business Enterprise National Council. They, were founded in 1997 to develop a nationwide standard for women owned business certification. Since then, they've grown to be the largest third party certifier of business owned, businesses owned and controlled by women in The United States. They're also a leading advocate for women owned business. So to wrap this up, you'll need to provide proof of your third party certification through certify sba.gov, and that's how you can get certified and start working as a woman owned small business. So we have a timeline, looking back of all the changes that have come to pass for the Women Owned Small Business program since it actually went into action. In April 2011, the new Federal Acquisition Regulation or FAR, as we refer to it, implemented the Women Owned Small Business program and limited the number of eligible industries that can qualify for the women's contracting program. As a result of the change, 38 industries were eligible for economically disadvantaged women owned small businesses and 45 industries were, for women owned small businesses. Then in December 2014, the National Defense Authorization Act of 2015 ended the self certification program and provided, in addition, sole source authority, so women owned small businesses could be sole source too at that point. In October 2015, the FAR ended up implementing the sole source process, meaning sole source authority is allowed in industries in which women owned small business, set asides are offered. Again, for people who are newer in the in the contracting space, sole source contracts are contracts that are not competed publicly. The government still has to, prove that there are no other, sources for what they need, but sole source means that there is no competition. They just automatically, contract with that vendor, after proving that there are no other sources to get it from. In March 2016, the eligible industries for women owned small business and economically disadvantaged companies were revised and then expanded. The Department of Commerce did a study, where they provided information which led to the revised and expanded industries. 27 industries changed designation between women owned small business and economically disadvantaged. Six industries were removed, and 36 industries ended up being added. These industries are determined, to need more women owned small business representation. That's why they were picked and why things were changed around. Then in October 2017, there was a NAICS code update which led to the Women Owned Small Business and Economically Disadvantaged Industries being revised to a total of 112. And if you wanna ever check on a current list of NAICS that qualify for Women Owned Small Business, they're all on the Small Business Administration website. Finally, in 2020, Women Owned Small Business Certification can be accepted from Small Business Administration approved third parties and certain identified government entities and you are eligible under the Women Owned Small Business program as long as your application is pending. So as long as you're pending to be approved as a small as a woman owned small business, you are. The SBA adjusted the economically disadvantaged threshold at that time also in the '8 business development program to make it consistent, so that's why, they both have the same economic, qualifying factors now. And in addition to the certification requirement for firms that are seeking women owned small business set aside contracts, the regulations detail certification option for applicants and require authorized third party certifiers to notify applicants of their fees as well as the option to use the SBA's free online certification process, which is something of note you frequently have to pay. Fees to third party certifiers, it is free if you do it directly through the Small Business Administration. So one may ask why are there so many changes to this program so frequently? As I said before, the when I started doing this, there were 8,000 women owned small businesses now, 22,000. And it's not just women owned small business. They have to have to process eight a, HUBZone, etcetera. So, the administration had some difficulty processing applications just because of the sheer number of applicants, And doing these changes over the years has helped to ease that administrative burden, increase the speed and efficiency of getting people approved and out there. And altogether, obviously, any of these changes were really targeted toward the overall goal of increasing the number of women owned small businesses that can compete and win federal contracts. So to review some program details, we have four third party certifiers for women owned, small businesses, the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the National Women Business Owners Corporation, the US Women's Chamber of Commerce, and the Women's Business Enterprise National Council. SoleSource Women Owned Small Business Awards for nonmanufacturing services have a cap of 4 and a half million. All others have a cap of 7,000,000. We have 733 NAICS codes that are eligible for the program and a 107 NAICS that are eligible for the economically disadvantaged version of the program. And then really quick, so your eligibility to apply, as a woman in small business or economically disadvantaged, you have to meet the small business size standard, 51% ownership by one or more women. Women have to make day to day decisions, strategic, hold the highest position, work full time during normal hours. Basically, they're just making sure that you can't just have one woman at the top and say you're a woman owned small business. Women have to be involved from start to finish in the whole process. And then economically disadvantaged women owned small businesses include all of that, but also have the qualifying of the personal net worth of less than 750,000, adjusted gross income over three years of less than 350,000, and then the fair market value of all assets is 6,000,000 or less, all of those excluding, money reinvested to pay taxes or retirement accounts. So now let's take a look at some federal spending trends. So this first slide I, shamelessly poached from one of my, fellow fellows at Deltek, who does the eight a program, Kathleen Sievers, made this lovely slide, to go over small business goals. So one thing I wanna point about this slide that she, put together, there was an error with the State Department. There was a 21,600,000,000 obligation error that inflated some of the small business and small disadvantaged business data. She has put together this graph and pulled both sets of numbers. So the yellow or orange on your screen, in the graph is a rough number that removes the $21,600,000,000 and the red is a number that does not remove it. It does not have a big impact on women owned small business, the one that we're focused on right here in the middle, but just to give you an idea about this slide. So let's talk about small business goals. Every year, the Small Business Administration works with the government and agencies to ensure at minimum 23% of prime contracting dollars go to small businesses. There are specific statutory goals that remain for small disadvantaged businesses, women owned small businesses, service disabled veteran owned small businesses, and HUBZone firms. Goals for women owned small business and HUBZone have held pretty steady over the year at 53% respectively. Small disadvantaged business started at 5%, but then has been consistently increasing, fiscal year twenty two, 11%, '23 up to twelve, twenty four up to 13. It was supposed to be 15% in fiscal year twenty twenty five, but it ended up getting reverted back to 5%, when the new administration came in. The other changes, service disabled veteran owned businesses had been set at 3%, but they were upped to 5% for their goal starting in fiscal year twenty twenty four. Overall, those small business goals for agencies is 23%. The purpose of these goals is to ensure that small businesses receive a fair share of federal procurement dollars, to support economic growth, foster innovation, and increase equity in federal contracting. There are also subcontracting goals also which again when large contracts are awarded, the goals help to encourage prime contractors to subcontract work with smaller firms to again broaden participation across the pool. So here we're looking at federal prime women owned small business total contract obligations over the years. And it was now people may disagree with me. I added in fiscal year twenty twenty six. I don't know if that was a great idea or not. What I will say is that with how different the landscape is changing, it's more difficult to take a look at the past and say, I can absolutely predict what's happening in the future because everything is like it always has been and it's easy. I think it's harder to, like, have a good crystal ball to look into the future. So I tossed in the fiscal year 2026 info, at the last second. You know, have it for what it's worth. It's not complete, so it's not giving you a great view of what '26 looks like, but you have it there and you can do what you want with it. I will say that it doesn't look from the sights of it that it's gonna trend to be higher than fiscal year twenty twenty five. But, anyway, so what we see in this graph is that there was sort of a steady climb in prime contracting dollars being spent up to fiscal year twenty twenty four, and now it has started to trend downward in fiscal year twenty twenty five, which is what we're seeing across the board for small business and women owned small business. If we look, our next slide, is a little wonky. So this is not the prime total contract obligations. This is subcontracting. Here, it's a little bit more of a roller coaster. We have a huge spike in fiscal year twenty twenty one, which I believe has more to do with probably the COVID, post COVID contracting that was going on. It was sort of a bust and then a boom. I can see I'm sure due to a lot of different, contracts going on that there was a lot more subcontractor activity going on in that time frame. So I would not hold fiscal year twenty twenty one as a as a regular year. It was sort of a an oddity. But then if we if we take that out and we look at the rest of it, it looks a lot like prime, contracting, except a little bit more pronounced, in in the fiscal year 2025 with the dip that we sort of had this gain and gain and gain up to 2024, and then we're seeing a decline steadily, assuming, again, that fiscal year 2026 will probably follow suit with fiscal year twenty twenty five. So I wanted to talk about the impacts of the new administration. This is a pretty negative slide. So fiscal year twenty twenty five, as we know, is not really a great year for women owned small business federal contracting participation. There was a lot of talk. You know, I was looking at a report by the US Women's Chamber of Commerce about how women and small businesses really did suffer, they said disproportionately, with the q one f y twenty five Doge cuts, to all those contracts and also, obviously, with dismissing a lot of the equity programs, getting rid of DEI, they're they're gonna be a group that really suffers in this. The overall picture is obviously challenging. Like I said, even for all of federal contractors, it's a challenging marketplace right now because everything is sort of shifting in priorities. Things are are changing. What I would say, though, is that this is not really despite how negative this can look, I don't think it's a time to get discouraged, or or throw your hands up. The the ceiling is not falling down, for instance. I think it's really a time of taking a look at priorities, maybe shifting how you are strategically positioning yourself, and definitely a lot about learning how to adapt to a new environment that you're going to have to work your way through. So some tips that I think, you know, auditing your pipeline for contracts. I know Doge is over and it says at risk for Doge. Doge isn't actively happening anymore, but sort of auditing your pipeline to look for contracts that could be at risk of, you know, the equity issues or, agency consolidation. There are a lot of contracts that are getting consolidated, a lot of movement over to agencies like GSA. Perhaps you had some contracts in your pipeline way out in the future that you knew, you know, it was gonna expire this year, so I'm thinking we're gonna go after it when it's coming up for expiration. And perhaps that contract has been canceled or perhaps has been rolled under something else or consolidated in. So really taking a hard look at your far in the future, prospects and figuring out what you should still go after and what you maybe need to move on from. Also, if you are struggling in your area, being able to pivot and be more agile, which is sort of an advantage of being a smaller business, right? It's not this large behemoth. You can be more agile and move because the defense sector is still booming. There's still a lot of money, especially in the defense sector. Looking at cybersecurity, IT, AI, all of those are still spending strong areas to to maybe pivot towards if you need to. Making sure that you're maintaining all of your certifications that you have, especially the fact that for a women owned small business, you you have to remember that you have to recertify every single year, so staying on top of that stuff. Exploring teaming and subcontracting opportunities. If you are constrained and you're not getting the amount, that you wanted to with prime contracting, teaming and subcontracting can be a great way to sort of fill that gap. And then lastly, you know, we talked before a little bit about the third party, certifiers and the groups that are involved with women owned small business and really efforts to try and lift them up. These are the groups that are that are actively lobbying right now in Capitol Hill on behalf of women owned small businesses to try to keep it in the conversation, to try to keep, equity and inclusion, you know, alive and well. So if you haven't engaged with any of these groups, maybe engage with them, get to know them, maybe see what they can offer you for networking, and see what you might be able to offer them as well. Okay. So now moving into the opportunity landscape. So I took a look at all of the potential opportunities in our deltekgov win database that are planned to be set aside for women owned small business or economically disadvantaged women owned small business, and that have an anticipated solicitation date in the next eighteen months. That said, I do wanna say understand that these are estimates, based either off of the government giving us an estimate or Deltek analysts looking into trends, talking to the government, trying to feel them out, looking at forecast, some idea of when things might happen. So what to keep in mind though, and I guess what I'm trying to say is timetables can and they do shift frequently with federal contracting. So take all the dates with a grain of salt. Things could move back. That said, I will note that always in the past, frequently when we made those kind of comments of, you know, the timetable can shift. Frequently, it was because we saw a lot of delays. Normally, the government was not known for being the fastest fastest moving animal when it came to contracting. Frequently, stuff was slow. Delay, delay, delay. This administration procurement seemed to be trending to happen, I don't wanna say earlier, but on time, or faster than we expected them to, especially, larger stuff. I know I gave this advice back in, we have our top opportunities webinar series in October, but this is not the environment to rest on your laurels and take your time to come up with what you wanna do. It's really a time for you to look at your pipeline, plan out what you wanna go after, and get ready, so that you're ready to jump when it's time. This is not a slow moving procurement cycle. It is moving. To our chart though, I'm not gonna go into opportunities since I'll talk about those big ones, in a few, but what we can see is that women owned small businesses are favored in the defense areas a lot, which has been consistent whenever I do these reports. That's not a surprise. Navy has the most estimated value when it comes to this with the army having, the most when it comes to actual, like, raw opportunity numbers. Women in small business often do well with defense in the professional services area, which obviously can range from administrative work to training, etcetera. Also IT and AEC or architecture, engineering, and construction is always a really strong showing with women owned small business in defense. That comes to light a lot with the army. Navy does a lot of construction though as well, But, the Army Corps definitely has a lot of action with women owned small business. A lot of their multiple award task order contracts will have opportunities for women owned small business to get in there. DHS also showed up, has a strong showing for this set aside right now. A lot of IT work coming up with, with DHS, which isn't a surprise with, you know, different cybersecurity efforts and border security efforts and things like that. In this view, we see what I've been describing while talking about this and also, what I have seen frequently when I do this report, which, is professional services is consistently an area where we see the most, women owned small business work coming up for a few reasons. One is, in fairness, professional services is a pretty broad category. A lot can obviously fall under that umbrella. It's also a prevalent area of work under every single agency. You know, like, I'm talking about architecture and engineering specifically with army, but, every agency is gonna have requirements for professional services. And I think also that kind of work easily lends itself to a smaller set aside contract, still worth good value, but they're not these gigantic, you know, research and development requirements with the government. AEC or architecture, engineering, and construction, again, is always a big industry with women owned small business set asides. We tend to see the most opportunity for this work with the army and navy as well. Women owned small business, usually appear as part of the larger multiple award task order contracts that those agencies release that includes several different set asides, and include women owned small business in them. So you might see with those big May talks different pools for women owned small business, eight a, service disabled veteran owned, all under there. IT is, third place. Again, it's also usually a popular industry when I do this report. IT is obviously a great area to be in right now as it's still getting funding. There's still a lot of movement in it, a lot of changes, in the market, when it comes to IT. Alright. So here we have our top value competitions that are coming up. So these are the ones coming out in the next eighteen months. We have some that are coming out really soon in May, others that are way further out, but these are the ones that have the highest estimated values. And you can see with the primary requirements, we're looking at professional services, AEC, and some IT in there. So our first requirement is out of health and human services. It's for the National Institute of Health, the project program and portfolio support services. That's our top value op for women in small business set aside with the solicitation coming out very soon in May. So if you are going after that, hopefully, you're already up to speed on it. We've got another requirement out of GSA for a multiple award general construction contract, out of the Department of Justice, the role player support for training division. Another GSA requirement, the multiple award IDIQ contract for design build general construction services in New York and New Jersey. And then we have three navy opportunities. The first one is a professional services requirement for the mine warfare surface countermeasures. The next two are AEC requirements coming out for navy. Our last three opportunities on this list are, out of DHS. As I was saying, they're all information technology requirements and if any of these pique your interest, you'll have a copy of these slides and you can look them up on the, in the gov wind portal. Alright. So conclusions, recommendations. So overall, what I would say is from the looks of things with women owned small businesses and economically disadvantaged women owned small businesses, You want to take this as sort of a call to action of how to move in the new environment that we are all finding ourselves in. Do not get distracted. Don't get discouraged. It's important to keep focus on the competitions that you are pursuing and look at where you may need to reassess with the changes that were put forth by the administration when it comes to DEI changes and different consolidation efforts. We know the DOD budget is continuing to loom large, as well as there's a lot of investment still in IT and the border. You also wanna make sure that you're compliant. I talked before about making sure that your, you know, your certifications are up to date. But as acquisitions are tightening up, there are more and more compliance requirements too. So you wanna make sure, is there a CMMC requirement? Are you up to date? ISO. Frankly, just following instructions to a T. You know, I personally, in for GovWin at Deltek, I manage the army team and one of our biggest opportunities right now, which maybe some of you have heard of or are even interested in and are competing for, is MAPS, which is a huge consolidation effort, of IT and professional services coming together. They have extremely strict instructions on how to even propose your solution to them. It may not be the first time for everyone. It's the first time personally for me that I've seen things like gate requirements being applied to these procurements, which means that you need to adhere exactly to all the items they need from you or you're out then and there. You didn't even get through the gate, quote, unquote. So it is a lot about being really dot your t dot your i's, cross your t's. This also leads into being very aware of AI and how AI has the potential to be more involved with even the review process for things. So think about how you can make sure you're not gonna be overlooked or misunderstood if AI is reviewing something that you submit maybe before a human gets a chance to look at it. Right? We have to be more careful about how we're phrasing things and how we're following instructions. Also, we're seeing a lot of alternative acquisition strategies becoming more and more popular. A lot more use of OTAs or other transaction authorities, CSOs, SBIRs, for example. So I'd really recommend educate yourself on these other kinds of acquisition strategies, learn what kinds of methods they are and how you can fit into them. There's definitely, and I'm not in any way saying that traditional procurement is not still a common method. It very much is, but I think there is a little bit more of a movement away from the traditional procurement methods into these new ways of acquiring work because this administration is very heavy into trying to use nontraditional, federal contractors. Right? Bringing in more contract more companies that don't have as much federal contractor experience to move faster. So that's something to be aware of as well. Finally, you know, making sure that you're building and tending to your teaming relationships. I know I said that earlier. I think it's a really important thing to do. It can really help you you when it comes to getting on these multiple work contracts and vehicles if you have those relationships. And finally, stay informed. It's real there's things coming out all the time. There's changes happening all the time. You really wanna, stay on top of changes to any programs that you're tracking and keep abreast of executive orders as they come out that could end up impacting acquisition. And with that, I wanted to move into q and a. We've got some time to do that. Let me take a look at the questions. I'm sorry. Bear with me for a couple of minutes, guys. I've got a lot to scroll through. Okay. So who who are 30 third party certifiers? What's the difference between that and the small business administration? So the third party certifiers are there's four of them, the El Paso, National Women Business Owners Corporation, the US Women's Chamber of Commerce, and the Women's Business Enterprise National Council. The difference between them and the Small Business Administration is that, they can sort of, do the process for you with you, to make sure that you're getting every that you're doing everything that you should be doing and can certify you themselves, but then you still need to submit all of that stuff through the small business administration, and you probably do have to pay a fee to them. I would say the advantages to the third party certifiers, and I'm sort of speaking out of place because I have not personally had to certify myself as a woman in small business. Some of you may have a better opinion, frankly. I would imagine that the benefit to using a third party certifier is they are experienced and want to help you if they hand hold for you, through the process where if you're doing it just through the small business administration, obviously, they wanna help you as well, but I think, maybe it's it's less. But it is free to do it through the small business administration versus going through a third party. Although I'm seeing some of the comments, it's better and cheaper to do the certification for yourself. So there you go. That's somebody who's gone through it. I haven't gone through it. How often are NAICS codes updated? A great question. I don't think there's a specific timetable to it. I'm I I think it just gets updated when they decide that, it needs to be updated. Like, the the few times that they, I talked about in the history timeline, it was due to them deciding, you know, this certain, women owned small businesses, for instance, were not well represented at all in this particular kind of work and then they sort of redid, the NAICS codes. But usually, it's pretty it's pretty publicized, I think, if you're in the federal contracting space, that you'll be aware that they've updated the NAICS codes. So I have one question that I hope I can do justice to asking asking what is an OTA. I will say we have, people that are much smarter than I at Guffwin, who are experts on other transaction authorities and CSOs and all that stuff, and they also have training sessions and webinars about them. So you can certainly look at other events that, that GovWind and Deltek are hosting about it. What I can say, is I know that other transaction authorities are a vehicle that federal agencies use, I think it's DOD heavy, to simplify their access to technology that they need faster than the typical, old school FAR protocol allows them. It can move faster. And I think it was created more to give more flexibility and to incorporate business practices that reflect more of, like, current commercial industry standards and best practices than, you know, the old school federal ones. I know that OTAs do not follow the standard format, for contracts that fall within the FAR, which makes them more flexible and does make them more appealing for the nontraditional contractors to do that work for the government. And like I said, that's what the administration is moving more towards, these nontraditional. So, yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. Thank you, Kathleen. NAICS codes do get an overhaul every five years, but they do some periodically doing, in other years. So there you go. Is there a NAICS code for AI? That's a great question. I don't believe there is. If there would be something like that, it would fall under the IT umbrella, I assume, but I do not know if there's a NAICS code for AI. I would say no right now. But, if you wanna be sure, you can check on the Small Business Administration website. They list out all the NAICS codes. Let's see. Sorry, guys. I'm trying to sift through some of this. With the new DEI rules, how is it that government can still seek women owned small businesses? It's a good question. So Now I might be sorry. It's okay. I mean, I guess it gets cloudy and that's a lot of the concern when we talk, about all of the socioeconomic small business concerns out there. We they do still exist in the far, and, They do still exist in the FAR, and it is still it's still a thing. I mean, you can't you can dismantle only so much with an executive order. You can't dismantle how federal contracting has worked since, you know, the dawn of federal contracting. So, frankly, I think maybe that's my answer as to why, it still stands and will likely remain standing. You know, you can say something shouldn't be, but you you can't actually get rid of it that quickly. So, yeah, that would be my answer on that level. Also, I have been alerted the artificial intelligence, NAICS code is 541715 for research and development in the physical engineering and life sciences. Oh, I'm sorry. Artificial intelligence businesses are generally classified under that NAICS code. So it's NAICS code 541715 for research and development in the physical engineering and life sciences that tends to be where businesses doing artificial intelligence are classified under. Alright. And let's see. Are the goals for women in small business still 5%? Yeah. Just again, another question about I understand the DEI position of the administration versus the federal, you know, small business contracting goals. Yes. They are still 5%. They all still are standing as of now. And I I don't foresee them going away anytime soon, to be honest with you. Like I just said, I mean, you can executive order anything, but you can't dismantle the actual law, that quickly. So I think that's about all we have time for today. So I'm gonna wrap up with you guys. I would like to invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn if you found today's presentation valuable. I hope you did. I know it's a it's a weird time in this government contracting space for women owned small businesses. If you would like to connect, a reminder, my name is Ashley Sanderson. I am a senior manager of research for GovWinIQ, which is one of Deltek's information solution platforms. And, for that, I wanna thank you so much for your time spending it with me today. Hope you got something out of this, and thank you. Have a good rest of the day.