The Small-Business Guide to Government Contracts: How to Comply with the Key Rules and Regulations . . . and Avoid Terminated Agreements, Fines, or Worse
352
The Small-Business Guide to Government Contracts: How to Comply with the Key Rules and Regulations . . . and Avoid Terminated Agreements, Fines, or Worse
352Paperback
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Overview
Each year, the federal government awards billions of dollars in small-business contracts. The Small-Business Guide to Government Contracts puts a wealth of specialized legal counsel at readers’ fingertips, answering the most important compliance questions like:
- Is a small business really small?
- Who is eligible for HUBZone, 8(a), SDVO, or WOSB programs?
- What salaries and benefits must be offered?
- What ethical requirements must be followed?
- When does affiliation become a liability?
Small-business contracts are both the lifeblood of hundreds of thousands of companies and a quagmire of red tape. No one can afford to be lax with the rules or too harried to heed them. The Small-Business Guide to Government Contracts empowers contractors to avoid missteps, meet their compliance obligations—and keep the pipeline flowing.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780814439722 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AMACOM |
| Publication date: | 06/06/2012 |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 682,472 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.15(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.85(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
click millionaires
work less, live more with an internet business you loveBy SCOTT C. FOX
AMACOM
Copyright © 2012 C. Scott FedewaAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8144-3193-1
Chapter One
work less, live more becoming a click millionaire
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. —Lily Tomlin, actress and comedian
THERE HAS TO BE a better way!
Isn't that what you have been thinking? Are you tired of the work you do, or the people you work with, or the low pay or uncertain career path? Or maybe all of the above? Or the fact that you may have to continue that same routine for years or decades more? Do you really think that you're going to be able to save your way to a comfortable retirement working for someone else? Aren't the odds of a comfortable retirement small unless you save so much that your working years are painfully light on luxuries, vacations, and toys?
If you are like I used to be, you probably thought getting that corporate job was a ticket to both money and security. Unfortunately corporate employment has turned out to be more of an "income for dummies" plan than a lifetime meal ticket. You are still required to contribute most of your waking hours to the corporate bottom line—but that's no longer a guarantee for steady pay, job security, decent health coverage, and a comfortable retirement. Sadly, the only person who cares about your personal fulfillment and financial independence is you. Add the daily pressure of commuting to an office, working with people you normally wouldn't spend time with, pursuing priorities set by people who don't understand the needs of your customers, plus the constant threat of layoffs, it's no wonder that more and more people feel trapped in a rat race from which they can't escape!
Don't Just Get a Job, Get a Life
If you challenge traditional assumptions about career priorities, you can discover that there are new solutions to these work-life balance issues. It's okay to put your own life ahead of making money or climbing the corporate ladder and you don't have to do work you dread just to keep afloat. Today you have the opportunity to redesign your life around what's important to you and define success for yourself. You can choose to build a lifestyle business online that supports both your family and your own personal life goals, even with little capital or technical training.
Redefining success on your own terms can allow you to rebalance your life to achieve the goals most important to you. Instead of focusing simply on making money, I'd like to help you find the courage to define your success not just in dollars, fancy cars, or shiny objects that are promoted to you on television, but to include increased flexibility, creativity, and happiness, too. But motivation and a willingness to make some sacrifices along the way are not all you need to build a profitable lifestyle business for yourself. You need specific practical recommendations about which online business opportunities and tools are the best today. Personalizing those recommendations into a plan that you act upon can make the difference between wishing you were successful and being successful.
I wrote this book to help you do just that.
This Book Is Different
Too much online moneymaking advice is focused on finding clever but unsustainable ways to attract more website traffic. That kind of approach focuses on tricks—it helps you exploit small advantages in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or search engine optimization (SEO), or attracting traffic from the latest YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, app, plug-in, software, or other "hacks."
These approaches sometimes work, but by the time an online marketing "guru" gets around to telling (and selling) you his latest traffic-attraction tricks, you can be sure that there's not much money left in that competitive market.
More importantly, building businesses on temporary market inefficiencies doesn't build the long-term asset value and recurring income of the Click Millionaire business system that I want for you.
So, this book is not going to teach you how to become the 100,000th person to rehash diet secrets into a free e-book, build a huge email list overnight with YouTube videos or mobile apps, or use Google Adwords PPC ads to promote affiliate marketing offers.
Instead of teaching you to push a product that may be outdated in six months and require you to start over again, this book is going to help you develop a new business and career that grows into a satisfying ongoing lifestyle for you. It's going to teach you to redefine success for yourself, redesign your life around the things that matter most to you, and support that lifestyle with your own Internet-based business that allows you to enjoy the financial independence, creative control, and schedule flexibility traditionally only available to people who already had millions in the bank.
The goal is to find a lifestyle balance that is comfortable and fulfilling for you.
You Can Build a Business as Unique as You Are
My goal for you is to create something new; an original and unique business that positions you as an expert in your chosen field; a business that channels your efforts into something more significant than just increasing your click-through rate by 0.01 percent; a business that targets niche needs that speak to you and those in your target market on a fundamental level. I'd like to help you mine your niche to generate long-term recurring profits from a sustainable, personally satisfying lifestyle business that is meaningful to you.
For example:
• How about building a business around your unique personal experience so that you can help others solve similar problems in their own lives?
• Or developing an interest you have into a new expertise you can use to help advise others with similar interests?
• And delivering that information or those products in a cost-effective, consistent, ethical way that attracts loyal customers to create a profitable business around you and your favorite hobbies?
I have done this personally in a bunch of market spaces that most "experts" and keyword research would have said were saturated, including probably the most competitive area of all, Internet marketing. Together we'll make sure that your approach will be different, successful, and practical, too.
What's a "Lifestyle Business"?
A lifestyle business is one where you prioritize lifestyle benefits over growth and profits.
It's a real business that makes you real money but one that also lets you enjoy more of the life you deserve. With little risk or cash investment, these new kinds of online businesses can help you create a "laptop lifestyle" that finally frees you from working for someone else. Plus, they can make you happier because you spend your time working on projects you choose with people you like. The money is not the point. Your lifestyle as the owner is.
You may feel like you're not qualified to build your own business, or that the niches that interest you must be "wrong" because they don't fit traditional MBA approaches. But business schools (and most business books) teach people how to work for and grow corporations, not build happier lives. With lifestyle businesses the emphasis is on your lifestyle at least as much as on the business. This means that (unlike with corporate jobs or business school management theories) you can prioritize your own lifestyle interests first and even have multiple business lines at the same time. And who's more of an expert on what you want out of life than you?
Business school professors, economists, and bankers turn up their noses at this kind of business, because it doesn't require venture capital and isn't aimed at maximizing profits, increasing shareholder value, or issuing an IPO. But I love those businesses.
Let's face it, you're not on track to become a billionaire anyway. Wouldn't you be happy with a six-figure business that was in a field you like, with low costs, few politics or management challenges, and that allowed you to control your own schedule? (Especially if that business had the potential to grow even more profitable through free Internet distribution and automated online marketing?)
Sorry, business school professors: your traditional corporate definitions of success don't apply to Click Millionaire lifestyle businesses.
The goal of most big companies seems to be growth for growth's sake. And the most ambitious people used to want to work for those big companies. But today the pressure of big company jobs has many professionals I know wishing for something less stressful, even if it means taking a cut in pay.
"Big" also used to be a requirement for business because it took lots of people to do stuff. People needed to explain product features and make sales, people needed to process paperwork, people needed to check inventory and coordinate with suppliers, people needed to spread the word through advertising and marketing, and so forth. But the Net has changed all that. Decades of competition in the software industry have created powerful Internet-based systems for publishing, distribution, and marketing that any start-up or small business owner can use for just a few dollars/month. Today most order-taking and sales functions can be automated through a simple website shopping cart that will track your inventory, too. A lot of marketing can get done even while you're at the beach or asleep—your website doesn't go to the beach and your online ads keep running while you're sleeping!
All this means that the "small" in small business no longer means small impact, small reach, or small sales. In fact, Click Millionaires specialize in profiting from big-company–style systems but without out all the expense and hassle!
As popularized in Tim Ferris's now classic book, The 4-Hour Workweek (Crown Archetype, 2007), today you can use the Internet to construct job opportunities, projects, and even new companies around your own preferences. Even without a business background or a technical education you can design your career and business around your own schedule and interests instead of having to punch the clock at the same time and location every day, dressed the same way, interacting with the same people, and doing the same thing. Free worldwide email, phone, video, chat, and social networks now mean that you don't need to be physically present in an office much anymore.
The Internet allows free-flowing self-organizing projects and ventures to emerge constantly, reducing your dependence on corporate paychecks. Outsourcing, virtual assistants, freelance contractor project marketplaces, mobile platforms, social networks, telecommuting, browser-based SAAS tools, cloud computing ... all of these developments have created a constant flow of new ventures and small business opportunities that don't require you to become a lifetime employee counting the years toward the gold watch you'll get when you retire.
What's a "Click Millionaire"?
I'm not talking about a "get-rich-quick" strategy. Click Millionaires is the manifesto of a movement focused on building flexible and profitable lifestyle businesses online that suit the individual lifestyle priorities of their Click Millionaire owners. Here's how I define the term:
Click Millionaire [klik mil-yuh-nair or klik mil'ye-nâr] Click Millionaires use websites, e-commerce, digital publishing, and social media to build lifestyle businesses that share their ideas and products with the world on their own schedule and terms. A lifestyle design movement as much as a business model, becoming a Click Millionaire does not require a million-dollar online business. Instead, Click Millionaires define success by using the latest digital commerce and marketing tools to build profitable, ethical, Internet-based businesses that improve their own lifestyles and the lives around them. The resulting Click Millionaire lifestyles offer unprecedented levels of personal career control, creative independence, schedule flexibility, and work satisfaction.
The traditional American dream centered on individual financial achievement—where becoming a "millionaire" allowed you to control your own life, afford anything you want, and live on your own terms. But today the phrase "Click Millionaire" captures the revolutionary idea that lifestyle benefits like the independence, security, and self-confidence—formerly only available to the wealthy—are now available to anyone who chooses to build a successful lifestyle business online. As you can see from the definition above, money is important to Click Millionaires, but it's not the only thing that matters to the "new rich." Money is not the destination on your life's road trip; it's just the gas to help you enjoy the journey.
To become a Click Millionaire I encourage you to:
• Change your thinking to focus first on your goal of living better, however you define that personally.
• Redesign your life around what's important to you and your family instead of working late to meet your boss's schedule.
• Rearrange your work so that your bank account benefits directly from your efforts instead of paying for your employers' new cars and vacations when you may be struggling to pay your mortgage.
My bet is that if you could redesign your life to emphasize your personal happiness, a comfortable lifestyle, and the ability to share your profits with others, you'd be satisfied—even without becoming a millionaire. Why? Because you're not greedy and the reality is that you would just like to be comfortable and lead a life that has meaning for you.
Don't Quit Working—Start Enjoying Your Work Instead
I'm not talking here about early retirement or passive income strategies. Instead what I'm proposing is that you start a business part-time, while you're still working your current job, and gradually build a niche business online that generates recurring revenues for you as automatically as possible. Over time you can grow your Click Millionaire side business to make an ever-increasing portion of your income, and a portion that you enjoy earning, too.
Wouldn't your life be easier with an extra $500 a month? How about $1,500 or $5,000 a month? Most business advice skips right over those more realistic numbers to promise you millions of dollars in some kind of magical cash transformation process. But Click Millionaires are realistic adults. We're not looking for get-rich-quick solutions. We look for legitimate opportunities that we can profit from with a reasonable amount of continuing hard work, clever marketing, and creativity. We invest our time to create profitable businesses that allow us the money and personal freedom to pursue lifestyles that we enjoy on a day-to-day basis, instead of only on weekends and during a few rushed weeks of vacation each year.
Everyone expects to be paid for their time. Where Click Millionaires differ is that they aim to evolve past the painful "hours for dollars" trade that dominates most people's working lives. Instead of organizing your life around working for someone else, as a Click Millionaire you start with the premise that you deserve to control your own time and daily schedule. Your time is more valuable to you than to anyone else. If you are going to spend time on a project, then you deserve not only to be paid, but paid well.
But as a Click Millionaire, your success is not just financial. You want to invest your time in work you enjoy and that benefits your lifestyle. In most cases this means making more money, but in many cases this means doing less work so you can enjoy life, too. This is the real goal of Click Millionaires: to get paid more for work you enjoy even while working less!
I know this sounds ambitious or even crazy, but I have accomplished this personally. And, this book will share with you dozens more examples of Click Millionaire success that you can apply to your own life to become a member of the new rich, too.
Together we'll develop a plan to help you rearrange your life's priorities from making the boss rich to living a richer life yourself—not overnight but over time, part time. We'll explore digital business– building tools such as email newsletters, blogs, online communities, podcasting, online video, and affiliate marketing. All of these are fun and inexpensive business models you can take advantage of online starting today. And don't worry if all that sounds too technical. Click Millionaires introduces these opportunities in plain, nontechnical language that can help you learn to succeed on your own terms just like I have.
How can you redesign your life and start a lifestyle business to get your share of the Click Millionaires revolution? Read on!
(Continues...)
Excerpted from click millionaires by SCOTT C. FOX Copyright © 2012 by C. Scott Fedewa. Excerpted by permission of AMACOM. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Is Your Small Business Really Small? 8
Chapter 2 The Affiliation Problem 23
Chapter 3 Subcontractor or Ostensible Subcontractor? 50
Chapter 4 The Wide World of Subcontracting 69
Chapter 5 Uncle Sam, HR Director: Hiring Restrictions
Chapter 6 Nondiscrimination and Affirmative Action 114
Chapter 7 Uncle Sam, Union Boss: Employee Wages,
Chapter 8 Prohibited Activities, Ethical Violations,
Chapter 9 USA! USA! Domestic Preferences and
Chapter 10 Under the Hood: The Nuts and Bolts of a
Chapter 11 The 8(a) Business Development Program 221
Chapter 12 The Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned
Chapter 13 The HUBZone Program 267
Chapter 14 The Women-Owned Small Business Program 291
Chapter 15 Special Rules for Tribes, ANCs, and NHOs 310
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