But that joint venture then can go after work, using the small businesses status, to pursue contracts that might be a reach for the protégé on their own. But they can then also agree that they intend to form a joint venture has to be separately approved. They can agree in their mentor-protégé program that to acts as a subcontractor to their mentor. “There are all sorts of ways that they can then receive help technical assistance, including and not but not limited to, they can receive help with procurement and in terms of actually performing contracts together. These include everything from technical assistance on things like cost and pricing to assistance on business development facilities to international trade assistance.

When a small firm decides to enter the mentor-protégé program, they are eligible to receive up to seven different types of technical assistance from their mentor. “Instead, the idea was let’s take a program that works and expand it and open it up to other businesses other so all small businesses could participate.” “To have other programs out there that were having small businesses spend resources and energy, but there were no actual measure of success for those programs, and potentially liability associated with the programs didn’t seem like a good direction for the government to be pointing those businesses,” she said.

Murphy said the impetus to expand and standardize the program came from the success Congress saw within the 8(a) mentor-protégé program. “This means that there’s only one program that they have to apply for now and that’s a statutory program, so there is SBAs and one at DoD, but it’s not a question of whether you have to have both because you do not.” So we had companies that were collecting mentor-protégé programs without really getting any benefit from them,” Murphy said during the discussion The New Mentor-Protégé Program for Small, Large Businesses. And if they wanted to expand then to the Department of Interior, they had to find yet another mentor-protégé program. “One of the other concerns we had was that a small business might spend resources to get a mentor-protégé program approved at, say GSA, but then they couldn’t use that mentor-protégé program when going after work at DHS, so then had to go get enter into the DHS mentor-protégé program. With this major change in the mentor-protégé program, what should companies and agencies keep in mind and how can they both be successful?Įmily Murphy, a partner and coach at CEO Coaching International and a former administrator of the General Services Administration, said now that SBA and contractors have a standard set of measures to understand what success looks like, the program is more valuable than ever. Some agencies, like the departments of Homeland Security and Defense, have been slow to adopt the SBA standards while others have discontinued their individual programs and will rely on SBA. It then took SBA eight years to finalize the rules-from 2012 to November 2020.Īgencies and vendors recently “celebrated” the one-year anniversary of these significant changes to the mentor-protégé program. The 2013 law created minimum standards for non-Defense agency programs that would have to be approved by SBA, and expanded SBA’s program to all small businesses. There were no standard measures of success. In some cases, mentors got credit toward their subcontracting goals for simply sponsoring agency small business conferences. Until the 2013 Defense authorization bill, the only mentor-protégé program at the Small Business Administration was for 8(a) companies, while other agencies ran their own programs with varying degrees of success and approaches.

Sba mentor protege program problem