“The economy has been slip sliding away,” says Witcher, whose 75-man operation also sells and services big rigs and is the Northeast’s largest supplier of Pierce fire trucks. “We decided we wanted another place we could sell.”

As the economy slows, this is a good time to take a closer look at the federal government, the largest buyer of goods and services in the world. The advantages are clear. The budget is set; the government typically lets vendors know where they stand throughout the bidding process; and, best of all, bills are paid on time, typically within 30 days.

Witcher says he has become a government convert. After hiring a consultant to learn how to navigate the complicated process of bidding for federal work, he shifted his inventory control officer to the full-time task of researching potential contracts and has amassed a database that tracks all the bids the company has submitted - won and lost - to learn from its history.

“The federal government is my No. 1 customer now when it comes to parts,” Witcher says. “It has been continually on a growth pattern for us.”

The government buys virtually everything the private sector does, from condoms to coffeemakers to the services of publicists, pest control experts to entertainers. Yet for some, the idea of doing business with the government raises images of can’t win backroom deals. That’s just not the case with contracts in the small business arena, says Malcolm Parvey, a marketing consultant who has coached Witcher’s company and others on how to win federal bids.

Most of the work is awarded electronically, he notes, through a rigorous procurement process that takes time to master. There’s a high level of transparency, too. The government even lets bidders see who their competitors were and how they priced once the job is awarded.

“I know that small businesses have a great interest in this market; they just don’t have the time and they don’t have the expertise to go after it,” says Parvey, co-author of a new book, “Winning Government Contracts,” due out in February from Career Press.

The book is the latest attempt to simplify what can look like an insiders’ game. There are many guides on how to get federal work, including the government’s own tutorials at the Web sites of agencies such as the U.S. Small Business Administration and the U.S. General Services Administration as well as popular sites for searching federal procurement such as FedBizOpps.

“With the Internet what used to take 10 days now takes 10 minutes,” he says. “There are more and more agencies that are allowing competitive bidding to be done over the Internet.”

reuters.com