The GSA has two soft requirements that you won’t find in the Solicitation, but after getting to know the clauses in depth, and talking to GSA officials regularly, I have come across some implicit requirements.
Equal or Better GSA Pricing
The first one GSA’s heart is in the right place. They have an agency goal to bring the best value to government buyers and investors that purpose.
The GSA will look at your GSA Price (with IFF) and compare that to your going commercial rate. Since the 0.75% IFF is added tot he price compared to the commercial rate, this means that if no discount is applied, then your GSA price is higher than your commercial price. Therefore, you have failed to offer the governemnt equal or better pricing. So, this means that there is a soft requirement to offer at least a 1% discount in order to offer better pricing to the GSA than your commercial customers.
Minimum Sales Requirement
I do understand that the GSA needs their Contract holders to be solid and establish companies. So, the GSA requires that a Contractor attempting to get onto a GSA can reasonably be capable of meeting the $25,000 annual minimum sales requirement. So, if a company is applying for GSA contract and their 2011 revenue was only $150,000, then the GSA will likely see them as having a very difficult time achieving the minimum sales requirement in the first option period.
If 15% of a contractors 2011 revenue does not amount to the minimum sales requirement of the GSA, then the GSA believes that that contractor will have a difficult time achieving the sales requirement. In this case, the Contractor will likely have some hurdles to overcome that other companies with higher revenue will not have.
So, at the end of the day if the company does not have over $200,000 in revenue on their last years profit/loss statement, then the GSA has a soft requirement that they prove that they will have no problem achieving the minimum sales requirement.
