According to the U.S. General Services Administration, "the single government-wide point-of-entry for federal government procurement opportunities over $25,000."

Ok, this is a first, and probably a last, in Pocket MBA history. We're featuring a website as term of the week. And that's only because, well, since the government is currently the largest driver of economic "growth," you'll want to be familiar with one resource your clients may be looking to in order to find contracting opportunities with the federal government. And as of this writing, fbo.gov advertises over 32,600 "active federal opportunities." This will be a quickie issue before we get back to the meat (if you're a vegetarian, the Boca Burgers) and potatoes next week. In fact, just telling you the website exists is all you really need to know if you didn't know of it already. Navigating it is fairly simple. Fbo.gov became operational in 2002 and is operated by the General Services Administration (GSA).

Of course, a website like fbo.gov only exists in service of a wider federal scheme, in this case the Federal Acquisition Regulation, 48 CFR Chapter 1, "the primary regulation for use by all Federal Executive agencies in their acquisition of supplies and services" since April 1984. In fact, fbo.gov was redesigned via the FAR in 2007, when the GSA awarded the contract to a firm called Symplicity Corp. Anyway, FAR "was established to codify uniform policies for acquisition of supplies and services by executive agencies. It is issued and maintained jointly, pursuant to the OFPP Reauthorization Act, under the statutory authorities granted to the Secretary of Defense, Administrator of General Services and the Administrator, National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Statutory authorities to issue and revise the FAR have been delegated to the Procurement Executives in DOD, GSA and NASA."

So let's say your clients want in on some ARRA programs or any other government business deal. How can they find out about it if they haven't previously been part of the process? Well, they can just head to fbo.gov and click on "getting started," where they will find demonstrational videos for vendors on how to take advantage of ARRA, along with general instructions on how to search for opportunities. The opportunities themselves are under the tab labeled, well, "opportunities." There, you'll find 1,650-1,651 pages of contracts to bid on (with 20 listings per page) or that have been awarded. (The number of pages actually increased while PMBA was looking). And imagine how many new pages there will be if we get new health care and cap and trade programs.

Now, just because PMBA is a curious sort, it skipped right to page 1,975, where it discovered that in solicitation RFQE008359, the FBI had been looking for a "One year .XRY and SIM id-Cloner Licnese (sic) Renewal." (The federal government ought to put out a bid for someone who can cleanse its websites of typos.) The solicitation describes the type of open bidding process that will occur — in this case it was an "online competitive reverse auction to be facilitated by the third-party reverse auction provider, FedBid, Inc." The solicitation also tells you what part of the FAR you must comply with, how you have to submit your bid and other fun stuff. And just to be complete, the contract for this offer was awarded in June to Spearhead Electronics Devices LLC. If that outfit is your client, congratulations, you probably already know all about fbo.gov.