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Modifications to your GSA Schedule are perhaps the most overlooked of all the upkeep required to make your GSA Schedule a profitable venture for your company. When was the last time you updated the pricing on your schedule to reflect a commercial price increase? Are you selling new product lines commercially that you haven’t added to your GSA Schedule? Did you perform a new service commercially but haven’t added it to your GSA Schedule? How many irrelevant products are taking up space on your schedule on GSA Advantage making it harder to weave through these products so that contracting officers can get to the product they are actually looking for? All of these are very important questions to think about when trying to make sure that your GSA Schedule is the most profitable and efficient it can be for your schedule.

The fact is many companies (especially small businesses) lack a person with the knowledge regarding the modification process and thus are unwilling to make these small or large adjustments to their schedule. Imagine if your sales representatives are trying to get both government and commercial business but have to go through two different sets of products or services, completely inefficient. There are agencies out there such as a PTAC or SBA offices that are willing to help with these tasks of updating your schedule but many times they will charge a fee for such services and are busy dealing with many different companies. If you are going to bother updating your schedule, you probably don’t want the process to take 4 to 8 months to complete.

Here are several suggestions on what you can do to ensure that your schedule is up-to-date:
1. Look up the EPA clause awarded on your GSA contract. This can be found in the award document or the Final Proposal Revision. This clause either says that you can raise your prices as your commercial prices increase or that you can raise it up to 10% per year. This is important to know to determine when the correct time is to raise your prices to the government and by how much.
2. Look at what you are selling commercially whether it’s products or services and see if there is a need for it on the government side of business. Many times this can be done by looking at what your competitors have on their schedule or by looking for solicitations (RFQ, RFP, Sources Sought, RFI) for the specific product or service.
3. Before adding a product or service look at your competitors to see what they are charging for the product or service. If it’s priced competitively and you can meet or beat the price then it makes sense to add it to your contract. If the price is not where you can be competitively, then it’s going to be a lot of effort for very little sales and most likely not worth it.

By having this knowledge and applying it critically to your schedule and projected products or services you can ensure your schedule is the most competitive it can be in today’s tough environment. As always, Schemtosh Consulting would be happy to do a free analysis to determine if products or services are worth the time to add to your schedule, give us a call or shoot me an email.
740-525-8664
steve@schemtoshconsulting.com