Here is how it works.
All federal bids need to be posted free. If you find out about a bid they are required to send you a bid offering, if you ask for it.
Every governemtn entitiy usually has their own purchasing dept. They also have their own website, and listing. So in order to find the government bids, you need to access all of the websites, etc to look for every bid. OF course, there are times that what you are willing to do for work is listed in a subcategory of a bid. For instance, I found a contract worth about $100,000 a year in a lawn mowing contract. So you need to learn what to look under, and the only way you can do that is through experience.
Once you start getting government bid offerings, and have wona couple, the purchasing agents get used to your name and will start making sure that you get the offerings that cover what you do.
Of course in my area, there are about 8 cities with a population over 100,000, and I do not have a contract with all of them. So I have to subscribe to a service that actually does a search engine function to find bid offerings with the services that I offer. They send them to me E-mail every day. This helps me to sort through a lot of crap.
The service that I use most is mostly local stuff. There are a lot of services that handle larger scale stuff, national contracts, fed contracts, etc., and that is what I found this particular contract on. .
Scott
