surprised me. But I would say that the Army program, again, that I inherited and have taken over from Ms. Pinson has a solid foundation.
THE NEW KID’S IN TOWN Marks meets with Team Redstone [AL] small business professionals in August 2015 for the first time since undertaking his new leadership role. (U.S. Army photo)
Army AL&T: Do you think it’s simple enough for small businesses to come to the Army, and say, “Hey, I’ve got a great idea,” and the Army might say, “Sure. Let’s give it a shot”? Or do you think it could be simplified?
Marks: I think there’s always room to make it simpler. But I think we have things in place to make it—“easy” is really not the right word, but to show them that there are opportunities that are part of SBIR.
Tat’s been around for years. It’s one of the tools, avenues for small businesses out there whereby some guy, Tommy Marks, develops a capability in his garage and can potentially show that to the Army to see if it fits in a mission. It has to be tied to some mission requirement to really be of value to us.
We try to make Army contracting easier for small businesses by helping them understand Army mission require- ments so they can mold their products and services to what we need. We then connect them with the small business specialist at the appropriate installation
or contracting office who can keep them updated on specific Army requirements and continue to help them hone their capabilities.
Army AL&T: You’ve been involved in small business from both that side of the fence and government. In “Unintended Outcomes of Small Business Legislation and Policy: Opportunities for Improve- ment,” released in early 2015, Jacques Gansler and his colleagues found sig- nificant disconnects between the original purposes of small business programs and the way they are currently administered. For example, the report says that with respect to the goals that each of the ser- vices has for small business participation,
“no one we interviewed understood the rationale or methodology for developing the goals, or whether one even existed.” Do you think that the Army Office of Small Business Programs’ work is ful- filling a deliberate and well-thought-out purpose?
Marks: I read the report months ago, right after I took the job. I actually went to an outbrief that they had. You know, some of the things that they said in there
Now, when it comes to the goals, I will tell you that in the community, the goals are what everybody talks about. And not everybody clearly understands them. In my six months in the job, even all the way up through the SBA [U.S. Small Busi- ness Administration] and OMB [Office of Management and Budget], which are actually where those goals come from— as they try to implement what Congress has written, the execution is not always the same as when somebody just wrote policy. In the Army, we have a clear rationale and methodology. In fact, what we do [is] we start with the spending projections.
Ten the commands look at what they’ve done in the current fiscal year in terms of small business utilization. Tey make adjustments based on their requirements forecast for the coming year and send a final projected goal up to my office.
We get an overall goal from DOD. Last year [FY15], it was 26.5 percent, meaning that 26.5 percent of total small-business- eligible Army contracting dollars should go to small business. Ten that’s further broken down, based on spend across the federal government, [into] what per- centages we should try to award in the socioeconomic categories of service- disabled veteran-owned small business, HUBZone [Historically Underutilized Business Zones, an SBA program] small business, small disadvantaged business and women-owned small business. (See Figure 3 on Page 23.)
Our commands—you know, that’s where the rubber really meets the road. Out there in the field are five HCAs—the heads of
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