GPO Work: Worth The Competitive Bidding (???)

Here’s an article I found on myprintresource.com about GPO (U.S. Government Printing Office) jobs. Early on in my career in the reprographics business, our company was based in Silver Spring, MD (a suburb of Washington, DC), and, although we did not win many GPO bid jobs, we did win several - - - and we did, routinely, research which jobs might be down our alley. I can still remember a large-format print job we bid through the GPO, back in the late 1970’s, for a training department of the IRS. That job consisted of a series of poster size prints, (size around 30 x 40), that the IRS was going to use for training IRS auditing agents at different IRS offices around the U.S. We used our diazo machine – and blackline paper – to produce the order (if I’m recalling this correctly, we did either 100 or 200 sets of the series of posters.) It was a very simple job to produce, it was profitable, and I’m pretty sure we got that GPO job because others who bid were basing their bids on large-format offset printing.

Okay, here’s the beginning of the article:

GPO Work: Worth The Competitive Bidding

By Deborah Snider, e-LYNXX Corporation

Created: February 15, 2012

The United States Government Printing Office (GPO) awarded more than 16,000 jobs (also called jackets) in the $1,000 to $10,000 per job range in 2011 totaling almost $30 million to private sector printers. Close to 2,000 jobs in the $10,001 to $100,000 per job range totaling more than $50 million were awarded per data from the largest database of GPO job records which is at e-LYNXX Corporation. The majority of printers that win these jobs are small to mid-size businesses, many with 20 employees or fewer, according to the GPO.

There also is tremendous opportunity for printers capable of handling GPO’s million dollar plus jobs – often ulti-year programs. Examining GPO data back to 2006, on jobs won at the $1,000,000 or more level, there has been an average of only four bidders per job. These jobs averaged $3,004,000.

Although the GPO has more than 10,000 printers that have been qualified for its print supplier network, fewer than a couple thousand win any work whatsoever during the course of the year. This past year, more than 1,770 print suppliers obtained at least one GPO job. However, the majority of the $305 million in GPO work awarded in 2011 was to several hundred printers.

Here’s a link to the complete article:

http://www.myprintresource.com/blog/10629990/gpo-work-worth-the-competitive-bidding