BES Welcomes the Air Force Small Business Director

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Mark S. Teskey, the Air Force Director of Small Business (SB) Programs, visited on June 14 to meet with Col. Michael W. Jiru Jr., Deputy Director of Business and Enterprise Systems (BES), and Denise Baylor, the BES Director of Small Business Programs.

Jiru and Teskey had an open door discussion while Baylor provided Teskey with an update on BES successes.

Among those successes she shared were the BES Vendor Industry Days, Vendor Exchange Forums, the BES Vendor Communication website and the BES Smart Guide, which has become the standard for communication to Industry Partners on current and future acquisition opportunities over the next 18 months across the BES Enterprise. All of these achievements are the products of the PEO BES Strategic Communication team. Lastly, Baylor gave an update on how BES is gathering data metrics to support these successes.

While Teskey was visiting BES, he attended a Town Hall meeting where he had the opportunity to engage in dialogue with the men and women of the BES Contracting Office.

Teskey stressed the importance of the SB program and emphasized that it is all of our responsibilities to help generate SB competition.

"By law, we have a responsibility to develop the SB end of the industrial base as well as generate more SB competition," said Teskey. "Congress has given all of us the responsibility, regardless of the position we are in, to execute the Small Business program."

Discussions included the pros and cons of using long term vice short term contracts in an ever evolving IT environment, especially when resources are limited and there is no solution for more resources in sight.

Teskey stated that Congress plans a yearly 10% budget cut and that 75% of that budget is in the sustainment of our weapon systems. He noted that sustainment is where you create competition and that this is not going to get any better unless Congress changes the rules, in other words, we have to work with smaller budgets and smaller personnel numbers and it's not going to get any better any time soon.

Teskey challenged BES contracting personnel to rethink and proactively engage in building flexibility in growth, to streamline technology and think about what makes sense whenever possible, to find ways to integrate into the cloud, to create competition, and to plan to leverage in smaller term "chunks" versus long term "chunks" so that the Air Force does not have to rely on larger companies that charge more money to provide services and solutions than smaller companies can.

Lastly Teskey encouraged contracting personnel to set aside time to focus and plan for the future.
He thanked the BES Contracting Office for their patience and daily contributions to the warfighters.