This was a great question that I got from my Facebook Group (If you haven’t joined yet, you should! It’s totally free), and I want to note the answers to this vary by region, but I am going to give a general/broad answer to this so everyone reading can contextualize it for themselves. 

So I want to break this answer down into a few parts and definitions. The Vendor Process and RFP Process are two separate processes that go into this answer. 

Vendor Process - To work with a school district, you have to be a registered vendor. What that means is that you have to complete a vendor application, provide them with certain business information, so that way they can review your application and approve, so that way you become a registered vendor within their system. Just about every school district has some type of vendor process. Now in the charter world, the terminology might be a little different, but if you were to look up your nearest school district and look under the procurement department, you would likely find some type of link on how to become a registered vendor.

I want to note that anyone who’s contracted by a school district has to become a registered vendor. If your school district is building a new school, the construction company that's building the school has to be a vendor. If there is some professional development that a school district needs, they have to be a registered vendor. I’m sharing that to say that the vendor process is not specific to just education consultants. 

Typically, when you go through that process within the application, you'll identify what type of services you provide. Based on your selections, you’ll then start receiving emails with RFP’s. 

RFP Process - RFP or Request for Proposal, is when a school district has a need for a particular service. They’ll write up an RFP and send it to the vendors in their system based upon the services that they need and the services that the vendor noted that they provide. If a school district is looking for a new testing platform, they would write up an RFP, send it out to certain vendors, and then those vendors would respond to the RFP with the actual proposal.

The Vendor & RFP processes are dependent on one another, because you have to be a vendor in order to get access to RFPs, and in order to respond to an RFP or to be selected and work with a district, you have to be a vendor. 

Another thing to note is that depending on your school district, there's usually some type of threshold by which the school district and/or schools are required to go through the RFP process. For example, it could be that any RFP above $50,000 has to go through the RFP process, which means that any services under $50,000 do not require an RFP process. A part of that is a little bit of, out of the spirit of fairness. When there's a larger contract, school districts want to ensure that they're considering multiple options, rather than just picking anyone. 

Now, there are some services under a certain threshold where you won’t have to submit an RFP. Let's say that a principal wants professional development and they've budgeted $20,000 for that engagement, you could be the consultant that they choose and you don't have to submit an RFP. You’ll still have to be a vendor, but you don't actually have to go through the RFP process. So part of the answer to the question working with a school district depends on your entry point.

You can get a contract with a school without going through the RFP process, and most of the time, in the early stage of your business, you may not have the capacity for a contract that requires an RFP process. When we're talking about contracts with school districts that are at the $50,000-$100,000, those require either that to be one of your two or three contracts you have during the year or you're subcontracting, meaning you have a team. 

If your education consulting business is still a side hustle, you may not have the capacity to actually be able to consider those types of contracts at that level, which is why I name that, it is so vital to leverage your network because your network can completely change your entry point to a school district. 

Honestly, in my experience, I've actually never had any issues with the vendor process because I was already identified as the consultant that they were moving forward with. It was actually like, we've chosen you, fill out this quick vendor form so that way we can move forward.

That’s why I always remind my clients that I work with in Get LaunchED Consulting™️, is that they can simplify the client acquisition process by focusing on working with the school leaders that are already in their network. Whether it's people they used to work with people, they went to school with, people they're in certain associations with that they haven't even tapped into, that's the starting point for your business!

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