DLA’s mentor-protégé program to help small businesses with contracting, technical processes

The Defense Department’s “oldest continuously operating federal” program is coming to the Defense Logistics Agency. The DLA’s Office of Small Business programs has just rolled out its mentor-protégé program, which will help small businesses navigate the federal contracting space and enhance their technical and business processes.

The types of reimbursable assistance available to small businesses fall under business infrastructure support, ranging from business development to proposal development training to human resource training to how they schedule their workload through different programs. The technology transfer category offers assistance with obtaining quality certification and machine setup, among other services.

“Quite often, with military contacts, it requires a certain quality system, and that certification can be pretty daunting for a business that’s never done business with the Department of Defense. We’re actually also looking for new entrants that have never done business with DLA or DoD before. This is also another benefit that they actually have a mentor that helps them go through our compliance and our certification, cybersecurity, all those things that make it very challenging to entry for small businesses if you’ve never done business with us before,” Daniele Kurze, the director for the DLA office of small business programs, told Federal News Network.

“Some companies might need more on their business side, whereas some companies might need a larger concentration on the technical side. So it allows a good mix, and you can do a little bit of both, but there’s a larger percentage required on the technical part.”

The DoD launched the mentor-protégé program (MPP) over three decades ago with the goal of growing the defense industrial base. It has been in the pilot stage since its inception, but the fiscal 2023 defense policy bill permanently authorized the program. 

The number of small businesses in the defense industrial base has been steadily declining over the last decade. In 2021, the Government Accountability Office found that the number of small businesses contracting with DoD dropped by 43%. 

The MPP has long been one of the key programs enabling small companies to become suppliers to the DoD. The 2022 assessment of the MPP conducted by the DoD Defense Business Board, however, found that “challenges have constrained” the program from achieving its full potential, including the fact that the program was in a pilot stage since 1991.

The standard mentor-protégé agreements are for three years but can go to up to five years. Mentors would require written justification and approval from the DoD to extend the agreement. 

“We really need to understand the timeline that’s involved to get that small business the skills or the capability that they need from that mentor. Initially, they were just two years for the base period. But to timeline this out to really understand how long it will take for your protégé to get that skill set or that extra capability needed to be successful, is imperative,” Kurze said.

So far, the agency has signed three agreements, and it plans to grow the program by at least 12 more agreements in 2025. 

“We first started in the April timeframe to get agreements in place. It was a little bit of a learning curve for us and setting up our processes. Now that we have a great foundation to move forward, the expectation next year is that we’ll be faster and be able to expand it across all of our supply chains. This first focus in this first book was really on our two hardware supply chains, so we’re looking to expand it across our enterprise,” Kurze said.

Mentor-protégé matchmaking

While the agency is not allowed to match mentors and their protégés, it can have matchmaking events around a particular area of interest for DLA where small companies can match with protégés themselves. 

Otherwise, mentors and protégés align themselves. The Defense Department has an approved list of mentors small companies can tap into, but mentors don’t have to be approved prior to pitching their match to the agency. 

The pitch provides an overview of how the agency will benefit from a particular match, the small business needs assessment and the mentor capabilities assessment.

“For us, we look at all of that together, and then we look at what they’re going to provide. Does that meet a critical gap that we need? Does it fit within our plan? And if it does, then we move forward and we work with DoD for that next step to get the mentor,” Kurze said. 

Performance metrics

In its 2022 assessment, the Defense Business board found that limitations around data elements that are currently being tracked make it difficult to assess the full potential of the program. The board recommended DoD enhance metrics and data capture tools such as dashboards that track demand measurement, including the number of mentor-protégé agreements, its performance, protégé successes, and program awareness. 

Kurze said data collection is done every month, along with protégé site visits. 

“We also require a lot of data points throughout the year. It depends on what the capability and what the need is on how we measure the outcome. So each agreement is going to be just a little bit different depending on the need of the small business,” Kurze said. 

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