Eric Coffie: 00:00:00 Episode 35 Speaker 2: 00:00:09 Welcome to the Govcon Giants podcast, federal contracting for people on the outside looking in. If you are here to learn how to win a piece of the pie without getting your face smashed in, then you've tuned into the right place. Now the giant that not only walks the walk, but talks the talk, your host Eric Coffie Eric Coffie: 00:00:29 In today's episode, the table's a turn. You're going to hear me being interviewed as a guest on another show with Jay Jones from the BEB podcast. Listen, as he asked me all the tough questions, including how did I get started? How did I make millions of dollars in contracts? Where did I learn all this stuff from? And the most important question, what led me to teaching it on YouTube. Stay tuned for today's show, an episode with Jay Jones and myself on the Govcon Giants podcast. Jay Jones: 00:01:11 Hello. Jay Jones: 00:01:11 Welcome to the Black Entrepreneur Blueprint show. I am your host Jay Jones. Black Entrepreneur Blueprint was created specifically to educate and inspire black entrepreneurs to launch, build, and grow successful businesses. Join us as we help build an economic power base in the black community by promoting business ownership. If you are currently an entrepreneur or want to be an entrepreneur, we invite you to join us every week here at Black Entrepreneur Blueprint. Jay Jones: 00:01:52 Welcome to the Black Entrepreneur Blueprint, episode number 281 I'm your host Jay Jones, and today we have a dynamic and outstanding show in stored for you. First and foremost, if you want to watch me do the show live with the interview, please go to YouTube and it's episode 281 with the YouTube cover. Now, today we're going to be talking to Mr. Eric Coffie. He's the founder of Govcon Giants and he has an amazing entrepreneurial story where he almost lost it all two times, but he used government contracts to come back and his business has done over $5 million in government contracts. So if you've ever were interested or thought about trying to work with the government, make sure you tune into today's episode via on all the podcast platforms or you can watch the video on YouTube. Now before we get to today's episode, I just want to share a few GOVCON GIANTS PODCAST ERIC COFFIE things with the BEB family. First and foremost, if this is your first time listening to Black Entrepreneur Blueprint, welcome to the BEB family. Now please stick around the end of today's episode and I'm going to share all of my social media information and also a resource guide, which includes my new book, a new book, Black Wall Street, and also the different eCommerce platforms I've created to help circulate the Dollars in the black community. So let's get ready to listen to my interview with mr Eric Coffie, founder of GovconGiants.com. Jay Jones: 00:03:24 We are live with Mr Eric Coffie, the owner of GovconGiants.com. Eric, how are you today brother? Eric Coffie: 00:03:31 I'm doing well, Jay. Thank you for having me today on your show. I know we been working a while. I'm trying to get together and hook up, but you know, pleasure, happy to be here, excited. You know, I want to rock and roll and share some information for the people out there and your community. Jay Jones: 00:03:47 Yes, it was. So I appreciate you sharing your time, man. One of the things that I always get on the show I get a request for is government contracting. So when we connected several months ago, I said, man, this is going to be perfect for the BEB family because so many people reach out to me and I'm not proficient in government contracting. And obviously this is what we do at the a BEB family. We bring people in experts to help us elevate entrepreneur IQ. And I know you're going to do that today, man. So for the listeners who aren't familiar with Eric Coffie, tell us a little bit about yourself personally and then we'll get into your entrepreneurial journey. Eric Coffie: 00:04:25 Okay. Well personally in terms of, you know, I started back in 2007, 2008, I was a realtor. And then as a realtor I wasn't really satisfied or happy what I was doing. Someone came to me, a older gentleman season on a bunch of properties and he talked to me about becoming a developer. And so I said, okay. I listened to him and I respect him because I know he had a substantial wealth and he had accumulated over the years. And so I looked up to him and, and I went out and he said, listen, if you get your contractor's license, and I, you know, I'll put the money up and then we can start building houses for like community development programs. And so I said, okay. I went GOVCON GIANTS PODCAST ERIC COFFIE out study, got my GC license, and then the market fell from under us. That's when the real estate market crashed. The banks were closing. And. Jay Jones: 00:05:17 I remember that time. That's when my mortgage business went down. Jay Jones: 00:05:19 You remember that time? Yeah. Eric Coffie: 00:05:25 No, there wasn't nobody building any homes anywhere around the country. There was no development going on, anything like that. So I I was stuck with having a pass my general contractors exam, State of Florida, and really nowhere to hang that and do anything with it. Fortunately for me I had a couple of properties and I was introduced. My air condition guy actually introduced me to another gentleman who was looking into the government contracting space. We hooked up, met and he talked to me about the world of federal government contracts and then, you know, I took off from there Jay Jones: 00:06:01 To go from there. Cool. And it's kind of funny how we get positioned for certain things. So you weren't even thinking about government contract, real estate business. So sometimes you know, things providence happens and make us move into a certain, a certain area that obviously you're blessed to be in now because you've been so successful. Right. So we want to, we want to kind of dive into that real quick. So how did you get started in government contracting after everything had gone down with the economy and what was your first foray into that? So you can just share that with us. Eric Coffie: 00:06:38 All right. So our first foray we, the gentleman that I met, the older gentleman which by the way, and we'll talk about this, Jay later on, he was actually just on CSPAN two weeks ago with the president of United States, Donald Trump and talking about the new opportunity zones. He has since built his business up to about $50 million a year. So that, that gentleman, so him and I, we got together and we essentially, he, he didn't, he knew about the opportunities, but he didn't know how to maximize them or take advantage of it. And so when we got together, he said, look, this is, this is billions of dollars of billions of dollars. And I had personally never heard of billions of dollars or GOVCON GIANTS PODCAST ERIC COFFIE anything, right? Opportunities. I mean, it looked like I'm an engineer. You know, you come out of school and you're making $60,000 a year, you get up to, you know, executive, you make it $130,000 years. Eric Coffie: 00:07:30 So that's about as high as I thought you could take it. But then he, you know, he talked about all these billions of dollars and what he did was he challenged me to go out and say, look, if you can figure out a way to wrap your hands around of these opportunities, you could bring it back to my organization and we will fulfill them. Right? And so I didn't realize I was doing business development, right? I had no idea what you call it. You just, you know, I didn't know. Now we also call it consulting, but he said, look, if you could figure out how to wrap your hands around some of this opportunity to bring it back down. We have the back office staff, we have the people, the team, to be able to execute and perform the work. So again mind you, nothing else was going on, right? Eric Coffie: 00:08:16 There's nothing else happening. The market was dead. Banks were dead, you know. And so I just started going to conferences and events and learning everything I could get my hands on, everything about government contracts and I would just stay up at night studying it and studying it and studying how it works. And then I start reaching out and talking to people and asking them. Right. And we were fortunate because we had this little known certification at the time called 8a.