The SBA Mentor-Protégé Program (MPP) lets an established company (the mentor) help a smaller firm (the protégé) grow — and, critically, lets the two form a joint venture that can compete for set-aside work the protégé could not win alone. Used well, it is one of the fastest legitimate ways for a small business to reach past-performance and capacity it would take years to build organically.
This guide covers how the program works, what each side gets, how the joint venture bids, and the compliance clocks you cannot afford to miss.
What the program is
A mentor and a protégé sign a Mentor-Protégé Agreement (MPA) and submit it to the SBA for approval. Once approved, the mentor can provide the protégé with technical and management assistance, financial help, subcontracts, and — the headline benefit — the ability to joint venture without being treated as affiliated for size purposes.
Normally, if a large firm and a small firm team too closely, the SBA’s affiliation rules would count their combined size and disqualify the small firm from small-business set-asides. An approved MPP relationship creates an exception to affiliation, so an otherwise-oversized mentor can pair with a small protégé and the JV still qualifies as small (or 8(a), SDVOSB, WOSB, or HUBZone, matching the protégé’s status).
What each side gets
- The protégé gets access to the mentor’s past performance, bonding capacity, technical bench, and often its systems and processes — plus a real shot at larger prime awards through the JV.
- The mentor gets a compliant path into small-business set-aside work, a business-development pipeline, and goodwill toward its own subcontracting goals.
How the joint venture bids
The mentor-protégé JV is a distinct legal entity that submits the proposal and holds the contract. SBA rules require, among other things, that the protégé perform a meaningful share of the work and that the JV agreement spell out management, workshare, and profit split. The set-aside eligibility of the JV follows the protégé’s certification, not the mentor’s.
Because the workshare and control requirements are strict and periodically revised, treat the JV agreement as a compliance document, not boilerplate.
The compliance clocks
An MPP relationship is only useful while it is compliant. Three dates matter most:
- MPA expiration — the agreement is approved for a set term and must be renewed before it lapses.
- The annual SBA review — SBA reviews the relationship roughly each year (typically around the MPA-approval anniversary) to confirm the mentor is delivering the promised assistance.
- JV agreement approval — an active JV needs an approved, current agreement on file for the awards it pursues.
Miss any of these and the affiliation exception can evaporate mid-pursuit — with your eligibility for the set-aside you are chasing.
How PursuitAI helps
Record your JV once on your Company Profile and PursuitAI can score opportunities through the JV’s combined strengths (the mentor’s NAICS and agency traction fold into your fit scores, reversibly) and track the compliance clocks — surfacing MPA-expiry, annual-review, and unapproved-agreement reminders as banners, inline chips, and nightly nudges so a lapsed date never quietly costs you a bid.
A word of caution
The MPP and its JV rules are governed by SBA regulation and change over time — including the affiliation exception, workshare requirements, and eligibility standards. Confirm the current rules with the SBA and your counsel before relying on any of the above; PursuitAI’s reminders track the dates you enter, they do not certify compliance.