Federal Compass - Waypoints

What is your capture management process? If you are like most government contractors, you identify opportunities, add them to your pipeline, put a strong bid together, and hope for the best. Not a bad process. Sometimes all you can do is hope for the best. While this process has worked for some, and maybe you, there are areas to vastly improve upon.

 

For smaller, less-established contractors, processes look relatively similar to one another due to budgetary and resource constraints. This leads to multiple people wearing multiple hats. The biggest problem...who wears which hat and what happens when they get too heavy?

 

Identifying opportunities is typically the business development (BD) person's job while the person or people putting the proposal together are the proposal managers. Easy to identify. Still, what happens in between is where many contractors struggle. The actual capture management process. Handing over data to another team that is accurate, up-to-date, relatable, and actionable, is often a struggle. Many teams use Post-Its, emails, or spreadsheets because they are cheap, relatively effective, and can work. While it would be easy to point out the issues with each of those methods, the goal is to help you improve your existing capture management process. 👍

 

The United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) is hosting its 20th annual GEOINT Symposium at America's Center Convention Complex in St. Louis, Missouri from May 21-24, 2023. This is widely considered to be the largest annual gathering of geospatial intelligence professionals in the nation with more than 4,000 government, military, industry, and academia, expected to attend this year's symposium. We, Federal Compass, will be exhibiting and we hope you can stop by booth #1231 to learn more about us!

 

Everyone has their own definition of success. According to Merriam-Webster, success is defined as a "favorable or desired outcome" or "attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence." With a lot of room for interpretation, no wonder different people define it in various ways. In a study conducted between men and women and how they define success, women defined it as having a good life balance and good-standing relationships while on the other hand, men defined it as having more material items. While gender is not the only factor that should be taken into account, age, personality, and experience should also weigh heavily into the definition.

 

If you were to ask a college student what they thought success is you would probably get an answer about how they would get a high-paying job in their field and be able to retire young. If we could go back and ask ourselves at 18 what success is we would surely get a much different answer than we would give now. And to think I thought journaling was useless.

 

As a federal contractor, how would you define success? Not specifically for yourself and your team, but for someone new to the marketplace? Would your definition be close to where your current market position or would it raise some eyebrows and make you say " I think we need to make a few changes to do x, y, and z"?

Have you ever wondered how well-known businesses achieve that notoriety? In business, expansion is necessary for survival. Whether that expansion involves customer acquisitions in the same market or new markets or adding or changing products or services - businesses must change to accommodate the market's needs. For those in a government contracting business development (BD) role, continual growth and company expansion are imperative, not only for the company but for job retention. Even though you may order (too many times a day) from Amazon, they still have competitors trying to infringe on their market share.

Landing B2B or B2C contracts in an ultra-competitive market can be incredibly challenging. Landing
federal contracts (B2G), however, can feel like scaling a mountain over and over. While your pursuit
process starts with grand ambitions, it can easily spin out of control quickly and leave you with stale
business development efforts – or even cause you to miss an opportunity completely.

Everyone brings something unique to the table. Maybe it is knowledge or expertise of a specific subject, an outgoing personality, an innate ability to strike up a conversation, or an analytical and data-driven mindset. No matter who it is, that person brings some sort of value to the table. While value differs in the eyes of the beholder, it is defined as having relative worth, utility, or importance. How it satisfies your team's needs is up to you.

As the largest procurer of goods and services in the world, the United States Federal Government opts to outsource its needs rather than satisfy them internally. Why? Because of the unique and technical specifications, they require in order to accomplish their missions. With the government turning to federal contractors to satisfy their needs, they require anyone who does business with them to abide by their strict guidelines and regulations. If you have ever seen the movie War Dogs, this is why guidelines exist and compliance matters.

Creating an identity as a business and adhering to it is an extremely difficult task. You want to provide a wide range of services, but you know that straying too far from your core competency can weaken your ideal offering. So you adopt a gradual expansion of your offerings and dip your toes into new markets. After several years of implementation, are you the same company you were before? Do you have a new company identity? Have your initial goals been met and are your new goals the right ones? 

If you own or run a government contracting business and are looking at the possibility of selling in the
coming months or years, then you may already be worried about all the things you need to do to prepare. There are countless articles about ways to maximize valuation by cutting costs, focusing on key customers, and presenting your financial reports in the most positive light. But as much as presenting
an ideal financial picture may increase the potential purchase price of your businesses, having disorganized and incomplete records for buyers (and their lawyers) to review can undermine even the best financial projections. Most of these articles will suggest that you perform “due diligence” on your own business, but they don’t really tell you what that means. It remains some sort of time-consuming mysterious ritual performed with the help of overworked executives and expensive lawyers. While that may be mostly true, here are some practical tips on what you can do to get started.

When talking with nearly any federal government contractor, there seems to be a love/hate relationship with the 8(a) program. Some will say it helped propel them and gave them the guidance and boost they needed in order to achieve the level of success they have today. Others will say that it was the best nine years of their business's life but have since struggled to repeat that success.

 

The government says they love doing business with small, disadvantaged businesses. To an extent, this is true. However, outside of doing business with them, those smalls often fall to the wayside and are unsure of what comes next. Winning 8(a) contracts is great, but there is little support outside of those set-aside contracts. Once that nine-year limit is up, it is as if you are thrown to the wolves to fend for yourselves. Some succeed while others falter. Before going through with your 8(a) certification thinking you are about to open a goldmine of opportunities, these high-priority items should be taken into consideration. Because once you become certified, the race against the clock is on.