Take the Time To Win

Every time I watch the movie Armageddon, Steve Buscemi's character, Rockhound, cracks me up. This line is classic: As the space shuttle is taking off, he turns to his boss and says, "You know, we're sitting on 4 million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 200,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it?

What makes the line funny is that there's some truth to it. What Rockhound neglected to note was that it probably took years of consulting, negotiations and bidding before the contractor got the job. According to our State of the Government Market report, time and money are the crux of the challenges facing all public-sector solution providers.

When bidding on government contracts--whether installing a town hall's desktop network or a federal agency's massive SAN infrastructure--it takes time to understand the problem, design an adequate solution, educate the customer and, then, bid and win the job. The process takes months to years to complete, and there's no guarantee that a solution provider will win the contract.

In the State of the Government Market survey, solution providers on all levels repeated the same refrain: too much competition, too much time to invest to get work, too little profit. The open bidding process is designed to thwart competition; if the project is built in the open and everyone has access to all the same information, there's little chance of collusion. The problem many solution providers report is that their government customers don't understand the nature of the problems they're trying to solve. This requires tremendous investment in educating them about the technologies that will meet their needs. It's a perfect job for solution providers, since they are, after all, the trusted advisers. But, unlike the private sector, building the government job doesn't mean you'll get the government job. Once you've designed a system and detailed all the specifications, the contract must go out to bid.

Oftentimes, a solution provider may be able to bid on the contract that it helped design. However, the more companies bidding for the work often drives down the lowest bid. It doesn't take a rocket scientist or Rockhound to figure that one out.

This is where relationships matter. While procurement laws do require government agencies to go with the lowest bid, many have the option to reject the lowest bid in favor of a higher-quality product and service. Solution providers that invest the time to build relationships, understand their customers' needs (even when they don't understand their own) and develop solutions that uniquely fit their clients' problems will win. It's just part of how some solution providers are experiencing double-digit public-sector growth.

Building government relationships takes time and, as our State of the Government Market research shows, those who invest the time will reap the greatest rewards in the end.