7 Things to Improve Your GovCon Business

In this episode of Game Changers for Government Contractors, host Michael LeJeune shares seven critical areas for improving your government contracting business. Inspired by Jim Rohn’s quote, “Never wish life were easier; wish you were better,” Michael discusses actionable tips on refining your target market, streamlining your proposal process, and developing effective prospecting and teaming strategies. He emphasizes the importance of tracking KPIs to ensure continuous growth and making strategic adjustments to stay competitive. This episode offers practical advice to help you simplify processes and achieve greater success in the GovCon market.

To listen on your favorite podcast platform, click below:

???FA: https://federal-access.com/ep-343-7-things-you-need-to-improve-in-your-govcon-business/

???Apple Podcasts:?https://apple.co/3y4sNdA

???Spotify:?https://spoti.fi/3SPTZoB

??To watch, click here: https://youtu.be/Ll7KcBuRbpA

?

Read Transcript Here:

Michael LeJeune (00:00) Welcome to another episode of Game Changers for Government Contractors. I'm your host, Michael LeJeune. If you're not familiar with me, I'll just give you a really brief intro here. I've been in this market for 20-plus years. We've helped our clients win a little over $14.5 billion in government contracts. We work one-on-one with government contractors, helping them, and we also have a group coaching program. If you want to learn more about that, go to federalaccess.com. You can learn more about our coaching programs and how you can work with myself or anyone on our team.

Today, I want to talk briefly about seven things you need to improve in your GovCon business. I'll tell you, this podcast episode was actually inspired by a very simple quote by Jim Rohn: "Never wish life were easier, wish you were better." After all, if you are wishing for something, you want to wish that you were better because the better you get at anything and everything, the better your life will be, the easier your life will be.

As I was thinking about that quote, I kind of peeled it back a little bit and thought, what are some things that people constantly wish were easier? If they would just make themselves better in these areas or further refine them, it would make their business easier. So I'm going to hit on six or seven of these today and walk you through the ones that I think are really, really important.

We're going to start off with number one: your target market. Most people are so vague about their target market that their target market is literally "the government." The government is not your target market. You may be in the government market, but you need to niche down as far as you can possibly be. When I look at niching yourself down, I've got one client right now whose focus is the Department of Energy, specifically the nuclear labs. They want to be in all of the nuclear labs—I think there are 12 or 16 of them—and they're in probably 10 of the 16. It's very easy to navigate a market, make contacts, and build your business when you are niched down in your target market.

If you just say "the Army," well, that is a more focused niche than the average person, but start to look at what bases, what commands, or whatever it may be, and start there. Once you have your process down, then you can expand to other bases, other commands, more of the Army, and start to tackle that. But I think this is really one of those areas that makes business so hard—people's target market is too wide. Because it's too wide, it's really hard to focus.

There's a balance where you have to look at your target market while ensuring you have enough opportunities. Drill down as far as you can go, and then ease the filter restrictions as you see the number of opportunities available. If you don't have enough opportunities, ease the restrictions a little. For example, if you're focused on the Army, targeting a specific command or base, and there aren't enough opportunities, add another one. See if there are enough opportunities. If not, add one more until you get the right mix of opportunities and niche focus.

That's number one: your target market. The second one ties into that a lot—your products or services. Way too often, people come to me saying they are very niche, but when I start to look at their niche, it's not niche at all. There are 18 different product categories or service lines. That's not niche. So, what is the one thing you sell—product or service—that you can laser-focus on? That's where you need to focus.

When you have 18 things you're trying to focus on, it's too hard to research keywords, NAICS codes, PSC codes, who's buying what you sell, and all of those types of details. Start with one. Similar to the target market, if there aren't enough opportunities, add a second, then a third, and so on. This also helps you with number three, which I'll talk about now. Number three is your pitch. Whether it's your 45-second pitch or your corporate overview, you need to refine your pitch so it's crystal clear what you actually do.

You've probably all seen the movie Office Space, where there's a famous scene with the Bobs asking, "So, tell me what you do?" The guy says some stuff, and they keep asking because they're not clear on what he does. If your prospects are not clear on what you do, it's going to be difficult for them to buy from you. They'll think you're just like everybody else. You need to learn what you sell and who you want to be. I'm not a therapist—I don't have time to teach you that kind of stuff. So narrowing your pitch is really important so you can speak with clarity. When you talk to people, they need to know exactly what value you provide.

If you improve your pitch, life will get easier. Number four is how you prospect. When I talk with people about how they prospect, most only have one way. While that makes sense for the other areas I talked about—using one thing and then adding more—when it comes to prospecting, you probably need five to seven methods. I highly recommend starting with one, mastering it, adding a second, and so on. I'll say "master" loosely—put a process and system in place, then move to the next.

If your only prospecting method is responding to RFPs, you're going to struggle. Expand your prospecting beyond that. Start doing capability briefs, look at forecasts, reach out to small business reps, go to conferences, use your LinkedIn profile. There are many ways to prospect besides just RFPs. Sources Sought is another good one. Learn to do more with prospecting and put systems in place. Many people will use a script, and when it's not working, they trash it instead of tweaking it. That's not how you work a script. Create it, test it, change a sentence or two, move things around, and slowly adjust your process to understand what's working and what's not. Constantly making 100% changes means you'll never know what the problem was or what the correction was. You'll just see numbers fluctuate.

Number five on my list is your proposal process. Streamline and improve it. Most people's proposal process is too complicated. It's hard to track, and ultimately, people don't use it because of that complexity. Streamlining the proposal process into a handful of steps—three to five, maybe six—is something I highly recommend. Streamline how you document, store, and retrieve those artifacts. Make a standard process for that.

Most people write a proposal, then go back to copy and paste things out of it, whether it worked or not. That's not a good way to document this stuff. Whether you use Excel spreadsheets or some sort of content management system, there are better ways to manage content and your process. If your proposals aren't winning, don't change the whole process. Focus on changing one aspect. Look at where in the proposal process you're losing the most or where there's a quick win for improvement. It could be your value communication or perhaps your corporate overview or capability statement needs improvement. Make incremental changes so you can track progress.

Next is your teaming strategy. Most people I talk to don't have a good teaming strategy. Their teaming strategy consists of making calls when there's an opportunity—that's the first time they make contact. You need to make contact with teaming partners year-round, even when you don't have opportunities. Build those relationships early. You need a strategy, and if you have one, you probably need to improve it and make it more integral to your business. Talk to eight or ten teaming partners, not just one or two. Build a stable of teaming partners you can rely on.

Those are the top six. I'm going to leave you with one more, number seven, which ties it all together: improve how you track things in your business. We call them KPIs—key performance indicators. You need a dashboard for the important areas of your business that need to be tracked for improvement. Measuring is actually a growth strategy. What you don't measure, you don't pay attention to, but what you measure, you do. Simply measuring things like how well prospecting is going or how your proposal process is doing, is a growth strategy. I highly recommend implementing something like that in your business. It often makes all the difference. Once you start paying attention, others do too, and that's when growth happens.

Those are my seven things that I think you need to improve to make government contracting easier. If you have questions or think I missed one, please let me know in the comments that go with this video. Thank you, and we'll see you next time.

?