The GovCon Teaming Trifecta - How RIVA Builds Better GovCon Partnerships

When people ask me how RIVA has grown and thrived as we successfully emerge from our 8(a) status, partnership is the first word that comes to my mind. Building and nurturing our partner relationships has been one of the cornerstones of our corporate growth strategy, but many other government contractors I’ve spoken with find this element of their business model challenging.??

Today, I wanted to share three lessons I’ve learned over the years about what makes a good GovCon partner, along with my perspective on how RIVA is able to build strong relationships.??

What Makes a Good GovCon Partner??

RIVA has teamed with hundreds of partners since our founding in 2009. We currently support:?

• 80+ active contracts at a 10+ customer agencies?
• 100+ partners, 70% of which are small businesses?

Many of our partners are household names in the GovCon space – AWS, Peraton, SAIC, etc. – but we didn’t start off with these relationships when I founded the company twelve years ago. We had to gain our partners’ trust over time by showing that we could enhance their capabilities and deliver value. We did so by focusing on three areas that I believe make a good GovCon partner:??

• Collaboration and Community?
• Transparency?
• Delivery?

I call these areas the GovCon teaming trifecta, and if you can accomplish all three, you’ll be sought out as a trusted partner by small and large businesses alike.??

Collaboration and Community

A good GovCon partnership is comprised of one team that shares the same goals. That’s easy to say, but difficult to execute in practice when a number of disparate vendors are serving distinct portions of a very large project at a very large agency. Even if everyone has the best intentions, you’re all doomed if you don’t collaborate.?

One of RIVA’s strengths is putting our ego aside and implementing the best idea. Great ideas can come from anyone from any level at RIVA or from a partner. We’re not afraid to ask for help outside our team, and we always let our clients know where a great idea originated. This means that we’re in constant communication with our partners about task orders, delivery status, and project requirements so we can all push forward in the same direction.?

Our focus on building a partner community helps with what I’ll call cross-pollination. The ability to deliver an innovative solution on a government contract is directly proportional to your ability to collaborate with your partners. And it’s also the best way to stand out from the crowd.???

The I in RIVA stands for Innovation. We’re always looking for a better way to solve a problem, and we include our partners in those discussions. Enabling a partner to deliver more value to their customers is exactly the type of relationship that fosters community and helps grow a business in the long term.?

Transparency?

In the old days of government contracting, primes were often very secretive about their business. In order to maintain what they perceived to be proprietary information or competitive advantage, these companies would do things like not give their teaming partners an overview of contract progress or prevent contact with end clients. RIVA takes the opposite approach with our partners, because transparency builds trust.??

Our goal is to make ourselves as transparent and easy to work with as possible, and doing so requires frequent communication.??

As an example, we are sharing all task orders from our USPTO BOSS IDIQ with our partners as we receive them. We are building a system that will reduce the manual component of partner outreach for these types of contract vehicles and make sourcing and delivery even easier.??

These are just a few of the ways that we’re building trust with our partners.?

Delivery?

Delivery matters. It might sound obvious when growing a business, but we’ve found that focusing on delivery puts your organization in a strong position for growth.??

Our goal is to deliver the highest level of quality that helps the customer achieve their mission. Doing so on large projects over long timespans is not easy, and our partners recognize that fact because they’ve been in the same situations. Our focus on delivery sets us apart, and we maintain constant communication with our partners and customers about expectations and requirements until the deliverables are signed off and in the hands of our clients.??

This mission-focused approach ensures our satisfied customers stay that way, and that our partners want to work with us again and again.??

I hope my perspective helps you understand RIVA’s approach to partnerships. We’ve found that an open, collaborative approach goes a long way. Who knows, one day maybe we’ll be working with you as well.?

If you’re interested in teaming with RIVA leave a comment or shoot me a DM