No Magic Beans

Do you remember the story of Jack and the Beanstalk? Government contracting often feels just like this story. There are a lot of people struggling to grow their businesses while others seem to thrive. What's the secret? Do those achieving success know something you don't? Are they just lucky? Do they have some sort of "magic beans" that you don't have? The short answer is no. There are no magic beans. There are no secrets. There are some fundamentals that you are either unaware of or aren't executing properly and today I'm going to review seven of those principles with you to help you accelerate your growth.

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Read Transcript Here:

Mike: [00:00:00] Anytime I talk to somebody new, the first question I always get is, what's the fastest way to win a contract? Most of the time people are thinking when I'm going to give the answer, it is in weeks or days, not in months or years. If you look at the average company, the average company in government contracting takes three to five years to win their first contract. Some never win a contract and just give up. So we're talking three to five years.

What I'm trying to help you do is follow some best practices and win in six to 12 months. That is dramatically faster. I don't know if you've done the math here, but it's dramatically faster than three to five years. What I want to focus on in this podcast today is: while there are no magic beans, there are no magic shortcuts, there are fundamentals that everybody can follow. And we're going to go through seven different areas today in the podcast so that I can give you an overview of how to accelerate winning a contract and do it as fast as possible. Again, no magic beans.

[00:01:00] This podcast today is primarily for those folks that are always looking for the shortcut. They're always looking for a book, a mentor, a training, a workshop. And all those things are good, but they're like, that's the thing. That's the thing that's going to make me win.

Is I'm going to read this book and I'm going to make that happen. The reason I know these people are out there is I was one of these people. I was one of these people that I'm like, if I just buy this book, this book on how to crack the code on YouTube. I'm going to sit down over the weekend. I'm going to figure this out. And in the next 30 days I'm going to have a million followers on YouTube.

And it doesn't work that way. Literally, almost nothing in the world works that way. Now, should you not buy the book? I'm not saying that. Because in fact, that book, that training, that workshop, all of those things add to your skillsets to help you go faster. I just want to help those people reset the expectation that just because you do any of those things doesn't mean you're going to automatically start winning in the next two weeks or two hours, or whatever [00:02:00] unreasonable expectation you've set for yourself.

A lot of us, me included, have set a lot of unreasonable expectations about how quickly we can use magic beans to win a contract. This reminds me of this friend of mine, I'll just call him John. John was one of those guys. He really felt like uh, that soap opera Days of our Lives.

You could go a decade without watching Days of our Lives. You could tune back in and pick up right where you left off. My friend John, his life was just like that. Anytime I would go some months or years without talking to him. And then I'd run into him. He'd be like, man, I am two weeks away. Two weeks away from my big break. And he's been like that for maybe 20 years. He's always two weeks away because he's like, I’ve got this thing. I'm going to go to this seminar. I'm going to go to this whatever. By the end of next month, I'm going to be billing $50,000 a month or whatever, right? But he never applied any of the stuff he learned.

And even the few things he did apply that he learned, he never stuck with them for [00:03:00] more than a couple of weeks. The new bright shiny object would roll around. He'd be like, oh man, I'm going to drop everything I'm going to do, or that I'm doing right now. I'm going to go to this new workshop.

I'm going to go get this new coaching thing. I'm going to go buy this book and I'm going to turn everything around in two weeks. I don't know how he picked two weeks, but that was always his thing because he would never follow anything for long enough.

If you find yourself in that trap: you can't stick to things, you're always hoping there's another thing around the corner. Hopefully this podcast will help reset your expectations, that's number one.

And then give you just some really simple things you can do.

Narrator: Are you struggling to figure out how to get to the next level? If so, I want to encourage you to reach out to me. There's a link in the description for this podcast where you can actually click on that link and grab a time on my calendar.

We'll set aside 30 minutes, talk about your business. I'll give you some tips and strategies to help you get to that next level. And if it makes sense and you want to talk about coaching, I could talk about some of those coaching options as well. So click the link in the description and I look [00:04:00] forward to meeting one-on-one for your strategy session. Now, let's get back into this episode.

Mike: Let's talk about the seven areas you need to focus on when you're just getting started. Or when you're trying to break out of a rut because you just aren't seeing progress in your government contracting business. The first one is: you need to focus on getting some past performance, any kind of past performance. It doesn't matter if it's prime and it doesn't matter if it's sub. You just need to get some past performance. And when I say some past performance, I'm not saying you need to win billion dollar contracts. You just need any sort of contracts.

Which leads me into number two. You need to think small wins. Think small wins. And when I say small wins, don't think of the limit on simplified acquisition, because that's where a lot of people go. Like, oh, a small win is $250,000. No, a small win is $5,000, $10,000, $50,000. That may be a really small contract in the type of business that you have. So think [00:05:00] small wins. That was number two.

Number three, get to know the long-term forecast of your customers. Your target agencies have a lot of information on their website. They have a lot of information in a forecast. They put out press releases. They put information all the time on LinkedIn and other different places. And if you're not looking to that, if you're not getting to know them, you are back into that magic beans bucket where you're just hoping that something's going to come out this week.

When that thing comes out this week, that's going to be the difference maker. And it's NOT. It's not going to be the difference maker. The RFP that comes out this week, guess what? Somebody else has been shaping it, because somebody else has been looking at the long term. So get to know their long term forecast targets, goals, those sort of thing. Get to know your customer and what's coming so that you can slowly and properly prepare for what's coming out with them. That was number three.

The next one is understanding and articulating your value. Most people have no idea what their value is, [00:06:00] why a customer would choose them over another. But here's one of the reasons I think it's so important to understand and articulate, or communicate however you want to look at it, your value. That tells a customer where you fit in, in their needs. If you can't communicate your value, if you can't communicate what you can actually do for them, they don't know where you fit in, in the whole grand scheme of things. So learn how to articulate your value, understand what your value is, what your role is with your customer. And that will help you greatly.

The next one here, number five, is: build your teaming stable. You should have five to seven companies at any given time that you can call up and say, Hey, Joan, hey Steve, I am getting ready to compete on this contract and we need you guys as a sub. We need you as the prime. Whatever it may be. But you need to be able to pick up the phone and call those people. Building your teaming stable is extremely important. Now, what's the number one tip on how to build a teaming stable? Get to know your customers. Get to know [00:07:00] who's already serving your customers and then bring opportunities to those people that they either can't do on their own or that you've got some inside track to.

That's the best way to get those people to take a call from you. But look, you need to ultimately build that teaming stable of companies So that again, at any given moment, you pick up the phone and say Hey, I need to work with you on this. And they're like, Hey, thumbs up. Let's rock and roll. I like you. I know you. I'm ready to do that. That takes time. It's not going to happen over days or weeks. It's going to happen over months.

The next one is building up your back office: your people, your processes, other resources. You have to prepare for how you're going to actually chase a contract. How you're going to execute on the contract. How you're going to go get the next contract. How you're going to balance the fact that you have more than one contract. You've got all these things in the back end, anywhere from setting up your accounting system and software and stuff like that, to buying tools that your people need. If it's a janitorial company, [00:08:00] there's probably just simple things like mops and buckets, cleaner, all that kind of stuff. All those things.

There's resources that you've got to prep on the back end of your business that seem mundane, but are actually the core of you executing what you do. So build up your back office, your processes, your people, all that kind of stuff.

The number seven here, and I can't stress this one enough: it's learn and relearn and practice the basics.

And when I talk about basics, it's prospecting, opportunity research, proposal writing, project and contract management, pricing. All of those little things that wind up again, being the execution of your business. You know, when you look at a sports team and they can't get anything right, what does the coach always say? That we got to get back to the basics. We've got to get back to the: if it's a football team, blocking, tackling, catching the ball, holding onto the ball, very basic fundamentals. That's always the thing. Once you start growing a business, people get a little [00:09:00] sophisticated. They get fancy and they forget the fundamentals.

So practice, practice, practice, practice. As you're learning the basics, keep practicing those basics so that you become a better company and you're prepared. If you start practicing today, and you start learning today, and it takes you six to eight months to win a contract: Guess how good you're going to be at the basics in six to eight months from now if you've been working on them.

These are all really, really simple things. There's no magic beans to this. There's not a single thing I said in here that was some super secret trick. But I guarantee you, most of the people listening to this podcast are not doing one, if not all, seven of those very basic areas of their business.

And that is why they're struggling. You may be that person. You may be like, Mike, I'm not doing any of this stuff. All I'm doing is sitting in my office and chasing RFPs. Well, if all you're doing is sitting in your office and chasing RFPs, because that feels like magic beans to you, that's why you're not winning. You've got to incorporate these other areas [00:10:00] into your business.

?Hopefully that was really helpful. I want to make one last suggestion with you here today. Because I know how important the sub/prime relationships are, I would highly recommend you go listen to podcast episode 239. It's called Seven Ways Primes Evaluate Subs. That'll not only help you on how to evaluate your subs. It'll help you understand how those primes are evaluating you and how you can prepare for those meetings. But like I said, it'll also help you because you need a way to evaluate your subs. Enjoy that podcast episode. Let me know your thoughts and we'll see you next time.

Narrator: I really hope you enjoyed this episode of Game Changers. If you did, please go like and share this episode on your social media as well as rate and review the episode. That helps other government contractors find out about the podcast and benefit just like you. We'll see you next time.