Interview with Tyler Sweatt, National Security Technology Executive

Tyler Sweatt said that “one of the main differences you'll see in the government sector is a lot of that is pretty well documented down from Congress, each year, they're passing budgets, so you're getting an idea of where new programs coming in, and where are they. And then it gets down to the more traditional aspects of capture of meeting customers and understand their problems.”


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Guest - Tyler Sweatt
Host - Carl Grant
Producer - Seth Grant

Transcript

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Carl Grant: 0:06

Welcome to Rainmakers. I'm here with Tyler Sweatt, Vice President of second front systems. But before we talk started talking to Tyler, I want to remind everybody that you're listening to rainmakers. And this is a podcast about business development. When I got into business development 22 years ago, nobody told me how to do it, I had no clue what I was doing, I had to figure it out on my own. And I realized there's really no good information on that out there about how to do this stuff. And so I'm talking to the best of the best about how to do what they do. And now this is an interesting interview, Tyler sweat and I are just talking for the first time we were introduced by Pat cast out, scowl, sorry, a mutual friend, who had wonderful things to say about Tyler and said he is the guy in the government space. And I don't even know how you do business at all in the government space. So this is gonna be interesting for me. Welcome, Tyler. Thanks for joining us. Thanks so much, Carl. I'm really excited to be here. All right, well, I know how to do this this stuff in a law firm and in an accounting firm, but how in the world do you do business development in a government sector?

Tyler Sweatt: 1:12

It's a great question. It's, it's a little bit different in the fact that, you know, there's there's a little bit of different complexity in terms of compliance and their security requirements and things like that. But at its core, I find it to be pretty similar, where you sort of understand customer's buying patterns, you understand where the funding comes from, and what budgets look like. And one of the main differences you'll see in the government sector is a lot of that is pretty well documented down from Congress, each year, they're passing budgets, so you're getting an idea of where new programs coming in, and where are they. And then it gets down to the more traditional aspects of capture of meeting customers and understand their problems,

Carl Grant: 1:58

I think of the government as is having, you know, very detailed proposals that you need to fill out, and you got to put it in the right format on the right size of sheet of paper and the right text font. And, and I feel like the government does everything to take the human interaction out of a transaction. Whereas in what I do, it's all about relationships. Tell me how relationships human relationships play a part in getting business done in the government space.

Tyler Sweatt: 2:30

That's a it's it's funny to hear you bring that up, you know, when I when I've worked in the commercial sector, we've we've closed deals over text message and writing good where it's no point in the government, it's 50 pages, and it's a bunch of highly compliant wording that at its surface probably doesn't mean much.

Carl Grant: 2:49

It doesn't mean much. But really?

Tyler Sweatt: 2:52

think about if you think about a lot of it is form, hey, I'm compliant with this policy and compliant with that. So what you'll see in a lot of those larger proposals is they'll be at least a few pages of somewhat cut and paste across the spectrum just because, hey, we understand this policy, we understand that. So it's all a compliance drill.

Carl Grant: 3:12

So that so the paper doesn't drive the process.

Tyler Sweatt: 3:15

The paper does to a degree, but I think it's I think it's what happens before the paper, that that sets everybody up for success. And that's where the relationships come in.

Carl Grant: 3:26

And I want to walk us through that dynamic, because I have no clue how that works.

Tyler Sweatt: 3:30

Yeah. So traditionally there and this will depend on the size of, you know, the opportunity or the deal you're going after. So smaller dollar size, you know, less complex proposal, much more human interaction, maybe a shorter time cycle, larger proposal. So where you see some of these large, you know, when the big companies when, you know, a $500 million, a billion dollar proposal, that's probably two to three years of work before you write that proposal. Wow. So that's interacting with the contracting officers with the different executives inside, you know, the program office or the service, understanding how does it fit in to the broader strategy? So what role is this specific piece going to play in a broader effort? You know, if it was a, an army opportunity to build a new tank, hey, how does this fit in to how the army is trying to modernize its entire force? And what are the actual problems that they're asking for in the proposal, but more often than not, there are a number of problems underneath the surface. Because if you think about how that big program requirement is made, there are a number of different users who will bring up their needs, and they kind of get consolidated together into a single requirement. Then industry can propose against. Now most of those, or at least some of those won't make it into the requirement. So you're going out to figure out what are those pain points down at the user level? You know, what types of solutions do your competitors have? How can you bring other companies on your team, to better position yourself to cover the requirements as they're seated, but where you think they're going to expand to, and all that work is done, before you even get to the proposal. And then everyone's sort of got their proposal process. But that drives a whole bunch of it to how you're writing a proposal, how you're using limited space, to get a whole bunch of thought through, and how you're doing it in a way that that is compliant, because that's the easiest way to lose is to have a non compliant proposal.

Carl Grant: 5:50

Do you ever get so far out ahead of this process that you help you help draft some of the requirements.

Tyler Sweatt: 5:57

So there's a fine line on on where you're writing a specific requirement, but I think helping them to inform and helping the government think about different ways to talk about the problem. And different ways to think about how to solve it is one of the big roles that private sector and commercial industry can play. Because if you've been, you've been in a role, and you know, like I said, the tank example, you've been working with a tank, and you've been trained on how to work with the tank, and how to modernize the tank, how to think about the next evolution of the tank, you're probably not spending a whole bunch of time, you know, let's say talking to Silicon Valley companies about how they look at software and form factors of hardware and things like that, and how maybe software development methodology could help accelerate that modernization. So I spend a lot of time trying to not just build relationships of my own, but actually share those relationships, and helpful to build their own networks of relationships, where their thought, and their sort of perspectives on the art of the possible or how to move forward can be challenged.

Carl Grant: 7:08

Yeah, imagine the drafting of those requirements if the requirement was drafted, so that it described the tank that you know how to build that would really solidify your ability to win that contract.

Tyler Sweatt: 7:21

So you will see, you will see a whole bunch of effort like that. And especially as you go larger, into the the scope and the size of programs, you will see a lot of a lot of folks trying to get it maybe maybe a specific requirement, and that gives them a competitive advantage. And so software or hardware,

Carl Grant: 7:42

I'm looking through your your bio, because because these are the set of relationships that you need to develop over a lifetime, to even be able to be in the room to even talk about requirements or any of these things. I mean, that takes that takes time and effort. And so I'm looking back, you went to West Point, you you graduated from West Point, and then you were an Army Reserve Officer, and you were a senior consultant at Deloitte. Take us through how you started to put together the building blocks of of this, these relationships that enable you to have this type of career?

Tyler Sweatt: 8:17

Yeah, that's a great question. So I started West Point, came out of there as an engineer officer, spent a little over five years active duty, transitioned into the private sector, and didn't know what I wanted to do, but knew that I had a security clearance and an economics degree and wanted to work on defense technology problems.

Carl Grant: 8:40

So were any of the relationships that you developed on active duty or as a consultant or in the reserve or any of these relevant to what you're doing now?

Tyler Sweatt: 8:48

Yeah, I would argue the vast majority of them are,

Carl Grant: 8:51

okay.

Tyler Sweatt: 8:52

Because it's, it's, they're not all relevant at the same time. And I think that's part of thinking about relationships as almost like a deck of cards, or, you know, something like a garden, that's going to require constant care and feeding. That's going to require attention and love, for lack of a better word, but you're not always going to be, you know, grabbing vegetables or fruit out of it.

Carl Grant: 9:19

Yeah, no, it was the same way with me. I so I got a job back in the mid 90s, where I was doing economic development, kind of like, you know, you do in your consulting or your army stuff. And I started my job was to attract venture capitalists into a county, and I didn't realize it, you know, I wasn't getting paid much in this government job. But for two years, I was developing relationships that I was gonna milk over 20 years. And and I didn't know I didn't realize it at the time. Is that kind of what happened with you with these government's position? All right.

Tyler Sweatt: 9:47

Absolutely. I've like I've cycled back into meetings in the last 12 months and seen my boss from 2007 when I was in the army. Wow. and been like, hey, alright, this is great. You know, we've already broken the ice. We already trust each other. Let's catch up and have a conversation.

Carl Grant: 10:02

That's cool. It's a lot easier to start from that right? Even. Anyway,

Tyler Sweatt: 10:07

it's definitely easier to start from a place of trust. And it's a relative for as big as the government market is. I think it it ends up being very small in terms of relationships. Most people are one or two calls away, you know, it's the joke and everybody's one click away two clicks away.

Carl Grant: 10:25

Hmm.

Tyler Sweatt: 10:27

But you usually can get connected to somebody if you need to, but it goes back to that care and feeding. So if you're going to call somebody for a favor, you have to build that relationship and not let it sort of just wither on the vine. You've had to make sure you keep it current.

Carl Grant: 10:43

Yeah, no, I was thinking about this, that this morning, I tried to touch I've got I've got almost 15,000 LinkedIn contacts. I try to touch every one of them at least once a year, if not twice. It's hard. But but you got it. You got to be perfectly purposeful about doing that.

Tyler Sweatt: 10:59

It's, it's really our purpose was exactly the right word. It's something you focus on, because I get asked all the time, hey, how do I build a great network? I want to go meet people, you know, I connect to people on LinkedIn. And I always sort of flip it around. Why would folks want to be connected with you? Or why would they want to have a relationship with you, you know, how are you sharing knowledge or sharing new relationships, or contributing to sort of their daily life? And that's where, you know, I've gotten to some really valuable training over the years that has helped helped me sort of think through how to structure some

Carl Grant: 11:32

talk about what the training is, because I have found that listeners to this podcast, have, they've sent me messages, and they've actually gone out and bought books that I and my guests have talked about on here. So if you've got something that's helped you tell her tell our listeners,

Tyler Sweatt: 11:46

absolutely. So there, there's a training program called grow big, and it's by Brunel idea group, down in Atlanta. And it was a three day course on how to break out all these different segments of selling, and how you think about relationships and where they sit from weakest to strongest, and how you can move relationship stronger, and how you can more rapidly develop trust. And it's essentially tradecraft for building stronger relationships under the guise of business development. And I found it to be the most practical, most practical training I'd probably gone through since I got out of uniform. It was unbelievable.

Carl Grant: 12:27

Well, that's cool. And so the takeaways, so how many? How many relationships? Can one person like yourself or myself realistically maintain? Because 15,000 is kind of hard?

Tyler Sweatt: 12:37

Yeah. So it's, it's interesting. So there's a lot of a lot of discussion right now on how trying to stay connected to sort of super connectors, invest your relationships there. So you can scale because you can't do if you're to your point, Carl, if you're focused on 15,000, well,

Carl Grant: 12:53

there's a handful that are really

Tyler Sweatt: 12:56

it becomes that becomes your year. So I usually have 10 to 20, that I'm really, really focused on building deep down and then I look at them almost as lily pads, they'll sort of branch out. And then I can use them to help me reinforce maybe a slightly weaker relationship, that's the next level out and then the next level out. But always thinking about it to where there's some strategy behind where you're investing in relationships. Yep. And then there's an ability for you to pivot. So you've built in some agility as well.

Carl Grant: 13:31

Yeah. So I remember when I was at PwC, late 90s, I, I was burning myself out just, you know, morning, morning events, evening events, doing my emails in the middle of the night. And I I'm like, there's got to be a better way to do this. And so I realized when I boiled it all down to where the best leads came from there, like five people, five people, if I if I spent time on the phone with five people each week, I knew about everything that was going on in the marketplace, and I didn't even have to leave my office. Do you? Do you find the same type of thing? Or is it more complex in that?

Tyler Sweatt: 14:08

I do, I think, I think as you look at different segments of government like defense, and maybe the Fed Civ and Homeland Security, intelligence, you probably have a handful in each of those. But I would agree it comes down to you know, four or five. And I think as you mature and better understand what relationships are or aren't and sort of your own approach. I think you're able to separate some of the noise because I've gone through the same thing where you feel like you have to be at every, you know, corporate happy hour or conference, right? You realize that it's noise and it's just distracting you and not helping you move forward. Exactly. But you

Carl Grant: 14:47

have to put some of that legwork in upfront. Absolutely. 100% agree. So I want to drill down on a couple of things here. So So you talked about leveraging yourself through the super connectors and that intrigues me because I kind of pride myself on being a super connector in my world, not yours, but you know, talk about how you would. Alright, so you and I connect today we're connecting today, you're a super connector, I presume you were, you're introduced as one to me in your world, and I'm one in in my world. And so if we want to connect our two worlds, how do we leverage each other? And how do we build a relationship to be able to do that?

Tyler Sweatt: 15:24

Yeah, I think some of the big fan of you know, you start small and kind of find early victories. So what I do, and what I recommend is, you know, you find some interesting different articles and news stories and offer a little perspective and share that with you. So you can share it with your community. Okay, identify faults that might be one step removed from you that you might not have known in maybe adjacent sectors are very interesting points of view. Yep. And connect them that way. So helping you build sort of your knowledge base and your relationship base, adding value. Yeah, that's exactly right. adding value along the way, so that when that opportunity pops up that maybe Hey, there's an opportunity for us to work together. Go after and then I'd always keep an eye out for opportunities for you to create value.

Carl Grant: 16:11

Yeah, always focus on the other person. That's exactly right. Exactly. It This is a common theme I'm getting from all people who are good at doing this. Alright, so we're coming up on 15 minutes. And I don't like to go too far. But I want to know, so for got a lot of students that listen. And, you know, students sometimes don't even know how to begin, even, you know, getting ready for something like this. If somebody is listening to you today. And they say, Man, I like what that Tyler sweat does, I want to be just like him. Where do they start?

Tyler Sweatt: 16:39

Yeah, so it's a it's a really good question. And I get asked this all the time. So I have a huge bias towards experience and not experience of Hey, go get 10 years experience and then come back and see me experience of go find an opportunity to intern over the summer at a company that's maybe in the defense sector, or paid right or paid or unpaid, either one, go either one, right, get the hands on experience, because that's going to help us a student, understand where specifically in the process, you want to start to focus, and maybe help you identify some opportunities to go get some new skills, or to refine some skills, and it's going to help you start building relationships. My first job in the sector, I literally made binders for senior principals and partners to look to go into meetings and and it got me into the room. I could sit in the back of the room if I made the binder. So I made every binder.

Carl Grant: 17:38

I was getting coffee for people when I started out. Yep.

Tyler Sweatt: 17:43

That's the best way that I do. And then I would also advise the students to go start to build their own mentorship network. One or two people who you can ask them questions to over a cup of coffee, because people want to help.

Carl Grant: 17:55

Tyler this went by very fast. This is very interesting. I want to thank Tyler sweat for joining me today. He is has been an excellent guest. He is vice president of I'm scrolling back up on here, second front systems, and he is hardwired in the government CES CES network. And I want to thank you so much for joining us Tyler. Joining us on rainmakers today. Take care.

Tyler Sweatt: 18:20

Thanks so much Carl cheers.