rTurner Solutions has a new market focus that organizes products and services underneath four pillars; Consulting, Training, Proposals and Pipeline. Join us for our inaugural podcast episode where you’ll learn a bit about us, our background and experience, how we go to market and what makes us different from our friends in the industry.
rTurner Solutions has a new market focus that organizes products and services underneath four pillars; Consulting, Training, Proposals and Pipeline. Join us for our inaugural podcast episode where you’ll learn a bit about us, our background and experience, how we go to market and what makes us different from our friends in the industry.
Welcome to GovCon Growth Bytes Hey There Industry. And welcome to episode One of Gov Growth Bytes. Your source for expert advice and key strategies to grow your business. One byte at a time. I'm your host, Maggie Bennett. And today I'm joined by Robert Turner, founder of rTurner Solutions. First, let me say a really quick thank you to our client of the day for providing the following feedback. I'm going to use the initials NC, who is the president of his company? And he has said that “my team has worked with Robert on proposal efforts since 2006 and they are one of the best in the business.” Well, thank you so much, N.C. We are really thrilled to have the opportunity to work with you. If you send us a quick email, we would love to send you an rTurner mug we have in all of the primo colors. As you know, we are very blue and red and actually not red. That was wrong. Purple and green, blue and black, all of the colors. And if you leave a review with your company name, we would love to give you a shout out as well and send a mug to the next five reviewers on your favorite podcast platform Spotify, Apple Music, whatever the case may be. All of the things. And with that, we are going to get into it. Greetings, Robert. Welcome. Thank you, Maggie. Great to be here. Very glad to have you. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Introduce yourself to the listeners. Who are you? That's a great place to start. Yeah, my name is Robert Turner. I've been in the GovCon industry kind of formally since I guess the early 2000, right about the time the dot com bubble popped. I spent the first part of my career as a I.T. manager, kind of next decade in enterprise software, traveled the world doing consulting and system implementations in Europe and South America and all kinds of fun places. And then my family, we ended up in the Northern Virginia area, really loved it, loved the history. Washington, northern Virginia, suburban Maryland, a great place to live. When we moved there right around 1998 and I found myself looking for the next adventure in my career and was surrounded by people in government and federal contracting. They spoke this strange language that I couldn't really understand. You know, they use words like G.W.A.C, I.D.I.Q, contracting officer, and I'm like, What is all this thing? So, you know, it occurred to me, you know, if if one industry is down and you're looking to transition your career, go to this go to the core of what your industry, of what your region does. Right. So if you're in if you're in L.A. and you're not in entertainment, in aerospace, check yourself. If you're in New York and you're not in finance or entertainment and media, you know, check yourself. Well, here we are. We're in Washington, D.C., federal government, federal government contracting. It drives the whole region. It's why God bless America, the capital beltway have some of the worst traffic in the world. I mean, it's April 20, 22. And if you're in Washington, D.C., you're in traffic, three hour commute home, you're in traffic. God bless you. We we feel your pain. So started working toward moving into moving into the government contracting space. Did some technical work based on the technologies I knew and then was hired as captured manager. I was very fortunate to win my first big strategic capture. It was a $40 million applications modernization effort at DISA out at Scott Air Force Base. So that was cool worked for various companies for the better part of ten years and then started as an independent consultant. Started building my own business around 2013 there. Oh, why work for the man when you can be the man? I love that. So that's the beginning of kind of rTurner Consulting, Robert, in this industry. That sounds like an awesome ride. It sounds like you also brought a lot of different expertize into what you were doing and being able to think really strategically. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of folks who in our in our business where one hat, right? Perhaps you're a business developer and you've been doing that for 20 years or you're a capture manager. You've been doing that a long time. You write proposals. You manage proposals. I'm one of these strange guys. I, I, yes, I've done all that, you know, a lot of things. I've carried a bag, I've sold services, I've led strategic captures, I've managed big proposals, I've written scores of proposals. Yeah. And so as I started as a consultant and as I started to look to build my own team, you know, the, the core, my core customer base is small business and small businesses by definition. Are resource constrained, have high needs. Always looking to grow but have limited resource. Right. So, you know, if they if they have a project that they need to get off the ground, it's not really in the budget to hire five people. So you need the one man who wears five hats. That's right. You need people who can wear multiple hats. So that's one of the things I bring to my clients and something that's really been the hallmark of of what we've done in the work we've done over the past several years. And do I understand that that sort of ability to diversify and a lot of different skills that you bring to a client is sort of how you made that evolution from rTurner Consulting to rTurner Solutions, right? So this has been very exciting. If anybody has looked at our website, rTurner.net over the past several weeks, we're moving now from rTurner Consulting as a brand to rTurner Solutions. And I'm doing that because we're really moving beyond consulting. One of the things that I found that has really resonated with our client base over the past several years are these packaged deliverables, fixed price offerings, subscription products that we're creating where clients can get value out of what we're doing, we can offer it at a lower price, they can control their budget and everybody wins . So we're really moving beyond consulting and we're organizing our service and product catalog under four pillars consulting, training, proposals and pipeline. And we have products and services under each of those pillars that deliver high amounts of value to our client base and integrate together. So it's it's been a great transformation. And as you and I are recording this podcast, we're right in the middle of it. In addition to having all these different pillars and wearing different hats and having a team that supports you in that effort. What are some of the other things that make rTurner Solutions different than any other sort of firm out there clogging up the traffic on the highway and bringing services to the industry? Right. So the way the way if you're leading a small, medium or large business, what you'll find is that the GovCon support vendors traditionally will engage with you on a resume basis and on a time and material basis. If you need a business developer in the army space, they'll give you a resume of a qualified leader who's got great Army background. And here's his hourly rate and here's how many hours you can buy right now. Do we do that? Sure. As a matter of fact, in the Army, one of the guys on our team, Jim Barrineau, retired U.S. Army Colonel, Signal Corps, COMMS guy, great network, fabulous business developer, is won millions of dollars. Clients love him. So we do that but we've and I don't want to say moved beyond it because it's not like there's any place to go. But what we found is that we can deliver exceptional value to our clients by creating packaged offerings that customers can buy, not on a time and material basis. So for instance, several of these large IDIQs and GWACs that have come out over the past several years thinking GSA, 8(a) Stars FAA eFast thinking CIO-SP4. We're right around the corner from GSA, Polaris, hopefully becoming live again and being something real. One can only one can only hope. Commerce just did. Cats. Yeah. So each one of those has some kind of pricing volume that you have to that you have to submit. Usually they're asking for either salary, direct salaries or fully burdened labor rates on site and off site for, you know, dozens scores, a couple of hundred labor categories. Where are you going to get that information? Yeah, that's a lot of data. Now you can do it. You want to do it. God bless you. Go do it. What we do is we have a very well honed mechanism of surveying multiple sites Bureau of Labor Statistics, Salary.com, Robert, half MOTUS Engineering Technology Survey Pay Scale. The list goes on, right? So what we do is do the hard work of mapping the labor categories from the RFP to these various salary sites and databases, and then pulling the relevant data, sanitizing it, organizing it, doing all the hard, tedious work for you. So and because we can sell these products to multiple customers because it's all open source data that's not proprietary to anybody. And in many cases, you're not competing against any. One because it's a points based kind of noncompetitive RFP opportunity. You can sell that as a product. You sell that as a product. So now something that would take you. Mr.. Ms. client 60, 80 hours or more to do, you can buy from me at a discount instead of doing it myself or hiring somebody to spend a bazillion hours doing it. Then I get that shortcut of It's already done. Let me just take it as it is. That's right. A long fit under that pillar of proposals, I imagine. That's a that's a proposal deliverable. That's correct. Now, in addition to that, we're also we had a lot of great success with this with CIO-SP4 So in the draft period of SP four, they said they really discouraged the use of commercial templates. So we didn't write your management plan or your technical plan, but what we did was that we created what we called accelerators. So we broke down the requirement and we put in the various components that you could take to put together to create your management plan, to create your technical plan. So again, accelerating your development of an end product without requiring the 40 or 80 hours that it took us to develop it. So what I've really found over the last several years, Maggie, is that in many consulting engagements, we end up doing a core part of the engagement. Doing the same work I've done for somebody else. Yep. I've built that pipeline. I've written that document. I've. I've done that work for somebody else. Or in another. In another engagement. It's open source information. It's standard information. It's not proprietary. We're not violating confidentiality. But we do the same work over and over again. Can I package that work up and can I make that available to multiple customers, which sounds like a really cost effective way of providing a lot of value to a lot of people so that all of these different things that they could theoretically spend 40 hours doing themselves or they could hire a consultant to spend 40 hours doing and pay them that that bill. They could get an accelerated piece already pre-prepared from one of your pillars in one your service offerings. That's right. And it can go to town. That's right. That's right. So and this really plays into the tagline that you'll see in our logo, on our web properties and in our deliverables, value, integrity and excellence. We're all about delivering value. Small business grows because you're able to extract value out of the market and win win more business. That's what we're all about. I love that. That's very much from the proposal. Pillar So tell me a little bit about one of the others. What's this training pillar about? Right. So in the training pillar I've partnered with my good friend Steve Cann who has won well over$1,000,000,000 in obligated funds on contracts for small businesses over the last ten years, and has a has a great method for doing business development and winning business. Steve and I have created a package training or one of our training offer, and Steve and I created is called the GovCon Growth Academy. And it's a it's a 10 to 12 week concentrated, high intensity program to teach small businesses of various sizes. We've had brand new businesses. We've had $20 million businesses go through this program, but covers the entire gamut of business development, contract writing proposals, operations, building pipelines, talking to the government, dealing with everything that you need to know, and helping clients refine their ability to win so that you can win on demand and winning. We're trying to take the mystery out of it because when you understand how the government buys, when you understand how to differentiate yourself from others in the marketplace, when you learn how to play the game better than your competitors, your win rates go up. So that's one of our training offerings we're working on, on several others, agency overviews, etc.. It sounds like you and Steve are taking your 30 plus years each. So at 60 years in the industry, 60 years of that consulting and boiling that down is some training that will help these businesses to do what they do, but do it with more insight, more expertize, and be able to accelerate what they're doing without necessarily having to hire a consultant because they're getting all that information in there already. What we're doing as a firm is taking that material, putting it in a package and offering it at, you know, when I can offer the same package to multiple customers, I can save you money and I can save you time, too, because now you can consume these products when it makes sense for you rather than being on somebody else's clock. Love it. So that is a little bit about consult, a little bit about proposals, a little bit about training. Tell me a little bit about this Fed pipeline. That's the third pillar. Yeah. So Pipeline is one of our most exciting pillars. So Jim is our chief technology officer. Hopefully we'll get a chance to meet Jim and talk to him on a future episode. For about the past year, Jim and I've been building, said Pipeline. You can see it right now at Fed Pipeline dot com. I'm really proud of the work we've done. I think it's a great tool. You know, I've been a consumer of. Subscription offerings in the government marketplace. For my entire career, we all have. I remember using Input and Centurion E-Z Gov ops. I've used all these various tools. Getting large amounts of data out of these tools has always been a challenge. Absolutely. Even just learning to navigate every different tool is a tough task. Very, very difficult. And what I learned and what I observed, again, by doing strategic captures over and over again, is that you we want to understand the scope of our market, both from the customer's viewpoint and from the vendors viewpoint. But you can't really understand the entire market until you can deal with the good size amounts of data, until you can search the entire database and get back the results that you need to understand how your customers spend money. How do they put money on contract? What contract vehicles do they use? What contract types do they use? What vendors are have the strongest positions in these customers? What are the trends that you're looking for? Right. And so Jim and I built Fed Pipeline to answer these questions. We built a fast search application. We have some fabulous reporting that comes out of it. We can with one click show you who has relevant past performance for a particular deal, which will indicate who you might compete with, who might be your partners. Answers all kinds of questions. We can do that very quickly. And we've got some integration between contract vendor and opportunity data that you won't really see in a lot, even of the more mature, sophisticated tools. They have a lot of features. They can do a lot of things their data, their databases, their UIs They're very, you know, I mean, I subscribe to them, right? Yeah. But there are things that they don't do. And so we're trying to fill that gap. We're trying to help customers better understand their market so that they can make more informed, strategic bid decisions, so that they can get beyond kind of anecdotal evidence. They can get beyond. Well, yes, I understand. You know, I've been to those presentations where they've shown me billions of dollars of spending on bar charts and whatever the case may be. Right. We're helping you drill down to understand your particular market so that you can make informed business decisions. And that's what we're all about with FedPipeline. It's fantastic. It sounds like a great combination of that value and that integrity, that excellence, all into all in one package, right. With just an absolutely insane amount of data backing it up. I remember we recently got some feedback from a senior manager who said that he'd been playing around with it for maybe half a day and it had provided him with enough information that would have previously taken him weeks and weeks to find. That's right. And that's exactly what we're all about. Right. It's is it the same data that all the other tools have? Absolutely. We're not inventing the data, but we're synthesizing We're making it available to you to answer the questions that every capture manager and every sector manager has. But, you know, traditionally would have to spend days and weeks sifting through data and or and answer these questions. Excellent. I love that. Well, thanks for that really clear intro into all four pillars in rTurner Solutions. I feel like we have a good understanding of the pipeline, some cool training things you have going on. I know you've got the proposals that you do and the service offerings and the accelerators inside of that proposal. Pillar And of course, bringing that 30 years of consulting experience all together, I think that's an incredible. That's right. And it's all backed up by what I call the A-Team. We've got exceptional proposal writers, proposal managers, business developers, capture managers to be able to supplement, you know, clients as they're going after new business. And then all that is supported by this new growing infrastructure of products and subscription services to help accelerate client growth. Brilliant. I love it. Well, speaking of all that cool work they were doing, I suggest we call it a day and get back to work. Let's go. Excellent. Thank you, Maggie. Thank you, Robert. Good to have you.