Business success is rarely achieved by the timid. Especially in Federal GovCon, we need to learn to ask hard questions of ourselves, our proposals, our partners, and our employees. What do hard questions look like? How do we ask them without being the bad guy and making matters worse? Why are hard questions vital to GovCon success? Listen in, as we challenge the status quo in the second episode of GovCon Growth Bytes.
Business success is rarely achieved by the timid. Especially in Federal GovCon, we need to learn to ask hard questions of ourselves, our proposals, our partners, and our employees. What do hard questions look like? How do we ask them without being the bad guy and making matters worse? Why are hard questions vital to GovCon success? Listen in, as we challenge the status quo in the second episode of GovCon Growth Bytes.
Welcome to GovCon Growth Bytes Hey there industry and welcome to Episode 2 of GovCon Growth Bytes Your source for expert advice and key strategies to grow your business or one byte at a time. I'm your host, Maggie Bennett. And today I am joined by Robert Turner, founder of rTurner Solutions. And we are going to talk about how success in govt. GovCon requires asking the hard questions. We'll get in a little pipeline management, a little capture development, a little business, a little proposal. And we also want to touch on how your desire is ultimately irrelevant. Are we being mean? We don't think so. It's all about challenging the status quo. But first, let me say a really quick thank you to our client of the day for providing the following feedback. JH The president of his company said, quote, We won. We are eternally grateful to you for your team's efforts and insight. Without your assistance, there is simply no way we could have navigated our way through this proposal process. Your team answered many, many newbie questions without complaint or hesitation. That is professionalism defined. Well, thank you so much. We are thrilled to have worked with you. We are excited about your success. And with that, let's get into it. Robert Greetings. Welcome. Maggie, Glad to be here. So glad to have you back. Can you really briefly give us an introduction and tell yourself, tell the listeners who you are? Robert Turner, founder of rTurner Consulting. Now, rTurner Solution's been in the GovCon industry for about 20 years. Business development, capture proposals, helping customers grow. Helping them win new business. Excellent. Sounds like you do all of the things. Our topic today is hard questions, but what do we even mean by that? What do we mean by asking hard questions? You know, I've told people for years that this business is hard on a good day. It's hard because it's it can be complex. The federal government is the largest buyer of products and services in the world. And not only that, they're bureaucratic. You know, if anyone who has any trouble with insomnia or just boredom, I mean, hey, pick up the Federal Acquisition Regulation if you need some help going to sleep. Digest that thing one page at a time. Endless, endless. Right. And changing requires lots of thought, you know, and and I find that that it's not uncommon for customers to think of the federal government as one buyer when really it's, I don't know, dozens, scores, hundreds of buyers. Right. Each department, each agency, each office can act in their own way, have their own rules. Perfect example. Seaport NextGen Naval Sea Systems Command Premiere IDIQ for 22 different functional areas of products and services. One contract many buyers. And just because you're on sea port. If you're buying from Indian Head versus Carter Rock versus the submarine lab in Rhode Island or San Diego, Charleston, each one of those markets is totally different. You might master one and not know anything about another. You can't assume that. Oh, well, I was great over here. I'll be great over there. No. Ask yourself the hard questions. How am I going to win in those markets? Right. So the complexity requires that we ask that we ask hard, sober questions to make sure we're maximizing our investments. Absolutely. It sounds like with that kind of scale and that magnitude of departments and offices and subcategories of everything, that there is going to be a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of red tape, a lot of moving pieces and a lot of differences from one contract to the next. Just because you're good in one area doesn't mean you're going to succeed in the other. And you have to really analyze that and ask those kinds of questions. That's right. That's right. Maggie, I think that's a good way to put it. And I think, you know, moreover, we we have to ask ourselves, you know, do we know enough about our market and how our customers buy that? We can tell we can tell somebody else why we're going to win. Absolutely. We can't just hope we can't just write the proposal. We can't just do what everybody else did and expect to get good results. And I think that's where we can circle back to that idea that our desire is not entirely ultimately the only relevant thing. It's irrelevant without the action behind it, without the hard questions to guide it. Yeah. I mean, we hear all the time, Oh, I really want to get into this agency or I want to go over here. I went, well, I mean, you know, good for you. I want to win the lottery. Right. The real question is, and again, this is one of those hard questions, am I making the investment in time and resource and activity to actually break into that market? Right. Am I meeting the right people? Am I talking to the right people? Do I understand that customer and what their needs are? Have I read their strategic technology plan? Have I been to their conferences? Do I know the executives? You know, and the hard questions? What they really reveal is that it takes time. It takes a persistent effort. And in gov con, I hate to say it, but nothing's easy. Absolutely. And so since nothing's easy, we really want to hone in all the right kinds of actions. And those questions can help us decide. Are my desires backed up by the right kinds of activity, the right kinds of actions? So let's narrow that down a little bit for the listeners. Let's go. More specifically, how would you guide people to ask good questions in their business development? Right. So you're qualifying an opportunity. You've got something that's come out of your pipeline. You're you're talking to folks in industry and in government. Maybe you're building a team to go after a particular opportunity. You need subcontractors. You need consultants. Well, are you teaming with your friends? Are you teaming with folks that you know already because you know them and yeah, they like you and. Oh, sure, I'll join your team. It's no problem. Well, I'll tell you the problem. They don't have past performance in this customer doing this work. How are they increasing your pWin? Except they're just another friendly face to go have lunch with. Yeah. Right. Is that the easy button or have you built a team with the kind of past performance that it takes to compete in this market and to differentiate yourself? Well, that takes work. That requires making cold calls, talking to people that you don't know. That requires really understanding why you can win versus somebody else. Those are hard questions. Absolutely. I think it's really easy to work with people we like and work with people we're familiar with and not always ask ourselves, is this the most strategic decision to get the kind of business growth that I'm looking for? How would you then take these kinds of questions and into the into the capture world? Right. So, you know, you're a you know, capture managers are really distinguished from business developers in that they're dealing with the strategic elements of a bid, really seeking to build that network of teaming partners. Consultants, understand the customer, understand the market, really dig into and really uncover problem areas that need to be solved. Right. Well, you know, it's it can be risky to bring up a real obstacle in capturing a deal. If you're a capture manager in a large or small company, you're out there in the marketplace, you're talking to people. You're uncovering both opportunities as well as challenges. Well, you know, a lot of times it takes courage to present those challenges in the right. Way to your leadership and to your senior management, because they're going to ask. They're going to ask what you're going to do about that. Right. So those are those are hard questions. That's that's the that's the risk element in this business. This business has risk everywhere you turn and you don't help yourself by avoiding the risk. Right. Really? I encourage folks, lean into the wind. Take that risk. Ask, ask, ask yourself, can I overcome that problem? Can I really win this deal? And if your senior leadership has said win that deal, come hell or high water, well, okay, how are you going to do that when you find a real obstacle? Do you need help with some innovative solutions? Do you need to meet new people? Are you asking are you uncovering ways to to scale that wall even though it might be high. Right. And really push through work in a future podcast episode, we're going to talk to a friend of mine, Steve, who had to had to learn or had to solve the question. The problem of how he was going to win lowest priced, technically acceptable contracts when his company's wrap rate was way over 1.8. You might look at that and go, that's impossible. Well, it's not impossible. It's just hard. It's just hard. Absolutely. It sounds like, especially in that captured manager role where you want to be like, do you want to be an encouragement to your team and to your company? You want to do all the things, but then you really got to ask, is this going to be successful? Is it going to be possible? And if it needs to be done, how am I going to do it and how are we going to move this ball forward and not just live in that daydream land of, oh yeah, we can absolutely win all of the things because we are great. That's right. That's right. I mean, you know, honing in on and identifying your specific technical capability that you actually own. And then also identifying the things that you don't do well and looking for ways to overcome those weaknesses. There are ways to do it, but you have to ask yourself those hard, sober questions and you have to be willing to really deal with reality. Right? You can't just create the dream. You have to you actually have to build it. Absolutely. I know a lot of the places that we see a lot of dreams come together are in pipelines. We see a lot of dream bids, a lot of fantasy acquisition opportunities, a lot of things that we can say, Oh, with that, be nice. I really want this, want that. So how can some of those hard questions be applied to the pipeline? Right. So pipelines are the lifeblood of any any government services provider. Right? Your your your strategic investments, your business development investments, the proposals you're going to always tie back to a pipeline opportunity. But pipelines are not static. You don't build them in, you know, I mean, the fiscal year turns over in October. So let's say by Halloween, you've already built your pipeline for the next fiscal year. Well, you can't just use that same pipeline in its current October state in April if you haven't revisited that thing. What's changed? Has that bid been canceled? Has that bid been pushed to the right? Has it changed from unrestricted to small business? Has there been a change in leadership within your customer? You know, pipelines need to breathe. But not every opportunity is winnable. Absolutely. It sounds like they're very much that living organism that needs to be tended to cultivate it. And does it have the right sunshine? Does it have the right amount of water? And did I look into it? Have I weeded out the bad apples if I tried? Well, you know, and moreover. Right. We only all of us only have so much time, right? Somebody added up the number of hours we have in a week or a month or whatever. Right. There's only so many. Yeah. You can push through and, you know, borrow from your family on the weekend or stay up late or, you know, trying to squeeze some time to do more. But, you know, the more your pipeline is filled with opportunities that you honestly have a very, very low to no chance of winning. The more time you're going to spend tending to a garden that's not going to produce fruit and then neglecting the things that really could produce fruit. So, you know, ask yourself that hard question, can I win this? Do you have the courage to tell your senior leadership? No, that I can't do that one. Right. That one that one is not possible. So now we're kind of getting into, you know, a little bit of, you know, company political relations. But but, you know, it all comes down to do I have do I have a good solid handle on what I can really get done on a weekly and monthly and quarterly basis? And I am I am I am I making the right investments in terms of my time activity and my money? And, you know, can I handle the truth? Right. You can't you can't handle the truth. I can tell the truth. You have to be able to handle the truth. You have to be able to handle the truth. And you have to be able to decide, is the time I'm spending with this pipeline, is that actually adding value to my company or am I just flitter fluttering around with the butterflies hoping that something will come together? That's right. That's right. And and I think it's I think this is all shows itself in our industry, where way too many business developers and capture managers spent 12 to 24 months at a given company and then move on. And you can't always you know, you don't always want to shoot shoot the guy on the field. Right. It's not always his fault. He's he's often the victim of, you know, maybe bad expectation from senior leadership is where leadership can ask those hard questions. That's right. Expectations reasonable. And if you're in a senior position listening to this podcast, like are you asking the hard questions of yourself? Like, am I guiding my team to do things that they are equipped to do? Have I equipped my team to do what I'm asking? Those are some hard questions that. That's right. I've usually said that proposals fail for one or two one. One of two reasons, sometimes two of two reasons. One, that the team is not following an effective, disciplined process to create that proposal. They're cutting corners or it's under-resourced. Well, these are both hard questions, right? Do you are you willing to put the controls in place to follow a good, solid process, to create a great proposal and have you resourced this thing properly? Right. If you don't have the kind of writer resources that it takes to write this proposal, what are you doing? Right. Yeah, there's no you know, if you're going to fail here, another one of my friends said this. If you're going to fail, fail forward, fail with purpose, fail because you're going to get something out of it. Don't fail because you just kind of phoned it in. And what like don't do that, don't do that. You don't learn anything from that. You don't gain anything from that. And you know, you just make you just make every day, every other day in this business more difficult. It is. It's more difficult. And then you build into that fear as well of of not going all the way and doing everything you could do. And I remember when I was learning to drive and I was timid and terrified and couldn't go around that one corner because there was this big pillar in the way. And my father said, You know what, Maggie? This was like maybe the fifth or sixth time I tried to drive past this particular little pillar on this little bridge. And he's like, if you're going to hit it, you hit it with conviction and you just got to go for it. You just got to go for it. I think that was a good kind of way of tying in some some pipeline work with some proposal work. Do you have any sort of concluding hard questions that you would like to give our listeners to put in their toolbox? GovCon is a very challenging, exciting business that requires that we're always learning, we're always stretching, we're always growing. So I like to encourage folks to invest in personal development all the time, find folks who are in this business who are winning, surround yourself with winning people, engage with folks who are good at what they do and ask them the hard questions of how did they overcome the obstacles that were in their path? How did they grow their companies? And you'll you'll find ways to make it through. That is an excellent piece of advice. It reminds me of one of my earliest mentors who told me that a lot of people become like the five people they spend the most time with, and it feels difficult to evaluate, but asking yourself, Do I want to be like this person? Do I want my company to look like this company? Do I want my business to be like this business? Do I want my personal life to look like their personal life? And you become very much like those people. So that's excellent advice to surround yourself with people that you that you admire, that that are winning and that you can win alongside of. And that's right. That's right. And, you know, I've I have found this to be a very collegial market. You know, spend spend your time connecting with others on LinkedIn, especially ask people for advice, ask people for help. I've usually found that most people in our business are happy to help. And, you know, we all want everyone to succeed. And there's plenty of opportunity out there for all of us. There is. It's an exciting market. It's not easy, but it is never boring. It's a lot of complexity, but it's a lot of opportunity as well, where speaking of filling our time and our spaces in our lives with people that we can admire and look after, where can we connect with you? Where can the listener find you on the Internet? Where can they connect with you via email? Right, right. So www.rTurner.net is our website. I'm on LinkedIn. You can search for me there. I think we've got a YouTube channel as well. We just launched our new pipeline, our GovCon procurement data search and reporting platform called Fed Pipeline. So you can find us there at www.pipeline.com. And Robert@rTurner. net is my email. I really look forward to hearing from our listeners. Excellent. So just to recap, we've got rTurner.net. We've got FedPipeline.com, we've got Robert@rTurner.net. And you can find me your host on all sorts of social media platforms if you just look for rTurner on Twitter, on LinkedIn. We've got all kinds of fun things happening. And with all that fun shenanigans, let's call it a day. Get back to work. Let's go. Thank you, Maggie. Robert.