 Part of my job description was I'll talk to anybody and what I've learned over the years and that's a span of about 20 years of my career by the way with some interruptions to actually work for a small business. What I learned is there are kind of some timeless elements that a small business has got a master in order to be successful in selling to government at any level. I think that's a great segment. Okay, so the first thing I would say is understand what your value proposition is. I talked to people. People would come and talk to me and they would have these great ideas and I'll put that in quotes and I don't mean to be disparaging about it because I think they were very enthusiastic about their idea and the idea that had a value proposition and I would listen. With an understanding of the government and how it worked I'd say that's not really the market you want to focus on because what I hear you saying is this is not a tool for community X but this is really a tool for community Y in the government and let me tell you why it's a tool for community Y because community Y does function A and community X does function B and while they're related community B is not going to use your tool. It's best to community A so I would say the number one thing is so know essentially the market that you really are going to target and know where your value proposition targets. The second thing I would say is understand who you're selling to and I'm going to use the district government as an example and I'll also use the department of the Navy as an example. So the district government procurement system while I was what was called the chief procurement officer was a hybrid because it was all of these satellite what we call agency chief contracting officers who had some level of autonomy depending on dollar value and complexity of the deal and their obligation to me as the chief procurement officer was to follow the rules and regulations but from a transactional perspective I did not do some of that work. Now from a transactional perspective I had a staff at what we call central office who did do some of that work the more complex work but the highly complex you know very political visible type stuff the high dollar value stuff so you really had kind of this you know federated model and the district government and if you don't understand that you've got a federated model in the district government and who really is from an agency and organizational perspective the folks that want to buy what you have to sell then you're going to waste a lot of shoe leather. You know the Navy is very much the same way so people would come and talk to me about you know doing business with the Navy and the first thing I would say to them is well you understand that I don't buy anything in the Pentagon here that I have you know 10 or 11 what we call echelon two organizations that have all the contracting authority and if you think about headquarters as being echelon one and you know to draw a private sector or public sector or private sector analogy I'm sorry you know as the operating divisions and a multi you know business corporation is being like you know the operating groups we had about 11 operating groups that had different missions right so I had my aviation product line and my maritime product line and my space you know and an electronic warfare product line I had the Marine Corps product line you know for troops and so on so if you don't understand how we're organized you can spin your wheels talking to a lot of the wrong people yes I agree the third thing I would mention is is this so going in with the idea that you're gonna listen rather than talk first because a lot of folks have problems and if you if you've done all the other things right you know if you understand you think you understand your value proposition you think you understand any organization there they're still you know this issue of hey I talked to a lot of people every day who tell me they can solve my problem and as I start talking to them they don't necessarily demonstrate that they understand what my problem is so so I would argue if you really want to make a sale if you won't really want to establish a relationship the first thing you need to do is you need to really walk in with what I'll call a listening heart you know hear the person who needs something and listen to their pain points in the problem that they're trying to solve and then the fourth thing and this is a last kind of timely enduring thing I would say network network network you know often the the entry into a buying organization is a contracting officer okay generally contracting officers have no requirements they simply manage the flow of requirements through the system so you're gonna have to go to trade shows and you're gonna have to go to industry days you're gonna have to talk to people who have real needs to get yourself in your product or service known and to have them you know be cognizant when when that need comes up you know you'll you'll deal with a contracting officer eventually if you're gonna pursue business but but if the technical folks is we like to refer to them don't know who you are or what your value proposition is you know you get hard to get on the radar screen so so industry days professional organizations trade shows conferences anytime the government you know you know has has a has folks available to talk to you take advantage of that the other thing is you know and depending on the organization we did a lot of business with very very large companies right I mean there are no small businesses that supply nuclear submarines or aircraft here right they have a supply chain wide and deep and they have people whose mission it is to do outreach to small business people and and and to you know minority owned business people network with them as well you know and in whatever government organization if you're trying to sell directly we have people who are called small business program managers whose job it is to look for opportunities for small businesses to get in there and and you know we have website federal business opportunities Fed biz ops you know folks should be looking at that so so a lot of this is a what's my value proposition who needs it how do I go find the folks that need it and organization I want to sell into and how do I build the network that gives me visibility to be able to take suspect to prospect I like it I like it now you said these are some timely principles that what would you say and I and I look back in it and I see you've been working in this federal contract since like around the 80s what would you say has changed from then to now well I think there there's been a lot more emphasis across different classes and and that's a double-edged sword because on one hand it introduces more opportunity but on the other hand it also introduces a level of complexity for procurement people and also people trying to sell to them so I started in this business with the Navy as a matter of fact in 1978 the summer of 1978 and when I started we basically had you know three if you will special emphasis programs right so we had small businesses set aside under the Defense Production Act we had small disadvantaged business and I'll include you know and that's our you know the 8a program okay small business administration and we had these things called labor surplus areas set aside and and if you well I'm dating myself but you know we're coming out of the mid 70s this is policy that came out of the mid 70s you know when we were hitting stagflation right and you know we had these pockets of real you know unemployment and we had workforce there so so the federal government said hey when we have people in one of these pockets that can do work for us we're gonna set that work aside for them so when I came in 41 almost 41 years ago those were the three areas so today we have small business set asides we have all disadvantaged business program we have women owned business set asides we have service disabled veterans set aside we have a preference program for what's called a billy one which are national industries for the blind national industries for severely handicapped and and and in those you know kind of umbrella organizations because it's very decentralized you find a lot of our wounded warriors we have we have what we call hub zones right which is the historically underutilized business zone so it says basically if you've got a company in a geographic area generally done by census tract which is you know got persistent higher unemployment and 35% of the people in this company live you know work in the zone you know we should set that aside so so as you can see we've moved from about you know three pretty well-defined programs that didn't really overlap very much to this plethora of you know preference and set aside programs which overlap can overlap quite a bit so so there is a level of confusion for both acquisition personnel as well as the people who sell to them that that would be the big change that was one of them so so another one of the big changes you know that I see is is the the application of technology here when when I started in this business in 1978 literally in the government desk calculators were cutting edge right like T85 yeah you know you were like you know sitting at your desk with a phone and a calculator and you making balls to find sources okay okay did you let me ask you this where did you ever work with a slide ruler I owned a slide ruler and a slide rule in high school and to my great regret I don't have it anymore because it would be worth a fortune on eBay yeah I'm sure all right please continue I'm an engineer so I you know I know those those things right so so you know think about now what what you have is is you have this explosion this information technology explosion which which has done a couple of things one it has really kind of if you will I've democratized work as I like to say right you know it's eliminated some of the clerical specialties we had you know it's the stenographers typists the typing pool that whole thing but but the other thing it's allowed us to do is to aggregate information so so small businesses are selling into different platforms than they used to because the platform used to be the telephone the the the other thing that that's happened is as we get a better understanding of what I'll call demand management right which is you know how we essentially stimulate demand in an organization and and how does industry organize to supply that demand there's a real challenge for small business and I'll give you an example so 20 years ago we bought in the Navy most of our non tactical information technology I won't say in a decentralized manner I think that's you know the safest way to say it so so there was a real opportunity at the prime contract of level for small businesses to sell you know into that market right you had resellers you know who could literally you know be outside the gates of you know Cherry Point Marine you know air station there were Great Lakes Naval you know training center and you know when you needed toner cartridges or you needed an extra PC or you needed a copy of D base 3 plus they were your go-tos well today because we understand essentially how that demand is aggregated and we need to reduce redundancy and we also need to be able to do the information insurance information security work we've outsourced the entire administrative network of the Department of the Navy to a company called Perspecta which used to consist of and I don't want to go through the entire genealogy of Perspecta but it but it started with Ross Perot's EBS and went to Hewlett the Packard and it's and it's now kind of spun and reorganized and it's this you know very purpose-built company that sells into this marketplace so those guys that were sitting outside the gate you know selling toner or selling the one-off PC or the one-off software package no longer have that business so so you know they again have to go approach the big primes and some of these fields you know to to be able to sell into these markets because the the the introduction of technology has essentially changed the nature of some of the markets that they used to sell into in the government so I think I've never heard a perspective actually before and our perspective they do they managed to set the administrative side right so so the the Navy has in it as a network we call it the Navy Marine Corps internet it is probably the largest network in existence it is 400,000 seats and 800,000 users and it serves the entire Department of the Navy so you know I'll give you a little bit of the kind of the genealogy so we started out with with the EDS Ross Perot's old company after you know he and GM got divorced and they eventually sold it to Hewlett Packard and Hewlett Packard then spun off the hardware and the services folks into different entities and then pieces of computer science corporation spun out and merged with the government services part of Hewlett Packard to create a company called DXC and then DXC and I forget off the top of my head what the company was but there was essentially another company that was owned by a private owned by a hedge fund basically private venture that did a lot of this IT type work and and they wanted to get out of that business and into the maintenance repair and operation business so so they spun that out and DXC merged with them to create perspective okay and they are so they created this network for you guys and so how long the how I mean was the network to was how is it used well it is a no so so I wouldn't say they they created it essentially what they did was they they aggregated the technology assets that the department of the Navy had okay and and they rationalized it and rearchitected it to be a coherent and cohesive network and it's essentially our administrative network and what I mean by that is is you know when I came in to work a you know the the analogy I used to use when I worked in a Pentagon was it was like it was like going to you know to watch TV on on your cable right so everything on you know my side of the wall plug was actually owned by perspective the PC all the software the keyboard the monitor the whole shooting match and much like your cable box you turned it on every morning and and you were able to essentially do your email you were able to do some spreadsheets some PowerPoint write some documents and use all of our Navy specific kind of back-end office software okay and you know the expectation was that you would be able to do this in an extremely secure environment that was shielded from our adversary so so this was the network they were running for the department of the Navy which consists of the Navy and the Marine Corps okay right but if you were selling toner cartridges years ago or printers or copiers for that matter if you were the reseller of those things and you were a small business and you're not you're now selling those things to perspective you're not selling them directly to the United States Navy and if you don't understand that you're not probably selling them at all yeah you're not selling at all I would agree yeah you're not selling at all interesting now you mentioned a couple of things you the first thing you mentioned was there's a plethora of options between before to now with regards to the special emphasis programs but we haven't you said I know we know it provides confusion but is it more participation now because of this or is it less participation or is it about the same well I can't I can't let me caveat this because I'm quoting numbers that I've seen now from memory right okay okay but but as I as I believe that the numbers demonstrated that we were we were sending more dollars to small businesses right but we were sending them to fewer small business there you yes those are the numbers I know yes yeah those are the same numbers I've read okay yeah I've said those are some of the same numbers I've read where yeah we've hit I think they fit the largest amount that they've ever said which again makes sense because we're spending more as well right so obviously we're spending a lot more in 2018 than we were spending in 1980 and so just on sheer volume it would make sense that they get more but yeah it seems like the participation has been significantly reduced and I think that's where the challenges are that the people my audience is running into is how do you know how do they participate and right part of the idea is you know they've created these programs and these avenues but what it seems like people falling short on is teaching them how to use it how to navigate it and the education piece so it seems like they're I mean and we know that we've got support agencies like the P-tax and the veteran of the V-box centers and right all this development centers the SBA we you know we know we have but it still seems seems like we're still not closing the gap and I'm not here so we can really talk about a solution just more just trying to understand the issues that are present and maybe help provide some insight into ways in which they can close that gap at least you know some of the people who are listening to this going back to when you said people were meeting with you talking with you and having to understand your value proposition I mean as the director how did someone get to how do they get to you was it at a networking event of some sort I well you know I had a really simple philosophy right you know I would imagine you're probably pretty difficult to get to no I was actually pretty easy to get to really yeah you'd have to call some of my former EAs I think I used to drive them crazy but but I was very serious you know one of my official functions was at the competition advocate general and and my really believed very strongly that that meant my job was to talk to anyone so a couple of things I mean just about kind of how I did business in that role I was a pretty visible speaker you know I was out when people asked me to come and talk to them if you know if I could justify that from a from a financial and a mission perspective I would go out and talk to industry groups other government groups to professional associations and and in fairly widely I worked fairly closely with with Emily Harman who was until she retired our office of small business programs director and now a gentleman by the name of Jimmy Smith and and we would do things much like we're doing you know we would do I think than the last you know six months of her tenure there I think I did three Facebook lives with her okay and and we talked about you know one of them specifically focused on small business and another one focused on just kind of the regulatory environment and what was going on so so I would do that and you know I used to tell people all the time if you want to get on my calendar you know I was on LinkedIn I think I probably got about 2800 you know in my network on LinkedIn I would say if you want to talk to me you know call my EA here's the number here's the email and he'll find some time on my calendar for you okay and then people you know would also people I knew in the business you know former federal employees who are now you know consulting with small businesses and so forth would bring folks to talk to me so so I don't perceive myself as being hard to get to you know so I would say that I wasn't standing on the street corner with the billboard that said questions answered here right but the other hand if you said to me hey I'd like to come and talk to you about something I never turned anybody away okay