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Like the Sirens of Greek Mythology who would lure ships to their rocky doom with their Sirens’ song, Government Contractors tend to hover to the first Contracting Offices they engage with, especially when business is being realized. This nearsightedness often prevents them from seeing the other business opportunities located at Contracting Activities, sometimes around the corner from the ones they are already doing business with.

During fiscal year 2021, three thousand one-hundred fifty-five contracting offices executed 70 million contract actions resulting in governmentwide obligations of $631 billion. These offices are located in 169 Contracting Agencies, which in turn are located in 71 Contracting Departments. This averages out to more than 44 contracting offices per contracting department. That’s just an average, since certain Departments like DoD, HHS and VA, have many more offices than do Departments like SBA, Energy and Education.

Let’s take a step back and unravel this a bit. If you’ve read any of my other GovCon Geek Squad blogs or listened to the GovCon Geek Squadcast, you will know “context” is one of my favorite teaching terms. So, here’s some context. When executing market research on Federal Contract spending, you need to understand these three terms, at a minimum:

Without this context, how would you know to look for Customer organizations who submit requisitions for needs to be fulfilled via a procurement? Did I mention Customer Funding Offices outnumber Contracting Offices 5:1? If you are doing business with a specific Contracting Office, or see your competition doing business with a specific contracting office, a safe assumption is other offices IN THE SAME AGENCY OR DEPARTMENT, are making similar buys for the same or different customers. This also means there are other offices outside of the agency or department in question, buying the same goods and services. If you were to take three minutes to do a query in FPDS-NG ezSearch, you would quickly find these other Contracting Offices with whom you could do more business with, along with who they buy from, who they buy for, how they buy and more.

I’ll finish with a short story.

A few years ago, I was having a conversation with one of our Wingman SOARR members on this very topic. His company was doing well, better than $10M annually, with a good chunk of work coming from two Contracting Departments, three Contracting Agencies within those Departments, and roughly six Contracting Offices tied to those agencies. I challenged this business leader to tell me how what percentage of the overall related requirements his company was being awarded. His response was 30-40%. If I were talking exclusively about the one office he supported, he would have been spot on. But I wasn’t. I then showed him how much business he wasn’t seeing at one of the civilian agencies he was supporting, specifically, coming from Buyers and Customers in the same geographic footprint (Zip Code) as the Contracting Office he was already doing business with. The result was helping his team to use this information to find additional business opportunities with his current Customer and with other Contracting Offices they also leveraged. Our training helped them see several new customers being serviced by his current Contracting Office, too. The biggest reveal was finding six other Contracting Offices buying what he was selling, for the same agency, located in the same Zip Code. The shock came when he discovered his current Contracting Office ranked fifth in overall spending. There is a happy continuance of this story, though.

During our most recent conversation, he told me they are now doing $20M, and still growing.

Peace,

Go-To-Guy