Name: The Future of Growth: Why Diversification Is the #1 Strategy for Government Contractors
Uploaded: 2026-09-02T19:30:45.004Z
Duration: 1 h 2 min 28 s
Description: The Future of Growth: Why Diversification Is the #1 Strategy for Government Contractors

Transcript for "The Future of Growth: Why Diversification Is the #1 Strategy for Government Contractors": Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's presentation. My name is Alex Gallant, and I am a senior marketing manager here at Deltek. And before we begin, I have a few administrative items to note. For the best webinar experience, please use Google Chrome or Firefox. The audio is going to be streamed through your computer, so there's no need to dial in. The slides are available on the right in the docs tab for download as well as some other resources that you might find useful. For any questions that you may have, please feel free to submit them anytime, during the webinar in the q and a tab, and we will try to respond to as many as possible. If we can't get to your question, we will try, and reach out individually and answer those offline. The recording will also be emailed to you within twenty four hours of the, conclusion of this webinar. So today, the future of growth, why diversification is the number one strategy for government contractors. We're pleased to have Kevin Plexico, senior vice president of information solutions here at Deltek. He's a frequent industry speaker and a trusted authority on the GovCon market. Kevin, take it away. Thank you, Alex. Appreciate it. And appreciate everybody joining us today for this session on diversification. Look. It's been a lot going on in the the market, the last year and a half or so with the new administration. Lots of changes to federal acquisition regulations, lots of changes to budgets, and some agencies definitely and decidedly going up in terms of funding, and other agencies, sort of have been going down, in some cases, even almost essentially wiped out. So it's it's definitely been a major upheaval for, for many companies, and and others have continued operating like nothing's going on. It's, it's sort of been a year of the the haves and the have nots, especially with, the the the first, you know, several months of the administration with Doge kicking in. We saw many companies have their contracts canceled. In some cases, we saw, cost cutting in, foreign aid programs at Agency for International Development that a lot of, companies found themselves on on just sort of the wrong side of in terms of, the priorities of the new administration. And at the same time, areas like Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense, law enforcement are are clearly areas of of investment that we're, that we're expecting more and more, funding to flow to. So there's a lot of change and a lot of, diversity in terms of what agencies, budgets, directions they're taking. And and as a result of that, I think it's it's a critical time for companies to be thinking about diversification and are they aligned to the right organizations and the light right agency customers for them to achieve their growth goals, especially in light of these changes that we're seeing to the budget. So that's sort of the topic of the day, is a little bit of discussion around why this is an important thing for for companies to be thinking about and doing right now. And and then we're gonna jump into sort of how to go about it. I've had the the good fortune of of being in this industry for for about thirty years. I I started my career as a market research analyst and have, have been an observer of the industry for for many years and and sort of seen companies do this well and seen companies struggle and either run out of patience or try to, to underinvest in it and and fall flat. And I've seen others be incredibly successful with it. So I I I hope to spend today sharing with you some of the lessons that I've seen companies learn, in some cases, the hard way, to to to really be successful at this this topic of diversification. So why diversification? Why now? I I talked about this a little bit, already, but there is a, a major pivot taking place in terms of spending priorities across, federal agencies. If if you look a year and a half ago and you were doing business in agencies like the Agency for International Development or the Department of Education or housing and urban development or, health and human services, you know, look, you've seen those agencies go through some major consolidation and in some cases, elimination, and, and we've seen many of our customers that have have really had some significant financial, impact related to some of the, the drawdown and and spending in those agencies. And at the same time, we've seen some companies benefit greatly from, the injection of funding that we're seeing in the Department of Defense and in Department of Homeland Security. Veterans Affairs has has always been sort of a bipartisan area that's enjoyed, increasing support and funding for our nation's veterans and the programs that we have to support them. So so the way I describe it is there's a trillion dollar pivot that's taking place between the one big beautiful bill, the the reconciliation bills, one of which is has passed as a follow on and another one that's, you know, potentially gonna be happening with department department of defense funding that could be the to the tune of $350,000,000,000. And then, of course, appropriations that are getting navigated as we speak, based on the the president's budget request that was released back in the spring time frame. So now more than ever is is a really good time for companies to take a step back and evaluate their growth plans and their capabilities and their portfolio of customers and, you know, really do an honest assessment about are you in the right agencies and are the those agencies going to give you the growth and the opportunity that you need to support your growth ambitions ahead. We we talked about this in the the the clarity study for those of you who have have read our our Deltek GovCon clarity report for 2026. 35% of the companies that we talked to identified diversification as their number one revenue strategy for 2026. So clearly companies are recognizing that the places they are are not the places that they want to be and are not the the the most attractive markets and, and some companies are are making investments as we speak in shifting their, their portfolio and trying to break into agencies and and, different markets that maybe they aren't in today, but feel like they have, they have something to offer in those areas. So, so as you think about, when you think about growth and and growing your opportunity, growth is obviously a key one in terms of addressable market. How much money is there available for you and your capabilities to to get after some of this opportunity? So that's one. Another reason for diversification, obviously, is risk. As you, have a higher concentration of customers, and and certainly there's some companies that, were doing a lot of business with agencies like the Agency for International Development, that fell victim to having a lot of their revenue tied up in in a a very discrete or finite set of either agencies or contracts. And when those contracts go away, there is a huge revenue loss that comes with that. And so, diversification is really a way of retiring some of that concentration risk so that when when and if you do lose a particular contract or a particular customer, you you have diversification strategy just like you would with your personal financial portfolio or you might have investments in different stocks or, mutual funds. You have the same kind of thing that you want with your customer diversification, making sure that you've got a good portfolio of customers and contracts so that you're not dependent upon any particular contract to be successful or to grow. And for those of you that, that maybe are business owners or or equity owners in your business, valuation is another big reason for diversification. Private equity firms and strategic buyers typically buy companies because of what they, they have to offer in terms of strategic strength and financial strength, and, and and, you know, a company that is doing business in one particular agency or has a high concentration of business in three or four contracts is just not gonna be as valuable as a company that's doing the same amount of revenue with similar profitability that has business and maybe four or five different agencies across 30 or 40 different contracts because they have more portfolio distribution and diversification. So the those companies that have that diversification naturally are gonna be more attractive and more valuable to, to investors that might be either looking to acquire your firm or invest in your firm. And so so for those of you who are equity owners, there's a reason for this for you as well. But, you know, obviously, the downside is when you're going after new bids in a new market, you gotta expect that your win rate is not gonna be the win rate you might have with your customers that you have today and, bids and and relationships that you have and agencies that you have today. You're you're gonna have to take some risks. You're going to have to recognize that your win rate on those opportunities is gonna be significantly lower than your win rate on recompete bids or even bids that you're making in an agency that you do have existing relationships because they know you, they've worked with you, they they have comfort with you, whereas when you're moving into a new agency, other than seeing the experience you have in those other agencies, they really don't know you that well. They might not have the same confidence and trust that they have in companies that they've worked with before. And even though the bids are set up to not provide bias for, for the the incumbents, we all know that people are behind these decisions, and there's a natural bias in their decision making to avoid risk where they don't need to take it. And if they have companies that they're comfortable with, it's gonna be really hard for you to unseat them unless you have some competitive, differentiation or, bit you mean unique bidding strategy or capability that the agency really wants or needs and that you've, you've done an articulate and a good job of conveying to those buyers. So so diversification has a lot of benefits, but it does come with some, some challenges, and we're gonna talk through today the best ways to go about that just based on what I've seen in my experiences, with companies in the market and just as a watcher of of companies in terms of how they evolve in this market. So, I wanna highlight six disciplines of diversification. Think about these as as almost a set of steps that you want to work through. They they are not intended to be sequential. You can you can sort of bounce around them a little bit and and bounce them off each other. You'll you'll start to see how that fits together as we as we talk through them. I'm gonna walk you through each one of these and then I'll go a little bit deeper. Let's start with selecting your target agencies. You know, if you have work in two or three agencies and you want to diversify, you don't want to pick six or seven others, you want to pick three to five. I would say five is probably a high end number, three is a good number. You really want to be thinking about, making sure you're picking the right agencies and being super selective because, you know, they're all completely different set of buyers even though they're all under one federal government. They're different agencies, different missions. They have lots and lots of employees. They have lots of scale, and each one of them is gonna take a lot of effort to to penetrate, build relationships with. So you don't wanna you don't wanna cast your net too wide. I think that's, that's one of the mistakes I've seen, a lot of small businesses make is they're reluctant to turn down any any opportunity for revenue, so they have a hard time narrowing down to the things that they do best and to the agency they have the best fit with, and they they they tend to go after too much. And they they they sort of have trouble boiling the ocean from that point of view. And then mapping your capabilities, and and and we say this honestly. You you really need to be intentional about defining what you do, what you do and and why you do it well. If you just say, hey. I do software development. You and thousands of other companies can say you do software development. It's when you start getting specific about what kind of software development. Maybe it's specific programming languages and technology, but also paired with specific, areas of expertise or subject matter around health care or medical, services or case management or call center operations, things like that that really can be discrete capabilities that you can describe that differentiate you, is really, really important to do. And then addressability and competitive analysis. Addressability is what is the the spend that's in those areas, who what agencies are spending it. So, you know, you don't wanna certainly live at the Department of Army level. You need need to go much deeper than the Department of Army when you're you're when you're thinking about going into the army. It's such a big organization. It's literally bigger than every other civilian agency in terms of its spend. So you wanna be very, specific about the organizations within army that you might want to go into. And I would say that's the same for for any department level organization. While army is the biggest one, even when you're going into housing and urban development, there's different, sub organizations and programs and you want to be intentional about which areas that you're you're getting into, you want to understand the environment from an incumbency point of view, what companies are currently providing services, in those agencies and how you stack up and also make sure that your, that your area of of interest and opportunity is something that you'd find fundable, meaning that the thesis for how you're going to enter that agency and why you're gonna enter that agency is something that you'd be willing to put your own money behind. I think that's always a mindset that I have. Like, if you were pretending you're spending your own money, would you invest in this? I'm not saying you'd put your entire, you know, retirement savings into it, but is it something that you'd be willing to dedicate some of your your own income into? Most companies don't ask you to do that, but, but I think that's the conviction you want to ideally have when you're, you're making these decisions around, diversification. Hopefully, you all understand and know that the right vehicles and partners is is sort of an essential part of, getting into doing work in a particular agency or agencies. They they all have different preferences on contract vehicles they prefer to work with. You'll find in in some smaller civilian departments a lot of leaning on GSA schedules and GSA vehicles. You'll you'll actually notice that in many cases, GSA vehicles dominate because they don't have enough, contracting officers and and acquisition staff to set up their own vehicles, and so they're they're leveraging the vehicles that are available. Obviously, the the federal government and OMB are are sort of pushing agencies to do more of that. Like, let's let's not set up your own vehicles. Let's draw on vehicles that are already established. But many agencies, as you look across agencies like the Department of Veterans Affairs, the army, the navy, air force, DHS, like, many of them have their own vehicles and will use g GSA vehicles. And so, so understanding the vehicles that are, that are available and that are really preferred by the agencies you're targeting is is a critical success factor as you're as you're looking to find your way or a lever point to get into these agencies. You want you wanna not only have a compelling capability and differentiation, you wanna have, a path to do business with them. You wanna be easy for them to access you, whether it's through your own schedule or through a schedule that your your capabilities are are part of somebody else's. And in in some cases, you're gonna have to partner. You're gonna have to work with partners that maybe hold those vehicles because you don't, and your, your window for securing a spot on that that vehicle is no longer available until, you know, four or five years from now when the next iteration comes. And so you you then wanna be looking at partners that you can bring some capability to and that complement what you do to, to to really get after the opportunities that that are available. And then building pipeline, building pipeline early is critical. Ideally, a minimum of one better better two to three years out. I know for for many of you that are maybe more quarterly driven or focused on annual planning, this can be hard to get your head around, but, but we all know that federal acquisition cycles can be can be lengthy, and, entering a new agency compounds that issue because you're you're you're building relationships, you're figuring out how you're gonna get access to vehicles that they use or companies that are on those vehicles as well as starting to position yourself for specific opportunities. And you wanna be, be recognizing that that your ability to get after opportunities is gonna be limited in the short term and much better for you to lay the foundation for future opportunities that are a little further out, that you have a bit more opportunity to shape and influence as well as more time to to plan and plot a course to to be a a viable bidder or a viable partner as a subcontractor to a bidder, in that agency. And then, the last category I'd say is earning the right to compete. This is really a compliance message here, which is if you think about, the different agencies that you might do business with, believe it or not, there's, you know, there's one federal acquisition regulation body of content, but many of the major agencies have their own set of acquisition acquisition regulations that are, an accompaniment to the far, if you will. The the most, notable and the one that most people know about is the DFAR, the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations, but, you know, NASA has their own, GSA has their own, HHS has their own. It's important to understand the, the acquisition regulations of each of your customers and be ready with the compliance requirements and readiness that you're gonna need to do business in those agencies. If you're doing business in VA, you wanna be particularly aware of HIPAA regulations, for example, and recognize that, that health record, management is gonna be top of mind for somebody, that's a buyer in the Department of Veterans Affairs, at least to the extent you're you're interacting with any kind of data that might touch patient record data. So so being prepared in advance and and planning that preparedness and and being ready with compliance, when the opportunities are are showing up is is really important. You wanna have all your ducks in a row and be ready to go when that time comes. So let's jump into each one of these in a little bit more detail. And if you have questions along the way, I would encourage you to ask questions in the q and a window so that as we get to the, to the wrap up portion, I I do wanna take q and a. And so I'm gonna take the questions that come in then, and and, if you if you have questions along the way, please go ahead and post them. Alright. So, selecting your target agencies. There's five filters that I've got laid out here that can help you cut the list. And and, I would suggest you you could even build a simple scoring sheet that that you can use to rate yourself, we'll say, on a scale of one to five or one to 10, or you you can even these days create a spreadsheet of agencies and and provide, AI your capabilities and have it give you a rating for this. But at the end of the day, you wanna know trajectory. Is the agency's budget going down? Are they cost cutting? Obviously, last year, agency for international development would not have been an agency that you would have plotted an entry strategy into. It would have been one that you were either kicked out of or looking for, an exit strategy, and you'd be looking at other agencies that you can fill that that void. So trajectory of of growth, is important, and and I think this is where we've seen probably some of the most significant change from the Biden administration to the Trump administration, obviously, going from, you know, sort of Democratic Party leadership at the house, and and in the presidency, and then the administration now being a Republican, party led administration as well as in the house and the senate. There's a very different trajectory for certain agencies based on the priorities of, the political parties and their bias around certain missions and and activities. So so making sure that you're aligned to agencies that have a growth trajectory is is a key thing. Mission fit, do you do things that are maybe not the same but very similar? You don't wanna be super aspirational, like, I'm going from health care software development to aerospace system design. You know, that's a pretty big leap. But can you go from health care software development that does sort of patient record management maybe into, like, case management for law enforcement? Maybe that's maybe that's a more viable, sort of pivot that you can make. So you all know your your capabilities best and and can do the best job at mapping those missions. We'll talk a little bit about that as we get into, a little bit more of the discussion. But, you know, the the closer the proximity of the mission of those agencies to the work that you've done for other agencies is gonna be, obviously, a much easier message for you to articulate what you bring to that agency, that is unique and differentiated from other companies that maybe don't have that background and experience. We talked about vehicle access. Obviously, you wanna be on the vehicles that they're using. That is not always possible or at least, within the the window of time. You might not have always possible, especially if they're they're relying on vehicles that were awarded two or three years ago and they don't have an on ramp process and it's a seven, you know, seven year contract. So, so it's really important to take inventory of the vehicles that you do have access to and, to the extent that you can bias your direction to agencies that are already using that vehicle. If you don't have those vehicles and you don't have the right ones, but, you know, you got a great fit on the trajectory and the mission, maybe there's an opportunity for you to explore partnerships and finding some of the prime contract holders for those vehicles that you can partner with to bring that unique capability to them, and and together, you could go after opportunities under that contract vehicle in that agency. And, by the way, subcontracting to get access to an agency and get experience is probably the most common path that you'll see, companies take as they're as they're getting, getting access to a new agency that they've never done business before. I think it's much more, rare for a company to start off as a prime in a new agency, versus a subcontractor under under a larger prime or at least a prime that's already got an established relationship. If you're a small business, there's set aside culture. If I'm doing business in the Department of Veterans Affairs, you know, service disabled veteran owned small businesses and veteran owned small businesses is going to get a lot more preference than, than many of the other, set aside programs. If you're doing business in the Department of Defense, it's it's much harder because they tend to spend a lot less on small business than many, of the civilian agencies just because of the nature of the aerospace and defense mission work they do that that doesn't lend itself as well to small businesses. So just understanding the the set aside culture and preferences and how they engage small business, especially if you're a small business, is important to understand. And then your relationships, and this is where tools like LinkedIn and your your business network, become vital and the the relationships that your business development and your program management teams have are vital, to really help you develop the the human relationship that's necessary to, to start to develop relationships that are real, meaningful human relationships with the people that can either help you get into the agency or the people that are working in the agency. And, you know, to do that, it's it's it's it's not rocket science here. It's it's tools like LinkedIn. It's networking at industry events and associations. It's going to the right conferences where, the people that are making the decisions and the agencies that you're looking to do business with go, there's lots of, lots of trade associations and industry association groups that offer events that are that are, perfect fits for these different constituent groups and these different organizations. And and so finding those right associations and organizations and getting networked and plugged in is a great way to start to build the human relationships that you're gonna need to leverage into, into contract and and real pipeline. Mapping capabilities, honestly, is is probably the area that I would say is the the most under invested in, area when it comes to diversification. I see, you know, lots of small businesses, and I don't mean to, you know, disparage small businesses. I think small businesses have the challenge of of needing to find revenue where they can, but but sometimes they tend to cast their net a little too wide. They don't wanna turn away revenue opportunities. But as a result, sometimes they can start to sound like they do everything when it's impossible for a company that size to be good at all those things. You don't wanna be the the Cheesecake Factory menu of, of things you want to to to provide to federal agencies. Less is more, I think, in in this particular case. And as you're thinking about the way you construct your your capability and your differentiation, I think this this little, formula at the top can be really unhelpful. It's not there's other ways to go about this, but this one I've I've found to be a useful tool for, for helping companies think through what they do and how they differentiate is what do you do? Maybe it's software development in what domain. Maybe you do software development for web applications, and web application and Java development is your your expertise, and for what problem. And this is the one that I think people sometimes miss. That subject matter expertise that you bring to not only the the software development, we'll just say if you're in that world, and the the ability to translate that into problems that the agency has where you can bring those software development capabilities if you have expertise in health care or medical related applications make sure that's front and center in your, in your capabilities because that's the differentiation that the agency is looking for. They there's many, many companies that do software development and do Java development. There's a lot fewer that do software development and Java development in health care or case management or, space applications. So really trying to break down the the capabilities that you have into these buckets and and formulate that as a defensible market position and a, a capability that is defensible and, differentiated from other companies is what you're trying to get to. You don't wanna sound like a thousand other companies. You wanna sound like a company who who can deliver specific capabilities and has specific expertise that can solve that particular agency's problem. And one of the ways you can do this is, take your last three to five contracts that you have and and and break them down into these categories and start to see if you you see a pattern emerge of what those defensible market positions are and those differentiated capabilities are. It's just a great exercise to sort of articulate the things that you do really well. And just another, topic when you're when you're looking at data, whether it's in govlin or the federal procurement data system data, there's lots of different ways that government categorizes, the work that's being performed and the companies that are doing the work. So it is a little little helpful to understand the the ways that you can slice this with data to to to map what you do to what agencies are actually buying. NAICS codes are are helpful, but, but some are very specific. I was looking at a list of NAICS codes today, and there was tobacco crop and tobacco farming, pretty pretty narrow, pretty specific. But there's also a NAICS code for engineering services, which is a huge a huge net that could include electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, software engineering, infrastructure engineering, like an architecture engineering construction. So engineering services is literally a huge bucket, and there are thousands and thousands of companies that, that have the NAICS code of engineering services on their sam.gov, profile record. So it's depending on the NAICS code, it can be helpful or not very helpful at all for for narrowing down your your capabilities and how they translate to government agencies. Product service code is, another one. It's better. This is what the agency is buying in in, agency terms. They they use this. It's a, a data dictionary that is managed and maintained by GSA, and it is a, a structure of product service codes that, that get much deeper on what the agency is specifically buying so you wouldn't see something as generic as engineering services you would see something more like nuclear engineering or software engineering or mechanical engineering as a discipline that gets you a lot closer and a lot more narrow to what, what the agency is buying, at least in describe in as described by the agency. And then the last one I would be remiss if I didn't mention because I I work for Deltek and we have built a proprietary, hierarchy of of offerings in, in GovWin we call smart tags. The way I describe this is is it takes all the the keywords that many of you do when you're doing searches for things, and assembles those keywords into what we call smart tags so that you don't have to describe the same thing five different ways. The best example I can give is if you think about, in the state and local market, every law enforcement agency, is buying police cars, but sometimes they'll call them squad cars, sometimes they'll call them cruisers, Sometimes they'll call them, police cars. They they will use different names and you, left to your own devices will have to type all those out, like, I want this or this or this so that you don't miss something. The idea behind smart tags and what we do within gov win with smart tags is we take all those terms, like police cars, squad cars, cruisers, and we we map that to a hierarchy of of capabilities, and you'll see one that is like police cars. So you don't have to worry about typing all those different adjectives and descriptors. You can just pick the one that matches best, and it will include all the the, the the similar, terms related to that. So smart tags can get you really close, in gov win, particularly when you're searching for opportunities for the things that are a good fit for your your organization. Analyzing the spend and competition. This is, you know, pretty much diversification one zero one, so I won't spend too much time here. But where where is the spend that's like the spending that you're getting today? You can look at your if you have prime contracts today, you can go into FPDS. Obviously, you can do this within GovWin. You can see the NAICS code. You can see the product service codes that are being used on your contracts, and then you can leverage those to do searches to see what other agencies are doing, that same kind of work. You can also marry that up. So if I go back to the prior example, what do I do with what capability and for what purpose? Oftentimes, you can weave that purpose into a keyword search that's paired with, like, a product service code. So let's say cloud computing, and I'll pick health care again. Cloud computing in a health care setting, might be a way that you can do a search to find other agencies that are buying things similar to what you do. Who is winning it? You know, what's the competitive makeup? Quickly getting to who are the companies that you're likely gonna be competing against. And keep in mind that when you go into a new agency, it's likely gonna be a different set of companies, that you're gonna be competing against than the ones that you've been competing against in the agencies that you're currently doing business with. That's not universal, but it's, it's quite likely the the the diversification across, across agencies in terms of the companies they use is is very diverse. And and so being aware of who you're gonna be competing against and their capabilities relative to yours is is obviously critical. And then on what vehicles, what vehicle is that agency using, and are they leveraging most frequently? Typically, there's gonna be an intersection point between the vehicles they use and the contractors they use. So those contractors that are winning that work on that vehicle, if you don't have that vehicle, they're gonna be your best place to start for partnerships and figuring out if there's a way that you can leverage that, that capability you bring to support those companies, with something complimentary to what they're doing in that agency. Securing access to vehicles and partners, some of them are easy to get. Most companies can get a GSA schedule. I wouldn't say it's easy. It's time consuming. It can be expensive, but it's doable. They don't they don't really sort of preclude companies from getting a GSA schedule, but there's definitely a lot of requirements that you have to navigate. And, certainly, this is an area where it's helpful to have some consultants that know how to how to secure and accelerate that process for getting a schedule for you if that's, if that's a path. I would say GSA schedules tend to be the the civilian anti. If, if an agency sees that you have a GSA schedule, they know you've at least spent the time and effort to get the most basic compliance capabilities in place to be able to get that, that GSA schedule. And it is, always an opportunity and an avenue for them to buy from you even though many agencies feel like they wanna use other tools, especially for more complex work, such as, an IDIQ or a GWAC contract. But but it's a great way to to get started if you, if you are new to the market. It's not for everybody. If you're selling software, you might wanna go through a reseller, a value added reseller versus rolling your own. So keep that in mind as you're as you're, deciding whether a GSA vehicle is right for you or not or whether it's better for you to be on somebody else's vehicle. And then IDIQs and GWACs, GWACs is is basically the government wide vehicles, the the alliance, the soups, the CIO SPs, which I know is going away. But, essentially, it's the vehicles that the, the Trump administration has been consolidating across NASA, NIH, and GSA into GSA basically leading all of those vehicles. That's sort of the direction it's going with government wide vehicles, but there's still many IDIQs, across other agencies. So the the t four n g contracts and the Department of Veterans Affairs. In army, it's the ITES contracts for IT. I know many, many agencies such as the Army Corps of Engineers also have IDIQ, contract vehicles that they have set up for construction related work, across their different regions. So it's really, just really important to pay attention to how the company or I'm sorry. How the agencies that you're targeting are buying, what vehicles they're using, and making sure that, that you're easy to do business with. And if these vehicles are not accessible to you in the short term, then partnering is gonna be, your biggest path and your best path forward, finding partners that you can bring some value to that do hold these contracts to help bring your capabilities into those agencies. And then building pipeline early, this is just a couple data points that I think are really important. 83%, companies that we asked last year, 83% of the companies said that they missed opportunities last year because they were late in their discovery, meaning they found out about it too late to be a viable competitor and either didn't bid because they it was too late or they bid and they they, they weren't able to do successful sort of capture and positioning within that agency to be successful. 75% of firms told us that, their contract wins were identified on average six months in advance of notice. Important distinction here, not six months in advance of award, six months in advance of notice. Meaning that 75% of the deals were won are deals that were found six months before there was a sam.gov notice, and it was publicly announced by a an acquisition shop. And this is, I think, you know, probably the biggest message in terms of pipeline development. If you are building pipeline on deals that are already announced, you are, really hamstring in your ability to do effective business development and capture and influence that deal to be successful. So it's something to keep in mind. You really wanna be looking further out. I know that's not gonna deliver revenue as quickly as most of you would like, but you're gonna have to look further out to, to to to start building pipeline and doing the proper business development work that you're gonna need to do to be improving your win rate, making sure you have the right team, and making sure you have a compelling solution that resonates with what the agency is trying to accomplish. And 75%, technically, 74%, but I'll say three quarters of the companies told us that one of their biggest priorities for their business development, initiatives in 2026 was finding opportunities earlier and doing better identification and qualifications. So they wanna find opportunities earlier and have more time to influence them so that they can be more effective and improve their win rate. One of the biggest, challenges that I hear, companies convey, especially small businesses when they're, when they're starting to engage with, with this this this diversification strategy or even when you're trying to win work in your first agency is the past performance gap. How am I supposed to demonstrate past performance if the key criteria for, the evaluation is my past performance? I don't have past performance, and I'm trying to establish that. So there's a number of ways to to do this. Obviously, subbing now to prime later is is probably the most common. Subbing as a as a partner to a prime contractor that you can bring something complimentary to is, is is critical. Peer agency task order, so leveraging what you do, for one agency and bringing that to a different agency even though you don't have past performance in that new agency. If the the relationship with the agencies is close enough, hopefully, they know each other, they're familiar with each other, and they'd be like, ah, if they did work for that agency, they probably are trustworthy, and that work has been, you know, going on for a number of years. It seems to be progressing. Maybe they even know somebody over there. They can certainly look at CPARS, but oftentimes, there's also an an informal network among, the the acquisition and program, community to to to talk to each other informally about, hey. How's how's x y z company performing over there? Because I think they're they're interested or bidding they've bid on this particular opportunity. Joint ventures and the mentor protege program is another excellent way to do this. For those of you who are less familiar with joint ventures, two similarly situated companies can partner up and form a joint venture to go after opportunities as a, a single entity or what looks like a single entity from a bidderen point of view. I know there's been various language in in, various RFPs that that sort of, depending on how it's written in section l and section m, can make the the joint venture, disadvantaged. That's that's not what SBA is intending, and there's been a lot of, rulings that have have tried to to make that that practice by some agencies to make joint ventures a disadvantage go away. But the opportunity here is if you have limited past performance, you can marry up to another company and draw on their past performance to form a much bigger, more robust past performance, history to to enable you to bid on some opportunities that maybe on your own, you wouldn't have won. But by by combining with a joint venture, gives you a better opportunity. And, again, the other one is a mentor protege relationship where you have a a larger company that is mentoring a a protege company, and there's obviously advantages there where, the the mentor protege business can have the the mentor be essentially a prime, but still get credit as a small business for the protege. So just some interesting opportunities there that you can use to unlock, unlock that past performance challenge that so many companies run into. And then earning the right to compete, this is in the category of compliance. So if you look at many of the, the procurements that are taking place, particularly the IDIQs, a lot of times you will see, self scoring sheets that, that are part of section l and section m where they basically are are asking you as the vendor to fill out, a very detailed scoring sheet of your capabilities and being able to point the specific evidence that you have for for the the scores that you're giving yourself. You will often find a whole section in that, that scoring sheet devoted to certifications and compliance capabilities. This might be, business system, compliance capabilities. Do you have an accounting system that's approved? Do you have an estimating system? Do you have an earned value management system? They will literally give you credit on the, on the scoring just for having these systems regardless of your past performance and what you do. They they just wanna see that you've got these these compliance capabilities in place. Certifications like CMM, CMM, sorry, CMMC, or CMMI, ISO, these types of capabilities can, can give you some differentiation. I know CMMC is obviously, sort of suspended for phase two, but we'll look for what happens there. But CMMI and ISO are other ones depending on your, your areas of opportunity. Financial capacity and stability, they they obviously wanna see that you've got the ability to to do the work and that if you look risky, that you've got some bonding and insurance, that you're gonna, be able to to sort of quietly take down some risks that, that other companies might not have invested in to to retire that as well. And then cybersecurity compliance, obviously, CMMC is sort of in a holding pattern for phase two, but that doesn't mean that NIST eight hundred one seven one compliance, particularly for anything that you're doing that touches controlled unclassified work, is still a requirement in the DFAR and the FAR and, many agency supplements. And you will also notice some very specific agency supplements that have their own cybersecurity requirements as well that you're gonna wanna be, you're gonna wanna be attentive to as as you're embarking upon doing business in some of these other agencies. So as you as you exit today, what do you do Monday morning? Picking those three agencies, we're gonna talk up in a minute. I'm gonna give you a a live demo of govlin to help you give you some tools that you can use for this. But finding those agencies that are closest in mission or maybe have some of the same needs that you're providing to another agency so that you can easily translate what you're doing for agency A to agency B, and making sure that those filters are honest filters and that that you've got a fact based and data based assessment for why you're picking certain agencies. Rewriting those capability descriptions to make sure you can clearly articulate your value and your differentiation, not generically, but as specifically as possible is gonna help you, be able to defend your value proposition and what you're really looking to bring to an agency. Building that spend and competitive picture, you wanna make sure you understand the competitive environment, what what the agency is spending in that area, who they're spending it with, and what vehicles they're using to buy it are sort of the three things that you wanna really understand there. And you're gonna quickly identify your vehicle gaps there, what vehicles you're on, which ones you aren't on, and what you might need to do in terms of either trying to position yourself for the next one or if there's an on ramp for that particular vehicle or whether partnering is gonna be the really the only way, that you have to get after that. Running the gap analysis and assessment, what do you have? Think about your inventory of vehicles, capabilities, past performance experience. What are your gaps, what are your your advantages, and how do you find partners that you can bring value to, that isn't redundant to what they do but complements what they do so that you make them better. And that's a key if you wanna if you wanna be a subcontractor is really to bring value. And sometimes that can be bringing value through personal relationships. Sometimes it can be your own past performance. Maybe you're you can help them get into the agency you're in and turn for them helping you get into the agency you're looking to get into. So that kind of thing can work. And then, again, compliance, making sure that you're ready when the, the compliance requirements show up in the RFP. Sometimes those compliance requirements are not something that you can turn on a dime to get. I know if you're looking to get FedRAMP or if you're looking to get NIST eight hundred one seven one, audited, that can take many months depending on the the dynamics of your organization and how, how experienced your organization and mature your organization is in your your cybersecurity practices. So those are not the kinds of things you wanna wait until the RFP comes out to start working on. And then I know this is is, you know, maybe the hard news for for many of you is this is not, generally speaking, a quick process. I would say, on average, probably the earliest payoff for many companies in this area is twelve to eighteen months, and full maturity might be three years. So this is a long term investment. You might have to hire, some people that you can use as resumes as well as door openers to to help accelerate the process, and that, obviously, also is expensive because you might be hiring somebody that's not billable, and that's not just a a a business development person. Certainly, you might need business development capacity as well, but, also, you need subject matter expertise to to bring to bear, and you might find that you need to hire some SMEs to to bring into the organization that that can give you really a strong argument around your capability and staffing that you can do the kind of work that they're asking you to do. So I have seen, many companies fail at diversification, and I would say it almost always boils down to impatience. It's it's we didn't win work in six to nine months, so we gave up and we lost interest or it just became a drag, or you didn't invest enough in that, that differentiation, capability capability description, targeting, and planning that goes into preparing for the right organizations and the right opportunities to go after. Those two things tend to be the things that people fall down on. I I ran out of funds or I ran out of patience. And, so just knowing what you're getting into and having a a a real business plan to get after that is something to to take seriously. Then I did want to spend just a couple of minutes talking about GovWin, around some specific tools that you can use here. I'm going to stop sharing the slides and start sharing my screen real quick. Again, I promise this won't be a long demo, but I think it will be helpful for those of you who are really looking to be successful in leveraging govlin for this kind of thing. Here I am, I'm on what we call our federal spending analytics. This is an excellent tool for helping you identify those three target agencies, understanding who their key competitors are, that you might be running into as you get in there or potential partners, and understanding the contract vehicles that they're using. So I'll just show an example here. How I got to this, I went under our federal tab, and then I went under our contracts, and I picked our federal spending analytics tab. So that's the the page that I'm on here. As I scroll down here, this is basically drawing on that federal procurement data system prime contract award data to, to to to get a I'll I'll describe it as sort of like a pivot table of, from Excel of the information that you want. So creating a a set of filters, I'll just say I'm looking for case management or call center work. Maybe that's my area of expertise that I've done in one or two other agencies, and I'm looking for some other agency targets to go after where they have similar needs. So I'll just put in those keyword search terms. You'll see I also have just three year trend here picked out, and I'm just looking across all federal. So once I do this search, it's gonna basically give me a a table of results. On the left hand side, I have which rows that I'm pivoting on, the the columns across the top, and then the filters that are applied on this particular search. Right? So I've got case management and call center as an example. And what I can see here is I've got 3,508 transactions across this three year period for a total of $4,000,000,000 of spend across 813 contracts. Just to give you an insight into the competitiveness of this particular area, on average, there's 24 bids that were received across the contracts in this. You can expand this to get sort of a bird's eye view of the, the data. I could see quickly who are the top spenders in this particular set of keyword searches, who are the top companies, the types of requirements, and I've got three years specifically picked. So it's gonna leave off '26 and '22. I could add those and see the full trends. And then if I collapse this, I can now interact with the right hand side. So let me, go ahead and say I don't want to have the contractor show. I just wanna see the top agencies. And maybe I'm already doing work in HHS, but, hey, homeland security and treasury and defense, those are interesting. Maybe I'll take a peek at those and learn more about those. I can then, come back here and say, let's say I wanna understand those agencies a little bit better. I wanna go deeper than homeland security. What parts of homeland security would I be targeting? And I can add the sub organization under that. I can even go down even further if I want to and add the layers. So now I'm looking at, I'll just pick off to to the second layer here. It's just a a good example, but I can see under HHS, there's CMS. Not a surprise there given the nature of their mission that they're the the biggest spender for, for call center and case management services. But you can see there's some some spending in other areas. Same with, DHS. I can see the top spenders. And I can quickly pivot this to say, okay. Now that I've got those picked, I wanna know who the top contractors are. So I'm gonna go down here and select contractors. And what it's gonna do now is add, okay, within CMS, who are the top contractors? Clearly, Maximus is the the big, the big gun in, in CMS. So whatever you do is is gonna likely be competing with them, or maybe they would be a great partner if you have something to offer Maximus in terms of, the types of work that you perform. You can also export this to Excel. So I can download this and I can download the table only, or I can also download the entire pivot table. Just gives you a quick way to do that. And now the other question we talked about answering was the contract vehicles that they use. So what I'm gonna quickly do here is then just tick off contractors, and I'll scroll down here to contract vehicle. And now I can see under CMS, they're they're not using a contract vehicle for this. So this is likely the same work that Maximus is holding. But if I go under, say, NIH, I can see they're using the GSA schedule. That's good to know. If I get a GSA schedule, NIH could be a viable option for me for this type of offering. If I wanna go deeper under, under DHS, I'm looking here under immigration and customs enforcement. Their biggest use is also the GSA vehicle, but you can see they have some OASIS, task order work that's been done as well. So that's one area I wanted to show. It's a great area for answering that target market, helping you do research on those agencies, what contract vehicles they're using and who your competition is. You can also even pull down specific contract numbers and names to get in more detail. And then the last thing I was going to show is our agency profiles if you're hiring a business development professional they might have some experience in that agency sometimes I I see with companies that have lots of BD folks they might be introducing somebody to an agency that they're not familiar with or maybe they're familiar with one part of army, but not other parts. So we have a a couple 100 agency profiles. I've just got one picked up here, which is the army cyber commands, and I can navigate a summary of their spending. I can go into their employment. I can go into spending patterns where it's gonna give me a nice overview of who the top contractors are, spending by category, as well as some of the top contracts and spending with small business. And you can see I can go across the top and look at different areas to drill deeper into each of these. So a great way for somebody to get smart about, an agency that they're doing business in. So hopefully, that gives you a little bit of, instrumentation and tools that you can leverage GovWind for. And now I'm gonna go back to our slide deck here, and we'll wrap up with some q and a. Having trouble getting the slides back up. There we go. First of all, I wanted to start with a poll question. If you think that gov one I q and some of the things that I've showed you today could be useful for you in, in in answering some of these questions around diversification, I would encourage you to take advantage of a free trial of gov one I q if you don't have it today. So please let us know if you'd be interested in being contacted by someone to, to work with you on on arranging a trial and a demo of of gov win and how it might apply to your particular needs. We'll go ahead and jump to q and a. There's a question here about offers received. When gov win shows offers received, does this represent the actual number of proposals submitted to the government? If so, how accurate is this data? Great question. It in theory is the, the number of offers that were received for that particular contract. But if you think about, for example, Oasis, right, there there might have been over a thousand proposals received, and so you'll see a number like a thousand plus, and it's gonna be overwhelming. And when you when you start looking at averages, it can really distort things. If I'm if I'm averaging Oasis with another contract that was a sole source, it's gonna show me an average number of bidders of 500. Well, that's that's, that's sort of like comparing apples and oranges. So you have to be pretty careful about when you're looking at aggregated averages. But if you look at a particular contract, it will show you the number of bidders that were on that particular contract. How accurate is it? It's as accurate as the, the contract official who entered that particular record, put it in. So I think it's, you know, reasonable, but is it guaranteed? No. Winability. There's a question around winability. That's a great question as well. I think I think of winnability as, assembling the the criteria that we talked about earlier in terms of agency targets, your past performance, how well do you have, relationships in that agency, are you aligned to the vehicles that they buy from, those things are gonna probably make your winability score not look very good as you're looking at agencies that are new to you. Don't be discouraged by that, that that should be that way. If you have a high winability score for an agency that you've never done business with, you've probably done something wrong with your math. That doesn't mean you shouldn't bid on it. What it means is you should be doing things like finding places to meet the people that are involved in decisions. You should be, actively submitting RFIs to get your your name and your company and what your capabilities are revealed and exposed to them so they don't you know, the first time they see your company name isn't the proposal that you submitted. It's through many other interactions that you've had both both, structured through, like, RFIs and sources sought as well as informally through the relationships that you've formed through associations. So those are the types of things that you can do to impact winnability. But when you're typically starting fresh at a new agency, your winnability is not gonna be what it is in other in other, agencies that you have relationships with. I know that's all the time we have for questions. I will take the others offline. Thank you all very much for joining us today and I will go ahead and turn it back to Alex. Alright. Thank you, Kevin. Before we officially conclude, I just wanna remind everyone that you will receive the on demand recording of today's webinar within, via email within twenty four hours. Also, we'd appreciate it if you could just take a quick second to, fill out the short survey you should see at the conclusion of this webinar. We appreciate any and all feedback. And, with that, I'd like to thank you for joining us today, and please visit deltek.com for upcoming, more Deltek events. Thank you very much.