What makes the GovCon market a tough nut to crack?
By
Nick Wakeman
Is the conventional wisdom around barriers to entry in federal market right or wrong? It might be a little of both.
Our friend Steve Kelman does some debunking in his latest column for our sibling publication FCW.com by taking on the conventional wisdom about barriers to entry for small businesses in the federal market.
These include socio-economic requirements, auditing and accounting requirements, low-price IT contracts that drives away tech talent, prescriptive requirements, minimal access to end-users and having to form partnerships with large traditional players.
Kelman describes the results of a survey conducted by the Digital Services Coalition, a group he describes as “small non-traditional IT vendors.”
While it was a small pool of respondents (14), the results are still worth thinking about.
These are barriers they see as the largest:
- Prescriptive requirements on the work and minimal access to users. This doesn’t line up with how the commercial world works.
- Proposal writing that is considered more complicated and jargon filled than in the commercial world.
Smaller barriers included the low-price environment and working with traditional larger contractors.
Not such big deals were socio-economic requirements and the auditing requirements.
I’m surprised the auditing requirements weren’t higher but it was a small sample.
What do you think are the biggest barriers to entry?