Top 100 webcast: Great growth but what about next year?

On Wednesday I’ll be hosting our annual Top 100 webcast where I walk through the rankings and explores some of the trends in the market.

We’ve talked with lots of executives across the Top 100 and one thing above all others stands out: The market has returned to growth, across the board.

Here are a couple stats to back that up:

• The Top 25 had $82.2 billion in total prime contracts versus $74.8 billion last year.

The increases continued down through the entire list:

• 26-50: $18.2 billion this year, compared to $16.6 billion last year
• 51-100: $15 billion versus $13.8 billion last year.

Those are some nice increases, but I also like those stats because of how well they illustrate the dominance of the Top 100 by the top 25 companies.

That’s just one factoid among many that I’ll be talking about during the 1-hour webcast.

A couple others:

• 22 companies have founders who are either the chairman or still the CEOs of their companies.
• 18 companies have more than $2 billion in prime contracts
• $115.4 billion in total prime contracts, compared to $105.3 billion last year
• 3^rd year where we saw the total for prime contracts increase, and the amount of the increase more than doubled.

But I’ll be talking about more than numbers. It is what these numbers tell us that I’ll be most focused on.

The numbers tell us that the market is in very good shape right now. And there are a lot of things to feel positive about. What the customer is buying and the emergence of new technologies are near the top of the list.

But there also are reasons for concern with the federal budget leading that particular list. Congress has mere months to pass a budget or at least come to some sort of agreement that address the automatic spending cuts that will kick in on Oct. 1.

And beyond the budget is the debt and debt service that rivals the size of the defense budget. Those chickens will come home to roost.

Another area of concern is the workforce. The supply isn’t meeting the demand especially in critical skill areas such as cybersecurity, cloud computing and data analytics. And don’t forget about clearances.

So I have a lot to talk about Wednesday and I’m saving time at the end to take some questions.

Click here to register. It’ll be a fast hour.