Understanding stakeholders and missions matters more than ever as the market faces change

The Growth Officers Association asked me to open a workshop they held on forming your company's 2025 strategy.

What follows is an adaption of my remarks on trends driving the federal market.

I was asked to talk about the keys to success in today’s market. The change in administration means we are entering a period of transition, which brings a lot of uncertainty.

This got me thinking about my mom. My parents had a restaurant just outside of Luray, Virginia that was nestled up against the Blue Ridge Mountains. On the edge of the Shenandoah National Park.

Over the years we weathered high inflation, high unemployment, high interest rates. We even suffered through the gas crisis of 1979. We always had new competitors. Some friendly, some nasty.

But mom had a particular philosophy or outlook, especially when times were bad. For her, every challenge that threatened to crush us was also an opportunity.

National competitors like Pizza Hut – a sit-down restaurant in those days – and even McDonalds brought fast and convenient food to town. My studied them to learn what they were offering customers that we were not.

It was always about value for her, so the restaurant changed over the years. The quality of the food improved. We used more fresh ingredients. We sourced meats locally as much as we could.

Mom kept notes so she could look back at any particular day and know how many people we served at each meal, what the big sellers were, and she even tracked the weather, and events. Like what time the then-Redskins game was playing on a Sunday.

She never used a computer, but taught many lessons that all of us can use during times of change.

My number 1 and 2 keys are – focus on value, and focus on your customers and employees.

What does it mean to deliver value in the government market today?

One of the more remarkable things I’ve observed over the last decade is how much closer contractors are to their customers' missions.

Even when offering basic IT services, the need to understand the mission is paramount.

“We are close to the mission” has always been part of the rhetoric, but now it is the difference between success and failure.

Agencies began migrating to cloud environments more a decade ago. Customers quickly grew tired of lifting and shifting.

To get the value out of the cloud, you really need to talk to your customers about reinvention. To do that, you need to understand the mission.

The same holds true for any cutting-edge technology like artificial intelligence. Focus on the mission as that is what dictates the value you can bring to your customer. Explain why the technology you can sell is important.

That makes me think of another continuing trend in the market and the technology world in general.

The first newsroom I visited as a college student was the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey. Reporters there had typewriters on their desks.

The computer, a mainframe, was in a separate room where the air conditioning was blasting. No reporters went into that room.

When I started working in a newsroom, only certain people could touch the mainframe. In journalism school, we experimented with computer-aided reporting. But you had to find a programmer to run queries of whatever database you got access to.

Now we carry more computing power in our pockets than any newsroom mainframe could.

At one time, I had to ask others for analytics on Washington Technology’s web traffic. Now I do that on my own.

Over the last 25 years, we have been experiencing this tremendous democratization of technology.

It was PCs, then laptops, then smartphones, and then the cloud and now artificial intelligence.

I was an English major. I know nothing about programming, but I use AI almost every single day to help write headlines and summaries. In some cases, analysis too.

I can hardly wait to see what quantum computing will bring.

My point is that your customers, the people you want to know and talk to today add up to a much larger and much broader group than it was 10 or 15 years ago.

It just isn’t the CIO or CTO or the mission owner that you must engage with. But it is everybody.

Understanding who your stakeholders are is another key to success.

It is also critical to understand where technology is headed and how it can impact your customer’s mission.

 AI is huge obviously, but automation is big and getting bigger. Quantum is coming.

With the change in administration, we can count on some things not changing, such as the importance of cybersecurity.

Tech trends such as customer experience and cloud migration will continue.

These issues will be priorities for the new administration, but there will be a different flavor. What that flavor is and how it impacts your contracts and project is another key to success in 2025 and beyond.

The big unknown to watch for in the coming weeks and months is who is appointed to leadership positions in Trump administration. He has made a lot of Cabinet appointments, but it is those next few layers down that will have a bigger impact on government contracting.

We don’t know who those people will be.