Believe it or not, despite putting out over 200 podcast episodes over the last 4 years, I still managed to find time to volunteer with my kids’ sports (it’s amazing how many things are transferrable from business to youth sports…and vice versa. However, that’s a rabbit hole for another day).
I have been helping coach my son’s baseball team (he’s 11). I’m a big fan of conditioning so we work the kids pretty hard during practice. In my defense, every lap they run, every push up they do, and every burpee they finish, I’m doing it right with them (it saves me a trip to the gym). Every 20 minutes, we take a break. First so they can catch their breath, but more importantly so they can get a drink of water. Water is by far the most important element of any healthy athletic program (we can argue that later if you like…go with me for now).
They are working hard, they are perspiring, but they often tell when I say to get a water break, “…but I’m not thirsty”. I get that standard answer each season. My son tells me it’s because those kids haven’t gotten used to how “persistent” (or I think the word he used was “annoying”) Coach Kevin is about making sure we drink water. The reasoning is that if I don’t remind them, they won’t think to drink until they are thirsty, especially in the heat of the game (pun intended). The trick is that by the time they are thirsty, they have already started to dehydrate. We live in Florida, even in the winter, once you fall behind in your hydration when you’re exercising, it’s tough to catch up quickly, if at all.
Now let’s apply this analogy to contract management.
Like with drinking water, we can’t wait until there is a problem to figure out what happened. The best way to build a healthy contract management process (or even a sales process), is to be in prevention mode, not in the repair mode…especially if we don’t know how to fix it. If we don’t know why it’s working, we won’t know how to fix it when it breaks.
Look over your contracts and see if they are thirsty.
- When is the last time you updated the funding ledger? When is the last time you sent that funding ledger to your CO so he/she can agree with it (or you both can come to agreement on what’s incorrect and fix it).
- When is the last time you reviewed your fill in clauses (there are more than you have time to read, we get that!)
- Do you know what your CPARS is going to look like this year?
- Do you know if the CO, CS, COR, PM, DPM, budget analyst, auditor, or any of their directors changed on the contracts you have? Do you know how to find out?
- Are your government customers on LinkedIn? Are you connected with them?
- When is the last time you contacted your government customer when you (or they) did not need something? NOTE: the fact that they didn’t answer the phone, or call you back, is not the point…the point is that you reached out when you didn’t need something. I had two contractors reach out to me just to see how they were doing. No agenda. No pitch. No need. Just customer service. It shocked me.
To this day, I remember the name of both of them. They didn’t wait until they were thirsty to call me…