The government market is huge. Got it. Let’s keep digging. What if I told you it’s not one large market as much as it is a series of smaller markets that integrate, overlap, and converge to make up the larger federal market? In that respect, it’s a lot like the stock market.
Wha… Bear with me. Here are few things that are the same.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) is based on the performance of only the 30 biggest publicly traded companies. 30 out of over 3,000 (!) publicly traded companies on just the New York Stock Exchange. If you include the American Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, and others, the numbers gets bigger fast. When we watch the news each night and we see the DOW is up or down, consider that this “good” or “bad” news is based on only 30 companies. 30 out of over 3,000. Ironically, many of these 30 are government contractors…such as Boeing, General Electric, and IBM.
(Note, if someone wants to correct my numbers, please do. Exactness here isn’t the point. The stock market is MUCH bigger than these 30 companies. That’s the point.)
Think of the federal market in the same way. Like the stock market, the federal market is not one big market…it’s lots of smaller markets that combine under one large umbrella we call “government sales”.
Each agency has its own culture, needs, strategy, requirements, acquisition strategy, funding lines, preference for (and need for) specific types of small businesses, etc.
The corollary here is that in the federal market, we hear lots of wide-sweeping statements about federal spending. Plus, the large data pool may not represent what’s happening in your “portfolio” of target agencies. For example, statements like “The Federal IT market is a $50 billion market” is analogues to our tracking the entire stock market’s success on these 30 stocks. The numbers are so big, and so far removed from the average small business doing the work at the contract level that any insight becomes nearly meaningless for anything other than pie in the sky planning. These items are indicators, but they should not be the only ones you track.
Just like the stock market that reports success based on the 30 biggest companies, the federal market tends to track success based on the largest agencies, the largest contractors, and the largest contracts. Once again, we come to the importance of targeting. You’ll need to spend time and resources identifying your target agencies so you are not making sweeping decisions on the equivalent of only watching whether the DOW went up or down today.
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