Responsiveness: The Key to Building Relationships

Responsiveness: The Key to Building Relationships

An observation about any business is that its growth can be limited. Relationships, access, and knowledge base are some of its primary limitations. For most small businesses, growth is also challenged by limited resources: either personnel or systems. Often times both. Locality and geography can also play a factor. Therefore, to expand into new business areas, a number of essential items should be considered.

For example, an organization must ask themselves: In what marketspace do we want to perform? What agency does this type of work? Do we have knowledgeable subject matter personnel? Do we have access to the program? Do we have the necessary resources to execute?

There are many considerations that must be addressed. Just looking at the Intelligence marketspace alone, there are a lot of options. This necessitates further exploration and questioning. Is the work just Intelligence or is it ISR? Which component does the work entail: SIGINT, HUMINT, FISINT, MASINT, OSINT, ALL SOURCE, CT, CI? For what agency is the work being performed, as there are many differences between Army, Air Force, and Navy work. Do we want to limit the work to DoD, or target all of the other 18 members of Intelligence Community (IC), such as FBI, NGA, NSA, DOE, or the CIA?

Support mechanisms should also be considered. For example, analysis and language operations. Many non-members of the IC have significant Intelligence capabilities, like TSA and CBP. For small businesses, all this has to be analyzed and determined with limited resources. Therefore, before we jeopardize our ability to be responsive, we need to narrow our focus. We know that responsiveness is the key to successful performance. Winning work is only part of the equation; execution is critical.

This means that resources must be immediately available to ensure responses are fast, pertinent, and valuable. The processes used to deliver responses must be efficient and effective, 24/7/365. The growth of every business takes, time, money, and resources as well as a defined process to target opportunities.

A company must be responsive to both its employees and its customers. Responsiveness in turn builds relationships. Relationships are critical to company growth. A company is only as a good as its reputation. If the company only wants the contract and then fails to execute, then its reputation will be damaged and there will be no sustained growth.

We know from experience that agile, responsive execution leads from one opportunity to another. Even as a subcontractor, exceeding expectations through successful execution highlights the value of our expertise and responsiveness.

We understand that contracting offices are busy. They therefore often choose to work with companies they know they can count on. That trust allows the contracting officer and the company to target new opportunities together, supporting different agencies or types of work. Building strong relationships based upon responsiveness, quality, and trust lead towards long-term and sustainable business growth. We understand that developing and maintaining those strong relationships, supported by extraordinary responsiveness, is the key to our success.