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V. David Zvenyach

Remember to read Section L

Although government solicitations can be intimidating to read, it's helpful to remember that competing for a government contract is an open-book test. If you want to win a contract, the thing to pay attention to is the solicitation. If a solicitation says that companies will be evaluated based

Some super boring finance stuff about stock buybacks

A few weeks ago, Matt Levine wrote an article entitled "People are worried about oil stock buybacks" where he wrote about how the oil-and-gas industry is using its record-setting profits to return money back to shareholders in the form of buybacks rather than invest in new energy supply.

You can't protest if you don't ask

If you think about it, bid protests are kind of amazing. Like, if I personally decided to buy a Toyota, Ford couldn't sue me saying that I made a bad choice. Or, like, if the NFL picks FedEx over UPS to ship the Lombardi trophy[1], UPS can

You gotta have a plan...

Here are two ways to think about the burdens of federal procurement: 1. The burden in federal procurement is a bug. Federal procurement policymakers should be making it easier for companies to win business with the government. The government creates silly rules and processes that weed out companies that don&

Multitasking your way through the revolving door

A couple weeks ago, a subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on the Pentagon's "revolving door." Senator Elizabeth Warren, the chair of the committee, produced a report with some good anecdotes and an awesome title—"Pentagon Alchemy: How Defense Officials Pass

The perils of the inverse pump and dump

One of my not-so-secret goals of this newsletter is to bring phrases like "NAICS arbitrage" and "them's the breaks" into the daily lexicon of #govcon. In an earlier posts, I used a phrase that at the time wasn't really ready for its

Reasonableness isn't realism

Coming of age in the late '90s meant that science-fiction disaster films gave me conflicting messages about the government's sensitivity to price. In 1996's Independence Day, hyping the myth of the $600 hammer, we learned that the government is totally price insensitive: President Thomas Whitmore:

No lease? Maybe you're not so small after all!

We've talked before about the quirks of determining whether a business is a small business for government-contracts purposes. In general, you look to the number of employees a company has, you look at the average revenues of that company, and you use those inputs to determine whether the

Earnings call

A fun dynamic in government contracting is that people treat things that happen before a contract is awarded (pre-award) and things that happen after a contract is awarded (post-award) as if they are two totally different spheres. This dynamic shows up in organization structures. In government, there's a

Taking vendors at face value

A thing about working in government is that everyone's always so damn busy. There's always some fire drill (and occasionally an actual fire), data call or time-consuming process, a suddenly urgent item that sat around for months before it needed to get done ASAP, or it&