Business Growth and Margin Improvement

Business Growth Solutions

Business Strategic Planning and Customer Segmentation

Working with our partner Transformative Management Solutions LLC, i3 offers a unique service oriented approach for marketing and sales organizations.  Our approach utilizes a uniquely-adapted version of the Business Model Generation approach to support your business strategic planning and improve your targeted marketing through carefully defined market segmentation.  In addition, i3 helps transform your marketing and sales organization into a services-based function.  This transformation significantly improves the operational focus, quality, and insight into the sales and marketing functions.  Our approach helped one of our federal contractor customers improve the qualified pipeline from $87M to $1.5B in two years.

Our approach enables your business to clearly articulate your unique value proposition, identify the marketable customer segments, the marketing and sales channels, and the necessary customer relationships.  Once defined, we collaboratively identify the key activities and process requires to execute or deliver, the key resources necessary, and key partnership necessary to achieve operational success.  Last we identify the cost structure and revenue stream to ensure that your profit and revenue goals can be achieved.  Last, we evaluate the risks and implications of any change on existing business segments.  This approach provides you with a solid strategy to be successful and achieve your business goals.

Working with a large federal system integrator, we reworked their processes and service approach, enabling their GWAC center to increase submittals by 225%, boost contract awards by 717%, and grow revenue by 240% within one year.

RECOMPETE WIN RATE IMPROVEMENT SOLUTIONS

In 2015, the win rate for U.S. government contractor incumbents on single-award recompetes worth $100 million or more with two or more bidders was 30% (Bloomberg).   Industry research estimates that it costs 4 to 10 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.  Simply put, keeping your customers is the first step in cost effectively growing your business or market share...And most government contractors are giving it away.

Data Driven Framework
i3 Design and Consulting LLC uses a data analytics-based approach that dramatically improves recompete win rate success.  Built on ten years of data, the i3 solution enables an accurate analysis of re-compete risk and a proven approach that has driven dramatically improved recompete win rate success for our customers.  Our approach has helped federal contractor customers improve from re-compete win rates of 36% to a sustained win rates of over 90% in less than two years. 

Using our data analytics approach we are able to accurately establish a recompete risk baselines at key milestones through the existing contract lifecycle.  Using this baseline, we drive the needed activities on the existing work to drastically improve win rates at proposal time. Our approach includes a common organizational strategy for the company that can be institutionalized across the business portfolio and customized solutions for key re-compete pursuits. 

Full Lifecycle Approach
Although they can be lost, recompetes are not magically won during the proposal phase.  They are also not the sole responsibility of business development.  To win a recompete requires a coordinated effort of management, operations, and business development throughout the life of the existing contract.

Customer Satisfaction Improvement

Gaining insight into the customer needs and wants is critical to ensuring those customers remain satisfied and loyal to your company.  i3 develops custom solutions that provide customer insights and feedback, and an actionable toolkits and training to improve your current standing.  

Customer Satisfaction is the #1 predictor of recompete success.  Yet, many companies do not have a complete picture of their current customer relationship. Many companies send out a customer survey, get a 20% response rate and claim they are monitoring customer satisfaction.  The reality is that you are essentially flying blind and leaving your recompete chances to mainly luck.  From ten years of data, we have discovered some proven facts about customer satisfaction: 1) The project manager is the primary touchpoint (or should be) for the customer relationship and has the largest influence on that relationship; and 2) When that PM/customer relationship sours, the customer will take 12-18 months to recover confidence with the vendor.  The question every senior manager should be asking themselves is, "What does the relationship between my PM and customer really look like and how much of my business portfolio may be at risk if I find problems?" 

i3 works with you to establish a comprehensive customer satisfaction profile with each customer.  We baseline your current situation against a set of proven key indicators and work with you to develop improvement plans and continuous monitoring mechanisms to ensure the actions and investments are being successful.  We provide management dashboards that enable simple and easy monitoring of key customer satisfaction and loyalty indicators.  Improving customer satisfaction is under the control of most vendors to positively improve if they have the necessary information, improvement strategies, monitoring, and follow through.

Margin Improvement Solutions

Margin Improvement for Government Contractors

Most companies spend tremendous organizational energy and capital in gaining new sales to grow top line revenue.  As companies grow, and especially when they grow suddenly, the back-office infrastructure (people, tools, and processes) is not adequate to support the work demands associated with their revenue growth.  For many companies, the immediate direction is to add staff to overcome the lack of adequate tools and processes.  Unfortunately, this response quickly drives down the margin, reduces cash on hand, and can stymie future growth.  In turn, companies subsequently cut staff to improve margin, but suffer when basic back office functions (i.e., accounts payable, purchasing, IT) cannot support the demands of the business. 

The i3 consulting approach to margin improvement focuses on planning and executing a strategic and scalable back office support solution.  We focus on identifying and implementing the right processes and tools to support an efficient and cost effective back office function that is scalable up and down with the demands of the business.  Also, we provide support to identify the right skills and qualifications for staff that will be needed to implement an evolving infrastructure.

i3 has successfully improved performance and lowered cost for our customers.  Examples include:

• Integrated online access to client internal business services and automated associated processes in contracts, procurement, HR, IT, security, and facilities.  Improved customer satisfaction of internal business functions by 94%.
• Implemented on-boarding/off-boarding automation that cut Human Resource costs for that function by 65%.
• Introduced paperless content management system to support contracts and procurement organizations reducing space footprint and paper archiving costs by $75,000 per month
• Doubled throughput rates for transactional processing of procurements and vendor payment by automating key business processes and systems in contracts, procurement, and accounts payable
• Integrated key data element of a case management system with human resources data to reducing data management costs by 38%.

Back to Green Engagements

We consult with programs and departments to get 'back to green' against organization objectives. Our approach focuses on innovation, process improvement, fiscal management, and culture change.  We conduct a comprehensive assessment of the organization, reviewing processes, operational metrics, business financials, tools and automation, personnel, training and skills, and other key factors.  Based on the results, we work with you to develop a back to green plan, timelines, costs, and implementation options.  For some customers, our interaction ends with the plan and the customer takes over to implement.  For others, we oversee the implementation of the improvement plans and report directly to senior executive on the progress.

Our solutions have covered a wide range of solutions.  Examples include:

• Helping a federal contractor determine how to hire 500 new staff in nine months and transition 2000 staff from a legacy to a new contract.
• Supported the contract transition of over 500 staff in a one month period without missing any SLA's.
• Improved month to month program revenue through reworking of operational processes, while improving quality on the program to this highest in the industry.
• Converting a software development group from waterfall to agile to move from yearly to monthly releases and providing much needed automation to their customers.
• For an IT organization, the customer was able to double number of users receiving IT services within one year without increasing deskside labor costs by implementing virtual desktop environment; enabled decrease of 1/3 in IT costs per user.  Drove significant improvement in IT response, resolution, and availability across all service level targets, including reducing average time to answer by 92% and improving virtual desktop availability to over 99%.  Automated IT functions and realigned tasks, doubling IT service desk hours with zero labor cost increase.