Get Started >

266: Grow Your GovCon in Both Directions with Kendall Lott

Kendall Lott, CEO and President of M Powered Strategies, is driven by a mission to empower public service organizations to grow their GovCon in both directions, aligning client needs with skilled talent.

We discuss the Tie Fighter (Bowtie) Framework, a strategic model Kendall developed to enhance growth by connecting business development, capture, and proposals (right wing) with networking, recruiting, and hiring (left wing), all bridged by training and development at the center. Kendall explains how this framework helps service-based businesses scale, maintain profitability, and empower organizations for long-term independence. He also shares insights on leveraging intellectual property and automation to optimize consulting operations and achieve greater efficiency.

—

Listen to the podcast here

 

Grow Your GovCon in Both Directions with Kendall Lott

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast. And my guest today is Kendall Lott, the CEO and President of M Powered Strategies, a management consulting firm that empowers government and nonprofit clients to serve the public more efficiently and effectively. Welcome to the show, Kendall.

Hey, good afternoon. Good morning. I guess it’s still morning here, but it’s nice to meet you again. So, thanks for having me, Steve

It’s great to reconnect and talk about govcon and professional service firms and how to kind of master this magic of having the right people and the right work in your business. So let’s start with your personal “Why.” So, what is your personal “Why” and how do you manifest it in your business?

Yeah, and I think this is the key to anyone who’s going to run a small firm. And I think that’s a lot of your audiences. Thinking smaller firms. I guess anybody needs a personal “Why,” but a small firm takes so much commitment. You better have a reason for it. And then it’s almost like the money falls where it may, as we like to say, no margin, no mission. So you gotta make that profit, but you still have some dedication to why you’re trying to pull it off, and I think that’s important. My own background, just personally, I’m the eldest son of a preacher man, and my parents are both educators, so I was raised in the whole idea that helping in the public service is kind of important. So that’s just kind of where I came from. So the work that I do, which may be different than a lot of your other audience members is really around govcon, government contracting, in the context of trying to help in the management processes and we can all roll our eyes what that might mean for government work.

I don’t.

Yeah, I mean it’s tough though. Because that’s not a focus when we think of government. We often don’t think of them as well managed or even possibly interested in management, frankly, given the amount of work they do and the size of the bureaucracy and all. So I come from a public service background. I was a Peace Corps volunteer. I was a civil servant myself. I had gone through testing to get into the government and I did those kinds of pieces of work. And then I decided to be a government contractor through a large firm and then ultimately through a small firm that I took over. And for me, one of the best things that I did that helps me now encapsulate this though, so that’s the journey here, I joined a group called Vistage, which is for CEOs, and I highly recommend that for everyone to get involved with one of those locally to the extent you want to work with peers. Because sometimes when you’re CEO, there’s no one to hear you scream. You’re in charge of your universe, and who’s going to help you out with all that? So it’s good to be able to work with peers sometimes. One of the drills that we did there was, did a couple of things that helped me after I was years in it was to boil it down. What are you after as a value? So this is not your personal values or your religious values so much, for example, your spiritual values or your family values. It’s kind of what are your values that you bring to the world as a professional? That’s what seems so important. And so for me, it boiled down. We had to do a drill. We had to put it in six words, which is a great drill to do. I came up with three couplets.

So for me, I'm engaged with the world as a person, seeking collaborators, building competence, serving others. Share on X

And that has framed how I express myself through the firm, which doesn’t always mean a lot of profit necessarily, because you work with collaborators and you build competence and you serve others both inside your firm, with your other primes and subcontractors, your partner firms, your frenemies, as well as your clients, of course, and potential clients. And other professionals who are doing things like podcasts, the Project Management Institute that I’m involved with, for example. So that connection is really important to me. My personal identity is wrapped around being a thinker who’s trying to help other leaders use organizing principles to solve problems. Like, so I come with a framework. They have to do the work. But you work with people to do that. So that’s my value system in serving others and showing up in the world as a professional. And that’s driven how I frame my firm’s work, which ultimately is to try and help with the management effectiveness, as you mentioned in your opening there, with government. And so that’s been difficult, but we work in that context, and our motto, our logo is serve, change, empower. Do the work, help them out, and then let them do the work without you because that’s the form of consulting that we do. We’re not operational that way.

Yeah. I like the empower as well. I think it’s very important to help people be the most productive and impactful they can be, that is the most valuable work we do, and then to achieve the mission. So these are important things. So let’s talk about frameworks, which is most of what you do for the government clients is give them the framework so that they can be empowered and effective. But you also have a framework for what you do and how you operate your firm. You call it the Tie Fighter. For those of you, Star Wars fans out there, the Tie Fighter model. So can you speak to that a little bit?

Yeah, I’ll speak to it. The reason I call it that is because just the shape. Something that I realized, this is for services firms, we have models for production, manufacturing, and you think of them as input process output models, for example. There’s a whole bunch of raw materials that get processed through a system and it produces goods. That’s kind of the classic post-Victorian era thinking. And when I was thinking about my own company in terms of services, I was like, the focus isn’t on producing the things, the focus is on engagement with humans, our clients. And I don’t have raw materials. I have people who bring skills of some level and then I help professionally develop them. In many cases, I tend to hire junior career people and build them along and move them along in their careers. Part of my service to others inside. So when I realized that, along with a comment I asked a guy who was very big in physics, a theoretical physicist, and I asked him, like, what are some key concepts that I would have to know about the universe? He said, the first thing we understand is there seems to be this hidden symmetry in things. And that got me thinking. So a lot of us in your audience may be aware of this. You think of your sales pipeline, like there’s these people that you kind of know, and then they get a little closer. You have that funnel, that classic funnel. What I realized, if I put the funnel on its side, and then I begged for symmetry, I was like, huh, I’ve got two funnels coming into the center, so it’s like the shape of the tie fighter, or a bow tie, actually. What we’re actually saying is, our firms and services firms sit in the middle of an interaction, and the process is not production. The process is this act of looking at an entire market of potential clients. Their requirements, there’s all this need out there, all of your people are delivering to a need, your audience, all of you as CEOs are delivering to some need that you perceive, but they don’t know us and we don’t know them yet.

So it's this big undifferentiated mass of need and that's the top of the funnel. Share on X

Or in my case I’ve took that on its side. As you bring that funnel in, particularly in government contracting, there’s some specific steps we do. You start doing that business development. Are you the kind of client I could help? Do you have the kinds of needs that I could help with? And then as you bring that in, you get into what we call capture, which is in the government, there’s a whole system of preparing for proposals and getting their ideas or their requirements together. So there you’re getting alignment, and that funnel gets tighter and tighter. And then finally you get down to, oh, there may be a proposal. And you answer a proposal, and then there’s this moment where you decide, are you gonna propose? And the government decides that they accept it. If they do, you’re now in my house. I’ve got the requirement from a client in the house. My job is to now deliver that back to that specific client. So those are the kind of the struts. It comes in, and then it goes out as delivery. So I viewed that as like, okay, that’s interesting. The funnel works down and then we go out and we do the work. So what’s the symmetry there? So that’s up top and bottom symmetry, but there’s left and right symmetry, which is as a firm, I’m bringing in the requirements, but I produce that with the organization of the firm and all of the consulting labor that’s needed. So then I was like, well, it’s the same problem, and there’s reason for seeing it as same. On the left side of my model is all of the potential people I can hire. Steve, I could hire you. I could bring in an SME, there’s a price where you’ll come in and help me out. There’s a price. Oh, no, there’s a price. It might be a trillion dollars, but it’s a price. So there’s all these people that might want work. That have something to offer a market, but they don’t know how to go to market. My firm is that funnel for connecting them to the market. We’re tying it together. So what I realized was I need to bring in people and get them interested in my firm, put on a podcast for example. Go to events and marketing where I’m marketing for candidates. And then eventually you find people that are like, I think I have the kinds of things you want and you might have work for me in some future. So you engage in the same kind of what we would call capture on requirements, but on this side we call it recruiting. It’s a real person that I want to talk to get them to come to me. Of course, when you really want them, when you have real requirements coming in, your goal is to hire them. Same thing, they go through a panel and screening. You bring them in and there’s a decision point. And if they pass, if you pass, if they want in and you want them in, they enter the bucket, they enter this center command pod with you. They come into the house. So now, what does that mean as a CEO?

That means that I have to time and consider how fast and how clearly I'm bringing in things from the right-hand side of this funnel into very specific requirements called the contract. Share on X

And the left-hand side of this funnel, very specific skills of a consultant who signs a contract, and we put those two together for the delivery. And what flows backwards is money. The client then is pushing money back up the strut. I keep some in-house and the rest goes back out to that labor market in the form of compensation.

And these resources, employees, 1099s, are they only for that specific job or you want to make them part of your organization permanently?

Well, there’s no such thing as permanent because no margin, no mission. So we have to have profit for that. We are project-based and that’s frustrating for a lot of people. I will say this, government contracting typically, although it’s project-based, if you will, tends to have longevity in the sense that it’s often they will sign a contract for one year plus two option years. So they don’t have to keep going with you, but they often do if they can or one year plus four years or six month base period plus three, six month option periods or something. So it tends to be project based. It is a problem when you have the secular cyclical life cycle where you might lose a bunch in a row. You’ve got a bench that you can’t support anymore and that is a problem. Now we do have some permanent staff that are the structure and we do have W2 employees that are constantly delivering because projects sometimes is some of your CEOs might know if they’re in the consulting space, this is the trick with consulting, is those tend not to be like full stack if you’re not always putting 10 people on site with the government for three years. It might have a lot of discontinuity in the delivery right a lot of work at the beginning and then you wait do some change management on the back end with a different staff who’s only working half time. So blending that classic problem of project managers, in fact, is blending resources across projects, or across activities within a project. So we have both W2s that are permanent that we try and keep, but we just had a gap in a contract, for example, where we’re trying to maintain the bench that we will need because we think that contract will come back or others like it. So I am trying, I’m stretching, to be able to maintain that staff through that for continuity. But see, that’s the magic of the model. Because I just anticipate what comes in and anticipate what I need to bring in so that I can bind them together in the way my company works, the culture we have, the way we work with people in the house, which includes developing the IP that we’re trying to work. I'm a thinker who helps people with organizing principles, models, and frameworks to get work done, to plan and decide things, make decisions. Share on X

I’m just wondering whether this is a specific model that works well in govcon because it’s a long sales cycle perhaps, but you have plenty of time to find the people and make sure that you’ve got the right team for the job. There are some other consulting where there’s more urgency. They want it yesterday and they want the team to be right on. Would that model work for that kind of job or it’s more where you have the time to put your team together?

Quite the opposite. It works better in the non-government way is my guess. And I’ll tell you why. Because it just means and that’s the beauty of a good model. So let me back up one step. By having this model, which may seem obvious to people, I’ve literally been able to say, what part of my work inside do I need to fix? Do we have enough business development going on? Do I have enough capture going on? Do I have enough recruiting going on? Am I doing enough improved delivery through improved IP and better methods? Am I training my people well enough? Oh my God, I’ve got them out there, now I need to step their game up. As a CEO, I have to make sure someone, or me, is doing that while somebody else is still making bids. So, this model allows me to pick, I almost see it as a place that glows. I can start seeing weak links. It’s like, oh, this next year, we better start building more capacity here. I need someone paying attention to that now. So to your point, I would say to someone in this model, that’s like, whoa, our problem is not the requirements so much, but fast spin up. I would say then you more than ever have to emphasize the left-hand side of this model, which is getting out in front of candidates and doing the recruiting. We have people talk about business development, part of the sales cycle. This is candidate development. More than ever, you will have to invest in readiness. Having a bunch of SMEs, for example, subject matter experts or high-end consultants if that’s what you need, or whatever your needs are, kind of at the ready, which means you will invest as a firm, possibly throwing, I don’t know, there’s a lot of ways you could do this. One of them could be, we constantly have parties, not with our clients, but with potential candidates that are waiting to get in our firm as soon as we have one. So more than ever, this model actually would tell you, your emphasis needs to be here. My emphasis has to be on the sales cycle more, as you said, but in another one, that just means this is a shortened sales cycle and a longer candidate recruitment cycle.

Okay, so let’s then talk about how this model can be scaled, if at all. So can this model, a govcon model, when it’s a project-based, it’s limited recurring revenue, where your lack of margin prevents the mission kind of situation, is it scalable?

Well, let’s talk about what you mean by scalable. Tell me what you mean by that. Because by my words and definition, nothing in services is scalable. So it just simply isn’t. You cannot take a marginal change like you can in an engineering code and now produce that to 10 million users. It’s just not, it doesn’t work that way. So products are scalable, services aren’t. Generally speaking, and people can challenge me on that, and I’d be interested in hearing about how we can see that differently. But generally speaking, it’s not scalable in the sense of replication with a marginal increase for dramatic magnitude wise output.

Well, it’s not scalable as a digital product, but still you’ve got the big four consulting firms are still growing. They are getting into different consulting fields. They are hiring more people. You can look at Accenture that’s scaled to a major firm. And then you have all those recurring service firms who are providing recurring services, starting with my loan care or the pest control and all that stuff. This is service and it’s scalable because they can get more customers and then they can rationalize the delivery of it. They can put technology and processes in, they can make drive efficiencies. It’s scalable. So in that sense, obviously it’s not exponentially scalable, but it is scalable organically. So how do you scale or can it be scaled? Now you said it cannot. So is there a way that it can be grown then?

Yeah.

When you still have these two funnels and you have this matching thing, what are the elements that would allow you to grow this business without taking on exponential risk?

Yeah, no, I think then your question is, is can it grow? Because what you just described in the large consulting firms is they grow. They get more requirements and they just get more people that look like that. So until they run out of potential labor market, it can always grow. So can this grow? You betcha. In fact, my point of thinking through the model was that what happens if I start to grow? Because if you’re small, particularly in the consulting environment, with 12 consultants or something, and I got up to about 50, we’re about 24 now, 25 at the current time. But when you’re only small, as a CEO, you do it all anyway. You’re doing all the administrative stuff, you’re trying to manage the culture or whatever, and you know all the people, and you know a lot about all the people, as well as all the clients. So this was to break that model, because what happens if I start having more clients with slightly different needs where it’s not the same management service necessarily? So because the IP is owned inside, the idea of a, I call it IP, but it’s the way we approach things, so it is intellectual property. This is to enable that scaling, to realize that, oh, this is more than me knowing a couple friends that I can pull in because I’ve got this client over here. It was to allow you to basically industrialize, to set somebody up to say, you go and get this, you go and get this, here’s where they come together. And here’s why it’s scalable in the words that you used. And this is the part that confuses people. If you think of what I just described as large funnels on either end that get tighter in here, you think of that as I need somebody in sales, those skills and capture and proposal writing and internal training and delivering and managing delivery. Somebody developing the IP that feeds the training, feeds the delivery. I need someone out here doing candidate development, recruiting and all of this. It turns out that in a small firm, you don’t necessarily wanna hire my labor group, my HR side. They’re not my candidate development people. You’re like, wait a second, that’s your people side. We got it, people side. I got my HR guy over there and he’ll go get all that, and I got my sales people over there and they’ll go get that, uh-uh. When you see it as symmetry, what you see is you’re dealing with an onion. You’re dealing with rings. The person who’s really good at going, and I’ll make it really straightforward. The person who’s really good at going out to a conference and talking and being told no, and hearing the problems of potential clients, and trying to engage in conversations to develop ongoing relationships for requirements, that skill set is the exact same skill set I need to show up at a conference, to talk to a bunch of your audience members, for example, or project managers to say, hey, oh, you might look for a job. What kind of work do you do? It’s the same skill set. My BD person is my candidate development, my CD person.

The people who are really good at the process of grinding out a proposal are really good at the process of grinding out the panel interviews inside. Share on X

So, in fact, it’s a reorganization of the skill sets or the way for teams to collaborate, to share. Some of my people who work in sales are the ones that most support my selection of candidates because they know what the client is wanting. What’s happening is, instead of seeing this as linear or siloed, it’s actually skill set based as you come in closer and closer. Of course, I sit with my management officer in the same.

So the more customers you have that you’re serving, the more capacity you have to network and to get more SMEs or whatever you call them, subject matter experts in the door so you can kind of grow both sides of the funnel organically bigger and bigger.

Or shrink, because really, our problem is profit, which is actually fit to market. You’re trying to grow, which is actually potentially driven by IP, particularly in the space you guys are in. Now you did mention something interesting. There are services that absolutely, well, everything can be helped with automation. And now that we have AI, and we just see that as an extension of automation, that’s getting into the management consulting side. So in fact, the use of technology is good, and is a very big help here. So first of all, the processes that I’m talking about could be automated to some extent, or at least technology helps that. But that’s just operational. What we’re really talking about here is, is it possible to come up with IP that’s reusable that once your people get it, they understand how to get it again and again and again? And yeah, that’s called education and using a model. And so it’s absolutely scalable if you have enough clients for replication, which is the same problem in automation. The first time you try and automate anything, the first time you used AI, the first time you used a project management software, it was miserable. You’re wondering, why am I spending 12 hours doing what I could have done for two hours on the back of a piece of paper? It’s the 15th time. That’s where the scalability or the ability to enhance growth comes in. And I think that’s really, really important. That does leave one last thing, though. The marketing, by the way, people have challenged me on this as well. Marketing sits all the way outside this bubble. The same marketing skill is needed to tell clients. I’m here. I do things. And candidates, we’re here. We do things and in fact the website in the government space often for me. it’s not sales. Nobody comes to my website to decide. Oh, I haven’t had any management consulting recently. I think I like this firm. I do get people coming who want a job though. So my marketing is actually aimed at junior professionals that want in and get traction with working with the government. That’s actually where I focus largely. There’s some other elements to it, but that’s the main part. So, it allows you to emphasize what you want to when you think of the world in symmetry and skill sets this way. And back to your point,

I think automation, the use of technology broadly, is really important for all of us, and that's getting cheaper and easier in a broader set of fields for us. Share on X

So I’m now using it, a lot of work we do, for example, is with facilitation and meeting management. Well, I’m summarizing notes. I mean, that’s a simple thing. I’m using it to try and drive some sentiment analysis. I’m working with a client now where we’ve got a mass of meetings where I’m trying to, you know, I know how to do the delivery and I’ve got a bunch of notes and flip charts. And I’m like, not only can I capture all that, which is nice, but the next step is, I’m being able to elicit underlying values out of it. Things of importance out of it, that are not implicit, or only implicit, I’m sorry. Only implicit, they’re not explicit. And so I’m able to bring more value to the client by doing that. So I think that happens in my field as well, and that does allow the expansion of what you can offer a market better. And that’s not necessary for my Tie Fighter model, but I think that’s true in a services model.

Yeah, I love it. I love the idea that you’ve got this Tie Fighter, you’ve got the two funnels, you have the same skills in both, so you can expand them together or you can shrink them together and then you automate and you productize potentially with your frameworks and then you create some measure of scaling here. So if someone would like to learn more about, maybe they are working at govcon, or they are a company that maybe it’s someone that is interested to be a 1099 or work with you on projects, or they are in a govcon and they know that they have some problems to solve, where should they go and how can they learn more about you?

Well, for me, they go to a website or actually probably get ahold of me on LinkedIn is probably the best way, because I’m always seeking a collaborator. Come and tell me why you thought what I said was wrong. Come and tell me why you think there’s more to it. Tell me why it’s not working for you and how you might want to fix it. This is a model about a services firm. Fundamentally underneath that is a model about how executives and how organizations work around their mission with the processes and the people. I have a framework for that as well to help understand it. But in that case, it’s my LinkedIn, John Kendall Lott, and I’m the one in Washington, D.C. metro area. There’s only two of us out there, and one was my dad, and he’s retired. So you should be able to find me there. And then of course, our website, M Powered, the letter M, mpoweredstrategies.com is the other probably best way to get hold of me. One of those two.

All right. So do check Kendall Lott, the CEO and president of M Powered Strategies out on LinkedIn and their website, his website. And if you are a professional service firm, then think about the model, the Tie Fighter, the bow tie, and how you’re bringing clients on one side, you’re bringing people who deliver the service on the other, and how do you match them, and how do you kind of leverage both sides of the family at the same time, the same people. Very powerful concept. So Kendall, thanks for coming on the show and sharing your framework. And for those of you listening, if you enjoyed the show, stay tuned. We come twice a week with new episodes and if you like it then please visit Apple Podcast, give us a review and follow us on YouTube as well. So thanks for coming and thanks for listening.

 

 

Important Links:

Summit OS | Stevepreda.com

PO Box 400, Rockville, VA 23146
Phone: +1.804.332.1307