There's many different options, and none are "wrong", but many are different enough to make certain options "better" for specific uses. Knowing and understanding those uses and their associative advantages and disadvantages is very important to making the most of your utilization of the innovation hubs. I have direct links to many innovation hub web portals on my website. You can go to "the library" on my webpage, and click the "External References" button to see the massive listing to help start exploring all the innovation hubs that might be right for you.

Anxiety comes from lack of preparation. If you were going to play in a championship sporting event, you would prepare beyond the requirement of the event itself. You would workout, eat right, and train for the specific event over a sufficient period of time. Treat your pitches in military acquisition with the same level of commitment as you would for gameday. When you are adequately prepared you are excited to get out on the field to show what you can do. Anyone can see and sense that type of energy, and that's the type of person that garners confidence and trust, which ultimately builds belief and approval of the request.

Continuing my "Insider's Perspective" series, once you know what type of government funding you need, it's time to go out and find it. This is far easier said then done, but it all starts with mapping out the minefield of "NO's", to plot your path to "Yes". In the slides below are the important rules of thumb that will help guide you to a building a more successful strategy for those funding requests. The most common issue is spending far too much time working a funding request with an organization that could never even fulfill the request to begin with.

"Let's Talk Money", is the first in a series of DoD Acquisition related topics I will be covering in my next book. It's a popular topic because, far more often than not, both contractors and Gov/Military personnel are knowledgeable in some but definitely not all of the phases of Acquisition. This isn't about getting hung up the minutia of mapping one master process to rule all possible facets of DoD Acquisition, but rather highlighting the main points everyone must consider and have a plan to address. Regardless of your funding programs, contract choices, or customer organizations...everyone has to deal with these issues.

I have number of defense industry friends who have called me up recently asking for solutions to the same hard problem. This was super useful for them, and since the DoD needs a better way to integrate capabilities holistically, I want to share this concept more broadly for applicable utilization. My friends were all looking for ways to rapidly integrate commercial capabilities with military customers, and the answer is surprising simple…plain text outputs.

Let me explain this in 3 simple points:1. It’s true in that most commercial products are not ready fit for any military customers, hence a new DefTech company will run into most of the core issues defined in the video.

All the big money is in programs, and programs are run on requirements, so per the DoD’s own mandates who has the required training to execute the requirements process? While many people might point to the program offices themselves, the primary source of requirements management is at the headquarters level in the applicable “5” division. The “5” is the requirements management office for the entire organization that the headquarters is commanding. You need to start the conversation at the “5” division when trying to determine “why” a particular current capability exists, or “how” to create or modify a capability for that organization.

The first section of my book is called “what to know” for a reason. Lots of folks will talk about the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), some may even be knowledgeable on it, but very few folks have ever been actually trained on all three primary facets of the overall DoD acquisition process. I cover all three of these in my book to give companies a foundational understanding of each and how to utilize them as part of your business strategy.

Remember the tech constantly improves regardless of your investment, so start your use case testing on current leading edge closed source models, then acquire and build a modular system that will utilize a future open source model. Use the consistent time lag between the release of leading foundation models to their equivalent open-source competitors to your advantage. With a roughly 6-12 month time gap between the best LLM of today, to the release of an equivalent performing open source model of tomorrow, you can capitalize on both to optimize your DoD project plan.

In today’s modern business environment, talent is more rare and expensive than ever, and the biggest ask of employees is the biggest struggle for many companies. In DefTech, the salaries more often than not, less competitive for the top talent in many high tech fields. There’s many drivers of this, but it’s been a long running constant for the industry. In the post-COVID world the biggest new non-financial demand of labor has been the rise of remote work. Therefore the ability to support remote work and utilize it effectively, has become a critical requirement for many companies in DefTech. Unfortunately, many managers both commercial and government, have failed to evolve their own skills to match the reality of this new paradigm.

Figured I’d share some interesting points from recent conversations I have had with friends, clients, and partners. Some of these things you might agree with, but I have absolute confidence someone or many will disagree.

It seems like a relatively simple question, but this one fact radically defines your target customer base. Now how big that potential customer base is also happens to define a big chunk of the difficulty of making a sale within the DoD as well. You don’t have to have a niche product, if that product is only purchased by a small if not singular organization within the DoD. The statistical odds of a sale are roughly the same. That isn’t to say those odds are zero, far from it, but if you only have a small number of potential customers that is lower odds than having many and separate possible ones. The point being to understand the game that you are playing. That way you can decide if it is a game you want to play, and then if so, to understand what realistic odds you have of winning that game.

The Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 Federal budget is likely to be the most drawn-out budgetary process in recent memory. I have discussed this probable reality with several companies in recent weeks, and want to make a more public reminder for everyone else. FY25 will kick off with a Continuing Resolution (CR) like every other FY in the last decade, but it is also an election year. The odds of the presidential election being close if not contested even more than we have seen in last cycle is likely. That will be the highest priority for congressional action overall. Plus, you have potential shifts in the parties as the majority status of either is likely to be and remain razor thin. Thin majorities give party outliers opportunities to be king makers on any number of issues, and we have seen this very thing play out over the few years. I don’t particularly care about politics, but it is important to highlight that the extended political infighting that is very likely on its way in FY25, and will ultimately make next fiscal year operate under CRs for most of the FY. But why does that matter to me, and why am I even talking about this to you?

The dirty little secret in military innovation circles is that MANY military personnel regard the SBIR/STTR program as “free money”. This isn’t an entirely inaccurate belief, in that all SBIR programs have some kind of funding support possible to Phase 1 and/or Phase 2 contracts, but the whole point of the program is to get to Phase 3 where it’s all on the customer to fund everything. Rather the customer went any number of other contracting routes to acquire the product or service, or chose to use a SBIR/STTR contract, it all ends the same way with a military customer funding the purchase. The hot potato game of trying to make some other military organization pay for your military organization’s wants or needs, can be the most frustrating and opaque game that many defense businesses end up suffering through.

The short answer is one is requested by a Gov/Mil sponsor, and the other is just your company pitching it to a potential Gov/Mil Sponsor for consideration…but there’s a deeper issue. Anyone can go and read the government’s legal description for an unsolicited proposal (https://lnkd.in/gRvCDsFu), but the real question with these proposals is not the format or contents, but the purpose behind it. The only real value in an unsolicited proposal is in the pursuit of a potential sole-source contract. Similar to most sole-source contracts, it is a high bar to clear, with many hurdles along the way. The fundamental question is, for your potential sell, is there a better way?

In the pursuit of defense sales, it is often the case that when talking to Government or Military personnel for the first time, it can be very ambiguous if that person is articulating a want, need, or requirement. Your understanding of the important difference between each of these concepts is critical to your identification of sales leads towards product or service sustainment. A want is simply something any person can express, but ultimately is not or at least not yet vetted through their chain of command with an associated priority for their unit or organization. In short, it’s an idea that has yet to be fleshed out and approved. A need is vetted and approved want that has been assigned a level of support and priority within that unit or organization. This generally comes with either some level of current year direct funding or level of leadership support to find external funding, but the point is the need is owned by that unit or organization alone. A requirement is a vetted, approved, and integrated need that is part of a capability plan of a higher echelon Headquarters. These requirements are racked and stacked for implementation and sustainment by Commands, Centers, or PEO’s over multiple years.

It might sound a bit odd, but truly the fastest way to get products in the hands of the government or military end user is via their existing Prime contractor purchasing them directly from you. It’s not always the most monetarily efficient acquisition maneuver for the Gov/Mil, but it is the simplest and quickest. You as the third party product provider can work a standard commercial B-to-B contract with the Prime, or the Prime can purchase direct from your commercial purchasing endpoint. It also helps to have an agreeable Prime contractor when the Gov/Mil requests this kind of action, as it is often easy or more difficult depending on the willingness of the Prime to execute quickly.

Your usual first move in the SBIR/STTR program, is to simply focus on winning early phase awards, but the real pro move is to utilize later funding to help achieve earlier funding. This has everything to do with the lesser-known fact that Phase 1 & 2 funding awards have very restrictive regulatory limits on the type (“color” in military parlance) of money used, versus the types of funding that can be used in Phase 3. Phase 1 & 2 are developmental phases, therefore by regulation, require the use of RDT&E funding. Phase 3 is a commercialization/acquisition phase so other types (“colors”) of money can be used like O&M or procurement. All military organizations have access to O&M, and it is the primary type (“color”) of money they will try to utilize for most things in yearly spending. Very few units outside of Headquarters, Labs, or Centers have access to RDT&E money, so paying for anything developmental is always a perpetual challenge for regular units.

If you want a reliable way to grab a chunk of money larger than $1 million, you go to the service headquarters and find an GO or SES to get it. The “budget dust” at scale can and is found at the Services’ and Agencies’ Headquarters. Everyone loves to talk about the defense budget being almost a trillion dollars, but the only quick, reliable, and moderately simple way to get a decent piece of that is to go talk a powerful person into giving it to you. Yes I know that sounds gross, counter to the acquisition processes, etc…but it’s also true.

Navigating the defense industry as a new business can be tricky, so the key is knowing who to talk to at each stage of the sales process. Here's a basic plan to get you started: