Julian: Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Mike Weiland, the CEO of Govly, where companies, resellers and distributors work together to bid on government contracts. Mike, thank you so much for being on the show. I'm really excited to dive into your background, your experience with the wealth of knowledge and, and building startups and, and going through the, the process time and time again.

And from what I understand, this is your first software technology startup that I definitely wanna get into the, the, the nuts and bolts of, of what you've learned jumping into to this realm. But before we kick it off and get started, what were you doing before you started Govly?  

Mike: First Julian, thanks for having me. Excited to be here. I I appreciate the opportunity. Before, before Govly is a company called Blazer, which is a full fledged government contractor where we resell goods and services to the federal government. They are a they're a prime contractor on a couple contracts.  

Julian: Yeah. Well, when you say government contract, that sounds very vague and some of us maybe think of like the movie War Dogs. Is it something similar to that or, or not as Hollywood as we think?

Mike: So definitely not as Hollywood. But actually somewhat similar in the idea that the government publishes a lot of opportunities and so war dogs pulled down. I think at that time it was called, Fed biz ops fbo, and you know, those guys saw an opportunity to sell.

And it was ammunition, right? Yeah. Ammunition, arms. Yeah, so so Blazer and myself have not done munitions or as we call it things that go boom. We have focused mostly on the IT side it hardware, software and related services. And so the vast majority of government opportunities actually comes through, not on that fbo, it's now sam.gov.

That's kind of the public. What most of the opportunities come through are private contract vehicles, and anybody that has access to those prime contract vehicles is a prime government contractor. Meaning the best way to look at it is they, they have a hunting license so that, you know, you could have a, you know, an Army contract that that's a hunting license to sell opportunities to the Army.

And if you're a prime on it, you have the opportunity to respond to the RFQ that they post on that.  

Julian: And the, the people who are, who are selling to the government or, you know, I guess closing these contracts, what, what is the typical background? Are, are they you know, focused in, in a certain sector area?

I mean, obviously we talk about things that go boom. But in other things like IT and solutions and technology, are these companies, are these individuals who are connected to companies Yeah. Help uncover some of the mystery behind that.  

Mike: Yeah, so it's, the answer is all of the above. The government being I believe the largest single customer on the planet. The US government being the largest single customer on the planet is, you know, they need anywhere from, you know, your highest end storage area network that spans the entire VA medical center to toilet paper. And they they buy it all. And so the, the contracts or the, the people responding to them generally are allocated into divisions.

They're broken up by, by NAICS codes or sick code. And so the, the contracts that I have focused on over the past oh seven, eight years has been entirely in the IT space. So we leverage a NAICS code 5 4 1 5 9, which is other computer related equipment services. Yeah. What basically anything with a microchip or relates to a microchip.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And so I guess, you know, I think a simple question and to ask is like, why don't they have a purchaser, someone who's allocated to identifying resources versus putting the information out and almost like crowdsourcing what the best option is for them, or the best. I don't know if it's a deal.

I don't know exactly what they're looking for. But yeah, why is, why is it flipped to where, you know, where it's a contract and then people can kind of bid for that?  

Mike: Yeah. And so, I mean, this is, we, this is a very, very long conversation that I'll I'll make short. It's ultimately the government created something called the far the Federal Acquisition Regulations.

And then that's and then on top of that there's the DEFAR, which is the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulations that specifically govern. Items being sold to the permanent defense, but this FAR it, it, I used to have a copy on my desk. It's about, you know, it would make a, it'd make a bible blush on how thick it was and how thin the pages were, where all the rules and regulations for what you can and can't do with regards to selling to the government.

And, you know, following all, you know, 4,000 of those pages create some really interesting issue. With selling technology. So, you know, these rules were created over the past, you know, call it 80 years. Mm-hmm. and. When technology came in, the speed at which things needed to be acquired drastically needed to increase.

And the process for doing that was not very efficient. So the government used to publish basically on fbo, say, Hey, I need, you know, a thousand computers. Who can send me a thousand computers and, well, lots of people can. And so lots of people would send in quotes and send in bids. And what would happen is the the ability to protest and to delay a purchase from the government was so easy that you'd have a hundred people, you know, going after that one opportunity.

And if one of them wanted to protest, they would, you know, hire an attorney and pay a few hundred bucks and they could delay the delivery of those. And it just caused massive delays so that at the end, even if the rightful person was, had already won, you know, a year and a half later the government said, Okay, yep, you won.

Now you can ship your year and a half old computers . And so yeah, total mess bit bit of hyperbole in there, but in general that is the case. And so what the government did was created these other avenue, these contract vehicles, which abide by these regulations, but also have a new set of. So that you know the example or the analogy of a hunting license, you know, if you are granted or gain access to this contract vehicle, this hunting license says you can't protest if you lose unless it's over 10 million.

You have to be able to respond within 24 hours. You have to have letters of authorization preloaded. You have to do all of these things that ultimately result in a faster turn for the government with less. . Wow. Wow. And in theory, the, the government should, when they wanna buy a thousand computers, should pick up the phone and call Dell.

Yeah. Doesn't quite work that way.  

Julian: Yeah. Is, is this the best way to do  

Mike: it? You know, it's it's funny and that's actually relates to the the reason why Blazer and Govly exist. Govly, Govly, Ley is there in an effort to make things more efficient. Mm-hmm. I had the idea of Govly we'll call. I don't know.

15, 18 years ago. Yeah. And what's pretty wild about it? Maybe not that long, 15 years ago. What's pretty wild about it is I've spent that time trying to figure out a better way to do it. And while it's nowhere near perfect and it's a mess the, it is the best way to do it that we know of today.

And so definitely is trying to lever, take that and take it to the next step of just making it more efficient.  

Julian: Yeah. How, how are you doing that?  

Mike: So what we are trying to do is, or what we are doing is creating a market network where the contract holders that have these hunting license or contract vehicles, and so there's not, you know, there's not.

that many of 'em, there's, there's thousands of them, but in the grand scheme of companies that sell to the government, there's, you know, tens and hundreds of thousands of them. But the the limit is the companies that have access these prime contractors. And so what we're doing is creating the network for them to join the Govly platform and to share basically the information that they get from the government and make it easy for them to communicate all the way downstream.

And so the the way we look at. You know, there's the, the government at the top that's creating the opportunities. The prime contractors that communicates with the government, these primes depending on who they are. And primes could be a, a large, you know, HPE level company, or it could be a mom-and-pop shop.

And these primes leverage, you know, their access to it goods and services, but also their massive network of their supply chain. And so for, you know, the average government contractor, Has access to a prime, So it's government prime. They buy stuff from either a reseller or a distributor, and obviously they're getting it from the oem.

And so what Govly does is kind of sit on the side and facilitate the sharing of this information in a very seamless and efficient manner. Whereas how I used to do it and how most companies do it today is they get an email from the government and they say, Oh, you know, I know Jim over at company over there, and I think he can respond to this.

I'm gonna email this to him. But these opportunities come out in such high quantities, it just doesn't make sense to do it manually. Yeah. On the contracts that we have access to we see anywhere from 300 to 1500 net new opportunities every day.  

Julian: Wow. How, how is integrating all these different stakeholders into one platform, What, what are the challenges that you're seeing?

Because, you know, everyone has email, right? Sure. But I'm assuming the government and other entities don't all use Slack. Maybe they use Microsoft teams, but how do you facilitate the communication and, and this whole process, and also integrate within all these different stakeholders?  

Mike: Yeah, no, that's a great question.

The the difficulty is, the ingestion of the original information. So a lot of this information is either emailed from the government or it's on a government portal. And, and it's all very different types of information. Some are, you know, very structured data and some are literally a government person.

Sending an email to a, a a mailer of, you know, 70 people saying, I need, you know, 70 Adobe licenses delivery to this email address. Go. And so what we've done is we've, that's why it had to be a platform play. So we've enabled this this ingestion engine so that we can ingest from any source, be it email, be it government website, be it A site.

So Govly actually enables organizations and the government to post inside of Govly so they can create an opportunity in Govly. So we are, what we're doing is we're taking all that information, putting it in as structured of a form as we possibly can, and now presenting it. You know, seamlessly to all users.

And so, you know, the, the prime contractor that has access and is granted access to the, the government opportunities can now say, Hey, I'm in alignment, or I have an agreement with these 40 vendors and these, you know, 200 OEMs. I can select them and now they can share my information. They can see it the moment I see it.

And so what it does is it relieves the burden of the prime to send it. Because the, you know, ultimately the oem, you know, Dell's interested in Dell, HP's interested in hp, and if they have access to it, they are only looking for their stuff versus the Prime is trying to sort through that thousand opportunities a day, you know, with potentially 300 different types of technologies.

Julian: Yeah. How do, how does someone find themselves selling to the government?  

Mike: Well you have to be a special person to want to sell to the government. begin with, it's a it's a. It is a fruitful process once you were there. Getting there can be very difficult. Mm-hmm. . Because the first question you have to answer is, do you want to be a prime or do you just want to sell to the government?

Are you looking to just add, are you looking to add the government as a customer? And if that's, that's really all you wanna do. What I would suggest, and what most people do is they, they align themselves with resellers or prime contractors that already sell to the government. And you are just adding technology to it.

Julian: Got it, got it. What was your experience being involved with, with, you know, your, you said you're involved in kind of multiple steps of the process and I'm assuming Yep. And you might have mentioned this, you, you were a prime at one point.  

Mike: Yeah, so Blazer is still a prime. And we work with a dozen or so primes today to manage and help them, you know, facilitate the information sharing, becoming a prime.

It, it's a pain in the ass. Like there's, there's no, there's no way around it. The these contracts, some of these contracts and the contracts that you want to be on I, you know, tend to list a few, or the, the soup and the CIO and the Army chess and the, you know, even gsa, I mean, there's, there's literally dozens or hundreds of these contract vehicles that you can go after.

And the process to win them is generally a six month to. I'd say up to three years to get a response. There's the the Army chess it's called a, its four H contract. The proposal has been out I think were over a year now. It's been delayed so many times. The proposal, so nobody's responded yet.

The due dates I think in a couple weeks, and it was original due date was last. Oh, wow. And so it got delayed. It got delayed. It got delayed, Which the, the current iteration, So this is I S four H. The I s three H there's 18, maybe 12, 12 or 18 contract holders on it today. So their contract keeps getting extended or will keep getting extended because the new iteration hasn't been, you know, released yet.

So even, even when the bids are due here in a couple weeks, the government's going. , Oh, anywhere from I'd say three to 12 months to issue a response. And that's if there are no protests, because again, we're back in the public domain where this is the establishment of that contract vehicle. Anybody right now can go to I S four H and bid on it, and it's a, it's a very large proposal.

It'd probably take, take the average company, you know, anywhere from two to six weeks to. Depending on what kinda resources you put in in it, and it's it's a bit of a nightmare. I believe that there's likely gonna be protest on this. And so what it's gonna do is the government's gonna say, Hey, these are the winners, and then there's gonna be protests, and then the you know, depending on what level of the protest and the government, they, they go towards the government's gonna say, All right, those are the winners, but nobody can do anything until we resolve all of these.

So we're gonna, you know, delay the actual awards. So they're gonna keep extending the I test three H, the previous version. Wow. So it's, you just have to, it is not getting into the government. Becoming a prime is not for the faint of heart. It is worth it in the end, as long as it's in the arena that you want to do.

I don't suggest just going out to bid one to bid one it needs to fall into a core competency. You're already doing  

Julian: yeah. Well, outside of, you know, the, the length of time you know, one, I can see what, what you mean by being a special person because the, I'm assuming the amount of you know, top of the funnel opportunities you have to respond to kind of mitigate the, the time that you spend waiting for that response to, you know, to actually win these contracts. And obviously the win loss rate, you know, increases as, as you, you know increase the amount of opportunities that you have Sure. On the table. But outside of the timeline, what's the difference between if you could tell the audience selling to the government versus selling to commercial companies?

Mike: Yeah, you know, it's interesting. The one of the best things about selling to the government is they always. Yeah, . So it's it's a bit funny talking to banks as a government contractor when they're like, Oh, well, there's a risk of the government not paying, or your customer not paying. And there's like, no, if, if that's a problem, you have way bigger problems.

So that's always a, that's always a perk. And I do have to, to caveat the, the contracts that I was referring to are, are those hunting license, those vehicles that give you broader access to regularly sell. Anybody can go, you know, go to that sam.gov and find an opportu. You know, bid it and become a prime.

A prime just means that you have a direct relationship with the government. But those are, you know, far and few in between. It's just not, you're not gonna make a business off of going after sam.gov opportunities. Yeah. Yeah. But as far as the difference between commercial and and government, the regulations associated with dealing with the government is the biggest challenge.

You have to have a public profile in that sam.gov website. You have to regularly update it every year with. The ownership structure, and you have agreed not to, you know violate any laws. You can't have any, you know, any, any felonies. You can't have all of these things. You can't purchase things from non-friendly nations.

So it's a, it's, it's, it's a event. Most organizations that have prime contracts have a dedicated person, a program manager mm-hmm. that's charged with entirely just making sure. The, the access and the requirements to maintain access are kept.  

Julian: Yeah. Is, you know, outside of Govly, which seems like, you know, a very disruptive technology for this space.

How, where is the level at which the technology that you're, you're dealing with like sam.gov and these websites, where are they at? Are, are they up to date, are they easy to use or are they,  

Mike: It's. You know, I don't wanna offend any of our, our government customers. It's, they we'll, we'll say most of the websites are generally lacking.

Yeah. . Yeah. It's and it's, you know, and to, to their credit, they are mostly stable. Just because they, they've been homegrown built for the longest time. They're, you know, some of these contracts are very old and they've just had to. On them for the past, you know, 25 years, for example. Mm-hmm. . And it, you know, for, because of how much data and how much business goes through some of these, it doesn't make sense to them to, you know, completely revamp where a commercial company is gonna say, Oh, you know, we're going to, you know, scrap the old system.

And, and while they probably should, it's just, it's not in the cards.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. When when you say selling to government who, and I don't know if you know, are there specific customers you can name or anything like that? With who you're working with, but who are the types of customers you sell to?

Are they certain agencies within the government? Is it Yep. Certain departments. When we think about selling to the government and who's, you know setting out these contracts to be fulfilled who are these individuals and and, and what's the communication process?  

Mike: Yeah, so great question. And it's another difference between government and commercial is that when you sell to the government it is a, it is a normal sales process where you are actually, or generally calling on or knocking on the doors of the end users.

And so, you know, the a the contracts that, you know, I've mentioned on the call already are what we call gwas or ID IQs which means they're a government-wide acquisition contract or a indefinite deliverable, indefinite quantity. And both of those all UX or i d IQs, not all ID IQs are UX and a GAC means any federal.

So literally the, all of the Department of Defense to all of your civilian agencies, you know, your, your state, state departments and such, down to your Bureau of Indian Affairs you know, large and small, it's any federal agency can buy off of a gac. The I D I Q portion of this basically means the government has identified that it needs to buy.

It doesn't know what it's gonna buy, and it doesn't know how much of it's gonna buy, but it's gonna buy. And so what that is, is a, the congress and the, you guys hear of the, the budget, you know, the continuing resolution. Every agency from top to bottom has a budget. Yeah. And what they've done is they've allocated a certain amount of money to go towards these contract vehicles, to basically have a pool of money to purchase.

Julian: Got it, got it. Wow, that's, that's so fascinating. And out, you know, obviously Govly Govly's working on facilitating the communication and, and acquisition of these contracts and ingesting all this information to expedite the process. But I, but it sounds like that's, that's a, a portion of the pie. But what else can help?

I assume if things are done more quickly and more efficiently and faster there'd be a lot, you know, better resolution and, and maybe more up to date technology solutions. Better toilet paper, what have you, and a lot and a lot of these agencies. And what else needs to be done to kind of create a more expedited process?

Is it is, is it honing in. More premium contractors or people who hold those hunting licenses, as you mentioned? Or is it yeah. Or is it something else? Is it something that we haven't thought of yet?  

Mike: Yeah, so I, I think that, you know, a combination of many things and the, the first thing that's coming to mind is, you know, a lot of these contractors have been in government contracting for so long that, you know, they have their, they love their stable contract of reselling the.

technology basically year over year, Just refreshing. It does not provide the existing structure does not provide an easy access for emerging or new technologies. Yeah. And for a lot of agencies it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense for, you know, a lot of Department of Defense customers to deploy an untested, brand new tech out in the field.

It. That being said, there does need to be an avenue for, you know, the, the next level entities, the startups that do have technologies that are, Hey, this is really cool, this is, this is going to kick ass in the next period of time. How can we get some of this into the the trial stages or the demo stages with the government?

And so the, these contract vehicles I do believe. Can foster that. And I think Govly can play a role in that because Govly is making it easier for these smaller entities to gain access to see, hey, there's this opportunity for, you know pulling something out. Hyper-converged hyper-converged deployment.

You know, at this location, and these are the specs that it needs to meet. And you know, there's three or four really big players in that space that have really good products, but maybe there's, you know, two or three new incoming that are like, Hey, I can do all of those specs and I can do it better faster.

Fill in the blank. They need an avenue or an ability to at least submit a bid. And right now they. And so that's where Govly can come in and help facilitate access to these opportunities. Just to shed some light on, Hey, this is the type of stuff the government is requesting on a regular basis. We have a, we have an analytics platform that can show you what customers are generally requesting, what type of technology over time, and we can see some trending movements.

That is all really interesting things to see.  

Julian: Yeah. What do you enjoy in particular about working with the government?  

Mike: It's interest. I think that's probably a little bit on the, the personal side. My both my parents were Air Force. My mom worked at the Pentagon. My dad flew C 1 41 s out of Andrews Air Force Base.

My grandfather was a, a colonel in the Marines and two uncles both flew flew airplanes. And I kind of, kind of fell into, I didn't want to go into the government. And I kind of fell into government contracting. By, you know, randomly getting recruited to a very large defense contractor. And from then it was just a I've thoroughly enjoyed the, the you know, somewhere between brain damage and very structured mentality of the government.

Julian: I love that. I love that. What are some of the biggest risks that Govly faces today?  

Mike: You know, that's interesting. The, I think the two, two biggest risks. , you know, we're playing in a space that is, you know, dominated by very large entities. And so I think there's, there's always the risk of one of the very large entities going, Oh, well, we can do something similar and just dump $30 million into, to, to attempting to replicate.

I think we've got a, a very good moat because it, it would take a special entity to really do what we've done by creating this. And this, this, this actual market network effect where, you know, people are sharing information and when you, you know, someone leaving doesn't just affect them. It's affecting anybody upstream and downstream from them.

So it does make it very sticky. So I, I think that moat is pretty good. And then there's also, you know, the, albeit slight, there's always a possibility the government. Hey G, there's a new, there's a new rule in that that far that says, you know, the stuff that you're doing you can't do, and they could write into the law and we, you know, get smoked out that way.

Yeah. I don't, I don't I mean, both risks are real, as in they're plausible, but both at this point are unlikely. Yeah.  

Julian: Yeah. If everything goes well, what's the long term vision for Govly?  

Mike: So I, I want Govly to be the, the singular point of access for government contracting. And I want it to be this, this place for, you know, large and small companies to come get structured, intelligent information about what opportunities are available to the government and to me in the you know, that, that, that personal endeavor is to make the process.

By making it easier, you're making it more efficient, which ultimately will save the government money. And, you know, we all pay enough taxes to know that we want to save the government money more regularly anyway. And so I, I do believe that the. The government has done a lot of good things in their RFQ process by making it so that you know, fraud and nepotism and, you know, the you know, selling to your, to your brother type of thing is prevented.

But I think in the process of all of these extra rules to, you know, create all these laws to prevent the bad actors, it's caused some slowness and we need to try to figure out how to bring some of that that speed and efficiency back. Yeah.  

Julian: And, and I, I alluded to this question earlier in the episode, but I don't think we got to it.

What's, what's the what have you learned now that this is, obviously, it's not your first startup and, and you know, first company that you've grown and, and had success with, but what is the difference, or what learnings have you gained from working on a primarily software technology company within this space that you think are either exciting.

You know, or a, a tough lesson learned a curve that you had to surmount. What, what's been exciting about, you know, working with software now?  

Mike: I think the, the largest learning lesson that you know, I suspect to most of your viewers is, is, is obvious to them, but was a very steep learning curve for me is the, my previous experience dealing with government.

You know, all the way back to the, the large defense contractor, the speed at which software. And the speed at which a SaaS business needs to turn through customers is, is wild. Yeah. You know, it goes from, you know, from previous companies where, you know, landing, you know, 1, 2, 3 new customers a month was, was awesome because these were long relationships that would ex, you know, Very high dollar amount.

And now, now in a SAS entity it's a total brain shift of, you know, we're gonna close 10 new customers this month, and then next month we're gonna close 14. Yeah. And then, and so the, the speed at which things turn has been exciting and terrifying. And, you know, the ramp up has been been a lot.  

Julian: Yeah. What kind of strategies do you use to, to kind of help, I guess, acclimate yourself to this new process or achieve these goals that I'm assuming are stretch goals? You know, if you hit 80% of the goal, you're still happy about it, but obviously hitting a hundred percent of it's, it's tough. But what are some strategies that you have seen that are helpful that could help other founders deploy in their organization?

Mike: Sure. I think it's you know, it's a lesson that I've learned over the past few entities. Most telling would be this one is, it's, especially with a small entity, it's all about the people you have, you know? Yeah. It's the it's the right right people in the right seats on the bus analogy it's the people that you have, when you're at a sub 10 person entity, Every person is very important, and if they're not.

You know, pulling their weight or doing what they're supposed to be doing, it's felt way more than, you know, even in a 20 or 40 person company. And so the the, the sales mentality as of late we've we've hired some really great people and they've really accelerated our our growth. And I, you know, I, I can't thank them enough. They've been awesome.  

Julian: Yeah. No, that's incredible. Well, thank you so much. I know we're at time, but last question before we before we conclude is is something I, I love for not only selfish research, but for my audience to get some, some agendas of information, but what books or people have influenced you the most either now or throughout your career?

Mike: Interesting. I, you know, I have a, I've had a couple mentors that have been awesome. I'd say they've been the most influential. But for your. I really, really enjoyed and have stuck to Simon Sinek. And I think his book of Start with Why has probably been the most influential. I think it was nice, nice timing in my career a number of years ago, as well as the getting to the root of your customer and understanding your customer best is is the best place to start when thinking about launching a company.

Julian: I love that. Well, Mike, thank you so much. I, I enjoyed learning from your experience. Obviously, we, we haven't had too many gov tech technologies on the show. Incredible to kind of see through the lens of, of someone who's worked in the sector and but is now building something innovative and disruptive in the sector as well.

So kind of marrying the two two different distinct parties here, which is super amazing to see. And I hope you enjoyed yourself, but thank you again for being on the show,  

Mike: Julian. This was amazing. Behind Company Lines has been awesome. And. I I really appreciate the time.  

Julian: Awesome. Thanks man.

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