CIO Bulletin

Blackdragon - Winning competitive contracts on behalf of bidder companies

While the process for government contracting is lengthy, it can also be quite lucrative and well worth your consideration. However, government contracting is challenging and can be hard to get through. Blackdragon is a first-of-a-kind full-spectrum management consultancy focused on advancing the efficiency and effectiveness for how federal contractors competitively win government contracts. The mission of Blackdragon is to completely revolutionize the way upcoming contracts with the US Federal Government are identified, pursued, and ultimately won. We interviewed Rob Rosenberger, the CEO, and Co-Founder of Blackdragon, to know more about the company. Here are a few excerpts of the interview:

Q. How is Blackdragon unconventional and value-added?

Winning federal contracts has been exponentially more challenging for a long time. The combined effects of advancing technology with the rise of the Gig Economy and disruption of COVID-19 have only amplified those challenges. There is no turning back. Clinging to outdated ‘industry best practices’ (repeated internal processes applied to every target opportunity in the pursuit of maximum efficiency) and relying on ‘rain makers’ is no longer a competitive recipe for winning contracts in the new normal. Today’s successful contract winners are bidding smarter, more cost effectively and in greater scale than ever before. The key to winning is to do something that no one else has done in such a way that is more inventive, lower risk with more volume and better return on investment.

As the only genuine matchmaking crowdsourcer platform across our vast industry, Blackdragon is the originator third party organization to be viewed by non-client bidders as a significant threat with respect to their winning a contract. Effectively, Blackdragon emulates a prime bidder by equally partnering with bidder clients for the win, however we do not join them in performing the contracts won. Because Blackdragon is client agnostic and autonomously chooses the contracts it wants to bid on and selects preferred bidder clients for each pursuit, we appear as a competitor to non-client bidders for that solicitation. Blackdragon must win contracts on each client’s behalf to collect the full fee so our experts are motivated to pool their resources and talents for maximizing the client’s competitive advantage.

Explain about freelance experts getting equal control over influencing market activity.

Coalition: Blackdragon is a rapidly expanding, a global coalition of expert freelancers (“Dragons”)—acting as a united body of opportunists, sharing an entrepreneurial spirit.

Proactive: Dragons no longer passively wait for the opportunity to call; they are now empowered to take the initiative on creating opportunities for themselves.

Power Shift: Blackdragon represents the first-ever power shift throughout the US federal contracting community, moving market control from Buyers (bidder clients) to Sellers (freelance experts).

Freelancers Pick Ideal Project: Dragons proactively unite on their own terms around upcoming bid opportunities they are familiar with, best fitted for, and passionate about winning.

Freelancers Pick Ideal Client: Dragon opportunists self-form into Dream Teams, then select the best candidate bidder client for each project instead of the other way around. Contrary to the old way where individuals competed for employment selection from bidder companies to support bids the company has decided to pursue without their respective input, our bidder clients compete for selection by each Dragon Dream Team already formed.

Partnering: Blackdragon functions more like a partner with clients, sharing accountability and risks for winning each contract pursued, compared to individuals simply filling support roles and getting paid regardless of win/loss outcome.

Value vs. Time: Blackdragon represents the first-ever platform business where freelance experts get paid for the value they create instead of the hours logged and the rate negotiated. We produce more value in faster turnarounds via fixed-price deliverables created by competitively selected Dragons tailored to each task.

Peer Reviews: Instead of working hourly, Dragons work together on each product (task) and score one another based on the perceived value of contribution to the overall effort. Scores are transparently logged and averaged to determine each contributing member’s portion of the fee pool. The more value contributed, the higher the score from fellow team members, resulting in more money earned.

Remote Workforce: In most cases, Blackdragon projects are conducted virtually by Gig Economy team members selected for the value they can contribute to the project success although they are geographically scattered across the country and around the world.

Q. What efforts have you put to provide the necessary quality and ultimately win targeted contracts?

All Blackdragon projects have milestones. These are especially important as a standard component of our Winning-as-a-Service^™ (WaaS) proposal development process. They ensure Deal Teams address every element of creating a winning proposal at the right time during the development process. Our reviews are crucial tools incorporated within each Blackdragon Deal Team, using a combination of hand-selected expert Dragon Reviewers and respective client employees. Blackdragon invented a groundbreaking, customized, modular methodology that maximizes winnability and increases proposal quality, speed, agility, and risk avoidance like no other.

Our rich portfolio of more than two dozen specialized on-demand reviews—used as a toolbox—can be quickly modified, scaled, merged, deployed, skipped, or repeated in unique combinations to boost higher quality outcomes for every proposal. Compared to the conventional industry practice of using a total of 4-7 reviews for each proposal, we typically have 20-30 internal reviews resulting in more competitive bids. Blackdragon Deal Teams have autonomy to tailor the right blend of these tools to maximize PWIN, while balancing workload demands and available schedule.

Delineate about Blackdragon’s matchmaking.

Blackdragon is an online matchmaking platform (kind of like Uber) that facilitates fast, powerful relationships between custom virtual Dream Teams of SMEs and bidder clients on a per-project basis. Instead of selling people by the hour, Blackdragon provides fixed price “products,” and then we use our crowdsourcing technology to find the best-fitting, most relevant SMEs to create each deliverable purchased. All products are available on-demand and are almost always 100% virtual. This innovative business model yields higher quality, better response time, and significantly improved value.

Q. How does Advising-as-a-service^TM(AaaS) help in making business strategies with custom marketing plans?

Advising-as-a-Service^™ (AaaS) improves a company’s return on investment (ROI) by helping them optimize organizational performance with lower risks while strengthening the internal opportunity pursuit selection process. When federal contractors target upcoming contracts, they first need to understand why pursuit is a good fit for their company and what makes it winnable. Too often, they waste time and money chasing the wrong opportunities due to inconsistent, subjective selection criteria.

AaaS starts with a comprehensive analysis of a company’s realistic competitive attributes to shape the “WHY” – emphasizing advantages for succeeding while diagnosing challenges to avoid. This data-driven methodology helps prevent operational derailment when appealing, yet wrong, pursuit opportunities are encountered.

Based on the analysis, Dragon experts help establish realistic strategic goals for growth and define meaningful performance metrics and milestones needed to keep everyone on track. The result is a sophisticated selection apparatus, custom-designed to maximize organizational health – enabling improved decision-making for pursuing only the right opportunities.

Please give us a brief description of your products and services.

We are the first to have created a full-spectrum integrated suite of on-demand services for winning contracts that work together in a complementary way replacing the inefficient and ineffective age-old approach of hiring individuals to log time, incur costs (travel, commuting), and attempt to broad-brush every project using the same core resources with bounded by human limitations and no scalability. We are also the first to offer full-spectrum outsourcing for helping bidders win contracts more successfully than ever before.

Q. Where do you stand in the market today? What is your customer base?

Blackdragon is the largest and fastest-growing bid and proposal (B&P) company throughout the federal industry. We are the only bona fide platform business throughout the federal contracting industry—all others are conventional pipeline businesses. With thousands of Dragons worldwide and more freelancers joining the coalition each month, the company is also approaching 1,000 bidder clients registered within its online marketplace. Blackdragon’s current customer base consists of companies seeking to win contracts with the US Government, although we anticipate expanding the enterprise into state and local contracting markets in the future.

About the CEO

Rob Rosenberger is the visionary CEO/Co-Founder of Blackdragon. He has served in the US House of Representatives (2014-2015) as a hand-selected Congressional Fellow. Rob is a former corporate C-level and senior executive for mid-sized federal contractor firms supporting the national defense arena and US Intelligence Community (IC). He has held numerous leadership positions in large organizations overseeing classified international operations of extraordinarily complex, extensive enterprise programs.