We're excited to announce two new additions to our team! Adam Stormer has joined Richter’s Competitive Intelligence team as a Research Analyst. Mr. Stormer began his career in Cyber Forensics and Information Security before earning a Master of Science degree in Applied Intelligence from Mercyhurst University. At Mercyhurst, Mr. Stormer was a team lead for [...]

Where and when is a little knowledge a dangerous thing? Sometimes, when it’s time to rebid a government contract in the federal marketplace, knowing more than your competitors do can be the beginning of the end. In other words, when you are the incumbent—that is, the company that currently owns the contract and who has [...]

Developing Aggressive Pricing: Overhead vs. G&A The government contracting arena is filled with words, phrases, and acronyms that can be difficult for the less experienced to define, let alone distinguish subtle differences between. G&A (General and Administrative) costs and OH (Overhead) costs are two good examples. What do they mean and, more importantly, what are [...]

When you’re looking for a ballpark estimate, an analogous (AKA “back of the envelope”) calculation may be all you need. After a quick look at the budget over the last five years, you can do a quick run rate, determine trends in play, and extrapolate those numbers into a rough estimate. Ultimately, this technique is [...]

SWOT analyses have been around a long time, and continue to be popular in the business development community. Unfortunately, the vast majority of SWOT analyses are essentially useless—not because the tool is broken, but because it’s not being used properly. The ultimate goal of a SWOT analysis is to produce actionable intelligence—and yet that is [...]

The way you handle sunk costs when attempting to break into a new market in the federal contracting arena can be the difference between success and failure. Deciding how best to treat these costs depends on how well you understand the difference between a “sunk cost” and a “relevant (or future)” cost, so let’s start [...]

A common misperception is that “competitive intelligence” is synonymous with “corporate espionage.”   Nothing could be further from the truth.   Corporate espionage is an illegal activity where companies steal valuable information from their competitors in order to gain a competitive advantage.  It may involve tactics such as wiretapping or hacking into proprietary systems to gain unauthorized [...]

Riddle me this. If knowledge is power, is it ever possible to know too much? If you watch the 1956 blockbuster “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” you’ll find that Alfred Hitchcock apparently thought so, especially if that “man” was dabbling in the world of international espionage. But what about the humble government contractor? Is [...]

Capture teams in the government contracting world spend a lot of time trying to determine the right balance of solutions and strategies that will differentiate them from their competitors and make them more attractive to their customers. Deciding how best to position your company, understanding what your competitors know about you, and analyzing how that [...]

A big part of winning a deal in the federal marketplace depends on how effective your PTW (Price-to-Win) strategy, or position, is. Keep in mind that a winning PTW position starts with a bottom-up analysis based on the requirements spelled out in the solicitation documents, but it doesn’t stop there. In order to arrive at [...]