Navigating Defense Contract Pricing with Ryan Connell

Ryan Connell [00:00:00]:
We talk about us being so unique. And I think once upon a time, the uniqueness of DoD was because we were creating the coolest, newest technology, and that actually did make us have unique requirements. I think today, if anything, if we are unique, it's because we're trying to catch up to the commercial marketplace. And the uniqueness of our things tend to be older legacy products that we're bringing in to integrate to our platforms that we haven't modernized into the existing real, where the world is commercially. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Through our blood and your bonds, we crushed the germans before he got here. You and I have a rendezvous with destin.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:00:45]:
All right. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I have Ryan Connell from the Defense Contract Management Agency. That might sound a little OD, maybe because DCMA not usually an organization or an institution where we would find some unicorns or. Ryan, do you mind introducing yourself and talking about what's your role at DCMA?

Ryan Connell [00:01:11]:
Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate it. So, within the Defense Contract Management agency, there's a small group called the Commercial Item Group, about 60 people. I'm the deputy director here, been in this role for about a year and a half, but the team fully organized itself in 2016 as a result of a 2013 NDAA that established the need for a cadre of experts related to commercial acquisition. I don't know, employee number nine or something, and been here since the beginning.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:01:39]:
Oh, wow. What year was the NDAA?

Ryan Connell [00:01:42]:
2013. Wow.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:01:43]:
So ten years.

Ryan Connell [00:01:44]:
Yeah. And so, yeah. Pilot effort in 2014. I think about that time that they decided that DC may was going to be the agency to house this organization. And then fast forward, I think, right, January 2016, we got the green light to go hire. So came into the role as a supervisor manager of zero employees, and was told to go build your team from scratch and then just been moving forward since then.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:02:07]:
How many people are on this team?

Ryan Connell [00:02:09]:
Yeah, so I think 62 is the current number. Basically operating in four equal teams of contracts and pricing folks and engineers to help evaluate the technical part of our job, and then a branch with contracting officers that does the commercial item determinations for DoD.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:02:26]:
Well, this is a good segue. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you today is because we've been kind of circling each other in our careers, doing trying to accelerate procurement, in particular, procurement execution. And I'm curious, what are some of the things you're seeing in that seat in terms of what are the barriers or the constraints from your group who are trying to either coach or educate or provide tools to the department, to practitioners in the acquisition community on how to streamline, how to accelerate. And what are some of those things that you're seeing from being in that role?

Ryan Connell [00:03:06]:
Yeah, no, absolutely. Glad to dive into that. I'll just mention just here representing my own personal views, not necessarily the agency or the department. But I think what we're seeing is things like the requirement definition and potentially the market research not being done to the extent that it could have been done to be able to take advantage of what exists in the marketplace. And so I'll give you a story or an example I can run down, but we see things like a radar altimeter coming out of a helicopter, right, pointing at the ground, telling you how far you are in the air. Our team's objective at that point is to decide if the proposal that we've received, the government has received, meets the definition of a commercial item, a commercial product. And so we're doing the market research based on a proposal that we already have in hand, and we're identifying that there are a lot of commercial, similar products that exist for non military, non government needs. Exactly.

Ryan Connell [00:03:56]:
There's helicopters for non DoD. Right. It's not a unique use case. And we're doing that market research. We're seeing that there are ones that are significantly less expensive with similar technology. And so we're diving in and we're giving those recommendations or decisions back to a contracting officer or buying activity. And we're kind of late to need at that point. Like, why are we doing that market research for that identification of the product then, versus when we're defining what the requirement should be? And so one thing I wanted to dive into today a little bit is the center for Strategic and International Studies last year conducted a series of 24 war games specifically in preparation for China invading Taiwan in either 2025 or 2026.

Ryan Connell [00:04:35]:
Right. So we're talking two or three years away. The results of those 24 war games every time was the United States got involved, of course, and the average was we lost something like ten to 20 warships, 200 to 400 aircraft, two aircraft carriers, and 3000 us troops, all in the first three weeks. So dark and gloomy. Right. It doesn't paint a pretty picture. And then you pivot to things like Russia and Ukraine. You're seeing them use cots, drones, where they're duct taping satcom radios to them for recon and toy remote control boats with explosives.

Ryan Connell [00:05:08]:
And I'm like, why are we not thinking that way, like what types of solutions already exist commercially that I can define my requirements around versus defining them in a vacuum and then seeing what solutions exist to meet them. You want to talk about impact to the industrial base, or you want to talk about impact to speed of acquisition? Let's define our requirements around that existing commercial technology. I think that's where I see a big challenge for us right now, is we seem to be creating these military unique requirements instead of trying to define the requirements based off the marketplace. One more thought on that before I jump back to you. I don't think this is a DoD unique thing in terms of like, we tend to put our air quotes. I'm doing air quotes, right? We're so unique, we're DoD. Anecdotally, if I just happened to have redone my kitchen, remodeled my kitchen, and I had this 21 inch gap between my dishwasher and the end of the counter, and let's say I really, really wanted a wine fridge, and I was like, I need a 21 inch wine fridge, I really just need that. And I go look at the market and they make 16 1824 36 inch wine fridges.

Ryan Connell [00:06:15]:
I'd say the most common approach is you're probably going to buy the 18 inch wine fridge and then do like a little three inch spice rack or something, as opposed to contacting these companies that build wine fridges and trying to see if they'll custom make a 21 inch wine fridge. I feel like we need to shift the way that we think about that in our communities to start with what already exists in the marketplace.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:06:36]:
I'm probably going to sound like a broken record if anybody listens to this podcast on a regular basis, because what you're describing to me is we need to define problems, not requirements. So in your scenario, defining what is the gap, I would call that the operational gap or the mission need for your kitchen. I want a fridge and I have this much space or whatever, and let the solutions come back and actually be open to the solutions that come back to us, rather than us prescribing what we think the solutions should look like to industry.

Ryan Connell [00:07:13]:
No, 100% right. I mean, I'm full of examples today, but have you ever been driving on a military base in a pouring rain and you see someone mowing the lawn? It's because someone defined the requirement as I need the lawn to be mowed every Wednesday, as opposed to don't let the lawn go more than four inches or pick a number. Right? Yeah, exactly.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:07:31]:
So I want to dig a little bit deeper on that because I think the part people struggle with from. I'm using air quotes now, requirements standpoint. I've heard people use the term big r versus little r requirement. How do we reconcile what you're talking about with our requirements validation process? What are your thoughts on that?

Ryan Connell [00:07:50]:
Yeah, and it's an interesting question. I feel like it really comes down to, and it's not something that we're not supposed to be doing. Right. Like when you read far part one and far part ten and far part eight and all these beginning parts of the far that talk about this stage of acquisition, they're very focused on finding the existing technology, the existing things that are in the marketplace, taking advantage of those to help define your requirements in order to then enhance competition, take advantage and buy commercial to the maximum extent practical. All of those things are very prescribed to us. I think the challenge is we just get ourselves in this bubble or culture of constantly thinking that we're unique and that we have this new requirement that exists. I wrote down a note coming into this thinking. We talk about us being so unique.

Ryan Connell [00:08:39]:
And I think once upon a time the uniqueness of DoD was because we were creating the coolest, newest technology and that actually did make us have unique requirements. I think today, if anything, if we are unique, it's because we're trying to catch up to the commercial marketplace and the uniqueness of our things tend to be older legacy products that we're bringing in to integrate to our platforms that we haven't modernized into the existing real, where the world is commercially.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:09:05]:
Yeah, that reminds me of another pet peeve of mine where the difference maker, it seems like for an evaluation team or whoever the end user is, is does this person have experience like domain expertise? And that immediately, when you do that immediately limits your pool of possible solutions to people who have done business with the DoD. Do you see anything similar to that or do you have any other thoughts on that?

Ryan Connell [00:09:34]:
I think there's been some neat market research tools that have come out in the last even years and I think one of the things that always piques my interest is when they are able to identify that piece of the puzzle. It's pretty easy for companies to go into an API that comes out of like Sam Gov and just pull in all of the registered cage codes of who's done business with the federal government and what market sectors. That's not novel in my mind at this point anymore, but what is instilled piques. My interest is when you're able to identify companies who have the potential capacity to meet a specific requirement or provide a solution that have not done business with the federal government. The idea of Internet scraping, to be able to come up with that piece of the puzzle, I think is really interesting.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:10:16]:
So what do you recommend with regard to the requirements part of the process? How do you coach or mentor others in the department to either do this differently, think about it differently, apply different workflows or tools?

Ryan Connell [00:10:31]:
Yeah, it's an idea of just, like, independence. I feel like each problem set that you have in front of you, and I like to think about our day jobs as problem solving. Right. So I look at it like you're solving a problem, whatever that is. Like, I need to get x to the user, I need to deliver y, whatever that is. We're solving a problem. And I feel like each specific problem that you're solving needs to be addressed independently, even if it's a follow on the same requirement, because the environment might have changed. Right.

Ryan Connell [00:11:00]:
Like, if you were buying an AI solution in 2018, you're really going to copy paste that market research that you did. It's been five years and the market is drastically different. I think it's just approaching each problem set with that problem solving hat and independently. And it doesn't necessarily mean you have to be the first person ever to do something but just get to some solution that's somewhat unique and better. And I think if you approach those problems that way, you'll constantly iterate and improve how we're doing this. And things that are great in 2023 may not solve 2024 problems. So we just need to keep constantly being agile as we move through the problem solving.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:11:37]:
Yeah, you kind of reminded me or piqued my interest when you were talking about market research. I think there is a way of doing business that the DoD in particular is used to when it comes to market research. I post an RFI and it's out there for 30 days or something, and we get a bunch of submissions, and we may or may not talk to vendors that responded to better understand what's going on in the market, and that is a way to do it. But I think there are so many better ways to engage and understand and actually get a pulse in the market. So I'm curious if you have any recommendations on that front.

Ryan Connell [00:12:11]:
Yeah, I mean, for me, I'll go back to the problem solving piece, but it's a combination. Right? You're looking for data. So if one of the methods for you in finding that data is to post an RFI and hope that respondees come back or offer his potential offers come back with, hey, here's what I can offer. In my mind, that's one data set that you can combine with other data sets. So obviously the idea of independent market research, and I hate to say go to Google, but get a good understanding of what that solution is like, what that marketplace for those types of solutions are like. I think that's hugely important. And there are really some unique and promising tools coming in that specific area. Public spend forum, specifically one company that comes to mind with their gov shop tool, they're finding ways to explore different market sectors.

Ryan Connell [00:12:56]:
And again, get to that, I'll say unicorn piece of information of who hasn't done federal business before but maybe can play in this area. And I think those are some of the companies that we should be talking to when we're in that requirements development stage because it's going to help us open a requirement up that's going to let that biggest population of potential solution providers bid on the effort. Right. And you're reducing the military unique requirement to meet the marketplace as opposed to the opposite of that. So I think just combining multiple data sets of market research is going to be hugely important to help you really frame today's market looks like, and I use the word today's because it isn't the same. And I use the AI example, right. It's an ever changing landscape. So like you said, it's a method, the posting of an RFI, but I don't think it should be the sole method.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:13:43]:
Let's circle back with kind of where we started in terms of the commercial item group and leveraging or optimizing commercial acquisition authorities. Why do you think there was a push to go in this direction from Congress and now likely in policy to leverage more of the commercial market, what opportunity are we trying to take advantage of?

Ryan Connell [00:14:07]:
Yeah, I go back to like, and I've told this story in other settings before, but you look at, was it the 60s where GPS was a top secret military program? And it made sense during that time because DoD was the world leader in the coolest, newest technology. Right? And you think about that compared to today at least, Ryan's opinion, I don't view Dod as the world leader of new cool technology. It's the companies, it's the commercial space. Right. You look at, you know, all these technologies that have come out that have a defense use case for sure, but they weren't developed for defense, nor did DoD develop them. Right. And so I think seeing that changing landscape defines or creates that need for us to be able to take advantage of it. So now as a department, we're thinking about how do I get away from the need to create and figure out how to buy, right? So it's the shift from make and create over to what's the commercial market look like? What's that technology look like? How do I go about and buy it? So I think that's the shift in my mind.

Ryan Connell [00:15:08]:
It's the need to take advantage of the fact that our industry partners have independently grown technology beyond what DoD has either had the budget for or requirements for, which is, I think, a shift from the right.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:15:24]:
I've definitely seen in the AI space and in a former life, defensive cyber space, the bleeding edge stuff is definitely coming from industry. So taking advantage of that to me is super obvious and easy for us. From a value proposition perspective, as a practitioner, let's say an acquisition or a contracting practitioner, I believe there are a ton of benefits if you fully embrace what you're talking about, not just from a capability perspective, but there are actual process or execution benefits where you can accelerate lead times, you can streamline your paperwork and whatnot. So can you go a layer deeper in terms of as the practitioner who is trying to buy or trying to develop my acquisition strategy, what benefits do I get to look forward to if I do embrace this buy versus create?

Ryan Connell [00:16:14]:
Sure. Yeah. Right. I think there's a number of responses here that are appropriate. Right. I guess I'll start with if it gets to the point where you're actually doing that market research, figuring out what the space looks like, helping, using that to define your requirements, you're now hopefully, I mean, ideally building a requirement that is now in a competitive space versus something that's sole source. Right. So I think healthy competition, I think everyone would argue, is a good thing technically, or it should result in fair and reasonable pricing, because now you have competition in a space that you didn't have before.

Ryan Connell [00:16:46]:
So you can feel more comfortable from a pricing perspective and the value you're getting because you have a competitive market, I think increased competition, specifically when you're gearing your requirements to bring them down to where the commercial sector is, you now have identified an area for reduced barriers to entry, which that should theoretically influence and increase the defense industrial base. So we're talking about competitive market driving down prices. We're talking about increasing the defense industrial base. I think those things are both great and speed. I think speed is the last thing that I want to mention here. Right. I'll use far 15 as the generic DoD way of contract by negotiation, doing business for major weapon systems, anyone can go to us spending or fpds and download pult times. And you see things like the average far 15 is, I don't know, 300 days almost a year from a pulp perspective.

Ryan Connell [00:17:40]:
And then you take things like far 13.5. So far 13.5 allows you to buy commercial up to 7,000,007 and a half million dollars using simplified acquisition procedures, which should be the most simple form that we have of doing business. The pulp there is like 48 days or 42 days somewhere in that neighborhood. Right. So you're talking about a difference of weeks to a year in the ability to buy products just by understanding, hey, let's leverage the commercial marketplace and take advantage of the authorities that we have to use. And so I think it's a combination of dib pricing and speed. I think it supports all three of those.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:18:15]:
Yeah. How hard do you surmise it is to make the case that what you're buying is commercial?

Ryan Connell [00:18:24]:
I think the answer depends on when you're making that decision. I think that as it pertains to my day job, it becomes more difficult because effectively, if everyone followed the rules of the far, that means that the contracting officer buying activity put out a solicitation saying that it was not commercial. And the offerer replied to that proposal saying, hey, I'd like to do business with you, but I believe it is commercial. And then they've come to us to help mitigate that debate. Right. And so we're often trying to see, trying to evaluate products or services that may be commercial. But if we had just made that decision point and framed the contract and acquisition strategy that way up front, it would have been a much easier decision. So publicly available information.

Ryan Connell [00:19:08]:
I think over the last several years, the commercial item group has been somewhere in that 80% of the things that they review are commercial. Last year was a pretty significant departure from that, down to about 50. And so far this year back up to more traditional percentages. But again, I think that despite how hard it is, I think that the difficulty level is because of the timing. Whereas again, if it was done on the upfront, early side and requirements were based around the commercial marketplace, that's a much easier decision because you're developing the requirements in order to meet them. One more thing on that. So we've seen things that are, I'll call commercial services. The actual service itself would be something that's of a type of a service that exists in the commercial marketplace.

Ryan Connell [00:19:51]:
The specific definition of commercial services, the two definitions add a whole bunch of caveat and nuances to that. It's not just of a type of a service. It's not just similar to a service. It has to be similar to a service that is often provided by that same offer, similar terms and conditions. Pricing is either in a catalog or market. Right? So you're adding all these different caveats. So we've seen proposed commercial services come in and our response back to the buying activity has been the service specifically is commercial. But the way that you've framed this business deal is not the way it would be done in the commercial marketplace.

Ryan Connell [00:20:23]:
Therefore, what you've provided us doesn't meet the definition of commercial. But you doD, you can fix that. It's not the offer. It's the way that we developed and framed the requirements.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:20:33]:
How do you reconcile a situation like that? If an offer is saying this is typically or sold commercially, but the DoD has the way they've designed the business deal to your point is it's not commercial. Do they have to cancel and resolicit? Or how is that typically adjudicated?

Ryan Connell [00:20:54]:
Yeah, potentially. I've seen it go both ways. I've seen it just result in other than commercial contract award far 15. But I've also seen where the RFP was updated and requirements were updated. Little nuances of things like GPS repair, for example. Right. So you go to Garmin and they'll give you a flat rate to repair all of their gps. So in Ryan's mind, that's the way that the GPS market, at least one company commercially does GPS repair.

Ryan Connell [00:21:21]:
So when we see things that are, hey, we'll do a time material or some different contract type or some different strategy or different terms and conditions. Now you have to ask the question of why is DoD doing it this way when it's not the way that Garmin or a commercial company or vendor or sector of industry would do it. And so those are the types of things that we potentially would identify as a potential reason to go OTC, other than commercial versus commercial. But again, it's because we're not replicating the commercial business deal, which is, I believe, the intent of commercial acquisition.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:21:55]:
Yeah. To me, one of the primary benefits of acknowledging you're buying or leveraging the commercial market is to determine the price is reasonable. So if you're in an instance where you don't have price competition, I've operated mostly in the last five years doing other transactions. A lot of those. It's a harder case to make to say you have price competition because every solution is different. You don't get the apples to apples comparison. You're not necessarily putting that prescriptive requirement out. It's more of the here's our problem set.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:22:27]:
Here's the gap. What solutions do you have to fulfill the gap? And the solutions can vary greatly. So there is a case to be made that you can say, there was a, I think you and I have talked about this. There was, what do you call that? An intent? Or like everyone knew they were competing for something, say the price was competed. But even if that's not your scenario, for some reason, I always say commercial pricing is king in price analysis. I do think pricing and valuation is a barrier to doing business this way because I think we're trained to do more far 15 negotiations cost analysis. I think everyone's familiar with cost breakdowns, and I want to know what the labor rates are and I want to know what the materials are. So what have you seen in the landscape in terms of how you would like to see pricing and valuation happen?

Ryan Connell [00:23:21]:
Yeah, no, I appreciate the question. I think the first part of your question, I think we wrote a paper on OT pricing and we called it inherent competition as a force. And the logic was exactly how you explained it. And I think the example was if I have a leaky roof and I have companies come out to give me pricing, and one company says, you need an entire new roof and it's going to be $10,000. Another company says, hey, I found a thing that needs a patch. I can do it for $800. Significantly different solutions, significantly different pricing. I think there is some logic to the idea that they both acknowledge that I'm having multiple people come out and give me prices, and inherently there should be some force that is steering them towards giving a fair and reasonable price, I'll say it that way.

Ryan Connell [00:24:09]:
Right. It doesn't meet the far definition of adequate price competition, but I think there's a force that can't be. Right. Yeah. The other part of pricing, I mean, spot on. Right. I mean, ot guidebook talks about cost analysis being the less preferred over price analysis. Right.

Ryan Connell [00:24:25]:
Price analysis being the preferred option. Of course, commercial items are one of the exemptions to certified costs and pricing data. So again, lending itself to all of the various price analysis techniques that exist in the far. But I think when especially we get into more modern tech like AI, where the cost is so irrelevant from the conversation of valuation, we really need to focus on value. So, kind of circling back to the wine Fridge example, if I contacted one of those wine fridge companies to make me that 21 inch customized wine fridge it's going to be super expensive, and I have to recognize the fact that that's what I'm asking for. And if I just let the market dictate what already exists, those 18 inch, 26 inch, whatever, the numbers I used earlier are wine fridges, I'm going to get a much more competitive rate because of that inherent competition. So when we think about value and going into AI, ML, those types of things, I think value is one of those things where why am I buying the solution? It's either going to save me time or it's going to save me resources, or it's going to improve accuracy or efficiency, which those two things would likely result in time savings or resource savings. And both time and resource savings can be dollarized, they can be monetized.

Ryan Connell [00:25:37]:
Right. You can turn, hey, it's going to save me an hour a week. You can turn that into a dollar figure. Of course, I don't want to pay more than the value that I'd be getting back for a product which I think lends itself to another part of this conversation, which is value is different for everyone. Right. There might be an AI or ML solution that is very valuable to one user and less valuable to another user, still maybe getting value, but I think that conversation about price reasonableness now starts to include the specific use case and what the person is going to be using it for. So I think that's the importance of having those transparent understanding from both sides during negotiations, and that's how we get to reasonableness. There's going to be tools out there that, let's say acquisition support tool might cost $100,000, for example, and I have to make a decision if that is going to save the government more than $100,000.

Ryan Connell [00:26:32]:
It's a hard thing to answer because it's only part of the solution. We're already recommending savings back to DOD. So does this tool get me an extra $100,000? How do I figure that out? But I think, again, making sure both sides understand the conversation about how we're determining value, I think that will help itself through negotiations, in my experience.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:26:51]:
Yeah, that's definitely, as a practitioner, likely a harder skill to apply. Again, we're not trained to do that. We're not used to doing that. So unless you're in a setting where you can do it experientially, I think that's a harder skill to apply.

Ryan Connell [00:27:08]:
Yeah, I think the cost estimating career field is an important resource to tap into because their job is to figure out how much something will cost and that narrative. There's no answer. That said, I can't figure it out, right? So they're always trained to get to a number with the associated assumptions and rationale. And so I think that career field lends itself to being very useful in this conversation.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:27:30]:
I don't disagree fully. I would caution maybe that at least in my experience, individuals in that field as well, I would have similar challenges of getting over what they're used to. Because even some of the more recent cost estimating conversations I've had, they still want the cost breakdown like the labor material. Again, I remember I got my house appraised like a few years after I bought it because I thought it was worth more than what we bought it for because it was a very old house. It was built in the late forty s and the land was likely more valuable than the house itself. And I remember the first appraiser actually gave up. He was like, he didn't have comps. He wasn't able to do that.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:28:20]:
Apples to apples comparison to other houses in the market because ours is so different, it's so old, there's not a lot out there. And they had to find another appraiser who could maybe think a little bit differently and say, okay, even though this isn't, I don't know, a cookie cutter townhouse, kind of like you're saying you can draw correlations or to the value of this house based on these other types of houses in the market that aren't exactly the same and stuff. I think long term we should leverage that field more, but they too have to come with us on the journey to start thinking differently about the market and how we look at pricing in the market?

Ryan Connell [00:29:07]:
Yeah, completely agree.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:29:08]:
Yeah. So you're in the commercial item group. What types of resources do you recommend for people who maybe like what you're dishing out? And they want to do more and they want to do a little bit more research on their own. Any books, podcasts or videos that you all are promoting or that you personally enjoy and has helped you do what you do in the commercial item group?

Ryan Connell [00:29:34]:
Yeah, sure. So commercial item group has a public website where we do put a lot of those publicly available resources that we leverage out. Know one? Talk about thinking differently. One of them is a wage. So if you're talking services labor type contract, it's a wage tool that we developed which uses Bureau of Labor Statistics unburdened wage rates and then burdens them using the five year publicly available census data. And so we've been able to estimate indirects on top of the unburdened wage rates to come to a at price hourly know. Pick an engineer level three in Boston, Massachusetts with a specific NAICS code. So just another tool in the toolbox to help us get to fran reasonable pricing.

Ryan Connell [00:30:13]:
So I think that's one to mention. Hit Govshop earlier, pretty excited about an afworks tool that they funded called turbo innovate, which allows you to kind of type in a requirement like, I need this type whatever it is, and based off that it reads language, right? So it's nice from that perspective is you can type it in whatever, in your own words, it'll get you a, I don't know, five or six page paper of things to think about. Companies that exist in the marketplace, they've done federal business, scholarly articles on the topics, those types of things. I know a company we talked to several years ago called price systems. That one's interesting to me because they're huge data sets in the parametric part of pricing. So you could effectively say, I have a piece of electronic equipment, it weighs five pounds, it's in an airplane, and the weight of the electronics are one pound. And then it'll say, hey, that probably costs $32,000 without even knowing what it is just based on data. So I think that's a pretty interesting thing to watch.

Ryan Connell [00:31:04]:
It's been several years since we've talked to them, so it'd be interesting to see what they're up to. And lastly, more of a DoD resource, but I plug it a lot, but I think it's invaluable. Is Advana launched game changer? Game changer was specific for DoD policy. They took that same use case and applied it to EDA, where all the contracts are stored as pdfs. And so when you go into Advanta, have to do your own ESAr for DoD employees, but basically they've created all of the DoD contracts to be searchable, googleable, right? So I can go into advantage game changer and type in either a company name and an, and symbol and a part number or type in a part number and an SF 1449 to see if it's ever been on a commercial contract. Right. I use the term to be funny, but it's a game changer in the market research space for be able to understand all of the contracts that exist and have access to the language that is in them real time.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:31:59]:
Awesome. All right, last question. We call ourselves defense mavericks, but we hope that being a maverick isn't just an individual that comes out of the works. Occasionally and finds a way to break glass, we hope it becomes almost normalized. So what does a defense maverick mean to you? What would you like to see more of from practitioners become normalized?

Ryan Connell [00:32:23]:
Yeah, I kind of hit a little bit earlier, but I think it's constantly being unique and better independent in your acquisition, and each acquisition's approach constantly kind of challenging that status quo. I know that's a cliche. One of the things that I feel like has worked for me is just in this series of, as you're navigating all these decision points through an acquisition, either in acquisition specifically or just in your workplace, wherever, getting things approved, those types of things. I think it's the constant drive to figure out the fastest and easiest way to get to a yes and then iterate off of that kind of non acquisition example we just launched this past year. An opportunity for anyone in DoD to come rotate within the commercial item group as just a rotational effort. Right. That wasn't the original vision of the problem set that we wanted to solve, but that's where we got to as a first iteration. I think next step is potentially a one for one swap from someone from our group, et cetera.

Ryan Connell [00:33:18]:
But it's just that constant like, okay, you hit a roadblock. How do I get over that roadblock? Or just take a right. Take a left. Right. Constantly navigating and finding your way to yes. I think that's a skill set that we can all continually work on.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:33:30]:
Yeah, I've recently been referring to that as we all have a bunch of puzzle pieces in front of us, and we have to figure out which ones connect best to each other. Yeah, for sure. Well, Ryan, I can't thank you enough. This was truly a pleasure. I hope you had fun.

Ryan Connell [00:33:47]:
Thanks for having me.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:33:48]:
It was a little nerdy, but I like nerdy because, I don't know, this stuff should be talked about more. So I truly appreciate you sharing your insights with us.

Ryan Connell [00:33:58]:
Awesome. Yeah. Happy to be here.