Beyond the Bid: Bashar Haddad on Customer Service in Federal Contracts

Intro  

Welcome to another edition of inspired stories where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes, how they’ve overcome adversity, and explore current challenges they’re facing.

Anthony Codispoti (11:06.478)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispode and today’s guest is Bashar Haddad, COO of SSI. They are a woman owned small business started in 2002 and located near the nation’s capital. They are a prime contractor who manages staging for large scale and complex contracts.

in over 45 states, five continents, 22 countries, as well as throughout 80 government installations in hostile, extreme, and high threat environments. They are a DCAA approved accounting system and specialize in providing specialized personnel for the DOS, DOD, Special Operations Forces, intelligence, and healthcare community.

They provide a wide range of support roles, including linguists, translators, intelligence analysts, counterintelligence specialists, security professionals, logistics specialists, program managers, and much, much more. Their clients include all kinds of government agencies you’ve heard of, and many you probably haven’t. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Adback Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits.

that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible. To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefitsagency .com. Now, back to our guest today, the COO of SSI, Bashar. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Bashar Haddad (12:55.035)
It is my pleasure. I certainly appreciate you allowing me to be on your program.

Anthony Codispoti (12:59.31)
All right, so Bashar, tell us in your own words, what does SSI do and how did this company first come into existence?

Bashar Haddad (13:07.317)
Well, it was the brainchild of my sister. She and I both work for recruiting companies. She was a recruiter. was a, you can call me a program manager. I did the sales, she did the recruiting. I called the clients to see if they had any openings where we could help them fill them and she dealt with the candidates that were looking for work.

She made the last company she worked for, she made them over a million dollars and they paid her, I believe something like 60 ,000 a year. Well, she approached me and said, how about you and I start our own recruiting company? I said, great. So in 2002, June, we started the company and we tried to get clients and recruited for them, had a few little successes here and there until I got hired as a contract recruiter for a company called Titan Corporation.

They had just received the contract to provide 2000 linguists to go to Iraq. Now from my background, I was somewhat fluent in Arabic and they literally hired me within a minute and a half. That’s how long the interviews took. They said, just go grab a phone and start calling because they just needed to recruit as many linguists as possible and they were under a very tight time crunch.

The fact that I lived in Detroit for almost a year and a half also was a huge plus for them. Bottom line is I worked there for nine months. I got tired of the commute. It was over an hour each way. And I said, how about you make me a subcontractor? They said, we can’t make you a subcontractor. I said, why? They said, you don’t have a security clearance. You’re not an 8A company and you don’t have a DCA approved accounting system.

I said, okay, why don’t you just make me a vendor? I know how to recruit these people. have great connections. And they said, you know, that doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. They made me a vendor. In the meantime, I went out and started to work on my 8A status. If you’re not familiar with the 8A program, this is a designation the Small Business Administration gives to small companies if they qualify. You have to be part of the protected

Anthony Codispoti (15:15.437)
Hmm.

Bashar Haddad (15:27.765)
class of people that are disadvantaged. And if you’re not, you can write a letter to the SBA explaining how you’ve been discriminated against. Considering my sister and I are from the Middle East, considering the company is majority owned by my sister, she wrote a very compelling letter giving real life examples how she’s been discriminated against as a female and as a foreigner. My sister and I were both born overseas.

We went back and forth with the SBA. They asked us to make a bunch of corrections. Then they finally gave us the 8A status. Okay, so we have 8A. What does that mean? The advantage of the 8A program is that the government, instead of, you know, they bid, they put everything out for bids. And when you’re in 8A, the government has the ability to sole source a contract to you. They could literally just hand you a contract, just like you go to Walmart, you pick up something off the shelf, you go and pay for it.

The government can give an ADA company a sole source as long as the dollar value is under three and a half million. It’s basically a way the government gives small businesses a little push forward so they can hopefully become successful. The program only lasts nine years and there’s many requirements that you have to meet during those nine years to keep it going for the full nine years. Well,

We worked on our 8A, we finally got it when we called Titan. We said, hey, we’re in 8A. Can you make us a subcontractor? They said, we’re in the middle of an acquisition. L3 Communications just bought them out. They said, we can’t make you an 8A just yet. Just stand by. Keep doing what you’re doing. And eventually, the contract got awarded. Titan bought the company. They bid on the Recompete. They lost it to a company called GLS. We were put on hold. kept putting.

kept us on hold for a couple of years. In 2000, the beginning of 2008, L3 lost the contract to GLS. We were out of business. We almost closed our doors. And I said to my sister, said, that’s it. I’m not putting all my eggs in one basket. I said, and I’m not going to rely on a prime contractor for our success because we have no control. So I started to, I call it smile and dial, pick up the phone, call every contracting officer you can.

Anthony Codispoti (17:31.938)
Wow.

Bashar Haddad (17:50.613)
introduce yourself as an 8A. One day a lady in NSW, I didn’t even know what NSW was, Navy Special Warfare. That’s basically the Navy SEALs. I’m leaving her a message. She picks up the phone. She says, did you say you’re an 8A company? I looked at the phone. I said, do you have an analog answering machine at your desk? She said, well, they leave the high tech stuff for the boats and planes. They give us this crappy equipment.

Anthony Codispoti (18:12.652)
You

Anthony Codispoti (18:16.226)
Ha

Bashar Haddad (18:18.461)
She said, we have a contract. It’s only for about three months. We have the guy who we’d like to do the work. We can’t tell you who to hire. Are you interested? I said, absolutely. She gave me the guy’s name. I called him up. I said, are you willing to work on this contract for three, four months? He said, yes. The problem was the company the government was dealing with was making the government jump through hoops and giving them a hard time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this story. Okay. So we hired the guy. The government loved it.

Anthony Codispoti (18:43.789)
Really?

Bashar Haddad (18:48.497)
About a month later, they gave me another training contract. It was a small one again because we were in a day. They’re able to hand it to me without going through the bidding process. So when the government is up to a very tight time crunch, like they have to execute it in a week or two or a month, they don’t have time to put things out on bid and receive proposals, evaluate the proposals, make an award companies protest. It’s a long process. So

That summer of 2009, the government gave us our first million dollar contract. It was for Navy SEAL instructors. And it was roughly, I think, .6, 1 .7 million. Well, fast forward to today, we’ve been awarded over 100 prime contracts. We went through the entire 8A program, the full nine years, and graduated. And it was a huge success for us. We’ve actually…

I can’t tell you how great the 80 program was for us. Not that we got a ton of soul sources, which we did, but it also taught us how to run our company. We function completely independent of any outside resources. In other words, our accounting, our HR, our payroll, everything is done in house. And here we are today, 22 years in business.

Anthony Codispoti (20:09.934)
So this is interesting. So you and your sister both had a background in recruiting, but didn’t have any kind of background in any sort of government work.

Bashar Haddad (20:15.765)
That was it.

Bashar Haddad (20:20.061)
No government background, no military background.

Anthony Codispoti (20:22.306)
Yeah. And so the, obviously I can understand how the AA was good for you, right? Cause it got you a foot in the door. but as you were telling that story, now I can see how it’s also very useful for government or military because like you said, when they’re up against a tight timeline, they don’t want to go through the process of having to bid. And this apparently this AA is sort of like a shortcut. It’s the only thing that sort of allows them to bypass that open bidding process.

Bashar Haddad (20:50.259)
That’s correct. Now, women owned small businesses, which we are a certified women owned small business. Technically, when Obama was president, he put into into place that women owned small businesses should receive the same advantages as as as 8a. By the time it gets all filtered out and put through the far, it’s not quite as powerful. And when the government when the government wants to sole source something.

They have to write up a justification and it’s much easier to write up a justification for an 8A because it’s so well known. Women owned small businesses. They’re supposed to get the same advantages, but they’re not there yet. And I think there’s a lot of government contracting folks that are trying to get them there. And I don’t know if you know this, the government also has goals that they have to meet. There’s every agency in the government has a certain percentage, whether it’s 3 % or 5%.

of all their business they do must go to women -owned small businesses. There’s usually 5 % must go to 8A companies. Another 5 % to SDVO, service -disabled veteran -owned small businesses. There’s also the last category is hub zone, historically underutilized business zones. Like if you have a town or a city that used to be a booming town and then other towns around it grow and that

Anthony Codispoti (21:50.382)
Okay. Okay.

Bashar Haddad (22:16.881)
used to be booming town is no longer booming. You can look up a HUBZone map and see where the HUBZone areas are. There’s a lot of requirements for HUBZones. I’m not going to get into it just because I don’t know them all. But most of your employees, or at least half of your employees or a third, must live in a HUBZone. the government has a lot of requirements for small businesses.

And we outgrew our small business size standard for many years. And now we’ve kind of come back down. Our revenue has gone down the last several years just because we can only compete on the full and open side. We can’t compete on the small business side. But because our revenue came down, now we’re able to compete in the small business realm again.

Anthony Codispoti (23:05.944)
So a few things I want to unpack here. First of all, the smile and dial portion. Is that something that you had sort of developed thick skin in previous life for, or was this kind of your first go round with the smile and dial?

Bashar Haddad (23:21.045)
To be completely honest with you, when I was 18 years old, I became a real estate agent. And one of the training sessions that I listened to, there was a guy who is a master, I forget his name and I feel bad, I’m not giving him credit. He used the term smile and dial. And he used to say, when someone hangs up on you, that’s a plus. Because you have to go through the nos to get to the s’s. It’s a numbers game. Any sales is a numbers game.

So I knew that I was just going to call every contracting officer I could. Sooner or later, one of them is going to pick up sooner or later. One of them is going to have a need for my services or have a requirement for an eight day. So it was just a numbers game. So if you’re into sales, don’t get discouraged. If someone says no, don’t get discouraged. If they hang up on you, don’t get discouraged. If they just curse you out, say, don’t ever call me again. That’s a positive because you got to get through the nose to get to the S.

Anthony Codispoti (24:16.174)
And so you’re saying you got to get through the no of that person to find the yes from somebody else.

Bashar Haddad (24:22.303)
smile and dial. When you’re on the phone, if you’re smiling, people can hear that in your voice on the other side. If you pick up the phone, you’re like, hello, Mr. Jones, can I speak? That tone comes across. If you’re talking on the phone like, hello, Mr. Jones, well, now your tone has changed and you sound much better. should also try to mimic the people you have on the phone.

If you get someone who’s mild -mannered, so I’ll say a lady answers the phone and says, hello, this is so -and -so. You’re not going to come at her in a very aggressive way. hello, is this Juliet? And you talk to her at her tone. If a guy answered the phone, hello, Sergeant so -and -so, you say, good morning, Sergeant, how are you doing today? Now you’re talking to him at his level, there’s going to be more of a connection. There’s little tricks of the trade that I learned in my life that I use when I.

pick up the phone and dial. There’s some finesse and some techniques that will give you a better chance of communicating or getting them to receive you better when you’re on the phone.

Anthony Codispoti (25:31.426)
those are great little nuggets. I’m curious if you’ve got any more. I know one thing that, you know, I’ve heard some friends struggle with over the years is trying to figure out the right cadence in which to follow up with people. You talk to somebody they’re interested or they may be interested. You’re supposed to connect in a week. You don’t hear from them. Are you calling that person every day? Are you giving them a week in between those follow ups? Do you have any rule of thumbs there?

Bashar Haddad (25:34.037)
Okay.

Bashar Haddad (25:57.173)
I’ll give you my opinion. It’s not the law just my opinion and it’s worked very well for me First of all, if you get somebody on the phone be respectful of their time Some people when they get on the phone They want to ask as many questions as possible and leave them on the phone as long as possible Next time your number comes up on their caller ID. I guarantee you they’re pushing it to voicemail They’re not gonna waste their you know, be respectable of their time

Anthony Codispoti (25:58.936)
Mm

Bashar Haddad (26:23.889)
Only be on the phone for a short period of time because guess what? They’re busy doing something The fact that they picked up the phone. It’s awesome. So if I get somebody on the phone, they’ll pick up the phone. I’ll introduce myself on First of all have a reason to call. I don’t believe in cold calls Okay, obviously I had to make cold calls. But what I did is I used to search What used to be fed biz ops, which is a basically a directory of all or most business contracting activity

So when the government puts out a solicitation, used to be put out on FedBizOpps, okay? FBO .gov. They’ve changed that. Now it’s under SAM .gov. So you can search every government contract that’s gonna be solicited, or at least most of them. Some of them are clear, some of them are, you know, you don’t have access to. But you can search them on this database. So what I did is the people that I decided to call, I would search for opportunities that we can perform on.

And that gave me a reason. you put out this solicitation. I just want to ask you a question about it, you know. So you got to have a reason to call people. You don’t want to call. Hey, I want to introduce myself. I’m Beshara. You know, I work for an A day company. You got any work for me? Your your success rate in those types of calls is going to be almost zero. But if you have a reason to call, you strike up a conversation. That’s where you learn information. Don’t ask more than three or four questions.

and then say, look, I know you’re busy. I don’t want to keep you on the phone. I really appreciate your time. If I don’t hear from you, do you mind if I follow up with you in like a month or two? You don’t want to follow up every week, you know? I had one contract. I went and met her down at Fort Bragg and I gave her a business card and she said, OK, well, when we have something, we’ll let you know, you know, kiss the death. I said, look, I know you get a lot of people to come visit you and I know you’re telling me the exact same stuff you tell them.

Anthony Codispoti (28:01.463)
I think…

Bashar Haddad (28:18.068)
What are the chances you’re actually going to call me? She said, I’m going to keep your business card on my desk. When we have training exercises, I will let you know. I said, if I don’t hear from you, do you mind if I call you in like a month or two? She goes, well, I told you I’ll call you when I have something, but if you want to follow up, have no problem with that at all. I followed up with her about six weeks later and she goes, I still get your card. Your phone number is boom. And she read off my phone, my cell number on my card. said, you know what? I’m never going to bother you again.

I’m just going to stand by for you to call me. Just remember we can execute immediately, you know, give her a couple of little sales pitches and then get her off the phone. She called me a month later, gave me an exercise. We executed excellent, perfectly on the exercise. And then she gave us another one and another one. These are pre -deployment training. So before the troops get deployed overseas, we used to provide all the language, speakers to play the

terrorists or actors, whatever, was like a movie scenario. We provide makeup artists to dress up like serious wounds. Our makeup artists were some of the best in the industry. They worked on like horror movie sets. We provided AK -47s, a pyro team that did the explosions and stuff. And so we put together a full scenario before these guys get deployed overseas. So a young kid from Kansas, before he goes over to Afghanistan,

It’s not culture shock to him when something happens and he’s prepared to do the job. Well, she ended up leaving her post, but before before she left her post, she told her replacement, hey, do yourself a favor, give SSI a BPA for the next five years. A BPA is a blanket purchase agreement. So they sole source to us a blanket purchase agreement because we had executed on like 30 different role playing missions. And then we basically did

Anthony Codispoti (29:44.195)
Hmm.

Bashar Haddad (30:10.727)
all the role playing for, you know, one of the higher end military agencies for five years.

Anthony Codispoti (30:17.464)
There’s a few cool things here. The first thing you said that I really liked was have a reason to call, right? So you’re calling and you’re not just saying, Hey, do you have any work for me? It’s, Hey, I saw this particular post. I had a couple of questions about it. And it’s just an excuse to sort of start up a conversation. Maybe you didn’t actually have any questions about it, but you made some up so that you could develop some sort of a personal rapport with this person.

Bashar Haddad (30:39.893)
Exactly. I mean, it’s it’s, you know, imagine the phone calls that you receive on your cell phone or, know, hi, I want to talk to you about, know, I don’t mean to make fun of anyone. It’s just those phone calls are they’re nonstop. And even those folks have a reason to call you 99 % of the time, you’re hanging up on them. You’re tired of these sales calls. But the government has to deal with industry. They don’t have a choice. Okay.

Anthony Codispoti (30:41.558)
And then obviously.

Bashar Haddad (31:07.839)
But if you’re calling them, just saying to them, can I get a handout? I’m an 8A company, can you do you have anything you can sole source to me? Without them knowing anything about you, they’re not gonna do business with you. If you call them up and you’re asking about a specific reason, a specific item you wanna discuss with them, well, then their guard comes down a little bit, there’s a little bit of rapport, and then you get your three, four questions out, you show respect to them, you bow out gracefully.

and then you follow up a month or two later. Hey, I hope you remember me, you know, this, this and that. I was just wondering if anything new had come up. I remember I called you about that, you know, and just make your calls quick. But you but you got to have a reason to call.

Anthony Codispoti (31:51.954)
Mr. What is a prime contract? What does that mean? Just a good contract?

Bashar Haddad (31:55.881)
Alright, no, no, no, no, no. So the government awards contracts to prime companies only. Okay. Those prime companies can have subcontractors doing some of the work. Most ADA companies, because when a large company, let’s take Northrop Grumman, large, you know, aerospace and military company, right? Or Lockheed Martin. When Lockheed Martin wins a contract,

The government stipulates in their prime contract, they’re the prime, they’re the company that received the award. The government stipulates that you must give 5 % to 8A, 5 % to women owned, 5 % to SDVO. Those are called subcontractors. So we’ve done subcontract work where we have a prime and we support that prime. Let’s say they get 100 full -time employees on the contract, they give us 20 of them, they give us 30 of them, whatever the number may be. We’re a sub, they’re a prime.

The prime is the one who receives the work from the government.

Anthony Codispoti (32:57.838)
And so you’ve got sort of a two -tiered level of sales, I guess, going on here, right? You’re trying to sell to the government agency or to the defense agency that has the work. And then you’ve got to go out and you’ve got to find the people that know how to do these specific tasks. And I’m going to guess now that you’ve been in business for over 20 years and you’re probably providing a lot of the same kinds of services over and over again,

Maybe you know the right places to go and find some of these people. You’ve got some relationships that you can tap into. Correct me if I’m wrong on that part, but how did you first get started in, yeah, we need people to do, you know, the makeup art, the play actors, the linguists. Like, this wasn’t stuff that I’m gonna guess you had any background in your previous recruiting world.

Bashar Haddad (33:48.121)
Well, I tell you what, you hire good people underneath you that will do the legwork to, know, I don’t do any of this stuff myself. I mean, I’m the CEO. So I manage the company. I have a great VP that works for me. have great program managers that worked for me that went out and found the right pyro guys, the right, you know, gun guys, the right makeup artists. So, you know, and we have we have an incredible recruiting company.

The great thing about our recruiters is they come experienced that we’ve hired and Linda and I give them pointers and help them maybe get just a little bit better. Most of what we recruit for, you know, in the older days when we started the company, everybody used Monster and Career Builder. Those were basically, and Dice, those were the three websites that companies would go to. And there was basically a giant database of anyone who had a resume. Nowadays, it’s a lot more diverse. You have Indeed, you have LinkedIn, you have

You know, I think it’s called Upwork or something. There’s a whole bunch of others. I don’t even think this monster even exists anymore. I don’t even know. But, you know, what we recruit for. Yeah, what we recruit for, like when we started working with linguists in 2003, these guys who worked at gas stations, but they had the one special skill the government needed. They were bilingual. They were fluent in Arabic and they were fluent in English.

Anthony Codispoti (34:58.158)
I haven’t heard anybody talk about it in a long time.

Bashar Haddad (35:16.169)
And the fact that they work in a gas station is not that these guys aren’t educated. I’ve hired guys with bachelor’s and master’s degree and women as well, younger and older who got their degrees overseas. But they come here and, know, remember that movie, Bronx Tale wasted talent. It’s the worst thing in the world. These folks, you know, they just wanted to work and they had all these skills. They knew the lay of the land. They knew the tribal regions of Iraq and Afghanistan. And they were in

incredibly valuable. got paid very, well. And so how did Linda and I go and recruit for these people? We were the only two people in the company at the time. We had no employees. So we went out and targeted certain groups within Iraq. So we went to there like the, let’s say the Assyrians. The Assyrians are basically the original Christians. The Assyrians and the Chaldeans, those are the two Christian groups in Iraq. And

We targeted these folks and they started inviting us to their new years. I think it was in April, if I’m not mistaken. And there’s very large groups from the first Gulf War. There were very large groups of Assyrians. We discovered this in our recruiting. There were very large groups of, I’m not gonna say Assyrians, Iraqis. Like there’s a large group of Iraqis in Nashville. Who the heck brought them to Nashville after the first Gulf War? And we brought in a ton of refugees.

We put them in certain areas, large group of Assyrians over in Phoenix, Arizona, Modesto, California, Chicago. So, you we didn’t, we didn’t know any of this. We just had to go and find the right people that would support the U .S.’ policies, who are fluent in both languages and would pass a background check because they had to get a security clearance to work overseas. Even if they weren’t qualified for a security clearance, they still had to pass a background check. We can’t send violent people over there.

Anthony Codispoti (37:02.627)
Mm.

Bashar Haddad (37:13.343)
They had to pass a medical exam as well. There was a whole bunch of requirements that we had to get through. But you have to outside the box to try to find these people who are very specialized. We used the same concept when we started finding role players and moulage artists and the pyro guys and the moulage artists, the makeup artists. We used the same people over and over. These guys and girls would travel all across the country from

We did missions in Hawaii and Hunter Liggett, which is in California to Camp Shelby in in the south. Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, A .P. Hill in Virginia. mean, all over the country, Fort Bliss in Texas. So Yakima in Washington state. I mean, we’ve been everywhere. It’s it’s been a very impressive ride. I mean, I look back in the last 22 years. I’m like, how the heck did we do all this stuff?

Anthony Codispoti (38:10.018)
Ha ha ha ha ha.

Bashar Haddad (38:10.837)
But again, it’s not me. It’s certainly the people that work, that have supported SSI for 22 years. We have hired some of the best employees, some of the best people I’ve ever known in my life. So we’re truly grateful.

Anthony Codispoti (38:25.206)
And so you’re not, but are you just placing folks here in the States? You’re also placing folks in overseas environments.

Bashar Haddad (38:32.149)
So all the linguists in 2003 to 2009, all those linguists worked in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2012, we won a State Department contract where we had to provide personnel overseas as well in Iraq and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. We have several other contracts going on right now that I can’t discuss that are overseas and elsewhere.

Yeah, whatever the government wants. You asked me one quick question. How do you find all these people? know, government contracting is not the most complex thing in the world. Okay. Most people are a lot of people who retire from the military. They think, Hey, you know, have a lot of friends on the inside. I’m gonna start my own company and they can get the work. They have the connections, you know, they have the experience and they’re liked and they don’t have the accounting background, which

I don’t have that either, but they don’t take care of their back end of the business. And that’s how they unfortunately have issues executing. They can execute some of the missions better than I can. But where they fall short is they don’t have the back end. We’ve got the back end. We also have the experience to exude the contract as the government wants.

I bend over backwards to make sure the government gets exactly what they want. Whether I make money or not, that’s always secondary. Because again, I don’t have the military or the government background to fall back on. I don’t have friends on the inside. So the only thing I could rely on is my past performance. My sister and I, this has been our mission set since day one. That hey, we take care of the customers, the business will take care of itself.

Anthony Codispoti (40:11.864)
Hmm.

Anthony Codispoti (40:24.844)
When was it that the 8A ran out for you? What year was that?

Bashar Haddad (40:28.821)
We received our 8A in 2006 and it expired in February 2015.

Anthony Codispoti (40:38.286)
Okay. And then when that expired, is that what eventually led to some of the sales decline that you saw? Because it wasn’t sort of as easy to kind of get your foot in the door.

Bashar Haddad (40:48.863)
That’s correct. Now, most ADA companies, be honest with you, after the nine years, they fall flat on their face because they rely too much on the sole sourcing. We actually won several competitive bids before our ADA expired. We won several contracts that were small business set asides. So we didn’t even have to rely on the ADA for some of our work. So we were positioned well that once the ADA ran out, we were still able to grow.

in tooth, but when you grow really fast, you lose the small business size and you can only compete on the full and open market. Now I have to compete with the Lockheed Martins and the Northrop Grumman’s and the, you know, the big companies out there. That’s a very difficult place to be. That middle level is really, really difficult. So you either have to completely blow up after the eight day or right before the eight day expires.

or you’re going to have several years of struggling. Now, I’m thankful to say that we not only have we survived nine and a half years after the 8A finished, we also acquired another company in April of 2020, a company called McManus. We bought them in, like I said, April 2020. They were out of Erie, Pennsylvania. And so currently out of our office under SSI, they’re under the SSI umbrella.

In our office, we basically run two companies and it’s been a huge success.

Anthony Codispoti (42:23.182)
And do they do basically the same thing that you do or did they bring in a different kind set of skills?

Bashar Haddad (42:30.261)
little bit of the same, but a lot more different skills and different agencies. Like we never worked with NIH before. We have a contract with NIH. We do a lot of business with Indian health care services, Indian health services, do some interesting stuff with them. McManus had been doing it for close to 20 years and we just basically kept the exact same people that McManus had and they’re continuing to do a phenomenal job for us.

Anthony Codispoti (43:00.002)
When was it that you dropped off sort of that small business status and then when were you able to sort of regain that?

Bashar Haddad (43:09.717)
Okay, so let me explain this to you. The government, when they put out a solicitation, they have to use what’s called a NAICS code, N -A -I -C -S. NAICS code is an industry categorization. There’s like 47 pages of NAICS codes. Anything the government wants, whether it’s limousine service, transportation, agricultural service, mechanical service, accounting, scientific, engineering, anything you want has to have a NAICS code attached to it. Okay?

If you look up NAICS code size standard, every NAICS code has a different size standard. That size standard depends on what your five year average, what your business has done in the last five years, that NAICS code will determine whether you’re a small business or not. Some NAICS codes are, let’s say $9 million. Okay. That means if your five year average is 9 million or less, then you’re considered a small business. You can bid on that opportunity.

Anthony Codispoti (44:06.424)
Interesting.

Bashar Haddad (44:08.661)
Some NAICS codes are $41 million, like shipbuilding for the Navy. You can’t be a small business at $9 million, you know, to build ships. If they put something out, which I don’t think they put out shipbuilding at $41 million, these are billion dollar companies. But when they have engineering work and they have very scientific, very technical work for these ships and stuff like that, airplanes, know, tanks.

Those size standards are much higher and there are a lot of specialized companies that do very specialized work that are considered a small business in those NAICS codes. Does that make sense?

Anthony Codispoti (44:49.666)
Yeah, it does. So is where I was going to go with that. And maybe this question then is off the mark as I sort of understand that that small business threshold is different depending on which of those NAICS codes that you’re participating in. Cause I’m curious, like you lost the small business status because you got so big. Now you’re back in the small business status. And so that helps you to get some of these other contracts is the goal is the strategy to sort of stay in this tier now and just try to.

remain as kind of healthy as you can and in the size of business that you are today.

Bashar Haddad (45:19.004)
HMMMM

Bashar Haddad (45:24.019)
So here’s a little rule in the government that we weren’t quite aware of. When we acquired McManus, immediately after acquisition, we inherit their revenue. So now we just added our revenue and theirs together, completely blew us out of the small business size standard. And we have to go back five years. So their revenue for five years plus our revenue for five years added together divided by five, the average.

was much bigger than some of the stuff that we go after. But we’ve lost a couple of contracts and we’ve gone down a little bit in revenue. The most important thing is that those older years, every time we pass another year, those older years get erased from our average. So that’s what brings the average down. It’s not necessarily that we’re in, you know, that low in our revenue. It’s just that we got the biggest years because in 2016 we had our best year.

And so those years are slowly coming off, which allows us to bid on small business contracts again. Not all of them, but it brings us down below a few of the NAICS codes that are crucial for us.

Anthony Codispoti (46:34.966)
Is there a strategy to be had where you split off into two different companies so that both can have sort of the small business status or is that not really a thing?

Bashar Haddad (46:45.661)
No, you can’t do that technically. I forget the right word, just like exactly. And that’s the way the government looks at it. Because you know what? If you could do that, everybody in their mother would do that. Someone who’s probably much more savvy than I am has found a way to do it. know, I look I’m married. have eight children. I want to make sure I’m not on the cover of the Washington Post.

Anthony Codispoti (46:52.79)
because there’s common ownership between the two.

Bashar Haddad (47:14.963)
I do everything by the books.

Anthony Codispoti (47:17.71)
That’s a good way to live, but eight kids, huh? And I say that as being one of eight myself, but that’s quite an undertaking. What’s the age range there?

Bashar Haddad (47:19.689)
Hey

Bashar Haddad (47:28.213)
Youngest is 10, oldest is 25.

Anthony Codispoti (47:31.106)
Alright.

Wow.

Bashar Haddad (47:33.961)
Kinda crazy, but I tell you what, I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Anthony Codispoti (47:37.218)
Yeah. So when you get a contract and you’re placing folks at these jobs, do they remain your employees that are sitting there or, you know, they’d be okay. So you’re not, it’s not like a, what’s the term I’m looking for contract to hire. It’s a, it’s it’s a contract placement. And then those folks remain yours that you can use on a different contract if they agree to do that.

Bashar Haddad (47:49.044)
correct.

Bashar Haddad (48:03.529)
That’s correct. Most of the people we hire are specialized. When we want a new contract, most likely there’s people there who are already doing the work. So our first obligation is to offer those people their jobs if they want to continue doing the work they’re doing in the place they’re doing it, just to different companies signing their checks. So we usually hire most of the incumbent staff. And then we have to be in a position to

be able to backfill any of those people that are not willing to, you know, stick around. So, yeah, they become our employees. They’re W -2 employees. They sit on our payroll. They get our benefits. They get our PTO, everything.

Anthony Codispoti (48:48.47)
Yeah. Is it hard for you to fill some of these roles sometimes?

Bashar Haddad (48:54.217)
yeah, there’s been some challenges. Some of the contracts we have are very specialized and you got to find that needle in the haystack. Just finding people that are willing to do certain jobs and go to hostile environments like Iraq in 2007 and eight, you know. Not everybody wants to go to a war zone.

Anthony Codispoti (49:16.142)
I think one of the questions that I sort of had is I was doing a little pre -research here. this, I think I sort of guessed the answer, but I’d like to hear it from you is, you’re dealing with big government agencies, big military operations. Why aren’t they just going out and finding folks themselves? They’ve hired lots and lots of people during the course of their time. They have certainly an infrastructure for that. What brings them?

to SSI to have you sort of fill in.

Bashar Haddad (49:49.589)
Well, the government for many years, have hiring freezes, when the government, you know, you’ve heard the expression or the saying, you know, once you work for the government, you’ll never leave or you can’t leave. They can’t fire you. There’s all the. So when the government hires someone, they’ve got them for 20 plus years. They’ve got their pension or whatever you call it, their retirement and the benefits. It’s just it costs an unbelievable amount of money to hire someone.

when they hire a contractor, if the contract ends, those people are gone. The government washes their hands, that’s it. If they don’t like a contractor, like I’ll give you an example. We had to provide linguists of a certain language out in California. We hired them, we won the contract, and the government called us up three weeks later. They said, hey, these linguists are not doing a great job.

And I said to the customer, said, no problem. I’ll get you two other, not linguists, I’m sorry, language instructors. I saw, I’ll get you two other language instructors. I flew in these two other language instructors from other locations, put them in a hotel, paid their per diem, got them a rental car. Government called me back a week later. These instructors are the best we have ever seen. Next time we bid on this, make sure you put these instructors in there. And I told the customer, I said, sir,

this is a competitive bid. Next time I bid, you know, I’m not looking to recoup what I’ve already spent. But to keep them in these hotels, it’s going to cost a lot of money. And you’re the the competition was LPTA, low price, technically acceptable. So the government basically picks the lowest price. And if it’s technically, technically acceptable, they give the award. was a competitive bid. And I said to him, I’m not going to be the lowest price. I’m you know,

I can give you these instructors all day long, but it’s gonna cost a lot more money just because I have to pay these expenses. He said, don’t worry, I’m gonna evaluate according to the resumes and make sure these resumes are in your proposal and just give me a fair price. And all I did is give him the exact same price and just added the cost of the hotel and the per diem and the rental car.

Anthony Codispoti (52:10.392)
Mm.

Bashar Haddad (52:10.867)
And we ended up winning the other three companies that we were competing against were much lower in price. But one of the companies actually submitted the resumes of the two instructors that the government got rid of. So, yeah, so, you know, it’s you, you, got to take care of the customer. You got to do what’s right, you know, and it comes back to you because they get sick and tired of dealing with contractors that don’t perform.

Anthony Codispoti (52:21.866)
Okay. So they were out.

Anthony Codispoti (52:38.68)
So I’m sure when people find out what you do, they’re always eager to hear the stories that you’re actually not allowed to tell, right? You know, just tell me, I would love to hear some good secrets. I’m not going to ask that question, but tell us about something that you are allowed to talk about that would blow our minds, that would just fascinate people, some interesting, pick one, pick two projects that sort of fall into that category.

Bashar Haddad (53:03.061)
Alright, in 2009, the government gave us the contract, as I mentioned, for Navy SEAL instructors. It’s called BUDS. When they gave me the contract, they had a budget in mind and they had 10 positions that they needed filled. My sister and I were still working out of our house, out of her house at the time. We had very little overhead. So I went back to the customer. I said, hey, listen, how would you like 11 instructors instead of 10?

She said, what do you mean? said, look, I’m a small company. have low overhead. I can’t charge you a lot of money. I’m going to get it. I’m going to get audited one day by DCAA, which is defense contract audit agency. They audit every DOD contractor to make sure the government’s not getting screwed over. said, one day I’ll get audited by then. And they’re, you know, they’re going to say, I’m charging you a lot of money.

If I charge you what I can charge you for these 10 instructors, your budget is going to be much lower and you’re going to lose that money next year. I said, I can give you an 11th instructor and still stay within your budget. She’s like, are you freaking kidding me? You’re giving me more than what I asked for. Well, you know, us so calm has, you know, a little more than four branches, but there’s really four main branches.

NSW Navy Special Warfare, USASOC, which is US Army Special Operations Command, AFSOC, Air Force Special Operations Command, and MARSOC, which is the Marine Special Operations Command. Well, that story that I gave her an extra instructor, that story went from NSW, Navy Special Warfare, to US SOCOM headquarters. And eventually I’m getting calls from AFSOC, MARSOC, they all want to do business with us.

And they’re like, this is an honest contractor. You know, we like this guy. And, you know, we did more work with US SOCOM, this is a long time ago, than probably any other agency we’ve ever worked with. I mean, that’s the good old boys network and we were never one of the good old boys, but we delivered exactly what they wanted.

Anthony Codispoti (55:17.646)
But I love that story. mean, it was just you bent over backwards to go above and beyond. You had this creative thought process, this creative solution that helps you, helps them, and it just cemented this relationship that carried on to much bigger things down the road. I love that.

You got another good one for us?

Bashar Haddad (55:40.917)
All right, we did a training mission at Fort Polk, Louisiana. The government needed 20 role players, paramilitary role players from another country. We provided the role players. They needed 10 uniform, 20 uniforms and 10 helmets. So the day of the mid the day before the mission, the government called me up. say, hey, we’re missing 10 helmets. And I said,

What do mean? They said, we only have 10 helmets. I got 20 guys. What am I going to do with 10 guys without helmets? And I said, sir, the solicitation set required requested only 10 helmets. He goes, show it to me. I emailed it to him. He looked it up. He said a few choice words. He was pissed that the solicitation went out wrong. I said, sir, don’t worry about it. I’ll order you 10 more helmets. I’ll have them overnighted to you. He goes, I don’t have time to go through contracting.

Mission starts tomorrow night. I said, sir, I’m not going to go through contracting. I’m paying for these out of my pocket. I’d rather pay for this out of my pocket and have my guys working than 10 guys sitting around twiddling their thumbs. And I said, I just need you to give me a, because mailing to a military base is not an easy task. I said, you got to give me a good address where these can be delivered. And so I sent it to him. This guy wrote us a gleaming letter saying the government doesn’t always do things right.

But this contractor feels our pain and gets us. And he delivered for us exactly what we needed. Another customer, which I cannot even mention, was sending instructors to a foreign country. The problem with the contractor he used to work with, they would expect the instructors to pay their way in that foreign country and then come back and fill out an expense report and get reimbursed with the receipts.

This particular customer asked me, is there any way you can give these guys money upfront? I said, sir, with your approval, I could do almost anything. I said, that’s not a problem. I said, as long as they keep all their receipts and they know they’re only getting reimbursed for what they have receipts for, I said, don’t mind fronting them the money. If there’s receipts missing, it’s coming out of their pay. So they signed a letter saying, I understand, you these are the stipulations.

Bashar Haddad (58:08.021)
And we fronted these folks like $15 ,000 because they had to pay for their hotel, their food, their rent a car for a month at a time in foreign countries. Customer, I mean, just was tickled pink and gave us work for many years.

Anthony Codispoti (58:10.924)
Wow.

Anthony Codispoti (58:25.486)
I mean, you shared several stories in this interview that are just great examples of just doing the right thing. It’s going to cost you some money out of pocket. You’re going to risk some money out of pocket with prepaying these folks. But you’re making the customer happy. You’re forging that long -term relationship. You’re showing them, I’m a guy that you can work with. I’m not going to be super rigid and in the box. I want to do what’s good for you, and I want to help you. And that pays dividends for you down the road as well.

Bashar Haddad (58:33.685)
That’s exactly right.

Bashar Haddad (58:55.349)
customer service 101. Just because it’s the government doesn’t mean the government doesn’t deserve customer service. I had a customer call me on a Sunday and I was driving with my wife and my kids and I pick up the phone and she says to me, what are you doing answering the phone on a Sunday? You should be with your family and I said, Lieutenant Commander, I am with my family and you called me so I answered the phone. I said, what are you doing in the office on a Sunday?

She says, I just don’t have enough time to get all my work done Monday through Friday. I come in this peace and quiet. I could catch up with all my work. I said, look, you’re my customer. You call me. I’m going to answer. don’t care what time of day it is. And I said, everyone say hello to Lieutenant Commander. My kids all said, hi, Lieutenant Commander. She got the biggest kick out of that. You know, the government, their human being is just like we’re human beings, you know, just treat them like you would treat any other customer. Some people have just this mindset that, the

Anthony Codispoti (59:40.515)
You

You

Bashar Haddad (59:54.793)
government’s evil and the government’s this. I’m like, they’re your customer. You better treat them right.

Anthony Codispoti (01:00:00.654)
I want to shift gears for a second, Vishar. I’d like to ask this question of all my guests. I want to hear about a particular challenge, either something personal or professional that you went through, and then some of the lessons that you learned coming out the other side.

Bashar Haddad (01:00:17.461)
Personal challenge, when I was 11 years old, I lost my eyesight, my left eye. And the eye just went completely black. I went and I told my mom, I’m like, I can’t see anything, it’s all black. They took me to the doctor, or the emergency room. The emergency room sent me to a specialist. The specialist sent me to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. And the doctor I met there,

He said, we need to operate on him immediately. My first eye surgery was 11 hours. I’m sorry, nine and a half hours long. And my retina was detached. Just 65 % of my retina torn away. So they pieced it back together. You know, I don’t have the greatest eyesight in the world. I still don’t see that well out of my left eye. I see light and like, you know, take an old camera with a film, take out the film, cut it up, cut away 65 % of it, crumple it.

put it back together, put it back in the camera and take a picture. That’s what I see. All right. and everyone always, you are you okay? And I’m like, Hey, you know, I accept whatever God throws my way and I just keep moving on and I see him out of my right eye. So it works. Every time I have to get a driver’s license, I do have to go to a doctor. They have to sign off on it and everything, but that’s really the only challenge. But

I think it’s made me a better person today because of that. One quick story, when I was in the hospital, they say when you lose one of your senses, the other senses make up for it. Well, when they did the surgery, they patched both my eyes. I had both eyes patched up for two weeks straight. And when nurses used to come in, I used to greet the nurses. They’re like, Bishar, how do you know it’s me? I said, I could tell by your walk and I could tell by the smell of your perfume.

Anthony Codispoti (01:01:55.768)
Mm.

Anthony Codispoti (01:02:13.507)
Yeah.

Bashar Haddad (01:02:14.887)
So, you know, it gave me an appreciation for all my senses and, OK, so that’s a part of the Go ahead.

Anthony Codispoti (01:02:24.91)
So at this point in your life, you’ve kind of gotten used to that, right? You’ve had this limited eyesight in your left eye for so long, you’ve compensated for it. But what was that like as a kid, first adjusting to life with an eye that was only working partially?

Bashar Haddad (01:02:31.466)
Yeah.

Bashar Haddad (01:02:42.453)
It was just I don’t know I Never I don’t dwell on things. I Mean, I just that’s just my personality. I don’t you know Like I said, not a run. I’m not gonna keep bringing this up But I just trust in God and I keep moving forward and I don’t let things upset me everyone in the office They’re like, how are you always in a good mood in a positive mood? I’m like I woke up breathing. How bad could it be? You know, so

Anthony Codispoti (01:02:46.03)
Not a big deal.

Anthony Codispoti (01:03:07.63)
I love that.

Bashar Haddad (01:03:10.793)
But yeah, you know, maybe that wasn’t a good story because it wasn’t all. mean, it was challenging. Like right now, if you see me driving down the road, most likely I’m in the left lane because I don’t have to worry about traffic on my left that I don’t see. I’m more comfortable driving in the left lane because my right eye sees my peripheral to the right. I can see everything on the road. If I drive in the right lane, I’m not seeing much of the road because I can’t see traffic on my left. I have to literally turn to look at my rearview mirror.

Anthony Codispoti (01:03:24.802)
Hmm.

Bashar Haddad (01:03:40.543)
When I check my blind spot, I gotta turn like all the way around so this eye can see all the way to the left. But you know.

Anthony Codispoti (01:03:49.858)
I feel like you were getting ready to share another story there where I kind of jumped in to ask my question.

Bashar Haddad (01:03:56.437)
Let me think of a story that has to do with work, challenges.

Anthony Codispoti (01:04:02.158)
I mean, a good one might be when you guys almost went out of business pretty early on. That had to be pretty scary.

Bashar Haddad (01:04:10.421)
Yeah, I went personally, my wife and I, went into debt $80 ,000 on credit cards just to survive. We went from making 850 ,000 in 2007 between the both of us to making 54 ,000 in 2008. Bills, houses, cars, whatever, you know? And my wife said, how about we cash out our 401k and pay off our credit card? I said, nope. I said, we’ll pay off the credit cards. We’re not touching our retirement.

And, you know, we, we not only, we started making money in 2009 was very little, but our revenue went from 1 million to 4 million to nine to 15. This is year by year to 22 to 38 to 42. So, there’s a magazine called Inc 500. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. It’s the 500 fastest growing companies in the U S.

We made the list, they look at the last three years of your revenue, how much you’ve grown. We made the list in 2013. We were number 421. Then we made the Inc 500. It’s hard to sustain, that was over a thousand percent growth in three years. So it’s hard to sustain that kind of growth long -term. But we made the Inc 5000, the secondary list, the next four years in a row. So.

13, 14, 15, 16, 17. Five years in a row we were in the magazine.

Anthony Codispoti (01:05:45.838)
So tell me a little bit more about what that was like going through those lean years there in the middle and maybe something that you sort of carry with you today as a result of that.

Bashar Haddad (01:05:59.737)
you got to stay positive because you got to step, you got to keep moving forward. I mean, we could have given up and closed, closed our doors and gone and gotten another job. You know, that was the easy route. The easy route isn’t always the right route. You know, we, I just, I stayed positive. I kept calling. I didn’t give up. There was a lady that used to work, with my sister.

before we started the company. She was a recruiter and her goal every single day was to make 100 phone calls. Whatever the outcome was, she would not leave the office till she made 100 phone calls. And after my sister left, she was literally the most successful recruiter in the company. Because she just, you know, she was structured.

make my hundred phone calls, I can go home for the day. Some of the days were, you know, duds. Some of the days were incredibly successful. But if you give up after 60 phone calls, then you don’t know which ones, you know, you don’t know when that yes is coming in. And, you know, I kind of use the same mentality when I was calling contracting folks trying to get some business. I just kept calling, smiling down.

Anthony Codispoti (01:07:26.478)
Where do think this positivity comes from? You’re just born like this? Do you have good teachers growing up?

Bashar Haddad (01:07:32.821)
I had great teachers growing up. My father died when I was three months old.

My mother never remarried and I was raised by my mother and my aunt, Saraya, who is my father’s sister and my father’s family. They basically took us in and helped us and had incredibly positive role models. I have a deep faith in my religion. I’m Catholic. And I tell you what, it’s got me through every single day of my life. know, God looked out for me when I didn’t look out for him. That’s my famous little note.

message.

Anthony Codispoti (01:08:10.722)
love that. Is there more to that? God looked out for you when you didn’t look out for Him?

Bashar Haddad (01:08:16.469)
Yeah, when I was when I was 25 years old I moved out of the house I moved down to Florida I lived the bachelor life in Florida for four years before I got married Thank God I never got involved in drugs but I used to go out with my friends drinking at the bar and driving home which I think that I look back I’m like How did I even get home? You know, how stupid of I how stupid was I and you know God never I never got into trouble and

God always looked out for me. you know, I look back today, you know, hindsight is 20, 20. It’s easy to see these things later on. But when you’re going through it, you don’t recognize, but man, did he look out for me.

Anthony Codispoti (01:08:59.48)
That’s great. So where do you see SSI going now? What’s the future plans for it?

Bashar Haddad (01:09:06.879)
You know what, we’re gonna win some more work and we’re gonna keep the train going. I love what I do. I mean, I’ve done all kinds of different things in my life. I was an all state insurance agent. I used to own a beer and wine store. I was a real estate agent. I worked in the jewelry business, retail. I’ve done all kinds of stuff. This is the only thing that I do that I’ve done that I’ve enjoyed this much.

So, you know, and I’m 55 years old, I’m not ready to retire. And just want to win some more work and just keep the train going.

Anthony Codispoti (01:09:43.886)
Bashar, I just have one more question for you today, but before I ask it, I want to do two things. For folks listening today, if you like today’s content, please hit the like, subscribe, or share button on your favorite podcast app. Bashar, I also want to tell people the best way to get in touch with you. What would that be?

Bashar Haddad (01:10:00.309)
You can go to our website groupssi .com Feel free to give me a call our phone numbers on the website Ask for me Bashar had dad. I’m very open All my employees the doors open they walk in whenever they want. I’m very accessible I’ve called companies where I try to speak to the CEO or the CEO and the receptionist will say They’re not taking calls at this time. I take all my calls

people reach me, the government reaches me on Sundays. This is what I do, I love what I do. Don’t call me with a scam, please. I don’t have time for that, but if it’s something legitimate, I’d love to hear from you.

Anthony Codispoti (01:10:41.006)
Only scam free calls for Bashar, folks. All right, last question for you, Bashar. Yeah. Last question for you, Bashar. I’m curious how you see your business or maybe the larger industry that you’re participating in evolving in the next five years. What do you think the big changes are that

Bashar Haddad (01:10:44.425)
There you go. I knew I’m the only one.

Bashar Haddad (01:11:02.395)
That’s a good question. wish I would have had this one beforehand. So the government does sometimes make some mistakes. Okay. When they put out solicitations, LPTA, low price, technically acceptable. You know, the government buys products and the products could be as small as a pencil or as big as a ship. And they buy services. Products are tangible. You can compare them. Services, different companies provide different services.

It’s very difficult to put out a solicitation for services on an LPTA basis. Some companies provide the reason we got our blanket purchase agreement from USASOC, one of the companies who was supporting them, they were providing role players that just they thought they could just bring in actors. We brought in real people that did the actual job and, you know.

they would make a lot more money because they’d bring in just college students. OK, you’ve got to act like an Afghani whatever. You’ve got to act like this. And it’s harder to act when you don’t know how to speak the language. You don’t know what to say. You don’t know. You you think you’re given a script and there’s no scripts in these missions. But the government, think, has been burned several times with low price, technically acceptable. And they’re starting to put more and more things out.

best of value. It’s a trade off. Okay, the government will pay a little bit more to get exactly what we want. We don’t want the cheapest. The cheapest is not good for the boots on the ground. And that’s really the most important thing that the guys who get the training, the guys who need the mission have the mission sets, they get the training and the service they need, or they’re going to go overseas, and they’re not going to be prepared to deal with whatever might come their way. And I hope the government has learned that

LPTA is not always the best solution. Best value is the best value for the government. And I hope that’s the way it goes.

Anthony Codispoti (01:13:02.776)
Do you see yourself bidding less on LPTA because you guys are providing this kind of quality and it’s hard for you to compete on the price?

Bashar Haddad (01:13:12.671)
think I’m going to bid less. You know, when you’re a small company, you bid on whatever comes your way. As we get bigger, we’re a little more selective, you know, what are the chances we’re actually going to win? Who the incumbent is, there’s a lot of factors that go into play when you’re deciding on what to bid on one not to bid on. So I don’t know if I would bid less if it’s work that we’re confident in doing. I you know, I’ve told I’ve told my old program manager I said,

I’ll always give our competitor an opportunity to fail. And one of the contracts we had, it was a multi award IDIQ, which means they awarded to three companies, then all the task orders get competed between these three companies. We ended up winning 50 % of the task orders the first year, 80 % the second year, 100 % of the task orders the third year. So the other two companies just, the government didn’t want to do business with them anymore because they couldn’t deliver what the government needed.

So the government learned that they can’t always go with the lowest prices. Just because it’s the lowest price, you’re not getting exactly what you want.

Anthony Codispoti (01:14:19.534)
Bashar, I want to be the first one to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Bashar Haddad (01:14:26.045)
I certainly appreciate you reaching out to me and having me on your program. Thank you very much for your time and I look forward to talking to you soon.

Anthony Codispoti (01:14:34.338)
All right, folks, that’s another wrap on an episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today