Looking into your future

I spoke with employee 1 of a 200 person government contracting company, and he described some interesting stages in a company:

• 0 employees - Use your network to get your first sub-contract
• 1 - 20 employees - Do good work, figure out some basic admin (finance/HR), get on GSA MAS or equivalent contract vehicles, leverage contacts to win small prime bids and continue to grow sub-contracts
• 20 - 50 employees - Hire some support staff (finance, proposal manager, HR, etc.), partner with large prime to grow further
• 50 - 100 employees - Start bidding and winning on large prime projects. Hire management team
• 100 + employees - More infrastructure investments (e.g. IT support), monitor opportunity pipeline, etc.

This is consistent with what I've heard from others.

Two takeaways from this:

• At 0 employees, you rely on your personal reputation and your network to kick things off as a 1099/sub-contractor. This seems universal and I describe how to do this in my book
• Anything above 0 employees requires increasing amount of organizational overhead, and require you to do a lot of different things to grow.

If you're not into the idea of doing all the things you need to do grow, there is a good case to be made for staying a one person shop (i.e. solo 1099).

You can have a great, above average lifestyle and then do other things that are more interesting to you on the side instead of spending all your time trolling SAM.gov for opportunities. Going 1099 requires about the same amount of effort as finding a good job every few years. Building a business requires far more effort and a lot more types of effort.

No wrong answer here. It's just something to think about if you're using going 1099 as a way to start a company that you'll want to grow.

Want the full playbook? Check out Going 1099.