Blackdragon was conceived to be a revolutionary disruptor to the federal industry which is renowned for its reluctance to change. Before the digital age, sustainable competitive advantage once came from maximizing the scale of production whereas now, it comes via the network effect of efficiently connecting consumers with external producers. As the only genuine platform business in its industry, part of Blackdragon’s commendable growth is powered by the fact that it does not manage networked supply chains like traditional companies but rather is a living, networked global workforce available for any task on-demand. While scale remains critical to achieving sustainable advantage the nature of scale is changing in the digital age. While Blackdragon’s competitors still try to achieve an advantage by gaining scale within their internal organizations, Blackdragon achieves scale by orchestrating the most valuable ecosystem of supply. Compared to competitors who are ‘pipeline businesses’ trying to manufacture and control all of their products and services internal to the organization, Blackdragon operates at a higher scale since its supply is elastic allowing it to achieve greater quality since it can offer consumers more personalized choice at reduced operating costs.
Blackdragon’s unmatched platform model is underpinned by network effects, or demand-side economies of scale, as opposed to supply-side economies of scale-like that of competitors. These arise not from maximizing production but facilitating the interactions that make its platform more valuable for every participant, such as making it quicker and cheaper to consistently create a high-quality proposal on behalf of a client. And since network effects are not subject to diminishing, but instead increasing, returns to scale, Blackdragon is enabling the market to move from having a few dominant players to winner-takes-most.
Blackdragon offering a revolutionary new business model with fresh thinking initially faced a slow rate of early adopters willing to try unfamiliar solutions. Some of the significant challenges the Blackdragon is trying to address and there are federal industry is 1. The industry is notorious for its glacial pace for adopting material change. Too many companies still try to win contracts using the same outdated tactics and practices from decades ago. In many cases, companies wrongly believe the secret to creating winning proposals is strict adherence to repeated processes for each bid pursuit. This applies to risk-averse companies focusing more on allocating minimal resources over the maximum number of bids to achieve operational efficiency more than competitive effect. 2. Most bidder companies continue to believe they can hire a skeleton crew of staff employees to do business development, pipeline management, and proposal development while augmenting this core staff with ad hoc part-time consultants paid by the hour. Effectively, they tried to win every proposal using the same set of people and resources even though winning each contract requires different mixes of talent, experiences, and capabilities.
Blackdragon offering a revolutionary new business model with fresh thinking initially faced a slow rate of early adopters willing to try unfamiliar solutions.
The challenge of staying abreast and relevant to the changing trends in our market space is lower than competitors because Blackdragon has a unique advantage given the multitude of clients that it serves. Blackdragon, being a living body of entrepreneurial-minded freelancers who are experts at winning contracts throughout the federal industry, stays in tune with market trends because its family of Dragons is disbursed throughout the breadths and depths of the industry is always in the know. Additionally, it has the advantage of operat- ing in scale doing so many projects for so many clients which gives an enterprise vantage point to monitor developing trends that smaller firms are not able to detect or discern on a timely basis. Blackdragon has managed to achieve tenacity to deliver well and consistently over the years to its customer base by doing what its competitors cannot. It operates a shared-risk business model where its expert freelancers are incented to win the contract on behalf of the client, not just clock in hours regardless of the outcome.
The tag of being a trusted organization has positively impacted and changed Blackdragon’s position and consequently the position of its clients. Blackdragon has earned a renowned reputation for producing high-quality products with unequaled accountability because it shares risk with our clients; it has skin in its game when it comes to winning each contract. As a result, Blackdragon is looked at as an industry thought leader with an aggressive entrepreneurial culture that wants to win every contract it pursues a client. Blackdragon brings the on-demand economy to the federal industry for winning contracts. Platform businesses are often successful because they are highly disruptive to their industry. Blackdragon has ‘productized’ the full spectrum including everything it takes for the right companies to win the right federal contracts. Its robust portfolio of on-demand products and services are made-to-order, deliverable-based, fixed price solutions that better align with the industry’s growing appetite for higher quality, greater convenience, increased speed, lower costs, and simplicity.
The culture of Blackdragon is more global, more varied, and more liquid than our traditional compet- itors. Blackdragon is more functional with less need for managerial hierarchies and operates more kaleidoscopically like a team of teams quickly forming for each new project, completing the tem- porary task then disbanding only to allow the free- lancers to perpetually self-form into new teams. “We’re not at liberty to disclose the finer details of the road map for Blackdragon but what we can tell you is we’re excited about the unprecedented potential we see ahead. Stay tuned!” says Rob Rosenberger, CEO & Co-Founder when asked about the roadmap for his company. Blackdragon is under perpetual development and embraces opportunities to improve its business model. Unlike conventional firms that deal with risk aversion, Blackdragon is not afraid to fail by experimenting with new ways to win for our bidder clients. It is continuously exploring developing benefits of advancing technology, crowdsourcing, machine to machine learning, and predictive analytics.
