How often do incumbent contractors win the recompete?

Companies business projections — their pipeline for future business — is based on 100% certainty that we’re going to win the same work again and again. No company plans on not winning their recompeted work.

 

Which makes me wonder, what’s the percentage of incumbent wins. I wonder if there’s a stat on that somewhere. I would say in my experience and the contracts I’ve awarded, it wasn’t much north of 50 percent. It’s not even close to a guarantee.

That was from an interesting episode of the Contracting Officer Podcast, 292 – No Change please. There was an interesting discussion at the beginning about how customers often have high switching costs, which is why firms in insurance, cable, banks, and other sectors will have low teaser rates to draw a customer in and then raise the rates with the hopes that many will avoid the process of switching.

In the government, switching — or at least recompeting the work — is required every 5 years by the Federal Acquisition Regulation. A major difference in the government world is that the buyer — the contracting officer — is a separate individual than the customer — or the user/operator.