Hey, Fat Head, remember the Long Tail? How the security market can connect with your niche capability.

During the war between Israel and Lebanon in 2006 (also called the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah War), I was an Operations Manager at a UK based Security & Risk Management company, overseeing protective security contracts with international News Media clients operating in the conflict zone.

One client Bureau Chief was, naturally, chasing the same agenda as his competition, and so needed to get his team rapidly across the border, in order to broadcast their latest scoop, or face professional embarrassment (and, by extension, individual career reckoning). He needed to move in armoured SUVs that we… ah… didn’t have access to. Local B6 vehicles were at a premium and we had lost contact, temporarily, with our in-country fixer. The job of saving our client from diminishing employment prospects – and us from losing credibility and future contracts – was becoming an unexpected and unwanted challenge.

At the same time, alongside the rise of the internet, a new business model was emerging: the “sharing economy” – also known as the access economy, or crowd-based capitalism, collaborative economy, community-based economy, gig economy, peer economy, peer-to-peer (P2P) economy, platform economy, renting economy and on-demand economy… You get the idea.

Without debating semantics, I’ll define it simply as faster and cheaper access to services in a way that reduces idle or spare capacity or promotes available niche, scenario-based capability.

“Spare capacity/niche capability” is typically found by word of mouth. Another method is in the “Long Tail” of search. Digital marketers will be aware of the terms Fat Head and Long Tail, which refer to the key word search element of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) management. In basic terms:

• Fat Head is a term used to refer to the small number of products / services that sell in large quantities.
• Long Tail is a term used to refer to the large number of products / services that sell in small quantities. It is a statistical pattern of distribution that occurs when a larger share of occurrences occur farther away from the center or head of distribution.

According to Chris Anderson, the Long Tail Economy is “rooted in the theory that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of mainstream products and markets at the head of the demand curve, and toward a huge number of niche products in the tail”. Utilizing third party products and services to manage a short term problem saves significantly on capex and associated costs. This is not new to the security management sector, of course – it’s a largely outsourced model by definition – but applying this at an even more granular, operational level, it is this Tail that can potentially help ensure the success of a client task, or even enable opportunities when you may not actually have the required resources immediately to hand.

The B6 armoured vehicles (with drivers) needed in Lebanon amounted to an immediate tactical requirement of niche capability in a very specific scenario – effectively, a Long Tail search. Yet Googling “armoured vehicle suppliers in [specific location in Lebanon], for short term lease” was unlikely to provide the required result, not least because the Long Tail – those individual providers with potentially spare capacity – a/. didn’t have easy access to the market, and b/. probably didn’t, and still don’t, assign the significant time or resource needed for SEO to account for each conceivable client requirement!

So, how do you access the Tail?

Pacing around the Operations Room in 2006, with one intellectually curious eye on the emerging sharing economy, I wondered how much easier life would be if I had access to a centralized resource with the ability to submit RFQs and receive detailed proposals from the supplier network, by return: accessing and assessing the best capability available for short term use, to solve the immediate problem.

The likely outcome? Delighted Client + Reduced Cost of Delivery = Promotion!

Six months later, transiting Baghdad International Airport, I was once again engaging in conversations that began with “Do you know a security company that can do…” which, of course, prompted the same thoughts, in an ever-broadening context, and one in which, at the time, security companies were incorporating by the hundreds per day! Who were they and, more importantly, could they be trusted to deliver?

Subsequent years have shown time and again that the problem is a perennial one – the security market is highly fragmented and opaque, largely contingent, and (in some areas, at least) increasingly regulated. The lack of easy, rapid access to resources slows down the procurement process, causing operational delays, incurring costs, and increasing liability exposure.

Fast forward to 2022, and social media provides at least a channel for asking that question – from ballistic PPE, to TSCM providers, to secure airport transfers, to drone surveillance capability, to communications equipment, to remote medical support, to close protection teams on short notice tasks… whatever and wherever the scenario demands.

However, despite the limited alternatives, and although they are used as a personal network referral option of first or last resort, LinkedIn and Facebook are not ideal places to go to source Security & Risk Management capability. If anything, their use compounds the problem. Not only are requests meshed with mostly irrelevant, self-serving drivel dressed up as helpful social or business commentary, with outreach actually limited by algorithms (it improves if you “boost” – ie, pay!), they are also ephemeral in nature, so unless you are “@mentioned” you need to be actually looking at your feed at the right time to spot an opportunity or gain any advantage. (The same applies on the flip side, of course, when promoting services through a personal feed).

When a request is posted, a number of prospects who do see it directly, or get referred, swarm over the opportunity like flies around the proverbial, with pleas to “call us”, which can cause the buyer to run down various rabbit holes and waste more precious time talking to those with a potentially less-than-optimal solution, and an equally suspect history of delivering it. More capable or more relevant suppliers are likely to miss the opportunity altogether because, by the time they see it, it’s gone (so to speak).

Procurement Process Deficiencies

Tactically, then, when X needs what Y has, and Y is incurring cost of ownership charges and zero or reduced cash flow because their assets are underutilized, yet social media cannot connect them, the system is not working as efficiently as it might. Value for both sides remains locked up due to an inability to access the market.

At a strategic level, for longer term, full service partnership, there are many sector-agnostic procurement software tools which can be used to aggregate and evaluate tender responses. Enterprise-level companies have mature, proprietary platforms for publishing ITTs, and sending out notifications to a subscribed pre-vetted network when they have a need. For the SME market, though, without a centralized resource, the procurement process that takes the buyer to an informed (de-risked) decision is often a slow, cumbersome, productivity drain, comprising:

• sourcing companies
• conducting compliance and due diligence, and seeking client references (if done at all!)
• establishing and managing a preferred supplier list
• distributing RFQs and ITTs
• managing requests for clarification
• receiving and organizing proposal submissions
• evaluating, weighting, and comparing providers
• negotiating terms and awarding contracts
• submitting and tracking purchase orders

I recently spoke to an NGO undertaking a project for the procurement of Manned Guarding Services in Nigeria – an actual “project“, ie, with significant management and other costly resource assigned – where the volume of the response meant that it would take weeks to turn it around and deliver anything meaningful, therefore consuming time and effort that could be better spent on something more worthwhile such as improving the deliverable, for example.

So…

1. If you cannot easily compare and contrast niche capability, or access spare capacity, which then impacts your ability to support client objectives, or prevents you capturing opportunities;
2. If it takes several weeks – even months – to run a procurement project, with significant productivity and resource investment that could be better used elsewhere

… I would argue that this is a business function in need of [better technology based] support, rather than a slap!

Re-Imagining the Ecosystem of Supply

From Lebanon, to Baghdad… to Ukraine, I believe security as an “enabler of business objectives” could benefit from the core principle of the sharing economy: the rapid access to spare capacity and niche capability via a centralised supplier network, generating mutually supporting value.

Marshal is developing procurement systems and networks to address the problem of access to both the Tactical (analogous to the Long Tail) and the Strategic (the Fat Head) procurement options in the Safety, Security, & Risk Management market.

Tactically, we help buyers to source and organise immediate operational solutions in the from of niche capability or spare / underutilized capacity for sale, lease, or contract via our RFQ system. From hardware and specialized equipment, to training courses and facilities, to personnel and consultancy, intelligence and information products, to fully equipped teams and integrated services, posting RFQs to our supplier network generates indicative proposals to enable faster, more informed procurement decision making, via dynamic marketing collateral that includes:

• Product or service descriptions supported by images and video
• Management, Operator, or Instructor bios and accreditations
• Company operating licenses and other compliance documentation
• Locations of supply and delivery capability
• Indicative Terms & Conditions, and suggested prices for buying, hiring, or contracting, as applicable.
• Dates of availability
• Customer testimonials
• Links to similar value services in the company’s portfolio.

Business Development, HR, Project & Procurement teams mitigate challenges, generate and respond to new opportunities, increase cash flow, resource projects, and reduce risk (liability exposure, cost, and delay), at scale.

Strategically, if you are responsible for, or are directly invested in protecting lives and safeguarding assets for your organisation, we would welcome insight into your experience of the strategic partnership procurement process, via our short survey. Thank you!

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Marshal is a Safety, Security, & Risk Management hub. We’re helping stakeholders resource the best capability available to protect lives and safeguard assets, where and when needed, by making procurement faster, easier, and more transparent. To post RFQs, or register as a Supplier or a Job Seeker, visit https://marshalhub.com/