How This Principal BizDev Candidate Turned a Last-Minute Requirement Crisis into a Successful Deal Closure

So talk about a time where, um.

Makes sense. OK. This is when, um, I was at Boeing. I was in business development again we're back on the Singapore deal. Um, I already Give you the background. I'm not gonna, I could go to the background again, but essentially now we're 1 month away from closing the deal. Um, as I mentioned, we're squared away on requirements and we're 1 month left and I'm with my capture team. So you can think of a capture team of a 4-member team. Um, you have the chief engineer, uh, that was me at the time. Um, we had the program manager, um, you had your retired Air Force pilot, and you also have a legalese folks, and so 4 of us are down there. We're about to celebrate. They're about to close the contract. And we're sitting in the room and uh Pei Chu, I remember this clearly, the Singaporean PM uh was excited we're about to close the deal and she said there's one more thing, um, we need to levy about 125 requirements that our airworthiness team needs satisfied before we can fly aircraft in Singapore. What airworthiness means is they're like the FAA of the US and they give the check for them to fly or not. A little to set the benchmark, it took us 2 years to take 200 requirements from Singapore and work them all out. We have a month left and I have to work with my engineers back in the US and trying to resolve the 125 airworthiness requirements. First thing I did was I asked Page you, can I, can I quickly see these requirements? Um, it was Monday morning, um, I think 9 or 10 Singaporean time, and she said, Sure. I went into a different conference room and I quickly perused these 125 requirements. After I reviewed them, there were two things I was looking at. One, Are there requirements that I can estimate for the other teams, and 2, what are the requirements that I can't really estimate because of potential scope creep or my lack of understanding of the technology? After about an hour or two right before lunchtime, I came back into the room and, and, and told them that I'm gonna need about a week since Monday. By next Monday, we should have a good answer of how we're going to incorporate this into the contract. I got a ping on my laptop from Ed Palle, who was the, the capture team lead, and he, and he put down, let's make it Wednesday, smiley face. Uh, so now I have to, um, work with our engineering team in the US specifically, I have to work with the engineering managers who are responsible for meeting these requirements that are impacted by it and ask them to see how we can incorporate this without increasing the cost. A little background, um, our Boeing CFO made a deal with Singapore that they would sell them 8 helicopters for half a billion dollars at the high level. And the way Boeing would make a profit would be we'd be selling them baseline helicopters with the cost of the upgrade. Now I'm gonna go to these engineers who've already set the price for the contract and we already had a place and ask them without reducing cost, can you satisfy these or what was the minimal cost? I knew I was gonna get a lot of pushback, um, just historically when you get unknown requirements, a lot of people push back, so I have to be careful. So the first thing I had to do was, um, craft my message carefully for the managers to make sure they understand the urgency, and I asked them rather than giving me hours. To look at past programs, um, in the past, so look at our Army, Navy, and other international programs where we tested these requirements and if we can use that same test data to substantiate these requirements, rationale here was if I can use that test data, I didn't have to increase the hours and really keep the cost of the upgrades low. I remember Ed McKeever. He's like, Yeah, great, we'll do it. I'm gonna need like 23 weeks. I can't. How am I gonna just pull up reports out of the blue? I'm like, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna, Ed, I'm gonna need it within 24 hours. Got him in his back pocket. Yeah, Ed's like, he laughed. He's like, Are you serious? I'm like, Ed, we're trying to really close the deal. We're trying to make Boeing's 4th quarter earnings. He's like, Look, we're fine. I don't know. I mean, do you have any idea? I'm like, let me talk to Phil. Phil was the technical lead at that time. I'm like, let me work with Phil. Let me work with Andy. And so now I'm bringing Andy back in the picture. Uh, Andy now knows Singapore really well. Let's work together and see what we can do. I'll have Andy go through all the requirements and have Phil, um, work with us to understand which ones we can substantiate, which ones we cannot. Uh, we're at 9 p.m. Monday night. Um, I work probably to 2, 2 a.m. Singaporean time, which was 20 p.m. uh Boeing time, grabbed a four-hour nap, woke up, um, Tuesday 9:00 a.m., um, which was 9 p.m. now in Boeing US time, and me, Andy, Ed, we got Ed back on the call, and the result there was that out of the 125, we were down to 30 requirements that I had to review. Out of the 30, there were 5 that we couldn't substantiate with the customer.

were

We could not. We could not use that test report. And, and at this point I asked Ed, like, Ed, give me a slag, very conservative. Give me a number that you can give me. Ed gave me a number, um, and I took that number back to Ed Pallock, who was the business lead, um, before we went to the meeting, told Ed, like, Ed, it's gonna be around 500 hours that Ed's gonna need to substantiate these requirements. Ed looked at me and he's like. All right, we're gonna do that, but they're gonna have to take a 10% cost reduction in those hours. So, um, we're looking around close like 450. Um, I pinged Ed back. Ed laughed. He's like, yeah, I kind of figured I worked with Ed before. We'll take it. We'll do the 450. I padded enough that it'd be able to handle it. We, uh, my result, um, we presented to the Singaporean government and they were not happy. They looked at me like, wait, you're not going to test these. You're going to use prior test data to substant these requirements. I told Page Chu that look, we've done these requirements in the past. We have a helicopter that we built 4 or 5 years ago, has close to 5000 flying hours. We have test data that we can give you that are very standard test data that even your Singaporean engineers can understand. But there are 5 that we don't have data on. Those are the 5 that we're gonna inherit, and, and Patriot, it actually helps you because By doing, by substantiating these requirements, we can help reduce the delays in production and in testing, so you'll get your aircraft sooner than what was planned. However, these 5, let's work together and see how we can resolve them. Uh, she's like, All right, let me think about it. Uh, they came back a week later, uh, they worked with the engineers. They accepted the 5. There were 2 more though that they just weren't happy with the flight test data. Uh, these were radio requirements, um, that they needed, um, us to test only because the mission of these helicopters were to be used in an area where there's a lot of radio frequencies. Uh, so we worked with our comms manager at that time. Um, same story. Ask him that, look, we can't substantiate it. Are you going to be able to do this in the timeline? Um, he's like, fine, um, but it's gonna cost as many hours. Uh, Ed was fine with it, um, and then we're able to quickly close the contract, uh, in time to meet our 4th quarter earnings.

Yeah, so before going to Ed, I had to be careful. I wanted to guard the deal's time, right? I knew going in there that there was going to be pushback. This is not the first time they're estimating. Um, we're at a time at Boeing where we were making a lot of international deals. And so I knew that if I went in there and asked them to look at all 125, they would just pad the hours like, yeah, that's great. And so already knowing the pushback that I would get, I had to prepare myself accordingly. And so I did the due diligence first before approaching them. I don't manage Ed or his team, um, and so I asked, I had to be careful. I wanted to craft. I worked with, uh, Phil before and Phil's a member of Ed's team and so. Rather than asking Ed to substantiate everything, I already gave him a plan, like, look, I know you're going to push back. I've worked with Phil in the past. Here's the plan. Here's the process. If you do this, let's come back. I'm not going to give Ed your final numbers. Let's meet up on Tuesday morning. I'll tell you what we're able to do and what was not able to do, and that's how we got that final 5 requirements that we couldn't really estimate appropriately.