GovSpend isn’t just an invaluable tool to find data on government agencies, it’s also used to search for data on the companies doing business with government agencies. Frontline Education, a school administration software company, is one of these users. Frank Tait, Sr. Vice President of Corporate Development, uses GovSpend to determine potential acquirable Software as a Service (SaaS) companies based on their sales to K12 school districts.
Useful Data Saves Time
Frank jumps into GovSpend several times in a day, grabbing any data that he needs for his job. Before GovSpend, Frank or one of his colleagues would have to submit freedom of information (FOIA) requests to the public schools for the data that they needed. However, this alerts those companies to the fact that they’re looking at them. Now GovSpend provides that data so they can quietly maintain their anonymity until they’re ready to approach a potential acquisition.
When looking at a potential acquisition, some of the data he finds most useful is the company’s client base, who they sell to the most, who are their biggest clients, and what are their biggest sales. He specifically looks to acquire companies with at least 80% of their business in K12. With one quick search in GovSpend, he can determine if a client fits this criteria and either dig deeper or move on to the next potential acquisition.
One of Frank’s colleagues contacted him about a potential acquisition and the first thing he did was to pull up GovSpend and run a quick search. Within a few moments, he knew this acquisition wasn’t a good fit because the company predominantly sold to higher education rather than K12 organizations. It’s this kind of data verification that saves him time so he can make sure he is pursuing businesses that will bear fruit.
A Key Research Tool
Frank has only been using GovSpend for less than a year and it’s already become a key research tool. While general search engines often try to fill in the blanks and generate what it thinks the answer is, GovSpend allows him to look for raw data, identifying individual component pricing that is part of a purchase order. GovSpend may not necessarily give him every piece of data he needs, but it points him in the right direction.
“I consider myself a power user. I’ve already been in GovSpend 4 times today to run searches,” says, Frank Tait, Sr. Vice President of Corporate Development at Frontline Education.
To get a sense of the GovSpend system, he searched his own company and found 134 variances of the company name out of 468 possibilities due to all the ways agencies will sometimes fill out a purchase order. The application helps identify those variances, including prior company names and businesses consolidations through acquisitions so users can find as much relevant data as possible on a company.
The way Frank leverages GovSpend is just one of many ways to use its historical spending data to create new business strategies. Take a sneak peek into the application’s data today and see how it can help your company grow.
About Frontline Education
Frontline Education is an integrated insights partner serving more than 12,000 educations organizations, over 80,000 schools and millions of educators, administrators and support personnel in their efforts to develop the next generation of learners. With nearly 20 years of experience serving the front line of education. Frontline Education is dedicated to providing actionable insights that enable informed decisions and drive engagement across school systems.
Bringing together the best education software solutions into one unified platform, Frontline makes it possible to efficiently and effectively manage the administrative needs of the education community, including their recruiting and hiring, absence and time management, professional growth, special educations and employee records management. Frontline Education corporate headquarters are in Malvern, Pennsylvania, with offices in Andover, Massachusetts, Austin, Texas, and Rockville Centre, New York.
Learn more at www.FrontlineEducation.com
