Public vs Private Procurement: What's Different | Podcast

If you have ever tried to sell to a government entity after years of working in the private sector, you already know the experience is jarring. The timelines are longer, the paperwork is heavier, and the rules seem to multiply at every turn. But is public procurement actually worse than private? Or just different in ways that most vendors never take the time to understand?

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On Episode 7 of In Pursuit, host Mike Bitchick sits down with Jim Colangelo, former Chief Procurement Officer for the State of Michigan and Wayne County, the largest county in Michigan by population. Jim started his career in IT at Federal Mogul, moved through JetBlue, AAA, and a New York law firm before landing in public sector procurement, where he led a transformation that took Michigan from ninth to first in the country among state procurement organizations.

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His perspective on the difference between public and private sector procurement is grounded, honest, and full of practical insight for vendors trying to navigate both worlds. Watch the full episode here.

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Public vs Private Procurement: The Real Differences

The common perception is that public sector procurement is slow, arcane, and impossible to navigate. Jim pushes back on parts of that characterization while confirming others.

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On the technology side, the gap has largely closed. Most public entities are now on modern platforms, and the era of massive procurement transformation projects in government is largely over. Where the difference remains real is in process, approvals, and the legal framework that governs everything.

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"A big part of it is the law or policy. A lot of those laws were written a long, long time ago. And they were amended in a reactionary way. Meaning some kind of fraud may have taken place and someone said, we need a law so X never happens again. That's usually an overreaction, but what it does downstream is create a lot of process and paperwork that has to be jumped through."

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In private sector procurement, a contract might go from approval to signature through a director, a VP, and a CFO. In government, those same roles exist but are then followed by committee reviews, legislative oversight, and sometimes a public comment period. None of that can be skipped.

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The flip side, which Jim points out, is that private sector procurement has its own serious flaws. Projects get started and killed when leadership changes. Decisions get made based on relationships and gut feel rather than structured evaluation. Vendors can spend months on a deal that evaporates overnight. In government, that almost never happens. Once a project is funded and moving, it tends to see itself through.

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The Timeline Every Vendor Needs to Know

One of the most practical parts of the conversation is Jim's breakdown of what the actual procurement timeline looks like from the vendor's side.

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For a full RFP process at the state or county level, vendors should plan for nine to twelve months from the time a requisition enters the system to a fully executed contract. That includes roughly 30 to 60 days of internal preparation before the RFP hits the street, 30 days or more for the bid to be open, a scoring and evaluation period, committee and legislative reviews, and then contract execution and payment terms on top of that.

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"You might have a procurement cycle of two and a half to three months by the time a bid hits the street, gets scored, and is awarded. But then you may have another tail of a few months of reviews. And then you gotta cut a PO. And then you gotta get paid."

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For service contracts that require hiring staff to deliver, this creates a genuine cash flow challenge. A company might need to put people on payroll months before they receive their first payment. Jim is direct: there is no shortcut. The process is the process. But understanding it in advance is the difference between a vendor who plans for it and one who gets blindsided by it.

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Best Value vs. Low Bid: Why It Matters

One of the clearest differences between public and private sector procurement is how purchasing decisions get made. Jim draws a sharp distinction between low bid and best value, and explains when each applies.

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For commodities like road salt, lowest price wins. There is nothing else to evaluate. But for services, technology, and anything where quality of execution matters, government procurement uses best value: price plus other factors weighted according to publicly published criteria.

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"Do you want to buy the cheapest bulletproof vest for our state troopers? I don't think so. I want the ones that they want. I'll try to get the best price I can for them, but whatever the price is, we're going to work through that."

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This matters for vendors because it means price is rarely the only thing being evaluated. A well-structured proposal that demonstrates understanding of the agency's needs, strong past performance, and a credible implementation plan can beat a lower-priced competitor. The scoring criteria are published with the solicitation, and in many cases vendors can FOIA the scorecard after the fact to understand exactly how they were evaluated.

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In the private sector, that level of transparency almost never exists. Decisions often come down to relationships and conversations, with no formal record of how or why a vendor was chosen. Government procurement, for all its complexity, is actually more transparent and consistent than many private sector equivalents.

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The Triangle of Customers

Jim opens the conversation with a framework that shapes everything else he shares: the triangle of customers in procurement.

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The first customer is the internal stakeholder, the department or team requesting what they need. The second is the supplier. And the third is the procurement team itself.

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On the supplier side, Jim makes a point that is worth sitting with: he refuses to call them vendors.

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"A vendor is an old technology. A vendor is a vending machine. Your suppliers are your customers. Can they reach you? Can they interact with you? Is it hard to do business with you? Are you mean to them? Do you squeeze them year over year just for savings and don't care about a partnership?"

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This framing has direct implications for how vendors should approach government procurement relationships. The procurement office is not an obstacle between you and the contract. It is a customer you need to serve well. Showing up with that mindset, being easy to work with, being responsive, being transparent, changes how you are perceived throughout the process.

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How to Actually Get Into Government Procurement

The most actionable part of the conversation comes at the end, when Jim walks through exactly what a company with no government experience should do to break in.

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Step one: go to the websites of the government entities you want to work with and register in their procurement system. Fill out your categories and commodity codes carefully, because that is how you get notified when relevant bids go out.

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Step two: find the procurement director, deputy director, or category manager relevant to your area and request a meeting.

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"Just set up a meeting and say, hey, I just want to come talk to you. That's a huge part of what procurement does. We're there to find new suppliers and establish those relationships. If they say no, you probably don't want to work with them. They're not going to say no."

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Once that relationship is established, check in every couple of months. Ask what is coming up. Stay visible without being pushy. And critically, do not go around procurement to pitch directly to department heads or elected officials. That approach triggers red flags immediately and can damage your chances far more than it helps.

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"Doing a run around of procurement is the bane of our existence. That's when our red flags go up. It's better to start with procurement than around them."

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Small Business in Government: It Is Possible, But You Need a Strategy

One of the harder realities Jim addresses is the tension between government's stated goal of supporting small and diverse businesses and the structural reality that large contracts are difficult for small companies to win alone.

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His practical advice for small businesses is twofold. First, look for opportunities to team with other small businesses to collectively cover the scope of a large contract. Second, actively seek subcontractor roles on larger bids, particularly in construction and professional services where subcontractor diversity requirements are increasingly common.

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"If you're a small business, look for partners. Also look to be a subcontractor. A lot of bids go out now, especially in construction, where a certain percentage of your subs need to be minority, women-owned, or veteran-owned businesses. If you can be a subcontractor to a bigger company, go to them."

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Local certification also matters. In cities like Detroit, local preference credits can provide a meaningful scoring advantage, but the certification process takes time. Jim's implicit advice: start that process well before a relevant bid comes out, not after.

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What Jim Changed at the State of Michigan

When Jim arrived as CPO for the State of Michigan, the procurement organization was in trouble. Attrition was in double digits. Staff were leaving for other state agencies where they could do half the work for the same pay. There was no reliable spend data. And a transformation effort had started and stalled multiple times.

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His approach was straightforward but demanding. He met one-on-one with every member of his team. He then took his show on the road to the directors of every state agency, asking what was broken and what they needed. He stripped the existing transformation plan down to its essential components, collapsed management layers, and reorganized the team around two equally important functions: sourcing and customer experience.

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The team that had been handling reporting, FOIA requests, supplier risk, and training had been treated as back office support. Jim elevated them.

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"That team, to go all the way back to the JetBlue conversation, that's the customer experience team. They were a red-headed stepchild treated without a lot of respect for the work they did, and they were now elevated. This is really important work."

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He also started measuring things that had never been measured before: cost savings, customer satisfaction scores from both suppliers and internal stakeholders, cycle times, and data quality. Michigan went from ninth to first among state procurement organizations in the country.

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The One Rule That Guides Everything

Near the end of the conversation, Jim shares something he learned early in his career from a partner at a New York law firm.
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"If I can't read through this contract and understand it as a non-attorney, as a regular person, if I can't understand it, it's garbage. If it's full of legalese and things that nobody can understand, it's trash."

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He applies that standard to almost everything: contracts, transformation plans, procurement processes, bid documents. If a reasonably intelligent person cannot understand it, it needs to be simplified. Complexity, in Jim's view, is usually a sign that something is being made to seem more important than it is, not that the work itself is genuinely difficult.

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For vendors trying to figure out how to win government contracts, that principle is worth borrowing. The proposals that win are not the ones loaded with corporate language and feature lists. They are the ones that clearly answer what the agency asked, demonstrate genuine understanding of the problem, and make it easy for evaluators to say yes.

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This post is based on Episode 7 of In Pursuit, featuring Jim Colangelo, former Chief Procurement Officer for the State of Michigan and Wayne County. Watch the full episode for more on scoring committees, cooperative contracts, protest processes, and how AI is beginning to change the way procurement teams work.

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