E80: Services Down, Goods Up, and What It Signals Next

So spending is down, which kind of shocks me, honestly.

Like we always talk, it's never down.

It's always up, even in a deficit area, it's down.

But we're seeing some big numbers.

Like the benefit of working with a public sector is that keyword public, right? They make their data public, what they've spent money on, what contract vehicles they're using, etc.

It's a lot of data.

You have to parse through it.

But I've got a great data analysis team and the tools today that allow us to really do that.

So I wanted to know, and my question was like from fiscal year 24-25 to 25-26.

What did spending look like? Where did it go up? Where did it go down? And in what categories? Like what is government? And we focused on the state of California.

It's big enough.

What is government buying and where are they buying it? And so that was sort of the mission I sent my team off to sort of crunch some numbers on.

Okay, so that sounds like a massive project, and I know your team is really, really good at it.

You're intimate with the data all the time.

It's such a big subject.

Why don't we break it up into services and goods? And when I was reading the report, which I would encourage any listeners to, Reach out to Jen after the show and perhaps she'll hook you up with some of the insights.

Definitely check in.

It's a really cool report.

But the services component, if we start with services.

Technology's gotten more complicated.

We always hear about the deficit in state service among tech qualified employees.

So just from all the framing we hear, we would think that people are spending more on services, but that's not quite what your data shows.

It's actually really the opposite of what I was expecting.

So much so that I made my guys go back and make sure they didn't miss something or mess something up.

So we looked at the largest contract vehicles that sell services in the state of California.