Blair tells the story of recreation.gov and how its performance pay deal has been nothing but wins for every party involved, with plenty of lessons for buyers and sellers of all kinds of services.

Links

"Performance Pay Leads to a $500M Website" by Blair Enns for winwithoutpitching.com

Recreation.gov

Transcript

David C. Baker: All right, Blair, today's topic is how to get paid $500 million to build a website. The entire crowd woke up. Oh, I want to learn that.

Blair Enns: This is not one of these spoof episodes.

David: Yes, right. It's sad that we have to tell people that anymore.

Blair: Because it's a bit of a spoofy title, isn't it?

David: It is. How to get paid $500 million to build a website. Who doesn't want to do that? Was this story in your most recent book, The Four Conversations?

Blair: No, I don't think so.

David: Wait, you don't think so? Who wrote the book?

Blair: You know how you write a book. When it's out and it's done, it's like the last thing you want to do is read that book. I'll read it in a couple of years. I'm sure it's very good because I didn't go deep into pricing, and I didn't get into performance pay at all. I have been sitting on this story for a little while. Then, when Booz Allen came up in the news in the last couple of months, I knew what the numbers were, what they had earned when I first heard of the story. It was in the range of $165 million. I went looking for an update, and my mind was blown.

David: I'll just be honest, between you and me and thousands of people, I wasn't sure this was real either. I knew it was real, but I didn't think it was this real. I started looking at it, and it's like, "Shoot, this is one of those times that Blair is not exaggerating." Tell us the story. You and Colette actually experienced using this thing, too.

Blair: When I knew I had to use the app, oh, I was so excited to use it, and it was everything I hoped it would be. I've been aware of this story for about three, maybe four years. This is 2025. Yes, so around 2022. It was the front page story on The Wall Street Journal above the fold, the large type. It was actually not a negative headline. It was, Americans are flooding back to national parks, and one consulting firm is reaping the rewards.

Let me leap forward in time. Some of the listeners might not remember Doge, but it was a big thing back in May of 2025. At peak Doge, when Elon and his team were going through the US government finances, basically looking for fraud, waste, and abuse, one of the things that they uncovered was this consulting company called Booz Allen Hamilton, goes by BA or Booz Allen, 12 billion in annual revenue, when the source of 98% of the revenue was the federal government.

David: That might be a client concentration issue. I don't know. Seems like it qualifies.

Blair: It's spread out throughout numerous departments within the federal government. In a climate where people are looking for government waste, these numbers, 12 billion and 98% of it coming from the federal government, just sent some people into this stratospheric-- They just lost their shit over it. I knew at least where some of that revenue came from. I knew some of it came from the website that is known as recreation.gov, which Booz Allen won in somewhere around 2017. The website launched in 2019 or so.

I knew that hundreds of millions of dollars of that 12 billion came from this contract. I thought it was a couple hundred million. Turns out it's approaching $500 million, and it will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $580 million by the time their 10-year contract runs out. I thought they didn't deserve the flak they were getting because I was so proud of this consulting company that I don't know, and I was so proud of the government procurement people who hired them on this basis. This firm got rich- within the scope of their revenues, they're not getting rich. They earned a massive amount of money, and it cost the US taxpayer absolutely nothing. The media went crazy over it.

David: They thought it was crazy that Booz was making that much money?

Blair: Yes. Anytime you see a government contractor making hundreds of millions of dollars, your immediate thought is who screwed up or who conspired on the government side with their cronies at the consulting company to feather their pockets to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. That's not how it went down. Now, if I back up just a little bit, I'll do a comparison of two different US government websites. Last March, Colette and I are down in California. We want to go hiking in Joshua Tree National Park. As we're pulling up to the park, we realize, "Oh, we need a pass." The sign says go to their website. You go to their website, you're redirected to recreation.gov.

I thought, "Oh, shit." I've been to the website, but I've never used it before. "This is a government website, and I have to make a purchase. How onerous is this going to be?" I know it's going to be a good experience because I know Booz Allen just killed it on this project. It's this beautiful user experience, very intuitive. Within two or three clicks, I'm paying for my park pass with Apple Pay on my phone. Then we pull up to the gate, show the pass, and in we go. It was just like going into Disneyland. I've never been to Disneyland, but it was just like going into a really well-run private enterprise. It was very ungovernment-like.

Now, if I contrast that experience with another experience, as soon as I got home, I had to start working on renewing my-- I'm Canadian. I have a US visa. I've had one for going on 20 years now. I have to renew it every five years. I had to renew my US visa. Now, the websites involved in this process--

David: A little different.

Blair: It's everything you would expect from an online government experience. This isn't a knock against the US government or the federal government. You would expect this type of experience with almost every level of government in any country in the world, except for Estonia or some of the really technically advanced countries. Nothing works. It crashes all the time. The wayfinding is horrible. It contradicts itself. It looks dated. It feels dated. Doesn't work on some browsers.

I would say it's a frustrating experience, but it's not because we know going in, this is an online government experience. It's not going to be easy. The onus is on me to do all the work to figure it out, and there just seems to be no impetus on the part of the provider here to make it easy. That's just because of the bureaucratic nature of government. Anyway, I'm not trying to call out the US State Department or whatever the website is. I'm just saying that's the norm, and we all accept it.

Recreation.gov is an entirely different experience. This is like a private enterprise. Everything from the design, the entire user experience, the way you can pay on your phone, they give up the whatever percent to Apple. It's just seamless. It's like this was not designed and built by a government agency. It wasn't. It was designed and built by Booz Allen Hamilton. The reason this web experience is so freaking good is the way they were paid.

David: Right. Not cost plus. It's not like we don't yet have Air Force One after 4,800 years. I have my own experience with this. Last night, I was filling out-- I'm starting to do some work at a maximum security prison here in Nashville.

Blair: On the inside or the outside?

David: Hopefully, on the outside. I'm going to be on the inside, but I have to get all this paperwork done so that I'm not going to fly out everybody in a helicopter or something.

Blair: I'm sorry. What are you doing in a maximum security prison?

David: Oh, I'm working with the prisoners about life skills and so on. I have to be approved by the state level to do it. It's a maximum security, so they're a little careful about it, understandably.

Blair: Is this a whole other podcast, or do we need to talk about this now?

David: No, we don't need to talk about it now. You're distracting me. My point was they're asking, there's a home phone and a work phone, and there's no contact for mobile phone. How many years has it been since I've even had a home phone? Anyway, yes, I understand this completely.

Blair: Yes, that's like the experience of a typical government website.

David: Exactly.

Blair: It asks you for this information. What's your fax number? You can't proceed until you give them a fax number.

David: You make one up, and nobody will ever check on it. You went in. You were expecting a good experience, but it was even better than a good experience. Your point is that the reason this was done was because somebody decided to price this differently to arrange the incentives differently, right?