By Mariel Reed, Founder & CEO, Pavilion
I founded Pavilion to improve the lives of all Americans by making public procurement work better. How? By creating technology that empowers public servants to deliver better, public services from a larger and more diverse group of businesses.
“Empower public servants” is a guiding value for our company. That’s deeply personal to me. I came to public service from the startup technology industry, where I helped build user-friendly consumer experiences. But the technology I had access to as a public servant was stuck in the '90s. To find suppliers who had been awarded competitively-solicited contracts, I relied on calls, emails, and visiting websites one by one. It felt like a losing game of "Go Fish."
So I started Pavilion to change the game. Pavilion saves public servants time finding suppliers available on cooperative contracts, all in one place. We’re committed to providing Pavilion at no cost to public employees. This aligns with our mission and our values: if we required all public servants who might benefit from Pavilion to go through the procurement process to use our product, we’d limit our growth and therefore our social impact.
So, how does Pavilion make money?
In the early days, the answer to this question was simple: we didn’t. We were focused solely on building a great product for public entity users, and we could deliver a lot of value by aggregating and organizing public information. Today, Pavilion is a trusted resource for more than 2,500 public entities across all 50 states who annually spend over $1.5B with suppliers they find on our platform.
Now, we’re taking the next step in delivering a better public buyer experience on Pavilion by inviting suppliers to more actively participate on the platform.
Any business can be listed as a supplier and contacted by our public entity users through the platform for free. Suppliers benefit from selling off contracts their business has already won, which is much less expensive than participating in a new competitive solicitation process.
More recently, we've started offering suppliers the opportunity to invest in growing their public sector business by opting into a paid experience on our platform called “Pro.” Pro suppliers get more visibility on Pavilion, unlocking features that we know matter to public entity buyers. Going forward, you can expect to:
- See more relevant results in searches and get more information about Pro Suppliers up-front. Pro Suppliers access features that allow them to share more information about their business, including detailed information about the products and services within the scope of their awarded contracts and information about other public entities they’ve served. By collecting this additional information from Pros, which goes well beyond what is readily publicly accessible, Pavilion can help public entity buyers expedite their discovery process and more confidently display results in search that we know meet your needs and preferences.
- Quickly hear back from Pro Suppliers. We’ve received feedback from public servants who are frustrated by suppliers who respond slowly, or sometimes not at all, to their inquiries. We work with each Pro Supplier to make sure they have the proper internal processes to quickly respond to your questions when you message or call them through Pavilion. We track supplier response times so we can help get you a response within 24 hours.
Our objective is to create a positive feedback loop where public servants are more empowered to get the information they need and receive a higher level of customer service from suppliers, and suppliers who invest in delivering this kind of experience can grow their public sector business.
Now as ever, I’m energized by what we’re building and the opportunity to align our business incentives with the impact we seek to deliver for public servants and the communities they serve. As we continue to scale, we’re steadfastly guided by our North Star: “Empower public servants.” Thank you for joining us on this journey - onwards!
