Bloomberg Government saw 26 percent growth in first quarter

Josh Eastright, head of Bloomberg Government, sent out the following to its staff on Wednesday:

Hi Everybody,

By now, I hope you’ve read Mike’s email. Ahead of our Town Hall at 11:30, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts and attempt to answer some of the questions you likely have. The answers to what I suspect are some of your first questions are yes, yes and yes. Read to the end and you’ll find out if I guessed right.

First, I want to say how proud I am of this team. It’s been a year since I took over BGOV, and since then, we’ve grown our business dramatically, including 26% year over year growth through Q1, improved our product and content, and helped to sell Terminals and grow Terminal usage. And both the Government Affairs and Government Contracting businesses are on a tear. The GA business just finished its best Q1 for sales in our history and GC just had their second best sales month ever in March.

At the same time, I’ve heard from you that we need to find ways to accelerate our product development, take better advantage of and have more connections to Bloomberg’s other resources in Washington, and provide you with more local career opportunities. And that’s what today’s announcement is all about. With more focus on the Government Affairs and Government Contracting market than any time since BGOV started, there have never been greater opportunities for BGOV and for Bloomberg in Washington than right now.

To take advantage of this, on July 1, we’re going to combine our most powerful assets including Bloomberg Government, Daily Report for Executives, Money & Politics Report, Congress Tracker and Federal Contracts Report into a new Government business unit at BBNA. For the first time, all of Bloomberg’s product, content, engineering, data and sales resources focused on the Government Affairs and Government Contracting market will be aligned around one business.

And by becoming a part of BBNA, we’re going to have access to the scale of a DC-based organization with ten times the number of employees and resources that BGOV has on its own – which means great things for our product and our customers – and for you to grow your career. Just as important, BBNA is committed to the same values that we have at BGOV around building innovative products, taking care of our people and Diversity & Inclusion.

So now, back to those questions. The first answer is yes – there is a job for everyone at BBNA. We are investing in this business and this isn’t about cuts or saving money. The second answer is yes – we are staying at 1101 K for at least the next year – and we’ll be joined here by a number of our new colleagues from BBNA and the Bureau. The last answer is yes – you will keep your Terminal and access to all the features you need to do your job, as well as pickimg up a number of new tools and resources that BBNA has access to.

You’ve all worked incredibly hard over the past few years to build BGOV into what it is today. The investment and trust the company is putting into us to take this next step in BGOV’s evolution is a sign of how excited Bloomberg is about our progress and the opportunity the company sees in our team, our product and our market.

I look forward to speaking with all of you shortly in the open area.

Josh