Improve Your Company's Contracting Growth

Capture Management and Proposal Training: Every company should have career development plans for its employees and offer professional development training for its management, key employees and especially for those people involved in business development, capture management, and proposal development. They should also provide training in proposal writing for technical and managerial professionals to help them write more compelling proposals.

Business Acquisition Process: It is principle that having a well-structured business acquisition process increases business acquisition effectiveness and reduces cost. Documenting these processes is the first step in raising the maturity of the business acquisition process. All companies of any reasonable size should have defined, repeatable businesses acquisition processes covering the business development, capture, pre-proposal preparation, proposal development, and post-proposal submission phases of the business acquisition life cycle. These processes should be fully supported by management and used for all new business acquisition.


Capture Management: Companies should evaluate every new business pursuit monthly and make an affirmative decision to continue, delay or suspend the pursuit. If no reviews are conducted, then every new business opportunity remains in play, even when it is clear that the company can’t win. Proper capture management reduces the effort spent on opportunities that are likely to be losers and focuses effort on opportunities with a better chance of winning. Measuring capture progress and making associated management decisions also are essential parts of the business acquisition process and necessary for increasing your win rate.


Management Decisions: The purpose of gate reviews is to ensure that management makes timely decisions about continuing to invest in a new business opportunity and to provide an opportunity for executive management to coach the capture team on how to raise its win probability. These gate reviews are fundamental to effective and efficient acquisition of new business.


Annotated Outlines: Annotated outlines or storyboards probably are not used. If they are used, they are not reviewed and approved by management. No wonder there is so much rewriting involved in completing typical proposals.


Proposal Quality: Professionally developed proposals do not have these problems. They are always compliant, compelling and responsive. Major improvements in proposal quality are still need by many companies.


Performance: Execute contracts to standards in accordance with SOW/Solicitation. Consider compliance, administrative and management requirements

Monday Morning Contracting Tips

Inside the Critical Bid/No Bid Decision

What’s the key to determining whether or not to bid on a federal contract, “Knowledge” The best informed company “Wins”

15 Important factor in making a bid decision

1.      Are you completely informed about the opportunity?  

2.      How well do know the customer?

3.      How well do you understand the customer’s requirements?

4.      What kind of credibility or experience you’ve had with that customer?

5.      What is the competition and its capabilities?

6.      Do you understand the work?

7.      Do you understand what the customer’s mission?  

8.      Do you have the current talent on staff to understand the technology?

9.      Is this a small proposal effort that you can accomplish with our internal team?

10.  Do we have the team in place to provide a compliant, compelling proposal?

11.  Does the opportunity fit your company strategically?

12.  Will pursuing this contract help you achieve our financial objectives as a company?

13.  What are your parameters around the bid process?

14.  Do you need to partner with somebody, team with somebody?

15.  What are the go-no go guidelines you’re setting and stick to them?

What are the government challenges as they enter into the 4th Quarter Spending? Meeting the Set-Aside Goals

It will be very important to position your company for Set-Aside Contracts during the 4^th Quarter of the federal government fiscal year. For the sixth year in a row, the government has missed its goal to award 23% of all federal contract dollars to small businesses. On Tuesday, July 3, the Small Business Administration reported that federal agencies gave out 21.7% to small companies. That sounds close, but means that small businesses did not receive $3.8 billion set aside for them. The contracts are awarded by all federal departments for a wide array of projects and jobs. They funnel hundreds of billions of dollars every year to the private sector.

The awarding goal, which was raised slightly to 23% in 1997, was part of the same 1953 law that established the SBA. It was created to support small companies and avoid having large ones awarded all the federal contracts. But the government has missed the target consistently. Small businesses have missed out on at least $25.7 billion in contracts since 2006, the last year the government reached its goal.The SBA did not provide comment about the failure of agencies to meet the goal. It pointed to a blog post that discussed its efforts to minimize fraud and increase participation of small companies.

The chairman of the House Small Business Committee, Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO), has pushed legislation that aims to increase transparency in contracting and punish the agencies that fail to meet the goal. The legislation also provides for educating contracting officers who often mislabel contracts worth millions as "small business" contracts, even though they're directed to subsidiaries of major corporations. A provision in the legislation also raises the goal from 23% to 25%, which sounds unrealistic given the track record. But Graves insists even the higher target is achievable.

"Solutions to both of these problems can be accomplished at the same time. The goal hasn't been met, because there hasn't been an incentive for agency staff to do so," Graves said. The government has reached its 23% target only three times in the past dozen years. One group long critical of federal contracting procedures said the situation is worse than it appears.

The American Small Business League, which analyzes thousands of contracts every year, points to mistakes by federal contract officers and said they inflate the numbers.