You just got an estimate of $10,000 for a consultant to manage and write a proposal for your company. It’s a staggering amount for a small business, and essentially unaffordable to most companies grossing less than $10 million per year. But you’ve been submitting proposals and losing, which is not only disheartening, it’s a huge waste of your limited resources! So what can you do to improve your odds of winning government contracts, while not breaking the bank?
First, and probably the most important step you can take, carefully identify opportunities that fit your company. While you “can” do anything, your company no doubt has core areas of expertise that you (your company and key people) are currently doing or have done in the recent past that proves how great you are as a company. These should define what opportunities you pursue. You also need to establish a reasonable size of contract that you can perform. While everyone wants to win “the big one” the larger the procurement, the harder it is to win and to perform. Typically, the smaller the effort being procured, the simpler the proposal requirements will be (and therefore less expensive). A rule of thumb that some companies use is to determine how many people you can afford pay to work on a contract for 90 days prior to receiving the first payment from the government (i.e., with no funding from the government)?
Since the federal government rarely pays in advance of contract performance, this is a real possibility in the federal contracting world, one that you need to be aware of when you pursue government contracts. Whatever that number of people is, it probably is the size of the procurement you should be pursuing. And it will correspondingly reduce the effort and cost associated with your proposals that you can expect to spend.
A step that is often overlooked by small businesses, and which is free and available to you for most competitive government procurements, is to ask for a debriefing after competing on a procurement. The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR 15.5), requires that a debriefing be provided by the contracting agency for most competitive, negotiated procurements. Debriefings are available to help a company know what deficiencies and significant weaknesses were found in its proposal and understand why it was not awarded the contract. You can often get a lot of good information that will help you improve your proposals in the future. But here’s the catch: you must request a debriefing, and you must do it within three days after you have been notified that you did not win the contract award.
Another step you can take to improve your proposals is to get a proposal professional to review one of your recent proposals to identify areas that could use improvement and get some insight into what those improvements should be. While it often takes me 80 hours to draft a proposal, it only takes me a few hours to review a previous proposal against the solicitation requirements to identify what went wrong and what needs to be done differently next time.
You might also consider hiring a proposal consultant to provide some training to your company in how to prepare a proposal in response to a government solicitation. Training can range from online training in particular topic areas (e.g., how to read and understand a solicitation and how to outline a proposal) to onsite training over several days going through the steps to developing a proposal. Or training can be divided up and covered in seminars presented over several weeks. Some companies specialize in just providing training and have classrooms with preset training dates and subject. There are a number of companies that offer proposal training (including Skyway!) with a corresponding number of prices and capabilities. Take the time and choose the training you think will suit your company, and your budget, the best.
Writing responsive proposals for competitive government procurements can be challenging, but if you scale your competitive efforts appropriately, and take advantage of free and specialized expertise available to you, it need not wreck your budget!