TL;DR

• Most new small business federal contractors start by searching. That’s the wrong sequence.

• Before you open SAM.gov, you need to answer one question: What specific problem does my business solve, for whom, and what evidence do I have that the government pays businesses to solve it?

• Corporate professionals coming into government contracting default to broad self-descriptions (”HR,” “healthcare consulting,” “logistics”). Broad doesn’t win in this market.

• The right sequence is: expertise → specific problem → market hypothesis → validate against real solicitations → then search opportunities.

• A solicitation is not a business idea. The government should not decide what business you’re in.

Victoria’s Clarity Call

A woman named Victoria reached out to me for a clarity call.

She had about 20 years of healthcare experience. Real experience. Provider engagement, operations, strategy, patient programs, the kind of depth that takes two decades to build.

She wanted to start bidding on government contracts. She’d registered on SAM.gov. She’d started browsing solicitations. She was getting overwhelmed.

I asked her one question.

“What is the ONE specific problem you could confidently solve for ONE healthcare customer, better than anyone else in the room?”

She paused.

She had to think about it.

Twenty years of healthcare expertise and it took her real work to answer that question.

Eventually, after we talked through several angles, she landed somewhere specific: patient-care workflow inefficiencies. That was the strength. That was the thing she could point to and say, “this is what I’ve done over and over, and I’m actually good at it.”

That answer changed everything about how she should approach government contracting.

Because now she wasn’t searching for “healthcare contracts.”

She was building a hypothesis about a specific problem, patient-care workflow improvement, provider engagement, healthcare-program implementation, and looking for evidence that agencies buy solutions to that problem.

That is a completely different search. And a completely different business.

The Wrong Sequence (and Why Almost Everyone Runs It)

Here’s the sequence most new small business federal contractors run, often without realizing it:

1. Search SAM.gov or a state portal.

2. Find something that looks doable.

3. Figure out how to perform it.

4. Bid.

That sequence is backwards. And it’s why so many corporate professionals feel like a fraud on day one of GovCon. They have twenty years of expertise, but the search is telling them to bid on whatever looks winnable, regardless of whether it fits what they actually do well.

Ricardo, another person I did a clarity call with, described it perfectly. He’d been bouncing between subcontracting opportunities and prime bids for months. His exact framing was, essentially, “Whatever I saw that I thought I could do, I’d jump on it.”

That’s not a strategy. That’s a search engine driving your business.

The right sequence looks completely different:

Expertise → specific problem → market hypothesis → validate against real government buying behavior → identify the buyer → then search opportunities.

The search is the last step. Not the first one.

Broad Expertise Doesn’t Win. Specific Problems Do.

I want to show you the pattern with real examples; versions I’ve seen show up on clarity calls again and again.

BEFORE: “I’ve worked in HR for 18 years. I’m interested in government contracting. What contracts should I search for?”

That question is unanswerable. HR is a category, not a problem.

AFTER: Suppose their strongest expertise is improving employee onboarding and reducing time-to-productivity. Now the research becomes:

Which agencies buy workforce onboarding, organizational development, training implementation, human-capital support, or workforce-process improvement?

Now we can research the terminology, the buyers, the spending, the RFPs, and the primes around that specific problem.

That is a completely different search.

BEFORE: “Healthcare consulting.”

AFTER: Patient-care workflow improvement. Provider engagement. Healthcare-program implementation.

BEFORE: “Logistics.”

AFTER: Last-mile transportation and delivery from port or warehouse to final destination.

The point is not that these exact phrases are the government’s procurement terminology. They may not be. You research active and past solicitations to discover what the government actually calls this work. But you can’t research anything until you have a starting hypothesis to test.

The transformation is: broad expertise → specific problem → searchable market hypothesis.

Nobody is going to hand you the terminology. You build the hypothesis, then you go find out whether the government uses the same language, or a different one, or whether they buy this problem at all.

“But I Can Do a Lot of Things”

This is the part that will hit experienced professionals hardest.

You can. Of course you can. Twenty years of corporate experience doesn’t produce someone with one narrow capability. Victoria could do operations, partnerships, growth, provider engagement, implementation, strategy. Someone with 20 years of IT could do program management, implementation, cybersecurity, architecture, staffing.

That range is a real asset. Professionally, it’s what got you to where you are.

In government contracting positioning, it can become a liability.

I’m not telling you to throw away your range. I’m telling you to pick a door to enter through.

Once you’re inside the market, once agencies know your name, your past performance is concentrated, and your capability statement is credible, you can absolutely expand. But if you enter with a capability statement that says you do 14 unrelated things, and your opportunity searches cover 11 NAICS codes, you haven’t diversified.

You’ve made it impossible for anyone to see where you’re actually competitive.

Sebastian, another clarity call, spent an hour going back and forth with me about whether he should abandon 10 years of expertise for something that looked “easier to sell to government.” I told him what I’ll tell you: the thing that’s hardest to sell to the government is a business without a defined problem. It doesn’t matter how “easy” the surface category looks.

The concentrated past performance and buyer relationships you’d build in one lane in two years will do more for your business than five years of scattered wins across unrelated categories.

A Solicitation Is Not a Business Idea

Here’s a principle I want you to sit with:

The government should not decide what business you’re in.

When you scroll SAM.gov looking for “something that looks doable” and then plan a business around what you find, you have handed strategic direction of your company over to a federal procurement portal.

That is not how positioned contractors work.

A solicitation is a signal, a piece of evidence about what the government is buying today, from whom, at what price, on what timeline. A solicitation is not the answer to “what business should I build?”

The answer to that question comes from your expertise. From the problem you’ve spent years learning to solve. From the outcomes real clients have paid you to deliver. And from the evidence that federal, state, and local buyers are also spending money to solve that same problem.

Once you have a hypothesis about your problem, you use solicitations, past awards, procurement forecasts, and agency spending data to validate it, or force you to adjust it.

Your first positioning statement is a hypothesis. Not a fact.

Government buying data is how you test it.

The Four Questions You Have to Answer Before You Search

Here’s the framework I want you to run through before you open SAM.gov again.

1. What specific problem do I solve?

Not “HR.” Not “healthcare.” Not “logistics.” The specific problem, the one that took you years to learn how to actually fix. The one that shows up over and over in your career history because you’ve solved it before.

2. For whom do I solve it?

Who is the person or type of organization that experiences this problem acutely? A CIO trying to modernize? A program manager staffing up a new initiative? A director of operations dealing with capacity constraints? Get specific about the buyer archetype.

3. What evidence do I have that this problem exists in my career history?

This is where past performance starts. Point to real engagements, commercial, corporate, volunteer, whatever, where you actually solved this problem. That evidence becomes your capability narrative.

4. What evidence do I have that the government pays businesses to solve this problem?

This is where research starts. Have there been solicitations for this specific type of work? Awards? Sources Sought notices? Procurement forecasts that mention it? If the answer is “I don’t know yet,” your job for the next two weeks is to find out.

If you can answer all four with real, specific data, you have a positioning hypothesis worth building around. If you can’t answer them yet, don’t bid. Research.

Positioning is upstream of everything else in government contracting. Certifications, capability statements, teaming decisions, agency targeting, every one of those decisions is easier when you know what problem you actually solve and who buys it.

If you’re new to this and still figuring out how your career history translates, this piece will help: GovCon Starter Checklist for W2 Professionals. And if you’re already deep in the search-first pattern, I wrote about the underlying trap here: SAM.gov Is Not Where You Should Start Government Contracting.

The GovCon TechLab Challenge

I don’t want you closing this article motivated but with nothing to do.

I want you to have homework.

Before you open SAM.gov again, answer this out loud:

What specific problem do I solve, for whom, and what evidence do I have that the government pays businesses to solve it?

If you can’t answer that yet, the answer is not “keep searching.” The answer is: don’t bid, research.

Then do this:

Find five solicitations or past awards related to the specific problem you named.

Don’t bid them. Read them.

For each one, answer:

1. What does the government call my expertise? (What are the actual keywords the solicitation uses?)

2. Which agencies have this problem? (Which departments issued these solicitations or won this work?)

3. What outcomes are they purchasing? (Is it a deliverable, a service, a transformation, a metric?)

4. Who is already winning this work? (Which primes or small businesses appear across multiple awards?)

5. What qualifications keep appearing? (Which certifications, past performance categories, or key personnel show up in every one?)

Then, and only then, adjust your positioning hypothesis.

Every one of those five solicitations is a data point. Together, they’ll tell you either that your hypothesis is close to accurate, that it needs to be refined, or that the market you’re targeting isn’t actually a market for what you do. Any of those answers is valuable. All of them are more valuable than another hour lost inside a SAM.gov search.

P.S. We break down positioning, past performance, capability statements, and buyer research on our YouTube channel every week. If this piece was useful, that's where the deeper walkthroughs live. Subscribe to GovCon TechLab on YouTube.

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• “I don’t have any past performance” is almost always a translation problem, not a track record problem.

• Government evaluators aren’t scoring your résumé, they’re managing risk. Once you understand what they’re actually looking for, the writing gets easier.

• Commercial work counts. Corporate work counts. Key personnel experience counts. What matters is how you frame it.

• There are 3 legitimate ways to borrow credibility when your company is new, teaming, key personnel, and affiliate/predecessor performance. The line is: frame the truth well. Never fabricate.

• Every incumbent you’re competing against wrote a thin past performance section on their first proposal too. You’re not behind. You’re at the start.

Let me start where you actually are.

You’re staring at the past performance volume of a federal proposal. Cursor blinking. Word count zero. And underneath the frustration is a specific fear you probably haven’t said out loud:

They’re going to find out I’ve never done this.

That fear is real. It’s also a lie.

Everyone in government contracting started exactly where you are right now. Almost no one admits it. And nobody teaches you how to actually write a past performance volume when your company doesn’t have three federal contracts in your rearview mirror.

I want to give you what I wish someone had given me when I sat down to write my first federal past performance section, as a former corporate employee turned cleaning company owner with zero federal experience.

There are three reframes and three legitimate techniques. Let’s walk through them.

Reframe #1: “No Past Performance” Is a Lie You’re Telling Yourself

Here’s what’s actually happening in your head.

You are conflating no federal past performance with no past performance.

Those are not the same thing.

Seven years running a cleaning company is past performance. Managing payroll, hitting service level agreements, keeping clients through contract renewals, hiring and firing crew, resolving customer complaints, delivering to schedule, that’s past performance.

Fifteen years managing a corporate department is past performance. Delivering projects on budget, managing stakeholders, running procurement processes, coordinating vendors, hitting quarterly targets, leading through personnel transitions, that’s past performance.

Even if your company is brand new, your career isn’t. And even if your career is short, chances are the work you’ve done, commercial contracts, volunteer leadership, adjacent industry roles, includes deliverables and outcomes that map to federal evaluation criteria.

You have permission to count what you’ve already survived.

The problem isn’t that you don’t have relevant experience. The problem is that you haven’t yet translated it into the language federal evaluators are trained to look for. That’s a skill. Skills can be learned in an afternoon.

Reframe #2: Evaluators Aren’t Scoring a Résumé. They’re Managing Risk.

This is the single most important shift you can make before you write another word of a past performance section.

Federal evaluators are not looking for the most impressive vendor.

They are looking for the vendor least likely to embarrass them.

Every past performance section answers one silent question: If I pick this company, will they deliver what they said they would, or am I going to get called into my supervisor’s office in six months explaining what went wrong?

That’s it. That’s the whole evaluation lens.

Once you understand that, you stop writing to impress and start writing to reassure. You focus on:

• Scope alignment (did you do work similar to what they’re buying?)

• Delivery history (did you complete work on time, on budget, to spec?)

• Client relationships (would that client hire you again?)

• Problem resolution (did you handle it well when something went wrong?)

These are risk questions. If your past performance section answers them clearly, you’re already competitive. If it doesn’t, even with 20 years of federal contracts behind you, it doesn’t score well.

The Commercial-to-Federal Translation

Here is the practical core.

Federal past performance sections have a specific structure. Evaluators scan for the same handful of elements every time. Your job is to give them what they’re looking for, in language they recognize.

Every past performance write-up should map to these fields:

• Client / Buyer - Who paid you to do the work?

• Scope of Work - What did you actually deliver?

• Period of Performance - What were the start and end dates?

• Contract Value - How much was it worth?

• Your Role - Prime, sub, key personnel, or corporate delivery lead?

• Outcome - What was accomplished? Was it on time, on budget, to spec?

• Client Reference - Contact information for someone who can verify.

Every commercial contract, every corporate project, every long-term client relationship you have can be rewritten to map to these fields.

Here’s a concrete before/after.

Before (commercial description):

“I cleaned three commercial buildings for the last 6 years. Never lost a client. All still with me.”

After (federal past performance language):

Client: ABC Property Management Group, Contract with [Company Name] executed June 2019.

Scope of Work: Facilities janitorial services across three Class A commercial properties totaling 180,000 square feet, including nightly cleaning, floor care, restroom sanitation, and quarterly deep-clean protocols. Services delivered under 12-month renewable service agreements with defined performance standards.

Period of Performance: June 2019 – Present (renewed annually across all three sites).

Contract Value: Approximately $284,000 annually across all three properties.

Role: Prime service provider, direct client contract, self-performing delivery with a five-person crew.

Outcome: 100% client retention across the six-year performance period. Zero contract terminations. All annual renewals executed on schedule.

Client Reference: [Name, title, email, phone].

Same experience. Very different presentation. The second version is scoreable. The first is not.

Now do the same exercise for corporate work.

Before:

“I ran the marketing department for a mid-size company for 8 years.”

After:

Client: [Employer name], corporate role from January 2016 through August 2024.

Scope: Directed strategic communications and marketing operations for a 500-person organization across three regional offices, including brand development, digital channel management, event coordination, stakeholder engagement, and vendor management for creative and production services. Managed departmental budget of $2.1M annually.

Period of Performance: 8 years, January 2016 – August 2024.

Contract Value: $2.1M annual departmental budget. Cumulative delivery responsibility exceeding $16M across period of employment.

Role: Department director. Reported to executive leadership. Directly managed six-person team plus external vendors.

Outcome: Delivered all annual programs on schedule and within budget. Led team through two acquisitions and one system migration without service interruption.

Reference: [Former supervisor with contact information].

Corporate experience translates. It just requires translation. Nobody was ever going to score “I ran the marketing department.” Everyone can score the second version.

If you’re transitioning from a corporate role into GovCon, this is where the highest-leverage work lives. I wrote a companion piece specifically for W2 professionals making this shift: GovCon Starter Checklist for W2 Professionals.

Borrowing Credibility, Legitimately

Even with excellent translation, a brand-new company may not clear the past performance threshold on some federal opportunities. That’s fine. There are three legitimate ways to borrow credibility, none of them involve fabrication.

Lever 1: Teaming or subcontracting to inherit a prime’s record.

You do not have to bid every federal opportunity as the prime. You can join a prime’s proposal as a subcontractor, sometimes named in the past performance volume, sometimes providing supporting technical capability. When you do, the prime’s past performance carries the weight. Your role is to bring in specific capability, a required certification, or a portion of the scope. Every subcontracted engagement builds YOUR past performance for future proposals where you bid as the prime.

Lever 2: Key personnel résumés.

Even when your company is new, your key personnel are not. Attach detailed résumés for the people who will actually deliver the work. Individual experience is a legitimate part of the evaluation. If your project manager has 20 years of federal delivery in your target space, even if she did that work at a previous employer, that history is a credibility signal. Evaluators know how to read this. Give them what they need.

Lever 3: Affiliate or predecessor performance.

If you had a previous company, a related entity, or a predecessor organization, you may be able to reference that performance in your current company’s proposals. This is regulated by federal acquisition rules and specific solicitation requirements, check the RFP and be honest about the relationship. When it’s allowed, use it. When it’s not, don’t. The specific rules for affiliate and predecessor performance vary; when in doubt, ask the contracting officer or consult FAR guidance.

The ethical line.

Every one of these techniques is legitimate. Every one is regularly used by real government contractors. The line, and this matters, is that your job is to frame the truth well. Never fabricate. Never claim work you didn’t do. Never inflate a role you didn’t play. Federal evaluators verify. Prime contractors verify. Contracting officers verify. Getting caught doesn’t just cost you the contract. It can end your ability to bid federal work at all.

Frame truth well. Never invent.

The Mindset Close

Let me bring this back to where we started.

Every incumbent you’re competing against wrote a thin past performance section on their first federal proposal. Every large prime started as a small company with almost nothing on the page. Every contractor who now looks like the “obvious choice” was, at one point, exactly where you are, cursor blinking, wondering if they’d get caught.

Nobody got caught. Because “not having federal past performance” wasn’t a lie. It was a chapter.

You’re not behind. You’re at the start.

Confidence in this space is a skill, not a credential. And the specific work of writing a past performance section is one of the easiest skills to build, because the framework is small, the fields are predictable, and the evaluators are consistent about what they’re looking for.

You don’t need permission to write this section.

You need to sit down, translate the work you’ve already done, and let the evaluator see what a low-risk vendor you actually are.

If you’re still translating corporate proposal language into GovCon evaluation language, this companion piece will help: Stop Losing and Start Writing Better Proposals.

Your Action Plan (This Week)

Step 1: List every commercial contract, corporate role, or delivery engagement from the last 7 years (30 minutes).

Don’t filter. Just list. You are inventorying raw material.

Step 2: For each one, fill in the 7 federal past performance fields (60 minutes).

Client, Scope, Period of Performance, Value, Role, Outcome, Reference. Even a rough draft. Even for the ones that feel too commercial to count.

Step 3: Circle the 3 strongest (10 minutes).

Which three, when rewritten, most closely resemble the type of work federal agencies buy in your target category? Those are the ones you build out first.

Step 4: Rewrite one full past performance narrative for a real target opportunity (2 hours).

Take the strongest of your three. Write a real federal past performance narrative, the kind you would submit inside a proposal. Get it in front of someone who has evaluated federal proposals before, if you can.

Step 5: Identify one teaming opportunity to build fresh past performance (60 minutes).

Look for primes in your target category who take small business subcontractors. That’s your next-cycle past performance in the making.

The Bottom Line

You don’t have “no past performance.”

You have untranslated past performance.

The fear of being “caught” for not having federal contracts is not a real fear. It is what a new contractor feels when they haven’t yet learned the translation framework, and it disappears the moment they do.

Sit down. Do the work. Frame the truth well. And write with the understanding that evaluators are on your side more than you think, they are looking for a reason to feel confident about awarding to you. Give them one.

Because every incumbent’s first past performance section looked exactly like the one you’re staring at right now.

P.S. I break down proposal writing, past performance, capability statements, and federal evaluation language on our YouTube channel every week. If this piece was useful, that’s where the deeper walkthroughs live. Subscribe to GovCon TechLab on YouTube.

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• I would have started with state and local contracts before going after federal.

• I would not have chased certifications the way I did, DBE, MBE, WOSB, and EDWOSB are useful, but only when they align with the agencies you’re actually targeting.

• I would have started networking immediately, primes, subcontractors, and local agencies, instead of treating capture as something to figure out later.

• I would have understood the middleman strategy properly, including its real risks, and I would have concentrated my past performance in one lane much earlier.

• I would have learned how to translate my corporate experience into government contracting language much sooner.

I’ve been an active government contractor for seven years.

Written hundreds of proposals. Won contracts at DOT, Air Force, Army Corps, DECA. Managed $10 to $20 million in contract portfolios for other government contracting firms. Been through the wins, the losses, the CO turnover, the late payments, the terminated contracts.

If I could go back to day one and hand myself a note, this is what would be on it.

None of these lessons are complicated. Most of them are the opposite of what the gurus and courses were telling me at the time. But every one of them would have shortened my learning curve by a year or two, and probably saved me a lot of the frustration that a lot of small business federal contractors go through in their first three years.

Here are the five.

Lesson 1: Start with State and Local Contracts. Not Federal.

Every course, every YouTube channel, every guru points you at SAM.gov and federal contracting.

That is not where I would have started.

State and local contracts have faster procurement timelines (4 to 8 weeks vs. 12 to 18 months at the federal level), faster payment cycles (30 to 45 days vs. 60 to 90), less competition per opportunity (4 to 8 bidders vs. 20 to 60 on federal RFPs), and buyers you can actually meet in person at industry days, vendor outreach events, and public meetings.

Federal contracting is not the wrong destination. It’s the wrong starting point for most small businesses.

If I had started with state and local contracts, I would have built past performance faster, generated revenue sooner, and entered federal work already with real government experience under my belt, not as a stranger to the whole process.

I wrote a full breakdown of this in SAM.gov Is Not Where You Should Start Government Contracting.

Lesson 2: I Wish I Hadn’t Chased Certifications the Way I Did

I am DBE, MBE, WOSB, and EDWOSB certified.

Every one of those certifications took months to acquire. Some took over a year. And here’s what I want you to hear from someone who has all of them:

Certifications only matter when they align with the agencies you’re actually targeting.

I spent time pursuing certifications because the courses told me to. I chased them in the wrong order. I got some that didn’t materially change my win rate because the agencies I was targeting didn’t run set-asides for those categories. I paused capture work, the actual business development that generates revenue, to wait on certifications that didn’t turn out to be the leverage point I thought they’d be.

Here’s what I would tell myself now:

• Certifications are tools. They are not a business strategy.

• Get the certifications that align with your specific target agencies, the ones whose award history shows real activity in that set-aside category.

• Do not pause capture work to wait on certification approvals. Do both in parallel.

• One well-matched certification will do more for your business than four unmatched ones.

If you’re evaluating certifications right now, do it against your target list. Not against a generic checklist.

Lesson 3: I Wish I’d Networked from Day One

For the first two years of my government contracting business, I treated capture as something I’d figure out after I had my registrations, certifications, and capability statement in order.

That was backwards.

The relationships I built in year 3 would have been worth 10x more in year 1. Program managers, small business liaisons, primes looking for subcontractors, other small businesses building their own pipelines, every one of those connections compounds over time. The ones you make early have the most time to become real business.

I would have gone to industry days, vendor outreach events, and small business fairs from month one. Not as someone trying to close a deal, but as someone building visibility and learning the buyers who mattered in my target space.

I would have reached out to primes even before I had past performance. Just to introduce myself. Just to be on the list when they needed a small business partner for a bid.

Networking in this space isn’t optional. It’s not a “later” activity. It is the business.

If you want to understand who to be networking with, and, more importantly, who NOT to be pitching cold, read You’ve Been Pitching the Wrong Person the Whole Time. Building relationships with the wrong people is almost as expensive as building none.

Lesson 4: I Wish I Understood the Middleman Strategy Properly, and I Wish I’d Concentrated My Past Performance Sooner.

Here’s the pattern I fell into early on:

I won a landscaping contract without being a landscaper. Then a snow removal contract. Then a used-oil contract. Then real estate work. Every one of those wins came through the middleman strategy, bidding work I couldn’t personally perform and hiring subcontractors to deliver it.

The strategy works. I’ve said this before.

What I didn’t understand at the time was two things.

First, the operational reality of the middleman strategy, the cash flow gaps, the subcontractor risks, the scope issues, the fact that when things go wrong the government terminates you, not your subcontractor. I’ve now written about this at length, and I’m building a specific resource for people considering the strategy at MiddlemanMistakes.com. That is the guide I wish I had when I signed my first middleman contract.

Second, and possibly more important: because my middleman contracts spanned so many unrelated categories, I never built concentrated past performance in any single lane. That is the mistake that took me longer than any other to see. Small business federal contractors don’t win consistently by having diverse portfolios. They win by having deep portfolios, three, four, five contracts in a narrow specialty that agencies recognize you for.

If I had understood earlier that past performance concentration is what compounds, not variety, I would have focused my business on one core capability much sooner.

Lesson 5: I Wish I’d Learned to Translate Corporate Experience into GovCon Language Sooner

Most people coming into government contracting have real, valuable experience from corporate careers. Consulting. Program management. IT. Operations. Finance. Marketing. Whatever it is.

The problem isn’t that the experience isn’t relevant.

The problem is that government evaluators do not speak corporate.

Corporate resumes and marketing materials focus on titles, project names, and business outcomes. GovCon capability statements focus on scope alignment, past performance narratives, technical approaches, and evaluation criteria.

When you write your capability statement or your first proposal, you have to translate what you actually did, often years of experience, into language that maps directly to the evaluation framework the government uses.

“Managed a $2M CRM implementation” becomes “Directed a technology modernization initiative including systems integration, user training, data migration, and post-deployment support.”

“Ran the marketing department” becomes “Led strategic communications for a 500-person organization, including brand development, digital channel management, and stakeholder engagement across multiple regional offices.”

Same experience. Different language. Government buyers can’t score what they can’t recognize.

I lost proposals in my first year that I should have won because I wasn’t packaging my corporate track record in the language evaluators were trained to look for. If you’re transitioning from a W2 corporate career into GovCon, the fastest thing you can invest in is learning to translate what you’ve already done into terms that map to how the government evaluates capability.

I wrote a full companion piece for W2 professionals making this transition here: GovCon Starter Checklist for W2 Professionals. Packaging your corporate experience is one of the highest-leverage moves you can make in your first 90 days.

Your Action Plan (This Week)

Step 1: Audit what you’re chasing right now (30 minutes).

Are you focused on federal when state and local would build past performance faster? Are you waiting on certifications while your capture pipeline sits idle? Be honest.

Step 2: List the 3 agencies (federal, state, or local) you actually want to win with (20 minutes).

Only then look at which certifications those specific agencies value. Chase those. Skip the rest.

Step 3: Put 3 industry days, vendor outreach events, or SBLO office visits on your calendar (30 minutes).

Networking isn’t a “someday” activity. It’s a next-30-days activity.

Step 4: Pull your last 5 proposals and audit the language (60 minutes).

Does your capability statement read like corporate marketing or like GovCon technical narrative? If it’s the former, rewrite it.

Step 5: If you’re mid-way into a middleman contract right now, or considering one, go here: MiddlemanMistakes.com.

The specific risks that show up 90 days into a middleman contract are worth understanding before you sign the next one.

The Bottom Line

Seven years in, none of these lessons feel surprising to me anymore.

But every one of them cost me a real amount of time to learn, time I could have been using to build something instead of correcting course.

The gurus rarely tell you these things because none of them sell well as a course. “Start local, network from day one, and skip the certifications you don’t need” isn’t a $3,000 program. It’s the honest truth.

If you’re at the beginning of your government contracting journey, take one of these lessons and act on it this week. That is the difference between a business that gets built and a business that stays a plan.

P.S. We break down every one of these lessons in more depth on our YouTube channel, state and local strategy, certification decisions, networking tactics, and how to translate corporate experience into GovCon language. Subscribe to GovCon TechLab on YouTube.

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• SAM.gov is free, but “free” and “useful for actual market research” are two different things.

• SAM.gov is the official system of record for federal solicitations and vendor registration, you can’t avoid it.

• But when it comes to actually researching agencies, tracking incumbents, filtering opportunities intelligently, and building a real pipeline, SAM.gov’s user experience actively slows you down.

• GovTribe is a paid tool that fills those gaps. For most small business federal contractors doing serious research, the time savings pay for the tool.

• Free is only free if your time isn’t worth anything.

If you’ve spent any real time on SAM.gov, you already know what I’m about to say.

The interface is frustrating.

The filters are clunky.

The search doesn’t return what you actually want.

You spend hours clicking through solicitations that don’t fit your business, trying to reverse-engineer whether an agency has bought this before, digging around for the contracting officer’s contact information, and giving up before you find what you were looking for.

SAM.gov is free. And for a lot of small business federal contractors, that “free” is the most expensive thing in their business, because it eats hours that could go toward capture, relationships, or writing better proposals.

I made a full YouTube walkthrough of the tool I use instead, GovTribe. That video is here: How to Find Million-Dollar Government Contracts without Using SAM.gov.

This article is the written companion. If you’re deciding whether it’s worth paying for a research tool when SAM.gov exists, this is my honest breakdown of the decision.

What SAM.gov Actually Does Well

Let me be fair to SAM.gov before I criticize it.

SAM.gov is the official system of record for federal contracts. Every small business federal contractor is required to register there. Every active federal solicitation is required to be posted there. Every award record eventually gets published there (this now includes the historical procurement data that used to live on SAM.gov (formally FPDS, that system has been dissolved).

SAM.gov is not optional. It is the source of truth. You will use it whether you like it or not.

That’s not the question.

The question is whether SAM.gov is where you should be doing your research and pipeline development, or whether that’s a different job requiring a different tool.

What SAM.gov Doesn’t Do (And Where GovTribe Wins)

Here are the specific things I found myself losing hours to on SAM.gov, and what GovTribe does differently.

Search filters that actually work.

On SAM.gov, filtering by NAICS code, agency, dollar range, and category should be simple. In practice, the interface layers filters awkwardly and the results are noisy. On GovTribe, filters are built for the way small business contractors actually think, by service category, target agency, competitive posture, and contract vehicle.

Contract history and incumbent research.

When I see an active solicitation, the first question I want to answer is: Has this agency bought this before, and from whom? On SAM.gov, that research is possible but painful. On GovTribe, the incumbent, the prior award, the contract value, and the vehicle are usually one or two clicks away. That is the difference between spending an afternoon on research and spending 20 minutes.

Agency intelligence.

GovTribe builds agency profiles, what an agency buys, who they buy from, how they buy, and how much they spend by category. SAM.gov gives you the raw data. GovTribe organizes it so you can actually use it for capture strategy.

People and contact information.

Contract-level contact information exists on SAM.gov, but building a picture of who at an agency owns what program takes forever. GovTribe surfaces that faster and connects it to procurement activity.

Alerts and tracking.

Both platforms have alert capability, but GovTribe’s saved searches and tracking features are what make it useful for ongoing pipeline management, not just one-off searches.

If you’re still primarily using SAM.gov for research, I wrote about the bigger issue with treating SAM.gov as your discovery tool in general here: SAM.gov Is Not Where You Should Start Government Contracting.

The Real Cost of “Free”

Here’s the honest math on this decision.

If you’re doing serious federal contract research, the kind that builds a real pipeline, you’re going to spend somewhere between 5 and 15 hours a week on it. That is capture research, agency profiling, opportunity tracking, and competitive intelligence.

Now ask yourself what your time is worth.

If your time is worth $50 an hour and a research tool saves you 5 hours a week, the tool has to cost less than $1,000 a month to break even. If your time is worth $100 an hour and the tool saves 10 hours a week, the tool has to cost less than $4,000 a month to break even.

Most research tools priced for small business, GovTribe among them, come in well under those numbers. That’s not a coincidence. They know what your time is worth.

Free is only free when your time isn’t worth anything. If you’re building a real government contracting business, your time is worth quite a lot. Your paid tools are almost always cheaper than the alternative.

When to Pay for a Tool (And When Not To)

I don’t want you to walk away from this article thinking every paid GovCon tool is worth buying. Most of them are not.

Here’s the framework I use for evaluating any paid research or capture tool.

Buy the tool when:

- You’re doing 5+ hours of research per week that the tool automates or accelerates

- The tool aggregates data that’s technically free but painfully scattered

- The tool has search or filtering capability that isn’t available anywhere else

- The tool pays for itself with one contract-related decision it helps you make better

Skip the tool when:

- You’re not yet doing enough capture research to see the time savings

- You’re paying for a feature you’ll rarely use

- The “value add” is content or templates you could get from a free newsletter

- The pricing is out of proportion to what a small business at your revenue can absorb

GovTribe passes the first test for me. If it doesn’t for you, that’s a legitimate answer. This isn’t universal advice. It’s the calculation, applied honestly.

Your Action Plan (This Week)

Step 1: Track your SAM.gov research time for one week (10 minutes to set up).

Just note how much time you spend actually researching opportunities, agencies, and incumbents on SAM.gov this week. Don’t include time spent on registration or admin. Just research. Be honest.

Step 2: Assign a dollar value to your time (5 minutes).

Not your billing rate. What is an hour of your time actually worth to the business right now, given what you could otherwise be doing with it?

Step 3: Calculate what “free” is actually costing you (5 minutes).

Multiply. That’s your baseline. Now compare it to any tool you’re considering.

Step 4: Try a research tool at a paid tier for 30 days (30 days).

Most paid research tools have a trial or a month-to-month option. Run it. See if the time savings show up. If they do, keep it. If they don’t, cancel.

Step 5: Watch the full walkthrough (14 minutes).

The YouTube video shows exactly how I run a real search on GovTribe, filters, contract history research, incumbent identification, and pipeline tracking. If you’re evaluating whether the tool fits your workflow, that’s the fastest way to know: How to Find Million-Dollar Government Contracts without Using SAM.gov.

About the Clarity Calls

Over the last several weeks I’ve done clarity calls with small business owners at every stage of federal contracting, from people considering their first bid to contractors who’ve been in for a decade.

Tools come up in almost every call.

Which portal to use. Which research service is worth it. What to buy vs. what to skip. How to actually turn “data” into a working pipeline.

But underneath the tool questions, there’s usually a deeper conversation happening. About what business they’re actually trying to build. About the strategy, or the lack of one, behind the contracts they’re chasing.

One conversation that keeps coming up is the middleman strategy, people who won a contract, hired a subcontractor, and then realized winning the contract and operating the contract are two completely different skills. That is exactly the audience I’m building Middleman Mistakes for. Not another “find a contract, find a subcontractor” guide, the part that comes before you bid. The questions I wish I’d asked. The risks I didn’t see.

If you’re considering the middleman strategy specifically, that landing page is where I’d send you.

For everyone else, the answer to most tool questions is the same. Pay for tools that give you back time. Skip the ones that just give you content.

The Bottom Line

SAM.gov is free.

GovTribe is not.

Both are useful for different jobs, SAM.gov as the official system of record, GovTribe as the research and intelligence layer that actually helps you build a pipeline.

For a small business federal contractor doing real capture work every week, the paid tool pays for itself in the first few days. For someone not yet doing that level of research, it’s a premature buy.

The point isn’t which specific tool you use. The point is that “free” is not the same as “useful.”

Your time is one of the most valuable inputs in your business. Spend it where it compounds, on relationships, on capture strategy, on writing better proposals. Not on fighting a portal that wasn’t built for the job you’re using it for.

The full GovTribe walkthrough is here if you want to see the tool in action: How to Find Million-Dollar Government Contracts without Using SAM.gov.

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• A woman I recently spoke to lost a government cleaning contract, because the strategy she used on the internet didn’t include what happens after you win.

• I’ve personally won middleman government contracts across landscaping, snow removal, used oil, and real estate services. So, no, I’m not writing this to talk you out of the middleman strategy.

• I’m writing this because winning a government contract and successfully operating one are two completely different skills, and almost nobody teaching this strategy talks about the second one.

• The 3 scenarios in this article are the ones that come up in every clarity call I do with small business owners in or considering middleman contracts.

• If you’re considering the middleman strategy, you need to know what you’re agreeing to before you bid.

A woman reached out to me recently because her government contract had been terminated.

She had won a cleaning contract using what most people online call the middleman strategy.

She wasn’t doing the cleaning herself. She hired a subcontractor.

Her subcontractor then hired another subcontractor.

The work wasn’t being performed properly.

And eventually, the government terminated the contract.

Here’s the part I want you to pay attention to.

The subcontractor didn’t have the contract with the government.

She did.

So, when everything went wrong, the government didn’t care that her subcontractor caused the problem. She was the prime.

And that’s the part of the middleman strategy I don’t think enough people are talking about.

Let Me Be Clear About Where I’m Coming From

I can tell this story because I’ve used the middleman strategy myself.

I’ve won landscaping contracts without being a landscaper.

I’ve had snow removal contracts.

Used-oil contracts.

Real estate-related work.

I’ve hired subcontractors to perform work I couldn’t personally perform. So, I’m not going to tell you the middleman strategy doesn’t work.

It does.

What I’m going to tell you is that the version of it you hear on the internet leaves out a very important part.

Winning the contract and successfully operating the contract are two completely different skills.

The courses, the YouTube videos, the guru pitches, they focus almost entirely on the first one. Find a solicitation. Find a subcontractor. Add your markup. Submit your bid. Win.

What happens after you win is where the money is actually made, or lost.

Let me walk you through three scenarios.

Scenario 1: Your Subcontractor Disappears

You win the contract. Your subcontractor starts performing.

Three weeks in, they stop showing up.

Now what?

The government doesn’t care that your subcontractor is unreliable. The government hired you. You have a Statement of Work with delivery dates on it. Those dates don’t move because your sub decided to ghost you.

So, do you have a backup subcontractor lined up?

Can they start tomorrow?

Do they need background checks? Badging? Base access? Government-issued equipment? Are any of those things transferable from your first sub, or does the entire onboarding process start over?

What if the replacement subcontractor charges 20% more than your original? Who absorbs that cost?

Because your bid was locked in. The government’s not paying you more because your sub disappeared.

The internet version of this problem is “have a backup subcontractor.” The operational reality is that a backup subcontractor takes weeks to onboard, weeks you don’t have, and often costs more than the margin you originally built into the deal.

Scenario 2: The Government Doesn’t Pay You On Time

Let me tell you a version of this that actually happened to me.

I was performing on a contract. My subcontractor was invoicing me. And the government wasn’t paying because of internal turnover and administrative issues in the payment office. Not because I did anything wrong. The paperwork just wasn’t being processed.

Eventually, I had to pay my subcontractor myself. Out of pocket. For work the government had already accepted but hadn’t paid me for yet.

Could your business survive that?

Not “here’s how factoring works.” Not “here’s how a line of credit helps.” The honest question is: if the government owed you $30,000 or $50,000 or $80,000 for six weeks, could you make payroll to your sub while you waited?

Because your sub isn’t going to wait. Their payroll is due. Their fuel bill is due. Their crew expects to be paid. And if you can’t pay them, they walk. Which brings you right back to Scenario 1.

The internet version of this problem doesn’t exist, most of the guru content doesn’t mention it at all. The operational reality is that cash flow gaps are the single most common reason middleman contracts fail after the award.

Scenario 3: Your Subcontractor Says, “That’s Not Included.”

This one comes directly out of my own experience.

You don’t know HVAC. You don’t know landscaping. You don’t know pest control. That’s the whole premise of the middleman strategy; you don’t need to.

So, you send the Statement of Work to your subcontractor. They skim it. They give you a price. You add your margin. You submit the proposal. You win the contract.

Then during performance, something happens on site. The subcontractor turns to you and says:

“Oh, that’s going to cost extra.”

But the government says:

“It’s right here in the contract. Section 3.2.4. You agreed to it.”

Now what?

You didn’t know enough about the work to catch that your sub had priced only 80% of the scope. You didn’t have the technical expertise to review their quote line by line. And now you’re stuck between a government that expects the full scope delivered and a subcontractor who won’t do it without more money.

Every middleman contract has this risk baked in. The less you know about the underlying work, the more exposed you are to it.

The Middleman Strategy Isn’t About Finding Subcontractors. It’s About Managing Risk.

Finding someone on Google who can technically perform the work is easy.

The real questions are:

• Can your subcontractor perform consistently, not just once?

• Can you afford them at the price they quoted, after your margin, after cash flow float?

• Can you replace them fast enough if they walk?

• Can you manage them well enough to catch problems before the government does?

• Did they understand the entire scope, or just the part you emphasized?

• Can you float their invoices for 30, 60, 90 days if the government payment is delayed?

• Do you understand the contract well enough to know when they missed something?

• And if everything goes wrong, can your company still perform?

Because the government hired you.

Not your subcontractor.

If you can’t answer those questions with confidence, you don’t have a middleman strategy. You have a hope.

If you’re weighing this alongside subcontracting as an alternative path, I wrote about the economics of that model here: I Made More Money as a GovCon Subcontractor. And the original piece I wrote after my own four middleman contracts is here: I Won Four Middleman Government Contracts. And I Regret It..

Why I’m Building Something Specifically for This

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been having clarity calls with small business owners who are either considering the middleman strategy or already trying to use it.

And I’m hearing the same questions repeatedly.

“Can’t I just have a backup subcontractor?”

“Can I put ‘you get paid when I get paid’ in my subcontract?”

“How do I know if a subcontractor is actually good?”

“What if I don’t know anything about the industry?”

“How much should I mark up my subcontractor’s price?”

“What happens if something goes wrong?”

Those conversations made me realize something.

People don’t need another explanation of what the middleman strategy is.

They need to understand what they’re agreeing to when they actually use it.

Middleman Mistakes

That’s why I’m building Middleman Mistakes.

Not another “find a contract, find a subcontractor, add your markup” guide.

I want to show you the part that comes before you bid:

The questions I wish I had asked.

The risks I didn’t know existed.

The mistakes that cost me money.

And the things I’ve learned after actually managing middleman contracts for years.

Because I’d rather you discover a problem before you bid than after you win.

If you’re considering the middleman strategy, I’m putting something together for you.

Join the list at MiddlemanMistakes.com.

One Last Thing

So, the question isn’t whether the middleman strategy works.

It does.

The question is whether you’re prepared to manage what happens when things don’t go the way the internet said they would.

Because winning a government contract feels like the finish line.

It’s not. It’s the starting gun.

And the small business owners who succeed in this space are the ones who understood that before they submitted the bid, not after they lost the contract.

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• Everyone is debating whether AI should answer 911 calls. That is the wrong question if you sell to government.

• The real question small tech and AI companies should be asking is: Who sold this to the city, and how did they see the opportunity before anyone else?

• Government contracting doesn’t start with SAM.gov. It starts with a government problem.

• Local news, public meetings, budget documents, and hiring shortages are competitive intelligence that reveal demand before an RFP ever exists.

• One government buyer with a problem often signals a much larger market, other cities, counties, and agencies with the same one.

When I saw that New Orleans was using AI in its 911 system, my first thought wasn’t, “Wow, AI is taking another job.”

My government contracting brain immediately went somewhere else.

Who sold this to the city?

Because somebody had to recognize the problem. Somebody had to develop or package the solution. And somewhere along the way, somebody had to convince a government buyer that solving that problem was worth spending money on.

That is what I want to talk about today.

Two pieces of reporting frame the story, the Shreveport Times piece and the New York Post coverage. Both make one thing clear: this isn’t a story about AI replacing human 911 operators. New Orleans is using AI to triage certain calls, lower-priority situations and repeat callers, when human dispatchers are occupied. The system is designed to expand human capacity, not eliminate it. That distinction matters, and much of the online debate misses it.

But even more of the debate misses the bigger story underneath.

Government paid for this.

A vendor sold it.

Someone spotted the opportunity before anyone else did.

That is the actual lesson for every small technology company, every AI startup, and every government contractor watching this from the sidelines wondering how to break into the market.

The Question You Should Be Asking

Most technology company founders I talk to are stuck on the same question: What AI service can I sell to the government?

That question is backwards.

The right question is: What expensive, repetitive, slow, understaffed, or inefficient process does a government agency have, that technology could improve?

That reframe changes everything.

New Orleans didn’t post an RFP asking, “Who has AI we can buy?” New Orleans had a real operational problem: emergency communications systems have limited human capacity, dispatchers get overwhelmed during peak hours, and lower-priority calls compete with genuine emergencies for the same finite pool of operators. Someone paying attention identified that problem, built a solution around it, and made the sale.

That is how government contracts actually get won. Not by searching SAM.gov for “AI.” By understanding what government agencies are already struggling with and showing up with a solution before anyone else does.

GovCon Doesn’t Start with the RFP. It Starts with a Problem.

If you’re a small business or a small technology company trying to enter government contracting, the standard advice you get is: register on SAM.gov (or your local procurement site), get your certifications, set up alerts, wait for the RFP.

That advice is not wrong. It is just downstream.

By the time an RFP is posted on SAM.gov or a state procurement portal, someone else has already been studying that problem for months. Talking to program managers. Attending industry days. Responding to Sources Sought notices. Positioning themselves as the obvious answer.

The New Orleans AI 911 procurement did not start with a public solicitation. It started with an internal conversation about capacity. Then a budget discussion. Then market research. Then, probably, informal outreach to vendors already in the space. The RFP or contract action, whenever it was executed, was the end of a months-long process, not the beginning.

I wrote a whole piece on this dynamic, SAM.gov Is Not Where You Should Start Government Contracting. It applies just as much to AI companies as it does to landscaping companies.

The contractors who win consistently are not the ones who see the RFP first. They are the ones who see the problem first.

Where Government Problems Show Up Before RFPs Do

Local news is competitive intelligence.

So are city council meetings. So are proposed budgets. So are strategic plans, agency modernization initiatives, hiring shortage reports, public complaints, and procurement forecasts. All of these are public. All of them are free. And almost none of them are being watched by your competitors.

Here’s how to read each one for signals.

Local news - When a mayor announces a modernization initiative, a department says it can’t hire enough people, or an agency admits publicly that a system is failing, that is a demand signal. It is not a news story. It is a preview of a procurement.

Public meetings - Someone in a city council or county commission meeting will name a specific problem, “our current vendor isn’t meeting SLAs,” “the software system is 15 years old,” “we’re getting complaints about response times.” Those comments are the buying process starting. And most of the time, they end up in publicly posted meeting minutes within 48 hours.

Budgets and capital improvement plans - Every government entity publishes an annual budget. Read the sections on operating costs, personnel, and technology. Look for line items where they’ve allocated more money year over year. That is where the pressure is.

Modernization and strategic plans - Agencies publish long-range plans for exactly the kind of transformation projects small tech companies can win. If you know what an agency has committed to over the next 3 years, you know what they’ll be buying.

Hiring shortage announcements - When an agency publicly says it can’t hire, that is often the moment before it starts looking for a technology solution to expand capacity. That is exactly the pattern behind the New Orleans 911 story.

Sources Sought and RFIs on SAM.gov - These are not contracts. They are market research. Responding to them costs you 2 to 4 hours and puts your name in front of the contracting officer before the RFP ever gets written.

Sell Outcomes. Not “AI.”

If there is one thing small AI and tech companies get wrong when they try to sell to government, it’s leading with the technology.

Government buyers do not buy “AI.” They buy outcomes.

Reduce 911 call wait times. Process benefits applications faster. Detect fraud in unemployment claims. Cut administrative workload for overworked caseworkers. Improve public safety response times. Automate repetitive back-office tasks. Free up specialists to work on complex cases.

Those are outcomes. AI is a mechanism. If you cannot describe what problem your technology solves in a single sentence a non-technical procurement officer would understand, you are not ready to sell to government.

The company that sold AI to New Orleans’s 911 system almost certainly did not walk in leading with model architectures. They led with capacity, response time, cost, or citizen experience. Then the technology was the answer to how they’d deliver on that.

You Don’t Have to Build the Technology Yourself

This is the part most small business owners underestimate.

You don’t have to be the AI company that invented the model to win in this space. You can be the integrator. The implementation partner. The reseller. The consultant who advises agencies on adoption. The subcontractor to a large prime bringing government experience the tech company lacks.

Every technology sale to government involves a stack of roles beyond the vendor who owns the underlying IP. Somebody handles the procurement process. Somebody manages the pilot. Somebody handles the training and change management. Somebody supports the ongoing service. Somebody carries the certifications and set-asides.

If you have government relationships, procurement experience, or specific certifications that a national AI company doesn’t have, you have leverage. You can partner your way in without ever writing a line of code yourself.

One Customer Signals a Larger Market

Once you spot a story like New Orleans’s 911 AI implementation, don’t stop at the news article.

Do the research.

Find the vendor. Public reporting often names the company. If it doesn’t, look on the city’s procurement portal for recent contract awards in that category. Cross-reference with the vendor’s press releases, LinkedIn announcements, and case studies.

Find the procurement. What was the contract value? What was the procurement method. sole source, RFP, cooperative purchasing agreement? What set-aside applied? Who else bid?

Find the same problem elsewhere. If New Orleans has this problem, ask whether Atlanta, Baltimore, Houston, Philadelphia, or your own county has the same one. Emergency dispatch capacity issues aren’t unique to one city. Neither are staffing shortages, aging systems, or citizen response challenges.

That research process, vendor, procurement, problem, adjacent markets, is exactly the pattern behind building a real GovCon pipeline. One well-documented case gives you a template for capture strategy across dozens of similar buyers.

The Risk Conversation You Have to Be Ready For

Selling AI to government comes with real risks, and government buyers are getting more sophisticated about asking about them.

Cybersecurity. Data privacy. Bias in models. Accuracy in high-stakes decisions. Accessibility for citizens with disabilities. Human oversight requirements. Failure scenarios when the system gets it wrong. The New York Post coverage of the New Orleans 911 implementation specifically highlighted criticism around AI’s ability to interpret distressed callers, non-native English speakers, and unusual emergency situations. Those are legitimate concerns.

If you’re pitching AI or automation to a government agency, you have to be prepared to talk about risk, not just capability. Demonstrating that you understand where your solution might fail, and how you’ve designed around it, is often what separates a serious vendor from a startup pitching a demo.

The companies that win in this space aren’t the ones with the most impressive tech. They are the ones the government trusts to deploy it responsibly.

Your Action Plan (This Week)

Step 1: Pick one government problem to study (30 minutes).

Not one you already have a solution for. Pick one you’ve read about in the news. Emergency dispatch. Permitting delays. Benefits backlogs. Fraud detection. Cyber staffing shortages. Anything that showed up in reporting recently.

Step 2: Find who else has the same problem (60 minutes).

Search for the same issue in 5 other jurisdictions. City council minutes, budget documents, news reports. Confirm whether it’s isolated or a pattern.

Step 3: Find who’s already selling into it (30 minutes).

Look for vendors already delivering solutions to that problem. Contract awards on procurement portals. Vendor press releases. Case studies. Understand who’s there and how they positioned.

Step 4: Identify the outcome, not the technology (15 minutes).

Write down, in one sentence, what a government buyer actually wants from a solution to this problem. That sentence is your pitch. Not your tech.

Step 5: Set up ongoing intelligence for that vertical (30 minutes).

Google Alerts on the problem area. Meeting minutes for 3 target agencies. Procurement forecast reviews. This is how you catch the next opportunity before your competitors.

The Bottom Line

While everyone else is arguing whether AI belongs in 911 dispatch, someone is closing the next deal in a city that has the exact same problem New Orleans just solved.

The lesson isn’t about AI.

The lesson is about seeing.

Government contracts don’t get won by searching SAM.gov. They get won by watching where government pain shows up in public, in news, in meetings, in budgets, in hiring reports, and showing up before the RFP ever exists.

Don’t wait for the RFP to figure out what government needs. By the time the RFP comes out, someone else has been studying that problem for months.

That is what thinking like a government contractor actually looks like.

P.S. We break down how to find these opportunities early, how to research vendors and procurements, and how to pitch government buyers on outcomes rather than tech on our YouTube channel. If this is the reframe you needed, that's where the deeper breakdowns live. Subscribe to GovCon TechLab on YouTube.

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• Most people who fail at government contracting never asked the right questions before they started.

• These 10 questions come directly from clarity calls I’ve had with small business owners, the ones who thrived and the ones who didn’t.

• Running this diagnostic honestly will tell you whether you have a real government contracting opportunity or an expensive assumption.

• Save this article. Come back to it before your next major decision.

Every clarity call I do with a small business owner interested in government contracting eventually gets to the same 10 questions.

I’ve done a lot of these calls. And the pattern is clear: the small business owners who thrive in government contracting can answer most of these questions with real data. The ones who struggle usually cannot answer even half of them, because they never asked.

Government contracting for small business is not a get-rich-quick opportunity, no matter what the courses tell you. It is a specific market with specific rules, specific buyers, and specific timelines. And the small business owners who succeed are the ones who match themselves to it accurately, before they commit years to the wrong path.

I want to save you those years.

Below is the diagnostic. Ten questions. Answer them honestly. Save this article. Come back to it before every major decision you make about your government contracting business.

Question 1: Does the government actually buy what you sell?

This is the single most important question, and the one most new small business federal contractors skip.

Not “would the government probably want this?” but “does the federal, state, or local government spend meaningful money on this category, at volume, right now?”

You can check this in about 15 minutes on USASpending.gov (federal awards) and SAM.gov (both active solicitations and historical award data). If your product or service category shows almost no purchasing activity, your government contracting business is starting from a market that doesn’t exist yet.

Product-market fit is upstream of every other question on this list.

Question 2: Who buys it?

Once you’ve confirmed the government buys your category, get specific: which agencies? Which departments? Which state governments? Which counties or school districts?

Federal? State? Local? Some categories are federally concentrated (defense, national R&D). Others are dominated by state and local governments (education services, roadway maintenance, local IT support).

If you can’t name the top three agencies that buy your category, that’s the research to do this week.

Question 3: How much do they spend?

The size of the specific market matters, not the size of overall federal contracting.

A category with $50 million in annual awards across 200 vendors is a very different opportunity than a category with $5 billion in annual awards across 200 vendors. Both are real. Both require different strategies. Both may be right for you, but you need to know which one you’re actually entering.

USASpending.gov gives you this number for federal work. State and local totals are harder to aggregate, but you can pull them from state procurement portals and combine them.

Question 4: How do they procure it?

Federal, state, and local buyers use different procurement paths depending on the size and category of the purchase.

• Simplified acquisition (under $350K federal threshold), faster, lighter-touch

• Sealed bids and RFQs

• Multiple-award schedules (GSA MAS, agency IDIQs)

• Sources sought, RFIs, and pre-solicitation notices

• Small business set-asides (WOSB, 8(a), HubZone, VOSB, SDVOSB)

• State and local RFPs, RFQs, ITBs

Different procurement paths require different capability positioning. If your category is bought primarily through GSA schedules and you’re not on a schedule, you have a specific and defined next step. If your category is bought through set-asides and you don’t have the right certification, that changes your roadmap.

Question 5: Who’s winning today?

Look at the last 12 to 24 months of contract awards in your category. Who won?

Is it three or four large primes taking most of the market? Is it a diverse mix that includes small businesses? Is there a clear incumbent on every recompete? Are the same names showing up over and over?

This tells you the competitive landscape. It tells you whether you’ll be entering a market with real small business opportunity, or one where you’ll be fighting entrenched incumbents for a decade before you’re a serious contender.

Question 6: Can you actually compete?

Not aspirationally. Today.

Do you have the certifications the buyers in your category actually value? Do you have the past performance the evaluators will look for? Do you have the staffing to deliver a contract if you won one next month?

If the answer to any of these is no, that isn’t a reason to quit. It’s a reason to understand your gap. You may need to spend six months building past performance in the commercial market. You may need to pursue a specific certification. You may need to hire a technical lead. Know what the gap is before you commit to filling it.

Question 7: Can you subcontract while you build?

Small businesses that can’t yet win as prime often have a legitimate path through subcontracting. Delivering work under a prime contract still builds real experience and reference-worthy past performance in the specific category you want to move into.

Subcontracting isn’t a step down. For most new small business federal contractors, it’s a smarter starting point than trying to win a competitive federal RFP cold.

I wrote in detail about the difference between subcontracting and the middleman strategy in I Made More Money as a GovCon Subcontractor, the economics of that model surprised me.

Question 8: Do you have relevant past performance?

Past performance is one of the most-weighted evaluation criteria in almost every government contract award. Evaluators want to see that you’ve done this exact type of work before, for a similar client, at a similar scale, in a similar timeframe.

Do you have that history?

Commercial past performance counts, especially early on. But it needs to speak to the same problems your government buyer is trying to solve. If it doesn’t, you’re either building past performance through smaller wins first, or you’re teaming with someone who already has it.

Question 9: Can your business survive 6–12 months without revenue?

Federal contracting has one of the longest sales cycles of any business model. From RFP to award can run 12 to 18 months. And even after award, federal payment cycles frequently run 60 to 90 days after invoice.

That’s a long runway.

If your business can’t operate for 12 months without a new federal contract landing and paying, you are not ready to build your business primarily around federal work. That’s not disqualifying. It just tells you to start with state and local contracts (faster award and payment timelines) or with subcontracting, both of which generate revenue faster.

Cash flow is the reason most new government contractors fail. It’s not a strategy problem. It’s a runway problem.

Question 10: Why do you actually want government contracts?

This one takes the most honesty.

Is your motivation genuine fit, you have a real product or service that solves a real problem the government is buying, and you want to serve that market?

Or is your motivation “the government has money and I want some of it”?

Those two motivations lead to very different decisions. The first motivation drives you to align with what the government actually purchases. The second motivation drives you to force fit, trying to sell products the government doesn’t buy at volume, chasing contracts that don’t match your capability, and burning time on strategies that don’t compound.

You cannot force the government to be your customer. But you can align with what they’re already buying, if that’s the business you actually want to build.

How to Use This Diagnostic

Score yourself honestly.

8–10 answers with real data behind them. You have a legitimate opportunity. Build your capture strategy. Pursue the right certifications. Invest in the past performance and relationships that will compound.

5–7 answers with real data. Pause. The gaps you can identify are the exact list of things to research and close before you commit real time or money. Focus there for the next 60 days.

Fewer than 5. Don’t spend money on courses, certifications, or capability statements yet. You’re not ready, and the good news is that everything you need to become ready is available for free through public data. Start there.

If Question 1 comes back weak: be honest. Your product or service may still be a great commercial business. It just may not be a government business. Build where the market actually is.

If you want to think more broadly about whether starting a GovCon business makes sense for you at all, this piece is a good companion: Is It Worth Starting a GovCon Business in 2026?

Your Action Plan (This Week)

Step 1: Screenshot the diagnostic (30 seconds).

Save the checklist to your phone or notion. This is a reference document you’ll come back to.

Step 2: Block 3 hours this week (5 minutes to schedule).

This is not a “someday” exercise. Put it on the calendar. One 3-hour block or three 1-hour blocks. Enough time to actually research your answers.

Step 3: Answer questions 1 through 4 first (90 minutes).

These are the data questions. Use USASpending.gov, SAM.gov, agency procurement forecasts, and state procurement portals. Write down real numbers, not estimates.

Step 4: Answer questions 5 through 8 next (60 minutes).

These are the competitive and capability questions. Be honest about where you actually are today, not where you plan to be.

Step 5: Answer questions 9 and 10 last (30 minutes).

Cash runway and motivation. These questions require honesty more than research.

Step 6: Come back to this diagnostic in 90 days.

Your answers should look different. If they don’t, that’s information too.

The Bottom Line

Most people who fail at government contracting never asked the right questions before they started. They watched a YouTube video, registered on SAM.gov, and started chasing solicitations without ever checking whether the market actually fit them.

The small business owners who succeed in this space start with a very different question: does this opportunity actually exist for me, right now, with what I have?

These 10 questions answer that.

Save this article. Answer them honestly. Come back before every major decision you make about your government contracting business.

That is what starting government contracting the right way actually looks like.

P.S. I break down each of these 10 questions in more depth on our YouTube channel, how to research each one, what the data looks like, and how to interpret your answers. If you’re at the earliest stage of building a GovCon business, that’s where to start. Subscribe to GovCon TechLab on YouTube.

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• The government does not buy everything in mass quantity. A great product doesn’t guarantee a customer.

• Personal care products, boutique goods, and specialty items are almost never purchased at the volume you’d need to build a sustainable government contracting business.

• You can’t force the government to be your customer. You have to align with what they’re already buying.

• All of the data you need, what agencies buy, how much, from whom, and how often, is public and free.

A young woman told me she wanted to sell lingerie to the government.

I paused.

I didn’t want to be rude. But I also didn’t want to let her build a business plan around a customer that doesn’t functionally exist.

Yes, the government buys undergarments. Basic issue undergarments for military members, correctional facilities, and some federal healthcare programs. But those purchases are for standard, spec-driven items, bought in bulk from established suppliers who have been on that contract vehicle for years. That is not lingerie. And it is not a market a new small business can enter and grow month over month.

I’ve had this same conversation more times than you’d expect.

Someone wanting to sell high-end shampoo and body wash to federal agencies. Someone else pitching specialty hair care products. People with genuinely great products, real quality, real branding, assuming the federal government must be a buyer because the federal government is big.

Here’s the truth that costs new contractors years of misdirected effort:

The government does not buy everything. And the size of the government market is irrelevant if your product isn’t inside the categories they actually purchase in volume.

Big Buyer ≠ Universal Buyer

There’s a mental trap that pulls new small business owners into government contracting for the wrong reasons.

The federal government spends over $700 billion a year on contracts. State and local governments combined spend over $3 trillion. Those numbers are real, and they make it easy to assume that a slice of that spending must be reachable for any product.

It’s not.

The government is a big buyer, but it is not a universal buyer. Government spending is highly concentrated in specific categories. Professional and technical services. Construction and facilities. IT hardware, software, and infrastructure. Weapons and defense systems. Healthcare and pharmaceuticals. Basic supplies bought at bulk-standard specifications. Research and development.

If your product doesn’t sit inside one of those major categories, or a well-defined adjacent category, you are trying to sell to a market that doesn’t have a line item for what you make.

The problem isn’t your product or service. The problem is trying to force fit between what you sell and what agencies actually purchase.

Why “The Government Should Buy This” Is Not a Business Strategy

I want to be clear about something: none of this means your product is bad. Lingerie can be a great business. High-end body care can be a great business. Specialty hair care can be a great business.

They can just be great commercial businesses.

Building around the government as your primary customer requires a very different filter. The question isn’t “would the government potentially find value in my product?” The question is: “Does the government already spend money on this category, at volume, with buyers I can reach, on contract vehicles I can access?”

If the answer to that second question is no or unclear, you don’t have a government contracting opportunity. You have an assumption.

I’ve seen small business owners spend two or three years registering on SAM.gov, chasing certifications, attending industry days, and writing capability statements for a product category that has almost no procurement activity. That is time and money that could have gone into a commercial business where their product actually fits the market.

You can’t force the government to be your customer. You either align with what they buy, or you build elsewhere.

If you’re evaluating whether federal contracting even makes sense for your business at all, I wrote about that here: Is It Worth Starting a GovCon Business in 2026?. Product-market fit is upstream of every other decision in this space.

How to Find Out What the Government Actually Buys (All of This Is Free)

The good news is that federal, state, and local government purchasing data is one of the most public, most searchable, most abundant data sets in the entire economy.

Before you commit a year of your life to selling anything to the government, spend two hours checking whether the government is actually a buyer for what you sell.

Here are the sources every small business owner should use.

1. USASpending.gov.

Every federal contract award is published here. You can search by NAICS code, by product/service code, by keyword, by agency, by dollar range, by fiscal year. If your product category has federal buyers, they show up here. If it doesn’t, that’s your answer. Free. No account needed.

2. SAM.gov contract opportunities and awards.

SAM.gov shows current solicitations and historical award data. You can filter by category and see whether there are recurring purchases, the pattern of activity that indicates a real, ongoing market, or one-off buys.

3. Agency procurement forecasts.

Federal agencies publish annual procurement forecasts of what they intend to buy in the next 12 to 18 months. These are the roadmap of upcoming opportunities in specific categories. If your category never appears on any agency’s forecast, that tells you something important.

4. GSA Advantage and the GSA Multiple Award Schedule.

GSA is the government’s centralized purchasing catalog. What’s listed on GSA reflects what agencies are actually authorized to buy through a vehicle. If a product category has significant activity on GSA schedules, there’s a market. If your category is either absent or has almost no vendors and no purchase history, the market isn’t there.

5. State and local procurement portals.

Every state, most counties, and most large cities publish their procurement activity, RFQs, RFPs, awarded contracts, historical data. Aggregators like GovCB.com can pull this together, but each portal is free directly.

The 2-Hour Reality Check

Before you commit to selling anything to the government, do this. It will take two hours. It will save you years.

Step 1: Identify your product’s NAICS code and product/service code (15 minutes).

Every product and service has a code in the federal system. Look yours up. If you can’t find one that fits, that’s already a signal.

Step 2: Search USASpending.gov for that code (30 minutes).

How much did the federal government spend in that code last fiscal year? How many contract awards? Who won them, a handful of large primes, or a diverse mix that includes small businesses?

Step 3: Check SAM.gov for active solicitations (20 minutes).

Are there any current opportunities in this category? Or is it dead? A category with no active solicitations is not a market you can build a business in this year.

Step 4: Check 3 agency procurement forecasts (30 minutes).

Pick 3 agencies most likely to buy your category. Search their procurement forecasts for the next fiscal year. Does your product appear? What does it look like when it does?

Step 5: Talk to one person who already sells in this category (25 minutes).

Find a small business that has current contracts in your product/service code. Reach out. Ask them what selling to the government in this space actually looks like. Most contractors will tell you honestly.

At the end of two hours, you’ll know whether you have a government contracting opportunity, or an assumption dressed up as one.

If you find real activity: build your capture strategy around what the data shows.

If you don’t: your product may be great. It’s just not a government product. Build a commercial business around it and stop trying to force fit that doesn’t exist.

The Bottom Line

I want small business owners to succeed in government contracting. That’s the whole point of GovCon TechLab.

But success in this space starts with alignment, not enthusiasm.

The government has real budgets and real needs, and the buyers are actively looking for capable vendors right now. If your product or service fits inside a category they’re purchasing at volume, there is real opportunity for you. If it doesn’t, no amount of certifications, capability statements, or industry days will change that.

The best way to get into government contracting is to understand what agencies are already buying, and to make sure your business is aligned with what shows up in the data.

You can’t force the government to be your customer.

But you can find out, for free, in two hours, whether they already are.

P.S. I break down how to research the federal market, identify agency demand, and position your business inside real spending categories on our YouTube channel. If you're at the "should I even pursue this?" stage, that's where to start. Subscribe to GovCon TechLab on YouTube.

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• A paying customer can hurt your business more than a lost bid ever will.

• I learned this running a cleaning company. I forgot it and re-learned it in government contracting.

• Bad clients, bad contracts, bad agencies, and bad contract types all cost more than they pay, and the damage doesn’t show up in your revenue line.

• Great small business federal contractors don’t say yes to everyone. They know exactly what to reject.

I’ll never forget the day I realized a paying customer could actually hurt my business.

I ran a cleaning company for eight years before I ever touched government contracting. Cleaning was where I learned how to hire, price work, manage subcontractors, and deal with clients who thought paying you gave them the right to treat your team however they wanted.

There was one specific client that taught me the lesson.

The contract was solid on paper. Steady revenue. Recurring work. Predictable schedule. The kind of client you’re supposed to want.

But the client herself was toxic. Rude to my cleaners. Rearranged the schedule without notice and expected us to accommodate it. Made passive comments about my staff that crossed a line. Held onto invoices when she was in a bad mood.

I kept the account because the revenue looked healthy on the P&L.

And then, one by one, my best cleaners started asking not to be assigned to that job. Two of them eventually quit and one of them told me directly that this client was a big part of why.

That’s when I realized something that would shape every business decision I’ve made since.

Losing that client would have cost me a line item on a spreadsheet. Keeping her was costing me the people who were the actual business.

I fired her. My team stayed. The next client I signed paid more, respected the crew, and stayed with me for five years.

Years Later, I Made the Exact Same Mistake in Government Contracting

You’d think a lesson that expensive would stick.

It didn’t.

Years later, when I was building my government contracting business, I chased a contract because the number was big. On paper it fit our capabilities. The revenue would be meaningful. So, I said yes without really running the strategic math.

Here’s what happened.

The proposal took months of team capacity to write. Delivering the contract stretched us into work that was adjacent to our real expertise, not squarely in it. The margins were thinner than expected once we accounted for the actual scope. And while we were consumed by that contract, two other opportunities came up that were much better strategic fits, and I couldn’t pursue them because our capacity was pinned down.

The revenue was real. But it cost me the strategic capacity to build the business I actually wanted to build.

Same mistake. Different industry.

I said yes to revenue when I should have said no to the wrong fit.

That’s when I realized this pattern isn’t specific to cleaning or GovCon or any other business. It’s a universal small business trap. Revenue looks like the metric that matters, until you realize the hidden costs are what actually determine whether your company grows or stalls.

What Great Small Business Federal Contractors Reject

Once I started building the WIN system, I got much more disciplined about what to reject. There are four categories worth naming clearly, because every experienced government contractor has learned to walk away from all of them, and every new contractor is one hard lesson away from learning why.

Bad Clients

Not every buyer with money is a buyer worth having. Whether the client is a federal agency, a prime you’re subbing under, or a program manager you’d interact with daily the client relationship is the environment your business operates inside. Red flags:

• Disrespectful to your team or your subcontractors

• Constantly changing scope without acknowledging the cost

• Holding invoices as a negotiating tactic

• Micromanaging your work while claiming to want a “partner”

• Rewarding the vendors who tolerate the most abuse

A federal contract with a bad client will cost you your best people. In small business federal contracting, your people are the business. Losing them costs more than the contract pays.

Bad Contracts

The contract itself, the actual document you sign, carries its own risk. New government contractors often treat the terms as boilerplate. They’re not. Look for:

• Payment terms that stretch past 60 days without protection

• Undefined scope that will be “clarified” later (translation: expanded later)

• Impossible service-level agreements the government wouldn’t accept from its own agencies

• Termination clauses that let the government walk with no notice

• No cost-adjustment mechanism if scope or conditions change

A bad contract turns even a good client into a liability. If the terms make you the shock absorber for every risk, walk.

Bad Agencies

Not every federal agency is a good agency to work with. Some have well-known reputations for:

• Chronic late payments and administrative delays

• High CO turnover that resets your relationship every 6 months

• History of preferring incumbents regardless of merit

• No functional small business office, or a small business office that doesn’t advocate internally

• Contracts that consistently get protested, delayed, or restructured after award

You can find most of this out before you bid. Talk to other small business government contractors who have worked with that agency. Pull the agency’s protest history. Look at their contracting officer turnover. Some agencies are simply harder places to build a sustainable federal contracting business.

Bad Contract Types

Some contract structures are bad matches for a small business federal contractor’s stage. Common traps:

• LPTA (Lowest Price Technically Acceptable) when the work you do is quality-differentiated, you’ll get out-priced by contractors racing to the bottom

• Firm-fixed-price on ambiguous scope, you carry all the delivery risk

• IDIQs with no minimum guarantees, you win a “seat at the table” that never converts to actual task orders

• Middleman contracts where you have no direct client relationship and no expertise concentration (I made a YouTube video about my MiddleMan strategy experience).

• Contracts outside your concentrated past performance, every one dilutes your positioning

Your Action Plan (This Week)

Step 1: Write your “no” list before your “yes” list (20 minutes).

Most small business owners keep a target list of clients, agencies, and opportunities they want. Do the reverse first. Write down the specific characteristics of clients, contracts, agencies, and contract types you will not pursue, and why. This becomes your qualification filter.

Step 2: Audit your active portfolio (30 minutes).

Look at every client and every contract in your current book of business. Are any of them showing the red flags above? If yes, decide whether the cost of walking away is greater or less than the cost of keeping them.

Step 3: Rewrite your bid/no-bid checklist (45 minutes).

Every small business federal contractor should have a bid/no-bid checklist. If yours only measures whether you’re technically qualified, that’s not enough. Add questions about client fit, contract terms, agency reputation, and contract type. If any of these come back weak, no-bid.

Step 4: Practice saying no (this week).

The hardest part of this framework is not the framework. It’s the discipline to actually say no when a deal is offered to you. Practice on the next opportunity that doesn’t fit. Say no. Note what you feel. That feeling is what you’re building the muscle to override.

If you’re still on the fence about a specific opportunity right now, this piece will help: The Most Profitable Thing I Ever Did Was Walk Away From an RFP. It’s the article that helped a lot of contractors reframe walking away as a strategic move rather than a loss.

The Bottom Line

I lost a cleaning client I should have fired earlier, and it cost me people I couldn’t afford to lose.

I won a government contract I should have declined, and it cost me strategic capacity I couldn’t afford to lose either.

Different industries. Same lesson.

Small business federal contractors don’t grow because they say yes to everything. They grow because they know exactly what to reject, and they build the discipline to actually reject it.

Great businesses don’t say yes to everyone.

Great businesses know exactly what to reject.

P.S. I break down more government contracting strategies on our YouTube channel, how to qualify opportunities, when to walk away, and how to build the small business federal contracting business you actually want to run. Subscribe to GovCon TechLab on YouTube.

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• Small business government contractors keep adding services thinking it opens more doors. It closes them.

• Every service you add creates a new buyer, a new sales message, and a new procurement path, all of which fragment your business development.

• Federal agencies don’t remember what you can do. They remember what you’re known for.

• If your capability statement lists five different service lines, you’re not five times more likely to win, you’re five times more likely to be forgotten.

• The fix isn’t adding. It’s subtracting. The one question at the end of this article is where that starts.

Every service you add creates another customer you must understand, another market you must research, and another reason for buyers to forget what you actually do.

I had a clarity call last week with a small business federal contractor who wanted help figuring out why she wasn’t winning consistently.

She showed me her capability statement.

Here’s what her company was offering:

• Cybersecurity

• CMMC readiness

• Cloud services

• Staffing

• Hardware and software resale

Five service lines. One small business. And she was frustrated that agencies weren’t calling her back.

I want to walk you through what I told her, because this pattern is everywhere in GovCon, and it’s the reason a lot of contractors stall out somewhere between year 2 and year 4.

Why 5 Services Is Not 5 Times More Opportunity

Small business owners in government contracting often treat services like lottery tickets. More tickets, more chances to win. The logic feels right.

The logic is wrong.

Here’s why. Each of the services on that capability statement lives in a completely different world inside the federal buying process.

Cybersecurity. The buyer is usually a CISO or IT security lead. The problem is threat detection, incident response, and compliance with frameworks like NIST 800-53. The sales message is technical certifications and case studies of specific breach or compliance work. The procurement path is often through IDIQs and GSA IT Schedule 70 (now Multiple Award Schedule IT category), with heavy vetting.

CMMC readiness. The buyer is often a DoD prime contractor or a small business that needs certification to keep bidding on DoD work. The problem is passing an assessment at a specific CMMC level. The sales message is assessor credentials and DoD-specific experience. The procurement path is frequently commercial, not federal, because you’re selling to companies that hold federal contracts.

Cloud services. The buyer is an IT modernization lead or CIO. The problem is migration, infrastructure, and FedRAMP compliance. The sales message is your AWS, Azure, or GCP partnership tier, your FedRAMP experience, and your migration references. The procurement path runs through vehicles like JWCC, agency-specific cloud contracts, and cloud lines on GSA schedules.

Staffing. The buyer is a program manager or an HR contracting office. The problem is filling positions, often with cleared personnel. The sales message is your recruitment network, your talent pipeline, your retention rates. The procurement path is staffing IDIQs, HCaTS, and direct labor contracts.

Hardware and software resale. The buyer is a procurement officer or IT purchasing lead. The problem is getting products at approved government pricing. The sales message is your authorized reseller status, your GSA Advantage pricing, and your delivery reliability. The procurement path is GSA Schedule, SEWP, and open market purchases under simplified acquisition thresholds.

Five services. Five buyers. Five problems. Five sales messages. Five procurement paths.

You are not running one business. You are running five under-resourced ones.

What Agencies Actually Remember

Federal buyers don’t remember what you can do. They remember what you’re known for.

That’s an important distinction and it’s the one most small business federal contractors miss.

When a contracting officer or program manager has a need, they don’t scroll through your capability statement thinking “let me see all the things this company can help with.” They think of one or two vendors they associate with the specific problem in front of them.

If your capability statement says cybersecurity, CMMC, cloud, staffing, and hardware resale, you are not the person they think of for cybersecurity. You’re not the person they think of for staffing either. You’re the person they don’t think of at all, because your positioning is confusing.

I wrote about how much this matters at the buyer level in You’ve Been Pitching the Wrong Person the Whole Time. If you’re pitching five different buyers with the same generic capability statement, none of them see themselves in your message. That’s the practical cost of no positioning.

Concentrated past performance follows the same rule. Federal contracting rewards depth in a lane. Agencies award to companies that have proven track records in the exact type of work being procured. A small business with three cybersecurity contracts in its history is more credible on cybersecurity work than a business with one cybersecurity contract, one CMMC contract, one cloud migration, and two staffing contracts, even if the second company has more total revenue.

The market rewards depth. It punishes spread.

The Real Cost of Doing Too Much

There are three specific costs I see over and over on clarity calls with small business government contractors who have too many services.

Cost 1: Your business development is fractured.

Every service requires its own capture strategy, its own agency relationships, its own event calendar, and its own competitive research. Small businesses running five service lines are usually doing none of them well because their BD budget, time, money, attention is spread too thin.

Cost 2: Your proposals are generic.

When your capability statement is trying to be everything to everyone, your proposal writing becomes generic. You end up writing about your “diverse portfolio” and “broad experience” instead of building the specific, credible technical narrative that wins competitive federal contracts.

Cost 3: Your team doesn’t know what to say.

When someone on your team gets a phone call from a contracting officer, or meets a program manager at an industry day, they should be able to describe what your company does in one sentence. If the answer is “we do cybersecurity, CMMC, cloud, staffing, and resale,” you’ve forced your own team to sound unfocused. They will lose warm introductions because they can’t clearly answer “what do you do?”

The Fix Isn’t Adding. It’s Subtracting.

The instinct for most small business federal contractors is to keep adding services because it feels like more surface area equals more opportunity. It doesn’t. It equals more confusion, for buyers, for your team, and for your marketing.

The fix is subtractive.

You pick the one problem you want your government contracting business to be remembered for solving. You build around it. You concentrate your past performance around it. You develop the buyer relationships around it. You write your capability statement around it. And when someone asks what you do, including your own team, the answer is one sentence long.

Everything else gets deprioritized, subcontracted out, or dropped. This is the discipline that lets a small business federal contractor actually build past performance instead of accumulating a scattered portfolio.

Focus is not about limiting your income. It’s about making your business memorable enough to be selected.

Your Action Plan (This Week)

Step 1: Pull your last 10 proposals (30 minutes).

Sort them by service line. How many different service categories are you bidding on? If the answer is more than two, you are fragmented.

Step 2: Pull your past performance (20 minutes).

List every contract you’ve delivered in the last 3 years. Group them by service category. Which category has the most contracts? Which category has the largest total revenue? Which category has your best client references?

Step 3: Identify the highest-leverage service (30 minutes).

The service you should focus on is where past performance depth, buyer access, and win rate overlap. That’s your lane. Everything else is a distraction until it’s not.

Step 4: Rewrite your capability statement (60 minutes).

Rebuild it around the one service. Move the other services to a smaller “additional capabilities” section, or remove them entirely. Test the new version with a peer or advisor. If they can’t tell you what problem you solve in one sentence after reading it, keep cutting.

Step 5: Answer the exercise question below.

Don’t skip this one. It’s the whole point.

The One Question

Here is the exercise. Do it before you close this tab.

What is the one problem you want your company to be remembered for solving?

Write the answer down. Not the vague answer. Not the “we help agencies with their mission” answer. The specific problem. The one that a real buyer, in a real agency, would recognize immediately.

That answer is the beginning of your positioning. Everything else you’re doing right now is either building it or diluting it.

If you’re still deciding what to walk away from as you narrow your focus, read this: The Most Profitable Thing I Ever Did Was Walk Away From an RFP. Saying no is how you protect capacity for the work that actually builds your business.

P.S. I talk all this and more on our YouTube channel, how to position, how to concentrate your past performance, and how to become the small business federal contractor that agencies actually remember. Subscribe to GovCon TechLab on YouTube.

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• The middleman strategy in GovCon isn’t inherently good or bad, the structure of the deal determines the outcome.

• It works when you’re using it to build past performance, break into a new agency, or enter the market with low capital.

• It wrecks you when margins are thin, exit terms are undefined, and you have no direct relationship with the end client.

• The difference between a smart middleman play and a trap is 3–4 specific structural questions you can answer before you sign.

• WIN system: is this contract Worth It, for what you’re actually trading in exchange for the revenue?

I wrote a piece a while back called, I Won Four Middleman Government Contracts. And I Regret It. It landed hard with a lot of you.

I want to add something to it.

With another year of distance from those four contracts, I’ve realized something. The middleman strategy isn’t the problem. The way the deals were structured was the problem.

There are versions of the middleman play that make sense, that build a real business, and there are versions that quietly bleed you out over 12 months while looking successful from the outside.

The difference isn’t the strategy. It’s the setup.

Let me show you.

First: What “Middleman” Actually Means in GovCon

Let’s be precise about the model, because “middleman” gets used loosely.

In this context, the middleman strategy means: you win the government contract as the prime, then subcontract the actual work to another company, and keep the difference between what the government pays you and what you pay the subcontractor.

You are the contractor of record. You carry the liability. You handle the reporting. You have the CO relationship.

But you are not doing the work.

That structure has real advantages when it fits your situation, and real costs when it doesn’t. The question isn’t whether to use it. The question is when.

When It Works: 3 Scenarios Where the Middleman Play Is Smart

Scenario 1: You need past performance in a category you don’t currently have.

Federal contracting rewards past performance. If you’ve never done facilities management, HVAC, IT support, whatever the target category is, you cannot credibly propose against it. Certifications don’t fix this. Relationships don’t fix this. Only past performance does.

Winning a contract as the prime, with a qualified sub doing the work, builds your past performance. Next time around, you can propose the same category on your own, with a real reference. That’s a legitimate use of the strategy. You’re paying for a shortcut into a market that would otherwise take you 3 to 5 years to break into cold.

Scenario 2: You’re breaking into a new agency where you have no history.

Even with strong past performance in your category, some agencies won’t award to vendors who haven’t worked with them before. The middleman play lets you build that agency-specific history, one contract, one deliverable at a time.

Once you’ve delivered a clean contract, that agency has a reason to award to you directly next cycle. The middleman deal was the door. Your delivery is what walks you through it.

Scenario 3: You have low starting capital and need revenue to survive.

If your business is 6 months in and you cannot yet afford to hire, deliver in-house, or absorb the payroll of a full team, a middleman contract can generate revenue while you build. The margin will be modest. But modest revenue with limited overhead is a real business model, if you’re honest about what it is.

The key word is “honest.” You are not building a service business. You are building a broker business. Those are different companies with different economics. Know which one you’re in.

When It Wrecks You: 3 Red Flags That Turn the Play Into a Trap

Red flag 1: The margin is below 15%.

Middleman deals live and die on margin. Typical middleman margins in federal services run somewhere between 5% and 20%. Below 15%, one delayed payment, one subcontractor issue, one scope change and you are underwater.

On a $200K contract at 10% margin, you’re keeping $20K over 12 months. That’s not a business. That’s a part-time income with full-time liability. If the government pays late, and they will, you’re the one making payroll for your sub out of pocket. On margins that thin, one late payment can wipe out the entire year of profit.

Red flag 2: You have no direct relationship with the end client.

If the government contact only talks to your subcontractor, you are not the prime. You are a check-cashing service.

I’ve seen contractors take middleman deals where the sub had the pre-existing relationship with the agency, was doing all the client-facing work, and the “prime” was purely a pass-through for a certification set-aside. In those deals, the moment the contract ends, the agency has no reason to award to you again. The sub has no reason to keep you in the loop. You built nothing.

If you’re going to be the prime, you have to be present in the delivery, meetings, status updates, quarterly reviews. That is the relationship-building work that turns one contract into three.

Red flag 3: The exit terms are undefined.

Every middleman deal should have a clear answer to: what happens if this doesn’t work?

If your sub underperforms, can you replace them? If the sub decides to bid directly next cycle, is there a non-compete? If the contract ends, do you own the client relationship or does the sub?

Most contractors don’t ask these questions before they sign a teaming agreement. They should. In several deals I’ve seen, the sub ended up going direct with the agency the next cycle, and the “prime” was left with a strong past performance record and nothing else to show for it.

The 4 Questions That Separate the Two

Before you sign any middleman-style deal, run it through these four questions. Answer honestly.

1. What am I actually building here, a business or a bank account?

If the answer is bank account, that’s fine, but price the deal accordingly. Charge for the risk. Don’t take 8% margin to be someone’s compliance shield.

2. What is my margin after cash flow float?

Assume a 45-day government payment cycle. Assume your sub expects to be paid in 30. Calculate what it will cost you to float the gap. Subtract that from your headline margin. That’s your real number.

3. Will I have direct client contact throughout delivery?

If the sub is running the client meetings and delivering the work while you’re invisible, this is not a middleman deal. This is a pass-through. Those are different animals.

4. What happens at the end of the contract?

Who owns the client relationship? Who owns the past performance? What are the terms if either side wants to walk?

If you can’t answer all four with certainty, you don’t understand the deal well enough to sign it.

If you’re weighing this against going direct as a subcontractor, where you’re the one doing the work, I wrote about that trade-off here: I Made More Money as a GovCon Subcontractor. The economics of that model surprised me.

Your Action Plan (Before You Sign the Next One)

Step 1: Calculate the real margin (30 minutes).

Take the proposed contract value. Subtract sub costs. Subtract the estimated cost of floating a 60-day payment gap. Subtract your admin and compliance overhead. What’s actually left?

Step 2: Write down what you’re trading (10 minutes).

List what you’re giving up: capacity to bid other work, cash reserve for the float, direct margin. List what you’re getting: past performance, agency access, revenue. Are the trades honest?

Step 3: Confirm your role in delivery (15 minutes).

Get in writing, before signing, that you will be at all client meetings, receive all status updates, and have direct communication with the CO throughout. If the sub resists this, that tells you what kind of deal it really is.

Step 4: Draft the exit terms (30 minutes).

What happens if the sub underperforms? If they bid direct next cycle? If the contract ends? Put it in the teaming agreement. If they won’t sign, you have your answer.

Step 5: Decide (5 minutes).

With those four inputs on paper, the decision is usually obvious. If any of them come back weak, walk away. There will be more contracts. Your capacity is finite.

The Bottom Line

I don’t regret the middleman strategy the way I once did. I regret the specific deals I signed without asking the right questions first.

Some of those four contracts I would do again, the ones that built real past performance, real agency relationships, real optionality in the business. Others I would walk away from without hesitation.

That’s the framework I want to leave you with. The strategy isn’t the enemy. The setup is.

Run the four questions. Answer them honestly. Sign the deal only when the answers are on your side.

That’s the W in the WIN system, Worth It. And Worth It has to include what you’re really trading, not just the top-line revenue.

P.S. We break down on our YouTube channel. Subscribe to GovCon TechLab on YouTube.

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• Most contractors lose because they spread across too many agencies, not because they write bad proposals.

• Federal contracting is a relationship business. You can’t build meaningful relationships with 20 agencies at once.

• I target 3 agencies at a time, deeply, deliberately, and in a specific sequence.

• Going deep means knowing their budget cycle, procurement history, key personnel, and upcoming needs before any RFP exists.

Most contractors think losing is a proposal problem.

It’s not.

I’ve reviewed loss notifications for contractors who wrote technically sound proposals. Well-organized. Compliant. Clearly written. They lost anyway.

Not because the proposal was bad.

Because they were strangers.

They found the RFP on SAM.gov, had 30 days to respond, and submitted to an agency they’d never spoken to, whose procurement history they’d never read, whose program office had never heard their name. And they lost to a company that had been in conversation with that agency for 8 months before the solicitation ever existed.

Here’s what actually changes your win rate: picking fewer agencies and going deeper on each one.

I target 3 at a time. That’s my system. Let me show you why.

The Math That Exposes Spray-and-Pray

If your win rate on cold bids, proposals submitted to agencies you have no prior relationship with, is around 10%, you need 10 proposals to win 1 contract.

Each competitive federal proposal takes 30 to 80 hours to write. Not counting the time to find the opportunity, read the solicitation, gather past performance documents, develop pricing, and review for compliance.

Run the numbers: 10 cold proposals, conservative estimate, 40 hours each. That’s 400 hours of work for 1 win. Ten weeks of full-time effort.

And that’s assuming a 10%-win rate, which, for a new vendor with no prior agency relationship, may be generous.

Now here’s the other scenario.

You spend those same 10 weeks building relationships with 3 agencies. You pull their procurement history. You attend their industry day. You respond to their Sources Sought notice. You reach out to the small business liaison. You send a capability statement to the program office.

By the time an RFP drops from one of those 3 agencies, you are not a stranger. You’re a known quantity. Your win probability on that proposal is not 10%. It’s significantly higher because the evaluators have context for who you are and what you do.

Same hours. Different strategy. Very different odds.

What “Going Deep” on an Agency Actually Means

Targeting 3 agencies doesn’t mean bidding on 3 contracts. It means becoming the contractor those 3 agencies think of when a need shows up in their budget.

Here’s what I learn about each agency before I ever submit a proposal.

Their budget cycle. When does their fiscal year end? When are they most likely to release solicitations? Federal agencies operate on a September 30 fiscal year. Local and state agencies vary. Knowing when they buy tells you when to be visible.

Their procurement history. I pull their last 3 years of contract awards on USASpending.gov. What did they buy? How much did they pay? Who did they buy it from? Is there an incumbent? When does that contract expire? This tells me whether there’s an opportunity worth pursuing and when it’s likely to open.

Their key personnel. Three names matter at every agency: the small business liaison officer, the program manager for the work you want to do, and eventually, the contracting officer. You don’t cold-call all three on day one. You build access in sequence. The small business liaison is usually the right first contact.

Their upcoming needs. Federal agencies publish procurement forecasts. Local governments publish capital improvement plans and budget documents. Both tell you what they’re planning to spend money on before any RFP exists. I read these before I make contact.

Their events. Industry days, vendor outreach sessions, pre-bid conferences. These are free. They’re public. Most contractors skip them. The contractors who show up consistently get remembered.

How to Pick Your 3

Not every agency is worth your time. Here’s the filter I use.

Past performance fit. Can you point to work you’ve done that is directly relevant to what this agency buys? If yes, you have a credible story to tell. If no, you’re asking them to take a chance on you, and agencies rarely do that for significant contracts.

Certification alignment. If you’re WOSB, does this agency have WOSB set-aside history in your NAICS code? If you’re DBE, is this a DOT-funded agency where DBE participation matters? Your certifications only help if the agency values them. Pull the data before you commit time to an agency.

Contract size fit. Look at their historical award sizes. If they’ve never awarded a contract under $500K and you’re a 3-person business, that’s a mismatch, not because you can’t do the work, but because you may not have the capacity to staff it compliantly. Target agencies whose typical award size is realistic for your current bench.

Access. Can you get in front of people? Do they host industry days? Do they have an active small business program? Some agencies are easier to build relationships with than others. Start with the ones where access is real.

History with small businesses. USASpending.gov shows you exactly who an agency has awarded to. If they’ve awarded to small businesses in your category before, they’ll do it again. If every award for the past 5 years has gone to large primes, that’s a signal worth taking seriously.

Run this filter on every agency you’re considering. The ones that pass on all five criteria are your 3.

What the Pipeline Looks Like When You’re Focused

When I say I target 3 agencies, here’s what that looks like in practice at any given time.

Agency 1 is in the relationship-building phase. I’ve made initial contact. I’ve responded to a Sources Sought. I’ve attended an industry day. No RFP is on the horizon yet, but I know one is coming based on their procurement forecast. I show up. I stay visible.

Agency 2 has an RFP I’m actively preparing a proposal for. I’ve been building this relationship for 6 months. I know the program office. I have context for what they’re looking for. I’m writing from a position of information, not guessing.

Agency 3 is in research. I’ve identified them as a target. I’m pulling procurement history, reading their budget documents, looking for the right entry point. I haven’t made contact yet.

As Agency 2’s proposal gets submitted, I identify a new Agency 3 to start researching. The pipeline rotates. Each agency moves through the stages at its own pace.

This is not a fast system. Federal contracting never is. But it compounds. By year 2, you have a track record with agencies who know your name. By year 3, you’re getting calls before the solicitation exists.

That’s what the WIN system is designed to build: a pipeline that works because it’s intentional, not because it’s high-volume.

If you’re still at the stage of deciding whether to walk away from an opportunity that doesn’t fit, read this: The Most Profitable Thing I Ever Did Was Walk Away From an RFP. Saying no to the wrong agencies is how you protect capacity for the right ones.

Your Action Plan (This Week)

Step 1: Audit your last 5 proposals (20 minutes).

How many different agencies did you submit to? How many of those agencies had you spoken to before the RFP dropped? If the answer is zero, you’ve been spray-and-praying. That’s fixable.

Step 2: Identify your 3 target agencies (45 minutes).

Use the five-filter framework above. Past performance fit, certification alignment, contract size fit, access, and small business history. Write down the three that score highest.

Step 3: Pull their procurement history on USASpending.gov (45 minutes).

Search each agency. Filter by your NAICS code. Look at the last 3 years of awards. Note the incumbent, the award amounts, and the expiration dates. This is your intelligence baseline.

Step 4: Find their next event or contact point (20 minutes).

Search for upcoming industry days, vendor outreach sessions, or small business office contacts for each of your 3 agencies. Put at least one on your calendar.

Step 5: Make first contact with one of the three (this week).

Don’t wait for a solicitation. Reach out to the small business liaison with a brief capability statement. Once you know who to contact, that part is covered here: You’ve Been Pitching the Wrong Person the Whole Time.

The Bottom Line

Volume is not a strategy. It’s a substitute for one.

The contractors who build real GovCon businesses, the ones with consistent wins, growing past performance, and agencies that call them back, aren’t bidding on 30 contracts a year. They’re going deep on a small number of agencies, building the kind of familiarity that changes how evaluators read their proposals.

Pick 3. Learn everything. Show up before the RFP.

That’s the W in WIN - Worth It. And an agency is only worth your time if you’re willing to invest in it before the opportunity is posted.

P.S. I break down the full WIN system on our YouTube channel, how to pick the right agencies, build the right relationships, and position before the RFP exists. Come see how it works in practice. Subscribe to GovCon TechLab on YouTube.

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• We were just awarded a Department of Transportation IT contract in July 2026. We submitted the proposal in July 2025.

• The full cycle from RFP to award ran about 13 months, and that’s not unusual for federal work.

• The evaluation included clarifying questions, a waiting period most people aren’t prepared for, and no visibility into what was happening on the other side.

• Federal GovCon is not a get-rich-quick business. It is a long-cycle, relationship-driven sales process.

• Before you bid federal, make sure your business can survive the wait.

We got the award notification this month.

Department of Transportation. IT services contract.

I sent the team a message. We celebrated for about 10 minutes.

Then I sat down and looked at the timeline.

We received the RFP in spring 2025. We spent months putting together the proposal, writing, reviewing, revising, checking compliance, pulling together past performance documentation. We submitted in July 2025.

Then we waited.

The DOT came back with clarifying questions, which is normal in federal procurement, but if you’ve never been through it, it feels like the process has stalled. You’re answering questions on a contract that hasn’t been awarded yet, on a timeline you can’t control, with no visibility into where you stand.

Then we waited some more.

Award: July 2026.

Twelve months from submission to award. Thirteen months from the day the RFP dropped to the day we got the notification.

If nobody told you this was coming, it would break your business.

What the Federal Procurement Timeline Actually Looks Like

Here’s the phase-by-phase breakdown of what most people don’t show you.

Phase 1: The RFP drops.

You find the solicitation on SAM.gov. You read it. You decide whether to bid. This decision alone, evaluating the opportunity, determining fit, calculating your win probability, should take more than a day. The W in the WIN system is “Worth It.” Federal bids take months of your team’s time. Bid the wrong one and you lose months, not hours.

Phase 2: Proposal preparation.

This is not a weekend project. A competitive federal proposal for an IT services contract typically involves a technical volume, a management volume, a past performance volume, pricing, and compliance with a 30-page Section L and M. We spent months on this one. Some proposals take longer. Budget your time accordingly.

Phase 3: Submission.

You hit submit. The evaluation period begins. For most federal contracts, the government has no legal obligation to tell you how long this will take. The solicitation may list an estimated award date. It is frequently wrong.

Phase 4: Clarifying questions or discussions.

Not every procurement includes this step, but many do. The contracting officer may come back with questions about your technical approach, your pricing, your past performance, or your proposed team. This is your chance to clarify, but also an opportunity to strengthen your position. Respond quickly. Respond completely. Do not assume a question means bad news.

Phase 5: More waiting.

After discussions close, the agency completes its evaluation. There is no set timeline for this. Weeks. Months. We waited.

Phase 6: Award.

The notification arrives. If it’s a win, you celebrate. If it’s a loss, you request a debrief. Either way, the clock on the next opportunity has already started.

GovCon Is Not a Get-Rich-Quick Business

I want to say this as plainly as I can.

There are people selling courses, coaching programs, and masterminds built on the idea that you can start a GovCon business and be making six figures within 90 days. Some of them show screenshots of SAM.gov contract awards and call it proof.

Here’s what they don’t show you:

The proposal they wrote in month 1. The evaluation period that ran for 9 months. The clarifying questions that came back in month 4. The cash flow gap between business expenses and that first invoice getting paid after award.

Federal contracting has one of the longest sales cycles of any business model. The contract value can be significant but the timeline to that value is measured in months, sometimes years.

I’ve written more than 100 proposals. I’ve won at DOT, Air Force, Army Corps of Engineers, DECA. I’ve also lost more than I’ve won. And every win required the business infrastructure to survive the wait.

If your business cannot operate for 12 months without a new federal contract award, you are not ready to bid federal. That’s not a criticism. It’s a cash flow reality.

What You Do While You Wait

This is where FLOW comes in.

FLOW is the operational backbone of your GovCon business. While a federal proposal is under evaluation, your business still has rent, payroll, software costs, and operating expenses. The pipeline has to keep moving.

Here’s what we did while we waited on the DOT award:

We kept bidding. One proposal in evaluation does not mean you stop prospecting. If you treat each federal bid like a lottery ticket and stop buying after one, you will run out of runway before you run out of chances.

We pursued smaller, shorter-cycle work. Local and state government contracts have faster timelines 4 to 8 weeks from solicitation to award on many RFQs. These keep revenue moving while federal bids are in evaluation. I wrote about starting with local government before federal in an earlier piece: I Lost Every Proposal I Submitted for an Entire Year. That Was Normal.

We maintained our relationships. During the wait, we stayed visible. Attended industry days. Checked in with teaming partners. Monitored sources sought notices for the next round of opportunities. The pipeline you build during the evaluation period is what feeds the business 12 months from now.

Before You Bid Federal, Answer These Questions

The WIN system asks: is this opportunity worth your time?

For federal bids, “worth it” has to include an honest look at your runway.

1. Can your business operate for 12 months without this award?

If the answer is no, you need either a different pipeline strategy or shorter-cycle revenue while you wait.

2. Do you have 2–3 months of capacity to write a competitive proposal?

A compliant submission is not the same as a competitive submission. Budget the time for both.

3. Have you had any prior contact with the program office?

Zero relationship going into a competitive evaluation is not disqualifying but it is a disadvantage. The earlier you find the opportunity and start building visibility, the better your position when the RFP drops.

4. What happens to your business if you lose?

Know the answer before you submit. A debrief is useful. A surprise that breaks your cash flow is not.

Your Action Plan (This Week)

Step 1: Map your current financial runway (30 minutes).

How many months can your business operate at current expense levels without a new contract award? Write down the number. Be honest.

Step 2: Count your active proposals in evaluation (10 minutes).

How many bids are currently sitting with an agency waiting for an award decision? If the answer is one, your pipeline is thin.

Step 3: Identify 2–3 shorter-cycle opportunities (45 minutes).

Local government, state procurement portals, or subcontracting, any of these can generate revenue while federal bids are in evaluation. Find them and put them in your pipeline now.

Step 4: Set a calendar reminder for 90 days out (5 minutes).

Every proposal you submit should have a follow-up trigger. If you haven’t heard anything in 90 days, check the procurement status on SAM.gov and reach out to the contracting officer for an update. You are allowed to ask.

The Bottom Line

We won a DOT IT services contract this month.

It took 13 months from the day the RFP dropped to the day we got the award.

That’s not slow. That’s federal.

If you’re new to GovCon and someone told you the money comes fast, I want to give you a more accurate picture: it comes, but it takes time. The contractors who build real businesses in this space are the ones who planned for the timeline, who had enough runway, enough pipeline, and enough short-cycle revenue to survive the wait.

The award is worth it.

But only if you’re still in business when it arrives.

If you want to understand how to find opportunities early enough to position yourself before the RFP ever drops, read this: The Most Profitable Thing I Ever Did Was Walk Away From an RFP. Knowing when to walk is just as important as knowing how to win.

P.S. We break down the real mechanics of federal contracting, timelines, evaluations, cash flow, and what nobody tells you, on our YouTube channel. Come see how this actually works. Subscribe to GovCon TechLab on YouTube.

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• Most contractors enter the procurement process at the wrong stage, when it’s already over.

• The actual buying decision happens months before any RFP hits SAM.gov or your local procurement websites.

• Government agencies signal what they need at public meetings, city councils, school boards, budget hearings.

• You can position yourself as the solution before the competition even knows an opportunity exists.

• The WIN system starts here: knowing what’s worth your time before anyone else does.

If you’re waiting for an RFP to be posted online...

You’re already late.

Everyone tells you the same thing: search SAM.gov, search your state procurement portal, set up email alerts, check back every day.

That’s not wrong advice.

But here’s what they don’t tell you.

By the time that RFP gets posted, the real conversation has already happened. Often months ago.

Let me show you where contracts actually start, and how I’ve used this to position myself before the competition ever shows up.

The RFP Isn’t the Beginning. It’s the End.

Government agencies don’t wake up one Tuesday morning and decide to issue an RFP.

The process starts with a problem. Someone in a budget meeting says the HVAC systems are failing. A school board member flags that the website is broken. A county commissioner asks why the landscaping contract keeps going to the same company.

Those conversations, those are buying signals.

And they happen in public.

City council meetings. School board sessions. County commission hearings. Budget review sessions. Capital improvement planning meetings.

These aren’t secret. Anyone can attend. Most of them are recorded and posted online within 48 hours. Many have transcripts.

I’ve tracked contracts that were 14 months in the making from the time someone mentioned the need in a public meeting to the day the RFP hit the portal. Fourteen months. That’s 14 months of relationship-building time that most contractors threw away because they were waiting for the notice.

What a Buying Signal Actually Looks Like

You’re not listening for procurement language. Nobody in a city council meeting says, “we are initiating a competitive solicitation process for facilities management services.”

They say things like:

“Our current vendor isn’t meeting service levels.”

“We’ve had three complaints about the IT system this quarter.”

“The capital improvement plan includes a facilities upgrade.”

“We need to figure out the software situation before the new fiscal year.”

Those are buying signals.

The difference between a contractor who wins and one who loses is often nothing more than timing. I’ve talked to small business owners who wrote excellent proposals and still lost., not because the proposal was bad, but because someone else had already been having conversations with the agency for 8 months before the RFP dropped.

The government buyer already had a vendor in mind. The RFP was a formality.

That’s not a conspiracy. That’s just relationship capital, and you can build it too.

Where to Find Buying Signals Before Anyone Else

Here’s what the system looks like in practice.

1. Meeting minutes and agendas.

Every local government entity in your target market posts meeting minutes and agendas publicly. Most have them on their website. Many are archived going back years. Search them for keywords related to your service area: “vendor,” “contract,” “renewal,” “upgrade,” “assessment,” “proposal.”

I do this with a simple Google search: site: [agency website] “contract” OR “vendor” “2026”

Takes 20 minutes per agency. One strong signal can be worth $200K.

2. Budget hearings and capital improvement plans.

Every government entity publishes an annual budget. Capital improvement plans specifically outline what they’re planning to spend money on over the next 3-5 years. This is a goldmine.

If an agency’s capital improvement plan lists “IT infrastructure modernization” for Year 2, start positioning yourself in Year 1.

3. Sources sought and RFIs.

Before an RFP, most federal agencies post a Sources Sought notice or Request for Information on SAM.gov. These aren’t contracts, they’re market research. Responding doesn’t lock you into anything, but it gets your name in front of the contracting officer and can influence how the requirement is scoped.

Most contractors ignore Sources Sought because it’s not a contract. That’s exactly why you should respond.

The Competitive Advantage Is the Window, Not the Proposal.

Here’s the part that changes how you think about business development.

If you wait for the RFP, you’re competing on price and proposal quality against everyone else who also got the notice. Win rates for new vendors at that stage run around 10-15% on competitive procurements, and lower if there’s an incumbent.

If you find the signal 6 months early, you can do something different. You can request an informational meeting with the program office. Attend a public meeting and introduce yourself during public comment. Respond to the Sources Sought. Get your name and your capability in front of the decision-maker before they’ve finalized the requirements.

At that point, you’re not just another bidder. You might be the company that helped shape what they’re looking for.

That’s the W in the WIN system: Is this worth your time? And the answer depends not just on whether the contract is a fit, but whether you have enough runway to position yourself to win it.

If you can only find out about it after the RFP drops, your odds drop significantly. That’s not a proposal problem. That’s an intelligence problem.

I wrote more about this in SAM.gov Is Not Where You Should Start Government Contracting, the logic is the same. By the time you’re searching a portal, you’re downstream of where the real positioning happens.

Your Action Plan (Tonight)

This doesn’t require any special software. Start with 90 minutes.

Step 1: Pick 3 target agencies (15 minutes).

Local, state, or federal, doesn’t matter. Pick three agencies where you have at least one past performance or a realistic shot at qualifying. Write down their names.

Step 2: Find their public meeting archives (20 minutes).

Go to each agency’s website. Look for “meetings,” “city council,” “board,” “minutes,” or “agenda.” Most post the last 12-24 months of minutes online. If you can’t find them, search [agency name] meeting minutes site: [agency domain].

Step 3: Scan for buying signals in your service area (30 minutes).

Use Ctrl+F to search meeting minutes for words like: contract, vendor, upgrade, assessment, renewal, budget, RFP, proposal, services, system, infrastructure. Flag anything that mentions a problem or need in your wheelhouse.

Step 4: Pull their capital improvement plan or budget (15 minutes).

Search [agency name] capital improvement plan 2025 or [agency name] annual budget 2026. Download it. Search for your service category. Note anything planned for the next 18-24 months.

Step 5: Set up Google Alerts (10 minutes).

Create alerts for [agency name] + contract, [agency name] + procurement, [agency name] + RFP. You want to catch news before it hits the portals.

This gives you an early warning system that most of your competitors don’t have. Not because they can’t build it, but because they don’t know to look.

The Bottom Line

The contractors who win consistently aren’t better at writing proposals.

They’re better at timing.

They show up to the conversation before the RFP exists. They understand what the agency is dealing with. They’ve talked to someone in the program office. By the time the solicitation drops, they already have credibility and context that no proposal can manufacture in 30 days.

The RFP is the end of the buying process, not the beginning.

Start where the buying actually starts.

And if you’re new to this and still figuring out who you’re even supposed to be talking to, I covered that here: You’ve Been Pitching the Wrong Person the Whole Time. Understanding the difference between the contracting officer and the program manager will change how you use every buying signal you find.

P.S. I break down buying signals, capture strategy, and the full WIN system on our YouTube channel. If this clicked for you, come watch the next one. Subscribe to GovCon TechLab on YouTube.

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• “It’s a numbers game” is the most expensive advice in GovCon.

• One proposal costs 40–80 hours. If you’re submitting 20 per month, you’re not playing a numbers game, you’re burning resources on weak bids.

• Stop measuring yourself by proposal volume.

• Measure yourself by the win rate. The contractors who win consistently aren’t submitting more. They’re submitting smarter.

Someone in a Facebook group told you government contracting is a numbers game.

Keep bidding. More proposals mean more chances. Cast a wide net. Volume equals opportunity.

I’ve heard it a hundred times.

With respect: that’s nonsense.

And if you’ve been following that advice and wondering why your win rate is low, this is for you.

You Have Permission to Stop

Before I get into the math, I want to give you something most GovCon content won’t:

Permission to not bid.

Most contractors I work with feel guilty when they skip an RFP. Like they missed their shot. Like the contract they didn’t pursue was the one that would have changed everything.

That guilt is doing real damage.

It’s pushing you to write proposals you’re not positioned to win. It’s spreading your time across twenty opportunities when you should be focused on three. It’s keeping you busy in a way that feels productive but isn’t.

You don’t get paid to submit proposals.

You get paid to win profitable contracts.

Those are not the same thing.

What a Proposal Actually Costs You

People seriously underestimate how much work goes into one proposal.

Here’s what actually happens when you decide to bid:

You read the RFP, the full thing, not just the summary. You research the agency. Who’s the incumbent? What’s their history with this work? What does the CO actually care about? You build your pricing, which means calculating labor categories, overhead, materials, and margin, without losing the bid or winning a contract you can’t afford to run. You write the technical response, which isn’t a summary of your capabilities, it’s a direct answer to every evaluation criterion, written in the evaluator’s language. You collect past performance citations, which means finding the right projects, getting your forms filled out, and making the strongest possible case that you’ve done this work before. You review, revise, format, and check compliance. Then you upload and pray the portal doesn’t time out.

That’s one proposal. One.

In my experience, a competitive proposal takes 40–80 hours of real time. At $100 per hour, a conservative number for most small business owners, that’s $4,000 to $8,000 before you know if you won.

So, here’s the hard question:

If you’re submitting 20 or 30 proposals a month, how good are those proposals?

Really.

The Math Nobody Does

Let me show you what the “numbers game” strategy actually looks like on paper.

20 proposals per month. 40 hours each. That’s 800 hours, the equivalent of 20 full working weeks, every single month.

That’s not a strategy. That’s a treadmill.

And when you spread 800 hours across 20 bids, you’re averaging 40 hours per proposal. Which sounds like a lot until you realize that a truly competitive proposal for a $500K contract can take 80 to 120 hours done right.

You’re not playing a numbers game. You’re filing paperwork.

The contractors who win consistently aren’t submitting more. They’re submitting smarter. They’re putting 80 focused hours into a bid they have a 35% chance of winning instead of 40 distracted hours into a bid they have a 5% chance of winning.

Win rate is the metric that matters. Not volume.

Five Questions Before You Write a Single Word

Before I commit to any proposal, I ask myself five questions. If I can’t say yes to all five, I need to know that before I spend 60 hours finding out the hard way.

1. Is this work a good fit?

Not “could we do this”, does this scope map directly to what we actually deliver? Are the deliverables things we’ve done before and can document?

2. Can I actually make money on this contract?

Some contracts look good until you price them out. Know your cost structure before you fall in love with the opportunity.

3. Do I have the right experience to win?

Past performance isn’t just a checkbox. Evaluators are looking for direct evidence that you’ve done this specific type of work. If your citations are adjacent, not direct, that’s a problem.

4. Is this customer worth pursuing?

Not every agency is worth your time. Payment track record, scope clarity, CO communication, incumbent strength, these matter for win probability and contract quality.

5. Do I realistically have a chance?

This is the one most people skip. Is the incumbent strong? Did you find out about this when the RFP dropped, or have you been building relationships for 12 months? Can you answer the question: why would we specifically win this? If the honest answer is “someone has to,” that’s hope, not strategy.

If the answer to any of these is no, that’s not automatic no-bid. But it is a reason to be honest about your real win probability before you invest 60 hours.

What You Gain When You Don’t Bid

Here’s the part nobody talks about.

Every proposal you don’t write is time you get back.

Time you can spend building agency relationships before the next RFP drops, so you find out about opportunities 6 months before the solicitation, not 6 days after.

Time you can spend on capture work, identifying the right primes, positioning for the right set-asides, building the past performance you actually need.

Time you can spend making your next proposal 80 hours of focused, strategic work instead of 40 hours of scramble.

The no-bid decision isn’t a missed opportunity. It’s a resource allocation decision. You’re choosing to put your time where you actually have a shot and building the infrastructure to increase that shot over time.

In relation to this I wrote: “The Most Profitable Thing I Ever Did Was Walk Away From an RFP”

This Is a Decision-Making Game

My goal has never been to submit the most proposals.

My goal has always been to submit the right proposals.

The contractors who chase volume are busy. The contractors who chase decision quality are winning.

Government contracting rewards positioning. Relationships. Repeat business from agencies that know your name. Past performance that directly matches the next scope. Proposals that feel like they were written by someone who actually understood the requirement, because they were.

None of that comes from submitting 30 proposals a month.

It comes from running your pipeline the way the WIN system is designed to run it.

The WIN Framework Applies Here

Before every bid, I run the opportunity through WIN:

W — Worth It. Run the expected value math. Win probability × contract value versus your proposal cost in time. Is the return worth the investment?

I — Intentional Fit. Does this match what you actually have? Past performance, certifications, NAICS code, scope, no gaps the evaluator will see.

N — Next Move. Do you have a strategy, not just a response? Did you know about this before it dropped? Do you have a relationship at this agency or with a prime? Can you answer: why would we specifically win this?

If you can’t say yes to all three, that’s not a reason to automatically walk away. It’s a reason to know your real odds before you spend the hours.

Most contractors skip this entirely. They open the RFP, see a scope match, and start writing. Then they wonder why their win rate is 8%.

The answer is almost always the same: they’re bidding everything and winning nothing.

Stop submitting more.

Start submitting smarter.

P.S. We have a YouTube channel. If you want to learn more about govcon, check out our channel: https://www.youtube.com/@govcontechlab

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• Most new contractors bid everything and win nothing. The spray-and-pray approach burns time, money, and confidence.

• A competitive federal proposal costs 40–80 hours to write. That time has real dollar value whether you win or not.

• I walked away from an RFP that checked every box on paper, scope match, right agency, right NAICS code and it was the right call.

• There are 5 specific signals that tell you a bid is a losing bet before you write a single word.

• The WIN framework (Worth It, Intentional Fit, Next Move) gives you a repeatable decision not a gut feeling.

• The contractors who win consistently don’t bid more. They bid smarter.

I almost bid on a contract I had no business bidding on.

The scope matched what we do. The NAICS code was right. The agency was one I’d been watching. The contract value was exactly the size I wanted to win.

I read the RFP twice. Started outlining the technical approach. Pulled my past performance citations. Got three days into the process.

And then I stopped.

I stopped because I asked myself a question I hadn’t been asking: “Why would we win this?”

Not could we win it. Not do we want to win it. Why would we specifically, with our past performance, our relationships, our positioning at this moment, be the company that wins?

I couldn’t answer it. And that answer told me everything.

I closed the file. My team spent those hours on a different opportunity, one where I could answer that question clearly. We won that one.

The contract I walked away from? The incumbent won it. They always were going to win it. I just hadn’t done the work to know that before I started writing.

The Real Cost of a Proposal Nobody Talks About

Here’s what a proposal actually costs.

A competitive federal proposal takes 40 to 80 hours of real working time. That’s not counting the RFP review, the internal discussions, the pricing work, the past performance write-ups, and the final review. That’s the proposal itself.

If your time, or your team’s time, is worth $100 an hour, a single proposal costs you $4,000 to $8,000 before you know if you won.

If your win rate on cold federal bids is 10%, which is generous for a new contractor without established agency relationships, you need to bid 10 proposals to win 1. That’s $40,000 to $80,000 in time spent to generate one win.

Now ask yourself: was that the right win? Or did you just happen to be the last one standing?

Most new contractors don’t think about it this way. They think more bids equals more chances. And mathematically, that’s true, but only if every bid has the same probability of winning.

They don’t.

Some bids have a 1% chance of winning. Some have a 40% chance. The contractors who win consistently don’t bid more. They put 80 hours into the 40% bids instead of spreading 80 hours across eight 1% bids.

That’s the no-bid decision. It’s not giving up. It’s math.

5 Signals That Tell You to Walk Away

These are the specific things I look for before I commit a single hour to a proposal.

Signal 1: There’s an incumbent you haven’t beaten before.

If a company has been delivering this scope of work for this agency for 3, 5, 7 years, their win probability on the recompete is not 1 in 5. It is much higher than that. Incumbents win recompetes roughly 70 to 80 percent of the time. They know the agency. The CO knows their name. The program manager trusts their work. Your proposal has to be so substantially stronger that the agency is willing to absorb the transition risk of switching vendors.

That’s possible. But go in knowing what you’re actually competing against.

Signal 2: You found out about this opportunity when the solicitation dropped.

If SAM.gov is where you first heard about this RFP, you are behind. Competitive contractors have been working this opportunity for 6 to 18 months before the solicitation dropped. They’ve met with the program office. They’ve shaped requirements. They’ve had conversations with the CO. When the RFP published, they already knew what the agency wanted and built their proposal around it.

You are writing blind. That is a significant disadvantage that a good proposal rarely overcomes.

Signal 3: You haven’t talked to anyone at this agency.

Government contracting is a relationship business. Evaluators are human beings who make judgment calls. Past performance references get called. A contractor whose name is already familiar in the program office starts with an advantage that technical writing cannot fully close.

If nobody at that agency knows who you are before the solicitation dropped, your starting position is harder than it looks on paper.

Signal 4: The scope is a stretch from what you actually do.

New contractors overbid their capabilities all the time. The RFP is for IT managed services, and you do IT staffing. Close enough, right? Maybe. But the evaluator scoring your technical approach knows the difference. Your past performance citations won’t map cleanly to the requirement. Your pricing will show gaps.

Bid what you can deliver at a level that shows up clearly in your past performance. Stretches are expensive to write and rarely win.

Signal 5: You can’t answer the question “why would we win this?”

This is the test I use on every single opportunity. Not “can we do this work.” Not “do we want this contract.” Why would we, specifically, with our current past performance, our current relationships, our current positioning, be the company this evaluator scores highest?

If the honest answer is “because we submitted and someone has to win” that is not a strategy. That is hope. And hope is an expensive proposal strategy.

The WIN Framework Applied to the Bid Decision

Every bid decision runs through three questions. This is the WIN system in practice.

W — Worth It.

Is this opportunity worth your time? Run the numbers before you open a blank document.

Estimate your realistic win probability, not the optimistic one, the honest one. Multiply that by the contract value. Compare it to your proposal cost (hours × your hourly rate). If the expected return doesn’t justify the investment, walk away.

A $500,000 contract with a 5%-win probability has an expected value of $25,000. If your proposal costs $6,000 in time to write, that math works. If your win probability is actually 2%, the expected value drops to $10,000. You might still bid, but you should know what you’re spending.

I — Intentional Fit.

Does this opportunity align with your actual capabilities, certifications, and past performance, not the capabilities you’re planning to build?

Your past performance citations should map directly to the scope. Your certifications should apply. The NAICS code should match your documented work. If you’re writing around gaps, the evaluator will see them.

N— Next Move.

Do you have a capture strategy? Have you been working this opportunity before the RFP dropped? Do you have a relationship with the program office, a teaming partner, or insight into the requirement that makes your proposal more than a generic response?

If the answer to all three is no, the no-bid is not a loss. It’s a resource decision.

What to Do With the Time You Just Saved

Walking away from a bid is only profitable if you use the time on something better.

Here’s what I do with a no-bid decision:

I take the 40 hours I would have spent writing that proposal and I put them into capture work for the next opportunity. I schedule a meeting with the program office of an agency I’m already positioned with. I follow up with the prime contractor I’ve been building a relationship with. I update my past performance write-ups so they’re ready when the right RFP drops.

Capture work, the relationship-building and positioning that happens before a solicitation, is what makes the next proposal a 40% bid instead of a 5% bid.

Every hour on a no-win proposal is an hour not spent turning a future bid from a long shot into a real competitor.

If you’re still figuring out who to build relationships with before an RFP drops, this piece on pitching the wrong person explains why most contractors are spending their time in the wrong room entirely.

Your No-Bid Checklist

Before you commit time to any proposal, run this check:

• [ ] Can I name why we would specifically win this, not just why we could compete?

• [ ] Did we know about this opportunity before the solicitation dropped?

• [ ] Do we have at least one relationship at this agency or with a teaming partner on this bid?

• [ ] Does our past performance map directly to the scope, not adjacently, directly?

• [ ] Have I run the expected value math and confirmed this bid justifies the time cost?

• [ ] Is the incumbent weak, gone, or not competing, or can I explain why we beat them?

If you can’t check all six, that’s not a reason to automatically walk away. But it is a reason to be honest about your win probability before you invest 60 hours.

Knowing which opportunities are worth chasing starts with knowing your lane. The local → state → federal staircase explains how to build the track record that makes federal bids winnable.

The Bottom Line

The contractors who win consistently are not the ones who bid the most.

They’re the ones who say no to the bids they can’t win and put that time into the bids they can.

The no-bid decision is not quitting. It is the most disciplined move in proposal strategy. It protects your time, your team’s energy, and your win rate. And it forces you to do the harder, more valuable work of positioning before the RFP, instead of reacting after it drops.

Walk away from the bids you can’t win.

Win the ones you can.

P.S. Have you checked out our YouTube channel? Watch some of our videos and learn more about govcon: https://www.youtube.com/@govcontechlab.

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• Every new GovCon business wants to be the prime contractor. Most overlook the one path that’s faster, lower risk, and can pay just as well, or better.

• I subcontracted with the State of Maryland first. Then I used that experience to land a subcontract with the Department of Transportation under an established prime.

• As a subcontractor, the prime assumes the risk: cash flow gaps, CO relationships, performance liability, proposal costs. You just deliver.

• I built real past performance, real agency relationships, and real revenue without carrying any of the risk that breaks new prime contractors.

• It’s easier to get in front of a prime contractor with $10M in federal contracts, than to cold-pitch a contracting officer at Homeland Security.

Everyone in government contracting wants to be the prime.

I get it. The prime contractor gets the headline. Their name is on the award. They’re the ones who get to say, “we won a federal contract.”

But here’s what I know after 7 years in this market:

The prime contractor also gets the cash flow gaps. The performance liability. The CO relationship to maintain. The $30,000 out of pocket while the government takes 90 days to pay. The subcontractor who doesn’t show up. The cure notice when something goes wrong.

The prime gets all of it.

And for the first several years of my contracting career, the most financially stable period, the period where I was learning the fastest, building real past performance, and not losing sleep over operational risk, was when I was a subcontractor.

The Maryland Story

I didn’t start by trying to win a federal contract.

I started by getting in front of the right prime contractor who already had an established relationship with a state agency.

My first subcontracting opportunity was with the State of Maryland. I wasn’t the prime. I wasn’t managing the CO relationship. I wasn’t responsible for the proposal, the pricing strategy, or the contract administration.

I was delivering a specific scope of work that the prime needed covered, and delivering it well.

That one engagement gave me something I couldn’t have gotten any other way at that stage: real, verifiable, public-sector past performance. Not a promise. Not a capability statement. An actual contract reference I could name, with a scope I could describe, and an outcome I could document.

And it gave me something else: I got to watch how a prime contractor manages a government relationship up close. How they communicate with the agency. How they handle deliverables. How they manage scope changes. I was learning the business of government contracting from the inside without carrying the risk of the prime.

From Maryland to DOT

Once I had that Maryland experience on paper, I used it.

Not to go after a prime federal contract. To go after a better subcontract.

I positioned myself to prime contractors who held Department of Transportation contracts. And because I could point to documented public-sector experience, real scope, real outcomes, real references, the conversation was completely different than it would have been if I had walked in with a freshly printed capability statement and zero past performance.

The prime already had the agency relationship. They already had the contract vehicle. What they needed was a qualified subcontractor they could trust to deliver without creating problems.

I was that subcontractor.

And what I earned on that DOT subcontract, without carrying the risk of the prime, was better than what I would have cleared trying to win a prime contract with no past performance and no agency relationships, while also absorbing all the overhead that comes with being in the prime seat.

What the Prime Carries That You Don’t

Here’s what most new contractors don’t fully understand about the prime contractor role.

When you are the prime, you own:

The cash flow gap. Government payment cycles run 30, 60, sometimes 90 days. Your subcontractors don’t care about that cycle. They want to be paid. You float the gap out of your operating capital.

The performance liability. If something goes wrong on that contract, your sub misses a deadline, the quality falls short, a deliverable is late, the government issues a cure notice to you. Not to your sub. To you.

The proposal investment. Competitive federal proposals can cost $10,000 to $50,000 in staff time, consultants, and resources to write properly. You spend that before you know if you won.

The CO relationship. Building and maintaining that relationship takes years. Access to the right contracting officers doesn’t happen because you registered on SAM.gov.

As a subcontractor, the prime absorbs all of that. Your job is to deliver your scope of work, document your performance, and build your track record.

That is not a lesser role. For a new contractor without cash reserves, without agency relationships, and without proposal infrastructure, it is the smarter role.

The Networking Argument Nobody Makes

Here’s the one that changes the math for most people.

Everyone talks about how hard it is to get in front of a contracting officer or a program manager at a federal agency. At Homeland Security. At the Army Corps. At the Air Force. These are busy people with strict communication rules, heavy workloads, and very little reason to take a meeting with a new vendor they’ve never heard of.

And they’re right. It is hard. It takes years.

But prime contractors? Prime contractors are actively looking for qualified subcontractors.

A prime contractor with $50 million in federal contract vehicles needs reliable small business subs to fulfill their small business subcontracting plans. They are incentivized to find you. They show up at chamber of commerce events. They have booths at vendor fairs. They attend APEX Accelerator workshops specifically to meet small business partners.

You don’t need a CO relationship to get in the door as a subcontractor. You need a prime contractor relationship.

And prime contractor relationships are accessible in a way that federal agency relationships are not, especially when you’re starting out.

The network is everything in this market. If you haven’t read the breakdown on who you should actually be pitching, start there, it explains why most new contractors are talking to the wrong person entirely.

What You’re Building as a Sub

Let me be specific about what subcontracting gave me.

Past performance I could use. Every subcontract I completed became a citation I could name on the next proposal. Scope. Outcome. Reference contact. That’s what prime contractors and evaluators need to see, and you can only get it by doing the work.

Agency knowledge. Working inside a DOT contract taught me how that agency operates, what they value, how they communicate, and what success looks like in their environment. That knowledge is worth more than any certification or training program.

Prime contractor relationships. The primes I subbed for became references, mentors, and eventually teaming partners on future opportunities. Those relationships opened doors that no cold outreach to a federal agency would have opened.

Time to learn without catastrophic downside. If I had gone straight to the prime seat and made mistakes on cash flow, on sub management, on a deliverable, those mistakes would have cost me a contract and potentially my reputation with an agency. As a sub, I made mistakes in a protected environment where the prime absorbed the institutional risk.

If you’re still figuring out which lane to start in, the local → state → federal staircase works the same way, build your track record before you take on the full risk of the prime seat.

When to Make the Move to Prime

Subcontracting is not the destination. It’s the on-ramp.

You make the move to prime when you have:

1. At least 2 to 3 documented past performance citations you can name specifically.

2. A clear understanding of the agency you’re targeting and what they buy.

3. A relationship with the contracting officer or program manager built over time, not cold.

4. Access to working capital that can cover a 60 to 90-day payment gap.

5. A specific capability that you deliver better than anyone else you’ve worked beside.

Until all five of those are true, the prime seat is a harder, more expensive place to learn than the sub seat.

Your Action Plan

1. Identify 3 prime contractors who hold contracts in your service area and capability. Check USASpending.gov for who has active contract vehicles in your space.

2. Show up where primes network. APEX Accelerator events, chamber of commerce meetings, vendor fairs, industry days. These are where sub opportunities get filled.

3. Build a one-page sub capability statement. Not a generic capability statement, a document that tells a prime specifically what you deliver, what your relevant experience is, and what size contracts you can support.

4. Perform exceptionally on your first sub. One well-documented subcontract performance record is worth more than 10 proposals you haven’t won yet.

5. Use that record to move up. State sub → federal sub → prime. In that order. Each step earns you the credibility for the next one.

The prime contract is the goal. Subcontracting is how you earn the right to win it.

P.S. Have you checked out our website, no guru promises, no $3,000 courses. Just good information: govcontechlab.com.

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• The middleman strategy in GovCon is real. Win a contract, subcontract the work, keep the difference.

• I’ve won four contracts using this model. It works.

• But three lessons nearly broke me that nobody in the GovCon space talks about: cash flow gaps, inherited risk, and the expertise problem.

• Revenue is not cash flow. I had to float $30,000 while waiting on a delayed government payment and my subcontractor still expected to be paid on time.

• When your sub doesn’t show up, the government doesn’t call them. They call you.

• The bigger question: what business are you actually building?

If you’re expecting me to tell you the middleman strategy doesn’t work, I can’t.

I’ve won four government contracts using it. So, I know first-hand that it works.

But if I had to build my business all over again, I would not build it around this model.

That might sound like a contradiction. Someone who successfully used the strategy telling you to be careful about it.

Here’s why I’m saying it anyway.

There are three lessons I learned the hard way that nobody in the GovCon space talks about. The gurus don’t bring them up because the middleman strategy is easy to sell. “Win the contract. Find a vendor. Keep the difference.” Sounds clean. Sounds simple.

What they leave out is everything that happens between the award notice and the check clearing.

Lesson 1: Winning the Contract Is the Easy Part. Cash Flow Is the Hard Part.

I want to tell you about a specific situation.

We won a contract. The work was in motion. My subcontractor delivered. The invoice went to the government.

And then the government was late paying.

Not unusual. Government payment cycles can run 30, 60, sometimes 90 days. Contracting officers will tell you this is normal. And it is.

But my subcontractor didn’t care about the government’s payment cycle. They had payroll to make. They had their own bills. They expected to be paid.

I had to come up with $30,000 out of pocket to cover that gap while I waited on the government’s check.

Let me say that differently: I had won a contract, done everything right, and I was personally floating $30,000 because of timing.

Before you pursue the middleman strategy, answer these questions honestly:

• Could you float payroll for 60 to 90 days if the government’s payment was delayed?

• What happens if that delay runs longer than expected?

• Do you have access to working capital, a line of credit, cash reserves, something?

If the answer is no to all three, a cash flow gap doesn’t just stress you out. It can end your contract.

Revenue is not cash flow. Winning a contract doesn’t mean money hits your bank account. It means you’ve made a promise to the government that you now have to fund, often before you get paid.

The contractors who figure this out before they win a contract are the ones who survive it.

If you’re still figuring out which contracts are worth pursuing in the first place, this breakdown on qualifying opportunities covers the decision framework I use before writing a single word of a proposal.

Lesson 2: You Don’t Just Hire Vendors. You Inherit Their Problems.

Here’s how the internet explains the middleman strategy:

Win the contract. Find someone on Facebook who does the work. Keep the difference.

Here’s what that explanation leaves out:

You are the prime contractor. You own the relationship with the government. When something goes wrong, and something always has a chance of going wrong, the government doesn’t call your subcontractor. They call you.

If your sub doesn’t show up on day one, you’re responsible.

If they miss a deadline, you’re responsible.

If the work quality falls short, you’re responsible.

If they damage property on a job site, you’re responsible.

The government signed a contract with your company. Not with the person you found. Not with the vendor you lined up. With you.

That means you need to know before you win:

• How do you vet a subcontractor beyond a Facebook group recommendation?

• What’s your backup if they cancel two days before the work starts?

• Do you have a written subcontract agreement that protects you?

• What does your contract say about performance standards, and can you enforce them with your sub?

The middleman strategy is not “find a vendor and collect a check.” It’s risk management. You’re standing between the government and the people doing the work. When that gap closes fast, and it can, you’re the one holding the liability.

You’re not selling labor. You’re managing risk.

Lesson 3: You’re Building Revenue. But Are You Building a Business?

This is the one almost nobody makes.

Think about the range of contracts that get pitched as middleman opportunities:

Landscaping. HVAC. Janitorial. Snow removal. Security. Trash removal. Moving services.

If you win one of each, what business are you actually building?

You’re learning project management. You’re getting government past performance, which has real value. You’re building confidence in the procurement process.

But you’re not becoming the obvious choice for anything specific.

You’re not the company that government buyers call when they have a particular problem. You’re not building a reputation in a niche. You’re not developing expertise that compounds over time.

Here’s why that matters:

Specialization makes everything easier. Your marketing gets sharper when you solve one problem. Your past performance citations get stronger when they all point to the same type of work. Referrals happen when people know exactly what you do. Contracting officers remember you when your name is attached to a specific capability, not a general vendor profile.

A business without a specialty often struggles to become the obvious choice.

That’s not a death sentence. But it’s a ceiling. And the middleman strategy, by design, keeps you diversified in ways that work against specialization.

If you haven’t built relationships with the buyers before the solicitation drops, the specialty problem gets worse, this piece on building CO relationships explains why most contractors are talking to the wrong person.

So Do I Regret the Middleman Strategy?

Kinda.

I regret believing it was the destination.

Those four contracts gave me something I couldn’t have gotten any other way. Real government experience. Past performance citations I could use on the next bid. Confidence that I could win, manage a contract, and deliver. Relationships with contracting officers who now know my name.

That foundation was valuable. I don’t walk it back.

But at some point I had to ask a harder question: What business am I actually building? And the honest answer was: I was building revenue, not expertise. I was winning contracts, not becoming known for solving a specific problem.

That’s when I changed course.

What I Would Do Differently Today

If I were starting from zero:

1. Pick one problem to solve exceptionally well. Not five services. One. The business that solves a specific problem better than anyone else has a path to becoming the obvious choice. The business that does everything has a harder road.

2. Use subcontracting strategically, not as the entire model. Subcontracting has a legitimate place in GovCon. It becomes a trap when it’s the entire strategy instead of a tool within a larger one.

3. Learn cash flow and operations before chasing contracts. Understand working capital. Know what you can float. Know what you can’t. Win contracts you can actually survive.

4. Build relationships before chasing RFPs. The contracts you’re most likely to win are the ones where the buyer already knows your name before the solicitation drops. That doesn’t happen from SAM.gov searches.

5. Focus on becoming known for something. Reputation compounds. Every contract you win in your specialty makes the next one easier. Every contract you win outside your specialty starts over from zero.

The Bottom Line

The middleman strategy can get you into government contracting.

Don’t confuse getting into the game with building a sustainable business.

The internet celebrates contract awards. It posts the win notifications. It counts the contract value. What it doesn’t show is the $30,000 cash flow gap. The sub who went dark two days before the job. The evaluator who passed on you because your past performance was spread across too many unrelated services.

Business owners think about what happens the day after they win.

Build for the day after.

P.S. We have a YouTube channel, so if you even more detailed govcon information, check it out: https://www.youtube.com/@govcontechlab

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• Most new GovCon contractors suffer from blank page syndrome, they don’t know what a winning proposal looks like because they’ve never seen one.

• Winning proposals are public record. When you lose a bid, you can request the winning proposal directly from the contracting officer.

• I did exactly this after losing a local contract, studied the winning submission against mine and turned it into a working template

• The 3 things a winning proposal will teach you: how to lead with the evaluator’s language, how to structure proof points, and how to frame past performance as evidence not biography.

• You’re not copying, you’re extracting the logic of what works and building it into your own approach.

Let me tell you what blank page syndrome actually feels like.

You have an RFP in front of you. You’ve read it three times. You’ve highlighted sections, made notes in the margin, convinced yourself you understand what they’re asking for. You open a new document. You type your company name at the top. And then you sit there.

Thirty minutes later the cursor is still blinking at you.

You’re not stuck because you don’t know your industry. You’re stuck because you’ve never seen a winning proposal. You don’t know how they’re organized. You don’t know what language they use. You don’t know how long the sections are, how they frame past performance, or how they handle evaluation criteria. You’re trying to build something from scratch with no blueprint.

I’ve written over 100 proposals in 7 years of government contracting. I’ve won some. I’ve lost more. And the single most useful thing I ever did was call a contracting officer after a loss and ask to see the proposal that beat me.

The Psychology of the Losing Proposal

Here’s what nobody talks about: losing a proposal after spending 40, 60, sometimes 80 hours writing it is a specific kind of exhausting.

You put real work into it. You read the RFP carefully. You structured your response. You proofread it. You submitted it before the deadline. And then you got a two-line notification that the award went to someone else, and no explanation of why.

Most contractors do one of two things after a loss like that.

They either tell themselves the evaluation was unfair, the CO already knew who they wanted, the deck was stacked, and they use that story to avoid fixing the actual problem. Or they go back to blank page syndrome on the next opportunity and write essentially the same proposal they just lost with.

Neither of those moves the needle.

What actually moves the needle is treating a loss as a data collection opportunity. Because government contracting, especially at the local and state level, gives you access to data that almost no other sales process does.

The winning proposal is public record.

You can read it. Study it. Pull it apart. Compare it against what you submitted. And figure out exactly what the winner did that you didn’t.

Winning Proposals Are Public Information (Here’s How to Get Them)

When a government contract is awarded at the federal, state, or local level, the procurement becomes part of the public record. That means you have the right to request documents from the procurement, including the winning proposal, through a public records request.

At the local and state level, this typically falls under your state’s public records law, sometimes called sunshine law or open records law. You send a written request to the contracting officer or the procurement office, specify what you’re requesting, and they are generally required to respond.

At the federal level, you can request documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Here is exactly what I did.

We lost a local contract bid. Before I closed the file, I called the contracting officer directly, not to complain, not to argue the decision, but to ask two things.

First: Was there a debrief available? Many agencies will walk you through your evaluation scores and explain where your proposal fell short. Not every CO offers this, but many will if you ask professionally and show genuine interest in improving.

Second: Could I request a copy of the winning proposal through a public records request?

The CO told me yes on both. I submitted the records request, received the winning proposal within two weeks, and sat down with both documents side by side.

What I found changed how I write proposals.

Also, if you’ve been struggling to get in front of the right people before a solicitation even drops, this piece on pitching the wrong person explains the relationship-building problem that kills proposals before they’re ever written.

3 Things a Winning Proposal Will Teach You

1. Winners Lead With the Evaluator’s Language, Not Their Own

The most immediate thing I noticed when I read the winning proposal was how they handled the evaluation criteria.

My proposal described what we do. Their proposal used the evaluation criteria as its outline.

When an RFP lists evaluation factors, technical approach, past performance, management plan, price, those are not just categories. They are the exact questions the evaluator is scoring you on. The winning proposal I read addressed each factor explicitly, used the language directly from the solicitation, and structured every section around what the evaluator needed to see to give a high score.

Mine told our story. Theirs answered the test.

The rule I took from this: read the evaluation criteria before you write a single word of narrative. Then use those criteria as your section headers. Mirror the language exactly. If the solicitation says, “demonstrated experience in program management support,” your past performance section should use that exact phrase, not “project coordination” or “operational oversight.” The evaluator is looking for a match. Give them one.

2. Winners Use Proof Points, Not Promises

My losing proposal said things like: “Our team is committed to delivering high-quality results on time and within budget.”

The winning proposal said: “Under Contract No. [XXXXX] with [Agency], our team delivered 14 of 14 monthly deliverables on schedule with zero contract modifications for scope deficiency over a 24-month period of performance.”

Read those two sentences again. One of them is a promise. The other is evidence.

Every promise in a proposal, “we are committed to excellence,” “our team brings deep expertise,” “we prioritize client satisfaction” sounds exactly like every other promise in every other proposal the evaluator is reading. Promises have no scoring weight. They just add word count.

Proof points, specific contract numbers, specific agencies, specific deliverables, specific dates, specific outcomes, give evaluators something to evaluate. They transform your past performance section from a marketing brochure into a performance record.

After reading the winning proposal, I went back through every proposal template I had and replaced every promise with a proof point. That single change improved our evaluation scores.

3. Winners Frame Past Performance as Evidence, Not Biography

The way most new contractors write past performance is chronological and descriptive: “In 2022, we supported [Agency] with IT services. In 2023, we worked with [Client] on a construction project.” It reads like a resume. It tells the evaluator what you did, not why it matters for this contract.

The winning proposal I studied framed every past performance entry around the specific evaluation criteria for that solicitation. Each entry answered three questions: What was the scope and how does it relate to this requirement? What was the outcome and can it be verified? Why does this experience make us the right choice for this award?

Past performance is not your history. It is your argument.

Every citation should be selected because it is the closest possible analog to the work in the solicitation. Every outcome should be quantified. Every entry should close with a sentence that explicitly connects that experience to the current requirement.

The evaluator is not reading your past performance to understand your company. They are reading it to score whether you have done this type of work before and done it well. Write it for the score, not for the story.

What You’re Extracting And What You’re Not

I want to be clear about what this process is.

You are not copying the winning proposal. You are not lifting language, paragraphs, or pricing from a competitor’s submission. That would be unethical and, in some cases, legally problematic.

What you are doing is studying the logic. How did they structure the response? What did they lead with? How long were their sections? How did they handle the parts of the RFP that you struggled with? What techniques did they use to make their past performance credible?

Then you build your own template, your own section structure, your own language, your own proof points informed by the logic of what a winning submission looks like for this type of solicitation at this type of agency.

You’re not stealing the answer. You’re stealing the format of a correct answer and filling it in with your own material.

That distinction is everything.

Your Action Plan

1. After your next loss, request a debrief. Call or email the CO within 5 business days of the award notice. Ask if a debrief is available. Ask where your scores fell short.

2. Submit a public records request for the winning proposal. Check your state’s open records law for the specific request process. At the federal level, use FOIA. Be professional and specific, request the technical proposal submitted by the awardee.

3. Do a side-by-side comparison. Print both proposals. Read the evaluation criteria first. Then go section by section: How did they handle each factor? Where were you stronger? Where did they beat you and why?

4. Extract the structural logic. Note how they opened each section, how they used subheadings, how they quantified outcomes. Build a template from what you learn.

5. Apply it to your next proposal. Use the evaluation criteria as your structure. Replace promises with proof points. Frame past performance as evidence. Submit and get scored.

One well-studied loss is worth more than ten proposals written in a vacuum. The data is out there. Go get it.

If you've been putting off proposals because you don't know where to start, the starting point is a loss you already have. Pull the file. Make the records request. The blueprint you've been waiting for is sitting in someone else's award file.

P.S. We have a YouTube page, check it out for more detailed govcon information: https://www.youtube.com/@govcontechlab

Chat soon,

Steph

TL;DR

• Federal contracting is designed for mature vendors with past performance, certifications, and established agency relationships, not brand-new businesses.

• There are over 90,000 local governments in the U.S. spending more than $1 trillion annually, with far lower barriers to entry than federal.

• Starting local gives you smaller bids, direct relationships, and real deliverables, the foundation you need before federal ever makes sense.

• My first government win wasn’t federal, it was a state subcontract in Maryland, and it led directly to a DOT opportunity I never would have accessed otherwise.

• The sequence is: Local → State → Federal. Not the other way around.

Most new small businesses get the same advice: “The federal government spends trillions. Go get a slice.”

So, they rush to SAM.gov. They complete the registration. They start watching every opportunity that shows up in their NAICS code. Months later, they’re frustrated, confused, and still haven’t won anything.

The problem isn’t that federal opportunities aren’t real. They are.

The problem is sequencing.

Federal contracting is the most complex, most competitive, and slowest lane to start in, especially when your business has never delivered a public-sector contract before. Jumping straight to SAM.gov is like entering a national championship before you’ve played a single local game.

Here’s the sequence nobody teaches.

Why Federal Is the Wrong First Lane

Federal buyers operate inside a system built for vendors who already know the rules.

Before you even compete, you need SAM.gov registration, representations and certifications, a UEI number, and a capability statement written to federal standards. Many opportunities require specific certification, WOSB, 8(a), SDVOSB, that take months to obtain. And once you’re in the system, the opportunity lifecycle from pre-solicitation to award can stretch 12 to 18 months or longer.

Then there’s the competition problem. The opportunities that look the most accessible on SAM.gov , the ones at the top of the search results, sized for small businesses, already have incumbent vendors with past performance on that exact contract, deep CO relationships, and proposal teams that write responses every week.

You’re not competing against other new businesses. You’re competing against contractors who’ve been winning in that agency for years.

For new vendors, this is not a strategic starting point. It’s a demoralizing one. I’ve watched businesses spend 18 months “getting ready” for federal contracting, writing proposals that never win, and wondering if the whole market is a myth.

It’s not a myth. The timing is just wrong.

The $1 Trillion Opportunity Nobody Mentions

Here’s the number most GovCon content ignores: local governments, cities, counties, school districts, transportation authorities, utilities, and special districts, collectively spend over $1 trillion annually on products and services.

And there are more than 90,000 of them in the United States.

That fragmentation is actually the point. The barrier to entry at a single city or county is dramatically lower than at the federal level. The bids are smaller. The relationships are local. The procurement staff are accessible. And when you deliver well, they remember you, because they’re managing a much smaller vendor pool than a federal contracting officer ever will.

Three things make local procurement a better on-ramp for new vendors:

1. Simpler entry mechanics. Most cities and counties have a “Doing Business With Us” page or a vendor portal where you register once, select service codes, and receive bid notifications automatically. No SAM registration. No representations and certifications package. Just a business license, a tax ID, and an honest profile of what you do.

2. Right-sized opportunities. Local agencies frequently issue informal bids and RFQs under $50,000, sized appropriately for smaller vendors who don’t have the overhead or the proposal staff to compete on multi-million-dollar federal solicitations.

3. Direct relationships. Because these buyers are in your region, you can meet procurement staff at pre-bid meetings and vendor outreach events. A face-to-face conversation with a county purchasing manager does more for your positioning than six months of watching SAM.gov.

What This Looked Like in Practice

One of my best early wins wasn’t federal at all.

It was a subcontract with the State of Maryland.

Compared to the federal opportunities I was eyeing at the time, the process had far less red tape, the communication was more direct, and we were able to get to work quickly. That contract gave me concrete, state-level past performance. Which I then used to position for a subcontract with the Department of Transportation.

Local subcontract → state subcontract → DOT opportunity.

That’s the progression. And I didn’t manufacture it; I just ran the sequence in the right order.

This isn’t unique to Maryland. Most states and local agencies actively encourage new vendors to start with smaller engagements and grow into larger roles as they demonstrate performance. Georgia’s Team Georgia Marketplace, for example, is built around exactly this logic, a centralized platform where new vendors register once, select commodity codes, and start receiving notifications for appropriately-sized opportunities.

The infrastructure for new vendors exists at the local and state level. Most people just don’t know to look there first.

If you’ve been stuck in the pattern where you’ve had an LLC for years but never submitted a single bid, this breakdown of the two-year-old business that never bid explains exactly why that happens, and it almost always connects back to sequencing.

The Staircase: Local → State → Federal

Think of government contracting as three stages, not one market.

Stage 1: Local (City / County / School Districts / Local Utilities)

Find 1 to 2 local agencies in your region that buy what you sell. Study their procurement pages. Register on their vendor portals. Select the right service codes.

Look for lower-dollar RFQs and informal bids, or subcontract under a larger firm already working with that agency. Your goal at this stage is simple: deliver successfully and get documented.

Stage 2: State Agencies

With local delivery on your record, move to your state’s procurement system. Explore statewide contracts, master agreements, and departmental solicitations where your local performance is directly relevant.

At the state level, the bids get larger and the competition increases, but you’re now a vendor with a track record, not a vendor who just registered.

Stage 3: Federal (SAM.gov, Primes, and Subs)

Now SAM.gov makes sense. You have past performance. You understand solicitation documents, scope of work language, and what it means to deliver for a public-sector client. When you approach a federal prime as a potential subcontractor, you’re not a new business hoping for a chance, you’re a vendor with receipts.

The contractors I see winning early federal opportunities are almost never starting from zero. They’re starting from a documented state or local track record that makes their capability statement credible.

Your First Steps This Week

1. Clarify what you sell and who might buy it locally. Match your services to the actual procurement needs of your city, county, or local districts, schools, utilities, transportation authorities. You’re not looking for every possible buyer. You’re looking for 1 to 2 agencies where your offer is an obvious fit.

2. Find and register on local procurement portals. Search “[your city/county] procurement” or “[your city] doing business with us.” Complete the vendor registration and make sure your profile reflects what you actually deliver, not everything you could theoretically do.

3. Monitor opportunities before you bid. Spend 3 to 4 weeks reading solicitations in your service category. Attend pre-bid meetings when they’re available. Study past award data to understand pricing norms and evaluation criteria before you write a single response.

4. Start with right-sized bids or subcontracts. Target RFQs under $50,000 or look for established vendors already working with your target agencies and approach them about teaming. Your first win does not need to be big. It needs to be documented.

5. Build relationships, not just profiles. Connect with local APEX Accelerators and small business development offices. These organizations exist specifically to shorten the learning curve for new government vendors, and they know which buyers are most accessible in your market.

If you’ve been reaching primes and not getting traction, this piece on why you’re probably pitching the wrong person explains the org chart problem that kills most early outreach, and it applies at every level of government, not just federal.

The Mindset Shift

Federal work is worth targeting. Eventually.

But not necessarily as your first move. The more you look at the data and talk to procurement professionals at the local and state level, the clearer the pattern becomes.

New vendors who start local learn faster, build credibility sooner, and accumulate real past performance with far less risk than those who jump straight to federal competition.

Your Year 1 goal is not to land a seven-figure federal prime contract.

Your Year 1 goal is to become a reliable public-sector supplier in your own backyard, with one or two documented wins, a SAM registration that means something because you know what to put in it, and a track record that makes your first federal conversation credible.

That’s the staircase. Start on the first step.

P.S. We have a YouTube channel. Check out our videos and let us know what you think: https://www.youtube.com/@govcontechlab

Chat soon,

Steph