John Capewell —

Early in my independent BD career, I was fortunate to receive a long-term contract to provide a wide variety of BD/Capture/Proposal/Program development services to a top-5 defense contractor.  They were entering the full and open, competitive service contract world for the first time – a huge and difficult undertaking.  They were attempting this through the conversion of their labor-union-driven, eight-hour day, 5-days per week internal product support group into a full-fledged 24/7 direct-to-Government Service Contract organization.

With multiple Program Manager (PM) SMEs, we pursued more than $1.4B, in 5-year performance, single award opportunities, and achieved a 100% win rate over a two-year period. The seven bids we submitted averaged $200M+ per contract award. All efforts required me to perform internal BD training, whole Business Unit organizational development, and culture change, as well as implement a litany of service contract bidding compliance requirements. I fought multiple resistance-to-change battles daily and repeatedly, escalating issues with bad actors to their executive leadership.

The Most Difficult Proposal

One $300M bid was notable because it was an attempt to unseat the 18-year, heavily favored incumbent.  We accomplished this through the superior leadership skills and customer insights of the PM SME and key personnel, my demands for rigorous adherence to process, internal teamwork for the development of the technical/management approaches and PTW, heavy reliance on Teammate contributions, constant customer rapport, product insight, and competitor knowledge – all concurrently while developing the proposal. Our win strategy was to deliver the same or better proposal as the incumbent at a PTW the government could not refuse. The PM and I developed a mockup of the incumbent’s proposal to be certain ours was equal or better in all areas. We worked feverishly to get to the PTW, which included the creation of a new set of cost and expense accumulation pools that excluded portions of the internal capabilities and personnel to control rates.  We achieved an acceptable profit margin.

Our lack of B&P on some efforts demanded that the PM and I “do it all” with the support of just two part time technical writers, one part time DTP, and pricing/contracts support. The PM and I shared all responsibilities for capture, proposal, executive briefings and programmatic decisions, thereby providing flexibility to balance our workloads during crunch periods. At one point I was tossed from an executive briefing when one of the executive leadership team noticed that I was a subcontractor and therefore not allowed in the room. We explained the unique circumstances and the fact that I had developed the PTW, pricing approaches, and pricing model anyway, so I was allowed to remain and continue with the briefing.

The Government only requested clarifications to our Past Performance Volume and lifted the page count restriction on it as well. I worked 14 hours a day gathering every quantifiable piece of performance data from the sited contract PMs and summarized it to demonstrate that we had MORE experience that the incumbent. We won. During the effort debrief and lessons learned events we did NOT repeat our normal mantra of – we could have done this proposal with fewer people.

The Secret to the Wins

The opportunities we qualified and pursued were chosen based on directly related and relevant corporate experience and the availability of company Program Manager (PM) SMEs to lead the entire effort with minimal internal support.  B&P budgets averaged $125,000 per effort, to cover the Proposal Manager, Program Manager, part time production support staff, and final production/delivery, as well as other temporary overhead personnel.

Because they were previously an internal product support group, it was their habit to retain PMs at the end of their contracts/work orders and to make them available to BD to regrow the business. Those two critical decisions – (1) corporate experience and (2) PMs were paramount to their ability to win work. We literally started all efforts on the right foot, while adding a hired outside consultant as the Proposal expert (me).

Do you have a similar story to share? Contact us at dguillen@ociwins.com to feature your story on our blog!