Get into the conversation before SAM.gov

If you first learn about the opportunity on SAM.gov, your small team is already behind.

By the time an opportunity appears on SAM.gov, the program office has already signaled what it wants to buy, who it expects to buy it from, and what the evaluation criteria will actually reward. We help you get into the conversation earlier — before your team burns nights writing a proposal for a requirement someone else already shaped.

Small teams cannot afford to learn about the opportunity at the same time as everyone else

Defense programs are shaped over an eighteen-to-thirty-six-month pre-solicitation window. During that window the program office talks to industry, circulates draft requirements, runs industry days, solicits capability briefings, and forms a working picture of which companies can execute. For a small business, the cost of finding the opportunity at the same time as the press release is paid in nights and weekends — writing a proposal against criteria that were already shaped, against incumbents whose engineers built the requirement.

Typical deliverables

• Opportunity landscape brief. A written intelligence product identifying which programs in your lane are entering the eighteen-month window, who the program-office stakeholders are, and what capability gaps they are publicly and privately signaling.
• Pre-solicitation positioning plan. A sequenced plan of industry-day attendance, RFI response, white-paper placement, and capability briefing requests — mapped to the program's actual acquisition calendar rather than a generic BD playbook.
• Placed capability white paper. A program-specific white paper written to the evaluation logic the office is forming. Not a generic capability deck — a document written as though it is the first page of the eventual proposal.
• Industry-day talking points. Executive-ready briefing material that signals capability without over-disclosing competitive posture. Calibrated for the specific program office's cultural and evaluative tendencies.
• OTA / CSO pathway analysis. Where appropriate, a written recommendation on whether a traditional FAR pathway, an Other Transaction Authority, a Commercial Solutions Opening, or a SBIR Phase III is the highest-probability acquisition vehicle for the capability in question.

Methodology

1. We start from the program office, not from your capability statement. The right question is what this office is being asked to field, on what schedule, under what evaluation logic — and where the gaps in their current industry picture are.
2. We map the evaluator logic the program office is forming. Program offices develop a working picture of which capabilities count as credible long before the RFP. That picture is reverse-engineerable from public signals — OUSD and service-level priorities, program-element line items, recent industry-day content, and RFI responses other contractors have made visible.
3. We produce artifacts that meet the office where it already is. A white paper that reads as though the author understood the program's real constraints is more valuable than ten capability decks that read as though the author pulled them from a template.
4. We never promise access we cannot deliver. Pre-solicitation work is about making you legible to a program office. It is not a guarantee of contact or an introduction service. Anyone selling those is selling something else.

Questions we hear before the NDA

What is pre-solicitation positioning?

Pre-solicitation positioning is the deliberate work of becoming visible and credible to a DoD program office during the window between when a capability need is being formed and when the formal solicitation is released. It combines intelligence (understanding the office's priorities), artifacts (white papers, capability briefs), and engagement (industry days, RFI responses, capability briefings).

When should we start?

Eighteen to thirty-six months before you expect the solicitation. For a program of record entering its next major competition, that means starting when the prior contract is in its option-year execution phase — long before the re-compete is publicly announced.

How is this different from proposal development?

Proposal development takes the RFP as given. Pre-solicitation positioning shapes what the RFP will ask for and who it will be written to favor. Both are necessary; they are different disciplines and different time horizons.

Can you guarantee a program office will take a meeting?

No, and any advisor who promises that is either misrepresenting what they do or operating outside the ethical boundaries that make defense-advisory work sustainable. Our work is to make you credible enough that the meeting becomes a reasonable ask.

Who owns the IP in the white paper you place?

You do. The deliverable is authored for your company, contains your technology story, and is placed under your name. The engagement letter specifies this in writing.