“What would you do differently on your government contracts, and how would you be more strategic about them in hindsight?” A client asked me this question this week, and I suspect it’s one many founders have – whether they’re mid-submission or just starting to think seriously about government funding for the first time.
I’ve personally renegotiated more than a few government contracts mid-performance and watched companies realize the contract they’d fought to win had quietly become a liability. So I have two answers depending on the type of contract, but the idea is the same for both: the strategic mistake I see most often isn’t about writing or compliance. It’s about fit – between what you’re proposing and what you actually intend to build.
For SBIRs, only propose what you’d build anyway.
This is the single most important thing I tell every SBIR client, and it took me years in business to fully internalize why it matters so much. Whatever technology or feature you propose in your Phase I, make sure it’s something you already plan to integrate into your business in the next one to two years – regardless of whether you win.
I know that sounds counterintuitive. The SBIR program is funded R&D, so it’s tempting to swing for the fences and propose the most ambitious, impressive-sounding innovation you can. But here’s what happens when you don’t align the proposal with your actual roadmap: you win, and then you’re stuck executing on something that never really had a home in your product. Your technical team is building toward a deliverable that doesn’t fit your architecture. You’re burning Phase I dollars on research you’d have never funded yourself. And by the time Phase II comes around, the gap between what you proposed and what your business actually needs has widened into something you can’t easily explain to a program officer.
When you propose work that you’d do anyway (a capability you’d want to add, a data pipeline you’ve been meaning to build, a feature your customers have been asking for) the SBIR becomes what it was designed to be: an accelerant. The government is funding your roadmap, and that’s what you want.
The best Phase I proposals read like a glimpse into the inevitable. This is where we’re going, and here’s how federal funding makes us get there faster and more rigorously.
For other contract vehicles, get internal alignment before you submit.
This one applies beyond SBIRs: to OTAs, programs of record, FAR-based contracts, and anything else where winning means committing your organization to a multi-year execution plan. And it’s arguably even more consequential.
Winning a government contract that your manufacturing team can’t actually deliver, or that runs against your product roadmap, or that your finance team didn’t price correctly because they were brought in at the last minute – that’s not a win. That’s a slow-motion crisis. I’ve seen it happen, and it is genuinely crippling for a business. The contract is real, the obligation is real, and the penalties for non-performance are real.
The fix is deceptively simple, but it has to be done early enough: align your major stakeholders during the proposal process, not after award. Bring together your operations lead, your finance team, your technical leadership, your product team, and walk through the proposed statement of work together. Ask yourselves: Does the milestone schedule match your production capacity? Does the pricing reflect your actual cost structure? Does the deliverable roadmap make sense against where the product is headed?
These are conversations that feel like they can wait until you have the contract in hand but they can’t. By the time you’re in negotiations, the scope is largely set. Your leverage to reshape the work is gone. The time to catch a misalignment between what you’ve proposed and what you can actually execute is while the proposal is still being written, not after the contracting officer calls to congratulate you.
This isn’t just about risk management, either. Proposals that come from genuinely aligned organizations read differently. The technical approach is coherent. The team bios reflect the people who will actually do the work. The budget doesn’t have phantom resources or aspirational labor categories. Evaluators pick up on that coherence even when they can’t articulate exactly why one proposal feels more credible than another.
The common thread.
Both pieces of advice are really about the same thing: the best government contracts are born from well thought-out proposals that align to your company and product vision. They’re accurate reflections of what a company is genuinely capable of and genuinely committed to building. When that’s true, the proposal process stops feeling like a pitch and starts feeling like a plan. And plans win.
If this resonated, follow the Proposal Arc blog for more straight-talk and advice on GovCon strategy from someone who spent 20 years in aerospace and government contracting. And if you’re working on a submission and want help building a proposal your team won’t regret, reach out at amisha@proposalarc.com. Let’s make sure what you’re promising is something worth winning.
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