A service company's two greatest assets are its corporate experience and the background of its staff. Often, both assets are not presented effectively in a company's federal proposals. The following is a summary of common mistakes contractors make when drafting their proposals.

In the case at hand, a company is overwhelmed because it is attempting to write numerous proposals at once. Due to the chaos associated with such a task, the personnel and corporate experience chapters are not dealt with until the last minute because everyone assumes that they are pieces of cake. The thought process is that the company can use corporate experience descriptions and staff resumes from other proposals and plug them in at the last minute into the proposals being drafted.

It is the day before the 'due date and the company's new Proposal Manager schedules a meeting with management. The proposal being discussed requires that bidders provide resumes for (i) the prospective Project Manager, (ii) a senior Oracle DBMS engineer, and (iii) a security specialist (three in total). At the meeting, management tells the Proposal Manager, "We have scads of those types. Let's give the agency six resumes. That will show how strong we are." The Proposal Manager replies, "With all due respect, Richard White of Fedmarket says we should only give the agency exactly the number of resumes requested and rewrite the resumes to meet each and every requirement in the Request for Proposal (RFP)." Management responds, "We don't disagree but the proposal needs to be out the door by 10:00 am tomorrow. Pick six and throw them in. It will be fine."

Furthermore, in our hypothetical, the RFP states that the bidder should submit three corporate experience descriptions demonstrating the company's ability to handle the tasks outlined in the RFP. Management tells the Proposal Manager, "Wow, we can do this type of work in our sleep and we are the best qualified company out there. Give them six projects. We need to prove to them how eminently qualified we are. By the way, throw in the phrase 'world class' in the corporate experience introduction. We are truly world class in this field and the agency's proposal evaluators need to know this." The Proposal Manager, an avid reader of this installment series, once again objects and says, "Shouldn't we only give them exactly the number of corporate experience descriptions requested and rewrite them to meet each and every requirement in the RFP?" Management's response is similar to the one outlined above. While the meeting is winding down, the Proposal Manager is thinking to himself, "Richard White says we should write fewer proposals and win more. Maybe we shouldn't have attempted three proposals at once." It isn't difficult to envision what the success rate of this company will be.