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Is Your Proposal Kitchen on Fire?

February 2, 2022

Did you hire the wrong consulting firm to help write your proposal? Perhaps they were less expensive and appeared to be the most convenient at the time, but it turned out they just could not provide you the assistance, guidance, and appropriate proposal support you needed, so now you are stuck. Maybe you find yourself in a time crunch trying to write that proposal and having to pull an all-nighter to finish by the deadline like you were writing term papers back in college. Or maybe you know what you are doing when it comes to writing, but just need some assistance finishing that specific proposal.

If any of these situations sounds similar, we have advice for you: pick up the phone and call SMA.

After nearly 40 years in business, we have seen and dealt with all sorts of situations where a company’s proposal kitchen has burned to the ground. We provide the support needed to rebuild those proposals. Last year, we answered a phone call from an innovative aerospace company that was in immediate need of support for a NASA proposal opportunity. With only 28 days until their first government proposal’s due date, they were in a bind and reached out to us because the previous consulting firm had started a fire in their proposal kitchen and failed them. Being a new company, they never received a contract from anyone, specifically not a government contract, so we knew we needed to tailor this process to their specific situation, like we do for all companies.

We immediately took on this case to not only help the company write the proposal, but also provide support and walk them through the steps needed. With them, we reviewed their financials and realized they did not have a secure set up, so we set them up with someone who would help. We guided them through critical processes such as systems engineering, defining technical solutions, scheduling, and putting together an integrated master schedule (IMS). Unlike the previous consulting firm’s provided guidelines advice of just adding their own information, we taught them how to write a proposal and helped them write it.

To this day, the company continues to remind us that the best decision that they ever made was to hire SMA because we were able to not only provide the proposal but offer support from start to finish in a time crunch. So, the next time your proposal kitchen is on fire, (or you want to avoid a proposal kitchen fire) who are you going to call? Use the information below to get the support you need on your next project:

Posted on February 2, 2022, by

Dick Eassom, CF APMP Fellow