New to federal contracting

Your first bid, step by step.

This is the path from “found an opportunity on SAM.gov” to “submitted a compliant proposal” — the same walkthrough SAY, BOSS. runs inside the product, using your real opportunities and documents as the teaching material. No course, no jargon wall.

1. 1

   Set up your company profile.

   Your profile — NAICS codes, set-asides, keywords — is the filter the scanner runs every solicitation through. Thin profile, thin pipeline; it's that direct.

   The trick most newcomers miss: agencies scatter similar work across sibling NAICS codes. If you do help desk work, don't register just one code — add the two or three adjacent ones where that work actually gets posted.

2. 2

   Understand your pipeline.

   Every card here is a real federal opportunity posted on SAM.gov — the government's official contracting site — pulled in overnight and scored against your profile.

   The score isn't magic: NAICS match is worth the most (the government literally filters bidders by it), then set-aside match — if an opportunity is set aside for a status you hold, most of your competition just vanished — then your keywords and how much runway the deadline gives you.

   A set-aside match for YOU means the field is restricted to companies with your certification. Those cards deserve your attention first: same work, fraction of the competitors.

3. 3

   Pick an opportunity worth reading.

   Open a card and read the score breakdown — every point is itemized, nothing is a black box. High score plus a set-aside you hold plus keywords you recognize: that's a read.

   Now the deadline math evaluators wish more newcomers did: your first proposal will take three to four times longer than you think. A 10-day deadline on your first proposal is how people burn out — look for 21+ days of runway and give yourself room to do it right.

4. 4

   Read the solicitation like a pro.

   Experienced contractors triage a solicitation in five minutes, in this order: Section L first (how to submit — page limits, volumes, format), Section M second (how you're scored), Section C last (the actual work). L and M decide whether C is even worth reading.

   In L, look for anything you can't do: a portal you're not registered in, a due date you can't hit, a required certification you don't hold. In M, look at what's weighted most — if past performance dominates and you have none, that's signal.

   When to stop reading and pass: a hard requirement you can't meet or team for, an incumbent with strong ratings and no sign the customer is unhappy, or a deadline that forces sloppy work. Passing fast is a win — it buys back the hours for a bid you can actually take.

5. 5

   Build your compliance matrix.

   Upload the solicitation (or the whole attachment zip) on any opportunity, and every requirement comes back as a row: the verbatim text, where it came from, and what kind of requirement it is.

   Why verbatim matters: evaluators check compliance against the solicitation's exact words, so your matrix keeps the exact words. The amber VERIFY rows are items the extractor wasn't certain about — check those against the document first; over-flagging is deliberate, because a missed requirement can disqualify you.

   Teams run their whole response from this file: put a name in Owner for every row, move Status as sections get written, and nothing falls through.

6. 6

   Make the bid/no-bid call.

   With a matrix built and documents in your Knowledge Base, every substantive requirement gets a coverage color: teal means your own documents prove you can do it, amber means adjacent evidence, red means no evidence found.

   The honest read at the top is exactly that — honest. It will tell you when the math says walk away, and it names where a teaming partner would fill the gap. Red rows aren't shameful; unknown red rows are.

   Most experienced contractors bid less than a third of what they read. Passing is a skill — the tool just makes the decision visible before you've spent the weekend.

7. 7

   Build your skeleton and write.

   The proposal skeleton turns Section L's required structure into a Word outline: every volume and section in the order the government demanded, with the requirement IDs each section must answer.

   Volumes exist because different evaluator teams read different parts — Technical and Price are scored by different people, often without seeing each other's sections. The win-theme boxes are questions, not answers: they're prompts for the proof only your team knows.

   Here's what evaluators actually do with Section M: they build a scoresheet from it and hunt your proposal for evidence against each factor. Make the evidence impossible to miss — use their factor names as your headings and answer in the first sentence.

8. 8

   Before you submit.

   The unforced errors that kill first proposals: pages over the limit (evaluators stop reading, some agencies physically remove them), wrong font or margins (counts against the limit), and missing forms Section L required.

   Portal registration is the silent killer — if submission is through a system you've never used, register and log in DAYS early. Access requests can take 48 hours, and 'the portal wouldn't let me in' has never once extended a deadline.

   The 24-hours-early rule: plan to submit a full day before the deadline. Every veteran has a story about the upload that failed at 4:55 PM. None of those stories end with a waiver.