The work was done inside prior employers and under NDA, so the clients stay unnamed. The numbers are as awarded.
frwrd is a new company. The operator running your bids is not new to this. These are his own numbers, earned before frwrd existed — across federal departments and agencies, states including Texas and New York, and local government through cooperative purchasing vehicles. Employers and dates are on the about page.
Public sector win rate on the pursuits he personally ran.
In public sector revenue supported.
Led the AI transformation of a major cloud provider’s public sector capture and proposals organization — the tooling and agents a full proposal shop runs on.
APMP 40-under-40. Shipley- and APMP-certified. Speaker at the APMP Bid & Proposal Con.
A mid-size commercial firm drew its first federal RFP. Three weeks on the clock. They knew their product cold and had never written to Sections L and M.
We stopped the process before anyone wrote a word. First the team learned how this market works — how evaluators actually score, what compliance means here, why a debrief comes too late to fix anything. Then we built the compliance matrix. Past performance got rewritten against the stated criteria: relevance, recency, scale. The management approach was written from scratch instead of pasted in from commercial work.
They submitted on time, fully compliant, and won their first public-sector contract at $2 million.
What would have sunk it was past performance written for the wrong reader. We caught it in Plan. Nobody caught it in a debrief, because there wasn’t one.
A global cloud provider going after two state contracts with hard compliance gates. Miss a control, or fail to show one, and you’re out. No partial credit, no second look, no matter how good the rest of it is.
Every control and every requirement got mapped to a specific section, so nothing lived only in someone’s head. We rebuilt the technical approach around the scoring criteria instead of the feature list. Then we ran mock evaluations with internal teams and early AI tooling, and scored our own submission the way the panel would.
They won both. One a sole award on a $98 million vehicle. The other a seat on a multi-award contract now worth about $2 million. In one of the two, five of twenty bidders cleared the technical bar. We took the top technical score — five to ten points ahead on requirements the competition also met but never demonstrated.
Meeting the requirement isn’t the job. Making it impossible for an evaluator to miss that you met it — that’s the job.
A cloud provider won a large IDIQ in the intelligence community. Then came the part nobody plans for: hundreds of task orders a year, each on a short clock, each needing a compliant technical and pricing response. The team knew the work. They had no machine for the volume.
We turned the first task orders into a knowledge base built to be maintained, not just filled. The pursuit process got shaped around the contract itself — pre-cleared content, contract-specific catalogs, standing assumptions, an onboarding path, and tools for drafting, pricing, and compliance. As the program grew, AI carried the content updates and got new contributors productive faster.
We ran the same model on a second major defense IDIQ, and that team stood up a high-volume response program without adding a single proposal hire.
Over 200 task-order responses a year, at flat headcount. About half were competitive, and they won more of those than they had before the system existed. Some competitors stopped bidding. Others went to the customer to ask for more response time. By the time I left, the vehicle had awarded roughly $8 billion.
Generic tools give you generic speed. Build them around the contract, the team, and the actual work, and you get the kind of speed competitors stop racing.
A defense technology challenger chasing its first contract with a multinational military customer. The incumbent was entrenched, and feature by feature it looked more flexible.
The incumbent’s system would take in almost any data and sort it out later. Ours required the data to be structured before it went in. On a feature grid that reads as a limitation, and on first pass it looked like a compliance problem.
When the technical team kept running into it, we stopped working around it and asked the lead architect the question nobody had asked: why is it built this way? The answer wasn’t technical. It was operational. In a contested environment, the person under pressure needs information they can act on, not information they still have to resolve. Flexibility is worth having — it belongs further up, where someone has the time to use it.
We made that the opening argument of the executive summary. The proposal didn’t apologize for the difference. It asked the customer to decide where the analytical work should sit.
They won — the challenger’s first contract with that customer, followed by a nine-month operational evaluation. The debrief confirmed the framing had landed.
You don’t beat an incumbent by matching them feature for feature. You make the evaluator reconsider which features matter.
Before you spend a dollar of B&P, we run the gate on what enthusiasm skips: eligibility, real fit against the scoring, competitive position, past performance, price, and what the incumbent already has. If the read says walk, we say walk — including when writing it would pay us more.
The cheapest proposal is the one you don’t write.
We build the knowledge base, the process, the content, and the tools around how your team actually works. Then we train your people to run all of it without us. The goal was never to become permanent. It’s to get you running your standard bids in-house, and to be the call you make when the stakes or the clock justify one.
Some vendors win by keeping clients dependent. We’d rather you outgrow us and tell the next firm.
Tell us what you’re bidding and we’ll give you an honest first cut.
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