More Hustle Won't Win You RFPs. A Better System Will.

The government spends trillions a year across federal, state, and local agencies. Opportunities are everywhere, but most firms still treat RFP pursuit like a scavenger hunt.

They manually check sites. They forward PDFs across departments. They scramble at the last minute to piece together a response.

It works until it doesn’t.

The reality: you can’t out-hustle the volume, complexity, and compliance requirements of government contracts. Without a system, even strong firms hit the wall.

Welcome to The Value Chain Advantage. Each week, I share hard-earned strategies to help ambitious companies unlock clarity, protect margin, and scale without chaos. From sourcing to sales, procurement to planning, this newsletter is for founders, revenue leaders, and operators working to strengthen every link in their value chain.

What Separates Winners From the Rest

As operators turned advisors, we’ve seen what separates the winners from the rest. It’s not just more headcount. It’s having the right system and the right support behind it. Firms that scale in the public sector do so by putting a monitoring and response engine in place that takes chaos off the table.

Why Most Firms Struggle

When I look back at the firms that struggled most, the pattern is clear:

• They chased RFPs reactively instead of working from a steady pipeline.
• They leaned on heroic effort from a few overextended staff instead of building the right blend of process and people to handle the workload.
• They treated “execution” as paperwork instead of as margin protection.



On the other hand, the firms that win consistently have one thing in common: they industrialized their process.

The Three Stages of a Repeatable System

Think about it in three stages:

1. Monitoring: If you’re not tracking opportunities daily, across dozens of issuers, you’re already behind. Manual tracking might catch a fraction of what’s out there, but it leaves money on the table.
2. Vetting: Once opportunities hit your radar, the real work begins. Which ones fit your capacity? Which are margin-positive? Which will strain your compliance? Without discipline here, you’ll waste effort on mismatched bids.
3. Execution: A win is meaningless if you can’t deliver profitably and predictably. That means aligning sourcing, pricing, and compliance before the bid goes in. That way, you don’t discover the cracks when the contract is already signed.

Done right, this system doesn’t just win contracts. It wins renewals. Agencies come back to the firms that deliver without drama.

From Insight to Action

Before your next bid cycle, ask yourself:

• Do we know about every opportunity that matches our footprint?
• Do we have a standard process for vetting and disqualifying misfit RFPs?
• If we won tomorrow, could we execute without risking margin or compliance?

If the answer isn’t “yes” across all three, the system isn’t working.

What We've Learned

In government contracting, effort isn’t the differentiator — execution is. Firms that treat RFP pursuit as a repeatable system, rather than an ad hoc scramble, protect their margins and become the partners agencies return to. We've seen this firsthand in our work, and the results speak for themselves.

On of our healthcare clients has improved their monthly hit and win rate by 50%. This was earned not only through greater visibility into the right opportunities, but also by building the right system.

How does your team track and vet government RFPs today? 

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