The GovCon SMB Growth Formula: A Story Every Contractor Should Know

Once upon a time, there was a small business owner named Sarah. She had left a 10-year career in the Air Force to start her own company—Patriot Solutions LLC. With a laptop, a desk in her garage, and a head full of determination, Sarah dove into the world of government contracting, ready to serve the nation in a new way.

Every day, she responded to SAM.gov opportunities, submitted proposals, and waited. And waited. And waited some more. Sometimes she’d get a rejection. Most of the time, she got silence. She joined a few webinars, downloaded templates, and even paid for one of those “GovCon guru” programs that promised 6-figure contracts in 90 days. Still nothing.

Her team—just her and her cousin Marcus—began to burn out. They were working in the business every hour of the day, but they weren’t building a pipeline or relationships that would help them grow the business.

Until one day, she met someone at a local industry day who pulled her aside and said, “You’re doing it backwards. You don’t win contracts by chasing opportunities. You win by building a formula.”

That conversation changed everything. Sarah stopped focusing on the hustle of reactive bidding and started investing in a proactive growth strategy. A formula that had three parts:

1. Positioning to Win Before the RFP

Sarah learned that success starts before the opportunity drops. She narrowed her focus to one agency—the Department of Veterans Affairs—and became obsessed with understanding their mission, their challenges, and their upcoming needs. She built relationships with small business specialists and reached out to end users and program managers to ask about their pain points.

She crafted a simple but powerful capabilities statement, tailored every interaction to speak to VA-specific needs, and made sure her SAM and DSBS profiles were crisp, aligned and searchable.

This is where she stopped blending in and started standing out.

2. Building a Real Pipeline (Not a Hope List)

Sarah ditched her spreadsheet of expired bids and instead focused on building a living pipeline of forecasted opportunities and active relationships. She started tracking:

• Who she spoke with
• What their needs were
• Where they were in the buying process
• And any other intelligence she could gather

She also used tools like GovWin IQ, The SAM databank, and USASpending.gov not just to find leads, but to uncover patterns—which primes were winning what, when recompetes were due and where she could slot in as a teaming partner.

She even built a quarterly BD rhythm:

• Month 1: Outreach and discovery
• Month 2: Positioning and teaming
• Month 3: Proposal prep (for the things she was already aligned to win)

3. Delivering Like a Prime: Even When She Wasn’t One Yet

Once Sarah started winning small task orders as a subcontractor, she didn’t treat them as “just past performance.” She treated every project like it was a make-or-break contract—delivering ahead of schedule, reporting with clarity, and making her primes look good. Word traveled.

Eventually, she wasn’t just getting invited to bid – she was being asked to prime.

Because of that, she grew from two people to ten in a year. She didn’t need to chase every RFP. Instead, she knew which ones she was positioned to win, and she spent 90% of her time strengthening those few key relationships and vehicles.

As a result, her company was invited into an exclusive mentor-protégé JV (joint venture) and secured a spot on a multi-million-dollar IDIQ with the VA. Her revenue tripled, but more importantly—her stress didn’t.

She wasn’t burning out anymore. She was building. With intention.

Until finally, Sarah became the kind of contractor others looked up to. She started mentoring new business owners—telling them what someone had once told her: “GovCon isn’t just about bidding – it’s about building. And growth comes from having a formula.”

The Takeaway: Your Growth Formula

If you’re stuck in the chaos of SAM.gov alerts and proposal marathons with no return, take a breath. Sarah’s story may be fictional, but her formula is very real – and it works:

• Pre-position instead of chase
• Build a pipeline of people, not just opportunities
• Execute like a prime, every time
• Rinse and repeat!

It’s not magic. It’s momentum—built by aligning your strategy with the way government actually buys.