The gap nobody warns you about
Deciding to bid on government contracts takes an afternoon. Becoming able to bid takes most businesses four to six months, and almost nobody tells them that on the way in.
What happens instead is this. You find an opportunity that looks like a fit. You start reading. Somewhere around the third paragraph you discover you need a UEI, which means a SAM.gov registration, which means entity validation, which means documents that have to match your legal name exactly. Then the solicitation asks for a capability statement, and your NAICS code, and three past performance references with contract numbers. The deadline is in eleven days. You close the tab.
Six weeks later you find another one, and repeat. That loop is where most small businesses spend their first year in government contracting, and the cost of it is not the paperwork. It is every bid cycle that passed while you were getting ready.
Not sure which side of the gap you are on?
The Bid Readiness Check takes two minutes and names your actual gaps. Free, and you get a 30-minute call with us whatever it says.
Check My Readiness →What we do, in four weeks
This is the whole list. Nothing is held back for an upsell.
Week one — registration and eligibility. We file for your UEI and build the SAM.gov record end to end: entity validation documents, CAGE code, banking details, representations and certifications, points of contact. We complete your Dynamic Small Business Search profile, which is the record agencies actually browse when they are hunting for small businesses to meet set-aside goals, and which most registrations leave blank. We select your primary and secondary NAICS codes against the SBA size standards — checking that you still count as small in the code you choose, which people get wrong and do not find out until they are disqualified — add your PSC codes, and write you a map of which set-aside programs you genuinely qualify for, what each one requires, and which is worth your time first.
Week two — positioning. We write your capability statement on your real codes rather than placeholders, which is why it comes after week one. Then the part that actually blocks people: a past performance dossier. We inventory three years of your work, government and commercial, pin down contract values and periods, confirm your references are reachable, and write it into the narrative shape an evaluator expects rather than the shape a brochure expects. Alongside it we build a cost and rate structure — labour categories, loaded rates, a basic wrap-rate model — so that when a solicitation asks for pricing you are not guessing or bidding at a loss.
Week three — targeting. Registration makes you eligible. It does not make you visible, and it does not tell you where to look. We map the opportunity landscape for your codes: which agencies buy what you sell, what they typically pay, who currently holds the work. From that we build a target list of agencies and of prime contractors worth approaching for subcontract work, plus a sources sought strategy — those are the notices where agencies ask who could do a piece of work before they write the solicitation, and they are the lowest-competition way in that exists, largely because hardly anyone responds to them.
Week four — live. We switch on 90 days of bid monitoring across SAM.gov and the state and local portals that matter for your codes, tuned to your profile. You get two working sessions with us, kickoff and handover, with recorded walkthroughs in between rather than more meetings on your calendar. And you get a written 90-day roadmap: what to do next, in what order, with what you now have.
What you keep
An active SAM.gov registration in your own account. A completed DSBS profile. Your capability statement as a PDF and as an editable source file, so you can update it yourself when you win something. The past performance dossier. The rate workbook. The target list. The roadmap.
All of it is yours and none of it depends on us. If you decide after four weeks that you would rather work with someone else, you take everything and nothing breaks. We would rather you could fire us and keep working.
The past performance problem, and why it is smaller than you think
This is the objection we hear more than any other: how can I win federal work when every solicitation wants federal work I have already done?
It is a real problem and it is not as closed as it looks. Three things are true that most people starting out do not know.
Subcontractor performance counts. Since a 2022 SBA rule change, a small business can use a past performance rating earned as a first-tier subcontractor, or as a member of a joint venture, when bidding as a prime. A prime contractor has to provide you that rating if you ask for it, and cannot set a deadline earlier than thirty days after the period of performance ends. Most small businesses never ask.
Small buys often do not require it. Below the simplified acquisition threshold of $250,000, agencies have considerably more flexibility, and past performance requirements are frequently reduced or waived entirely. That is a real market, and it is where a first federal award usually comes from.
Commercial work is still work. If you have delivered the same scope for a private client, that belongs in the dossier, framed against the evaluation criteria rather than left as a line on a website. A great deal of what we do in week two is finding the relevant experience you already have and did not think counted.
So the honest roadmap for a business with no federal record usually starts with subcontracting and small buys, not with a large prime pursuit. We will say so plainly if that is your situation, and the target list will reflect it. We work the same 10% contingency on a subcontract award that we work on a prime one, so our incentive to point you at the realistic route is the same as yours.
Set-asides: three things that changed recently
Certification rules moved in the last eighteen months and a lot of the advice still circulating is out of date. If you are veteran-owned this matters to you immediately.
Self-certification for service-disabled veteran-owned businesses is gone. Since 22 December 2024, only firms certified through SBA VetCert count toward agency SDVOSB goals. Businesses that self-certified years ago and assumed they were covered are not. Processing currently averages around twelve days, down from sixty to ninety through most of 2024, so this is a fixable problem rather than a long one — but only if you know you have it.
The application platform changed. MySBA Certifications became the mandatory route for all new certification applications on 1 January 2026. Guidance written before that points you at systems that no longer accept applications.
The SDVOSB target went up. The FY2024 National Defense Authorization Act raised the government-wide goal from 3% to 5% of prime and subcontract dollars — an annual target north of $31 billion. That is the tailwind behind this whole category, and it is the reason a veteran-owned business that gets properly certified is in a better position now than it was three years ago.
Timelines vary by programme and are worth knowing before you choose one: VetCert currently runs around twelve days, WOSB thirty to sixty, HUBZone sixty to ninety with recertification every three years, and 8(a) ninety-plus days for a programme that lasts a maximum of nine years. Choosing the wrong one first can cost you a contracting year.
Two Sprints a month. That is the real limit.
Take the readiness check and book your free 30-minute call. If both slots are taken we will tell you the next opening rather than queue you quietly.
Check My Readiness →Timing, honestly
Four weeks is four weeks of our work, and we hold ourselves to it. What we do not control is the government.
Entity validation inside SAM.gov routinely takes up to ten business days, and longer when the system asks for corrections because your documents do not match your legal business name character for character. Until that clears, your CAGE code does not exist, and a capability statement with blank code fields is worse than no capability statement at all.
So our clock pauses while we are waiting on entity validation or a certification decision, and we tell you in writing each time it pauses and each time it restarts. We file on day one or two precisely so that wait runs in parallel with the dossier and targeting work rather than after it. What we will not do is promise you a date that belongs to someone else. You will find the same sentence on our SAM registration page, and we mean it in both places.
What it costs, and what happens to the fee if we win together
The Sprint is $2,497, paid once, at the start.
Bought separately, two pieces of it are already priced on this site: SAM registration at $597 and a capability statement at $197. The rest — the eligibility map, the past performance dossier, the rate structure, the targeting work and the roadmap — we do not sell on its own, and it is most of the work. Our published advisory rate is $250 an hour, and a Sprint is thirty to fifty hours. Draw your own conclusion about which is better value; we are not going to dress it up with a table.
The credit. Your Sprint fee comes off our commission on the first contract we win together within twelve months of signing the engagement letter — provided that single commission is at least $2,497. At our 10% rate, that means one award of roughly $25,000 or more. It applies once, to one engagement. Commissions from separate wins do not add together to reach the threshold.
That condition matters, so here it is in numbers rather than in a footnote:
| First award | Our 10% | Sprint credit |
|---|---|---|
| $15,000 | $1,500 | None — below $2,497 |
| $25,000 | $2,500 | Full $2,497 comes off |
| $100,000 | $10,000 | Full $2,497 comes off |
We would rather you saw the row where the credit does not apply than discovered it later. If your first win is a $15,000 small buy — which for a business with no federal record is a perfectly good first win, and a likely one — you pay our commission on it and the Sprint fee stays paid. The credit is a genuine reduction on a meaningful award, not a promise that the Sprint is free.
You can get some of this free, and you should know that
APEX Accelerators are federally funded, exist in every state, and cost nothing. They will help you register in SAM, look over a capability statement, and work through certification questions. SBA district offices and SCORE do similar. For the filing side of set-aside certification in particular, we will point you at them rather than charge you to retype your own documents.
If you have the time and the patience to work at their pace, that is a genuinely good route and we will tell you so on the call. What we sell is not access to information. It is that the whole thing gets done properly, in four weeks, by someone doing it rather than coaching you through it — and that at the end you have a dossier, a rate structure and a target list, which is the part free help rarely reaches.
This is probably not a fit if…
You already have an active SAM record and a current capability statement. Then you are mostly there, and buying a Sprint means paying us to redo work you have. What you probably need is the dossier and the targeting, and we would quote only that. Take the readiness check first.
You have a specific bid due in under three weeks. That is not a sprint, that is a proposal. Talk to us about writing it instead, and we will tell you honestly whether you are eligible to submit in time.
You are not willing to name past performance contacts. The dossier is the most valuable thing in the Sprint and it cannot be built from a business that will not put us in touch with anyone it has worked for. If references are a problem, the underlying issue is not registration.
Your business could not actually perform the work at the scale you want to bid. Winning a contract you cannot deliver damages your past performance, and past performance is the asset everything else is built on. We would rather say this now than write you a proposal for it.
You have time and enjoy this sort of thing. Your APEX Accelerator will help you for free. Slower, and you do the work, but it is real help and it costs nothing.
Where to start
Take the Bid Readiness Check. It is five questions, about two minutes, and it will name your actual gaps rather than give you a score and a sales pitch.
Then book the free 30-minute call, which you get whatever the check says. We will look at what you already have, tell you what is genuinely missing, and if the honest answer is that you need two pieces rather than the whole Sprint, that is what we will quote. If the answer is that your local APEX Accelerator can get you there for nothing, we will say that too.