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Additional Consulting
Training Capabilities

Winning Proposals

Today’s contracts are increasingly competitive and complex. Most are decided by contracting, not technical personnel. The majority of awards become low cost technically acceptable, regardless of words in the RFP (which can be incomplete, confusing, contradictory and not aligned). Therefore, therefore producing a responsive, compliant proposal is no easy task. Developing a winning proposal is even harder. It must be communicative, convincing, and score points on every page to achieve scores in the high 90’s. To this end, Gerry Decker, the faciliator has developed a set of proven, common best practices based on 40+ years of proposals (including winning 11 $1B+ contracts, across different customers, mission functions, and solutions/services).

Strategic Consulting

Consistently and actively navigating customer, competitor, investor, technology, political, and other dynamics (economic recession, COVID, etc.) to achieve organizational goals is a constant, critical leadership challenge. It requires a broad perspective, skill base, and experience in culture change, change management, strategic planning, market branding and positioning, organizational optimization and development, M&A assessment and integration strategy, team building and conflict resolution and technology enabled CONOPS. Mr. Decker has performed these activities as a C suite executive across large and small companies, private and public ownership, in different market sectors, with different capability solution and service offerings. For example, he was a SVP at DynCorp that grew the DOE business from almost nothing to 30% of the company’s profit in 4 years via winning 3 $1B+ DOE M&O contracts. As President and COO, he led the transition of McNeil Technologies from a $50M small business to a $600M prime solutions provider and then the sale to AECOM. He led the change management program at Alion to transition from a $700M academic oriented sole source provider to a $2B highly competitive prime solution provider and then the sale to HHI.

Capture Dominance and Excellence

In recent past, companies could win capture contracts by influencing customer thinking and their RFP requirements. Capture has always been predominantly about customer relationships (via incumbent performance, trusted agents, interaction at conferences/events, or social engagements). This is becoming increasingly difficult in today’s restrictive legal/regulatory environment. Capture now relies more on detailed research, data analysis, and point gaining strategies. Every single effort must produce specific, actionable artifacts for the proposal, not generalities and vagaries. The capture manager must be fully engaged in the proposal process vs just turning it over the proposal team.

After 40 years of capture management, including capturing 11 $1B+ single award competitive contracts, Gerry Decker, the facilitator has developed a set of common best practices for any capture, including creative research targets; teaming based analytical analysis and scoring of 3 key items. Regardless of your team’s experience, this will be an eye opening session promising cutting edge winning strategies.

Gerry Decker is available for both consulting on individual opportunities and training teams as a whole on these topics. Consulting and/or training may be conducted via classroom, war rooming, or virtually.

Gerry Decker

Facilitator