I had the unique pleasure of helping an existing integrator open up its business to new verticals to see where it may be best suited to be profitable based on the type of work involved. If you work for an integrator, you know that each vertical market has its own unique personality, especially when it comes to how you win jobs and how the vertical addresses things like the RFP process, bid evaluations, plus payments terms and schedules.

One vertical that I explored was the military. I responded to an open bid on www.FBO.gov, where government entities are required to post their RFPs. I found an opportunity to bid on some AV work for the Maritime Operations Center for the US Navy. I attended a job walk as required, made some notes, and then set myself to the task of winning the job, which I did. In that process, I found that there were several pieces of the puzzle that took a lot of time to learn along the way, that if known ahead of time, could have made winning that job easier, and determining the payment and verification schedule much easier. So in the spirit of education and helping integrators better navigate these waters and win more jobs, I thought I’d share a five tips on how to win more military work and make it more profitable.

1) Know your FAR Clauses

FAR stands for Federal Acquisition Regulations and if you respond to military RFPs, you will notice myriad Part 52 FAR clauses at the end. These tell you a lot of important information about qualifying for the project including business types eligible, expectations, needed clearances, etc. You should familiarize yourself with these clauses and as you read through them, make a note of the ones that may seem problematic for your business or processes. Then when you are scanning for opportunities, you can quickly look through the FAR clauses scanning for ones you already know may be deal breakers; e.g., If you don’t have staff with current military background clearance checks for Top Secret spaces, you may skip submitting. There is nothing worse than spending time creating proposals for a project that you find out later you don’t qualify to bid on or install.

2) Ask Better Questions

Most of the RFPs I responded to for military jobs had either mandatory job walks or at least the opportunity for a site visit with the contact before bidding. Even if the scope seems mundane, make sure you take the opportunity to get some time on site. There are all sorts of nuances to military work, including knowing the construction requirements. One job I did was in a “secret” space, where walls had to have a metal layer to stop sound transfer. Managing cables into that space was tricky, and there were only certain places that we were allowed to penetrate those metal barriers. While on site, you also get face time with the contact or contact team. Make sure you ask good questions to isolate all of the small things that may not be in the RFP. I once uncovered that the RFP mentioned AMX, but upon asking the team about the control GUI requirements, I found they had certified Crestron programmers on their N6 Communications staff. We also found that special security measures meant that all control systems needed to be hardwired and tethered, as IR, RF, and Wi-Fi were unable to be used in the rooms. Ask good questions and you’ll differentiate both yourself and your bid. Afterwards the Captain asked me to stay and made sure he wrote down my company’s name, which was a good sign.

3) Define FOB Destinations

Some military jobs can be rather large and require the purchase of expensive equipment that needs to be tested and commissioned well before the actual installation. In the commercial space, our company always collected a 50 percent non-refundable deposit at the start of a job to cover these costs and get projects started. In military installations, this methodology typically doesn’t work. If the FOB destination is defined as the job site, you won’t be able to invoice for anything until it arrives onsite and is signed off by the point of contact. If you have a three-month rack build and test, this could really but some strain on company cash flow.

The best thing to do is to define FOB destination in your bid if possible. You can then define all of your rack components, rack mountable electronics and test equipment with the FOB destination of your facility. This allows you to invoice once it arrives there for build and commissioning. The military then typically has a short window of time to come to your facility and verify it is there if they so choose before signing off. You can still keep FOB destination for things like projection screens and LFDs as the military installation if you are shipping those things directly to site.

4) Make Substitutions

As an integrator doing work in the more traditional corporate and education spaces, I rarely made substitution requests for specified equipment unless I had a compelling reason. It was a lot of work to put together documentation for the alternate equipment, and many times the suggested substitution would be nixed by the consultant or architect anyway. This meant that most of the time, I bid the brands and models for which the client asked.

Now many times this logic will hold true in military jobs as well, especially if there is an existing standard or skill-set, (like the Crestron programmers on staff mentioned above), so I am not suggesting a wholesale substitution of every part in the RFP.  However, I advise you to watch carefully for four letters in every military RFP.

Those letters are LPTA.

This stands for Lowest Price Technically Acceptable. Any time you see this in regards to a component or a job as a whole, I suggest you value engineer it or someone else will. This really says “we will buy the cheapest solution that fits our minimum requirements.” Make substitutions whenever you see LPTA and I guarantee you will increase your chances of winning the project.

5) Be Creative in Your Formatting

This is a piece of advice that will only be helpful in winning multiple projects at the same facility or with the same decision makers. Many times when putting together your project proposal for military work, you may be asked to submit two proposals. One is the “technical proposal” and the other is the “price proposal.”

The main difference between the two is that the technical proposal does not include pricing. One team evaluates all the technical proposals, while another team evaluates all the price proposals. They reach two independent conclusions and then come together to compare. Hopefully they choose the same one, but if not, it’s discussion time.

Oh yeah, there is one more important detail about these proposals. They can’t include your company name. The teams are evaluating them blindly, so as to assure that favoritism is not a part of the decision making process. Only the contracting official is supposed knows who wrote the proposals so he can notify once the decision is made.

This is where you get creative with your formatting. Some well-placed font sizes and colors, right justified print, bullets, etc. all may be within the realm of proper submittal guidelines, and can act as a “signature” in the absence of your company name. If you have done work with the group before, and you did it well, they will be looking for you in the stack of “anonymous” proposals this time as well. It’s human nature.

So there you have five easy tips that may just mean the difference between winning or losing your next military RFP. The learning curve can be a little daunting, so hopefully I flattened it out a bit. This information served me well in the past, so much that I used to have one contracting officer that would actually call me every time a new RFP he was in charge of hit the FBO site as to make sure I didn’t miss it and that I was submitting a number.