The standard advice for contractors who want to grow government revenue is: hire a business development person. Someone who does nothing but find bids, write proposals, and maintain agency relationships full time.
That advice is correct for a large contractor with the margins to support a salary plus benefits. For everyone else — the Class B GC running $1.5M in annual revenue, the specialty concrete shop doing municipal work on the side — it’s a non-starter.
The good news: the BD function in government contracting is more automatable than almost anyone in the industry admits. Here’s the honest breakdown of what requires a human, what doesn’t, and how to build the system without the hire.
The BD function, broken into its actual components
“Business development” in government contracting is really four separate activities:
- Bid discovery — finding RFPs that match your license, trade, and geography before the window closes
- Bid qualification — deciding which of those RFPs are worth pursuing (go/no-go)
- Proposal preparation — writing the response, building the price, assembling the package
- Relationship management — staying known to agency procurement officers so you’re a known quantity when the RFP drops
A traditional BD hire does all four. The question is which of these four requires a full-time human, and which can be done by a system.
What the system actually looks like, operationally
Component 1: Automated discovery (BidWire)
Daily digest of matched bids, delivered by 7AM. Each bid includes: scope summary in plain language, deadline, pre-bid meeting dates (if any), agency contact, and prior award data for that agency. The contractor reviews the digest — not searching portals — and makes go/no-go on each matched opportunity quickly.
Component 2: Go/no-go scorecard (human, 15 minutes per bid)
A simple 5-question scorecard: Do we have relevant completed work? Is our crew available for the performance period? Is our bonding capacity sufficient? Do we know anyone at this agency? Is the scope within our normal range? Score 3 or above: bid. Score below 3: pass.
The mistake contractors make is evaluating every bid based on gut feel rather than a repeatable criteria set. The scorecard makes the decision consistent and fast.
Component 3: Proposal template library (one-time investment, 8 hours)
Build your standard sections once: company overview, relevant experience table (top 10 projects with agency, scope, dollar value, completion date, reference contact), key personnel bios, capability statement, NAICS codes, bonding letter template. These sections go into most proposals unchanged or with minor modification.
What this costs vs. a BD hire
| Component | Cost | Time |
|---|---|---|
| BidWire Starter | $1,497/month | Daily digest review |
| Go/no-go scorecard | Free (one-time build, 2 hrs) | 15 min/bid |
| Proposal template library | Free (one-time build, 8 hrs) | Ongoing time savings |
| Total | $1,497/month | Ongoing |
Relationship management: the one part you can’t fully automate
You cannot automate agency relationships. What you can do:
- Show up at pre-bid meetings — even if you’re not planning to bid, attending gets your name on the pre-bid attendee list, which procurement officers review.
- Submit quality proposals even on bids you don’t expect to win — agencies keep losing proposal records and remember contractors who submitted complete, professional packages.
- Follow up after award announcements — a brief, professional note asking for a debrief on why you lost is rare enough that most agencies respond, and it turns a loss into a relationship touchpoint.
None of this requires a full-time hire. It requires a few hours per month of deliberate relationship activity.
A realistic growth path
If you’re at 2 government wins per quarter and want to reach 8–10:
- Month 1: Set up BidWire, build your go/no-go scorecard, assemble your proposal template library.
- Month 2: Run the full system. Your first wins may arrive depending on procurement cycles.
- Month 3: Track your bid-to-win ratio. If it’s low, audit your proposal quality and pricing. If it’s healthy, you have a working system — scale bid volume.
- Month 6: Evaluate whether government revenue has grown enough to justify a part-time BD coordinator.
The discovery problem is the first thing to fix. The rest compounds from there.