Brenda Crist

Brenda Crist, MPA, CPP APMP Fellow, serves as a senior capture and proposal manager and develops strategic solutions for clients at Lohfield Consulting Group. She focuses on helping clients work with their staff and partners to create winning, well-written proposal solutions. She offers hands-on experience from leading and conducting systems and network management projects for many civilian and military clients. Brenda was inducted as an Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) Fellow in June 2011 and also received the Steven S. Myers Award for 2011 APMP Chapter Chair of the Year.

Articles by Brenda Crist

• 5 tips for describing complexity

  Thursday, March 19, 2020

  Most requests for proposal (RFPs) ask you to define past performance in terms of relevant size, scope and complexity. The term size is easy to understand because it is numeric. Size refers to the dollar value of the contract, the number of staff, the number of users served, the number of locations served, etc. Scope is also easy to understand, too. We simply compare how well the requirements in the RFP’s statement of work or align with those of our past performance reference.

• 12 tips to get the most out of your bid and proposal dollars

  Tuesday, January 21, 2020

  Every time I go shopping, I try to stretch my dollars to get the best possible products for the most favorable prices. Consider using your bid and proposal (B&P) funds in the same way. Spend just enough money to create a winning proposal and use the leftover cash to fund new bids, improve your B&P infrastructure and/or enhance your team’s skills. Through careful planning, there are measures you can take to stretch your B&P dollars, including the 12 tips listed in this article.

• How to beat a losing streak

  Monday, June 03, 2019

  Proposal professionals are some of the hardest working people in any company. Despite their hard work, they may face a losing streak from time to time. These losses can erode their confidence, adversely affect working relationships, and even trigger job-hopping. Everyone faces losses at one time or another. For example, Steve Jobs is considered one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our generation, yet he prevailed despite numerous losses. If you find rebounding from a string of losses difficult, consider these five tips.

• 5 tips to make the most of your GSA schedules

  Thursday, May 09, 2019

  General Services Administration (GSA) schedules are the largest and most widely used acquisition vehicles in government. Experience shows many companies do not make the most of their schedules for many reasons. Therefore, this article offers five practical tips a schedule-holder can take to optimize their investment in 10 minutes per day or less.

• Integrate coding challenges into your proposal strategy

  Monday, April 08, 2019

  Proposal professionals can expect to see an increase in "coding challenges" added to Request for Proposal (RFP) requirements. Government and industry are using coding challenges to either down-select offerors as an entry or final review gate after they submit a proposal. Coding challenges are tests sent to evaluate the offeror's ability to build a minimal viable product (MVP) or web-based app to respond to a set of requirements. If government and industry do not create their own challenge, they may use one on sites like CoderByte or HackerRank.

• NMITS opportunity: A $2 billion small business IDIQ

  Monday, January 07, 2019

  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Mission Information Technology Services (NMITS) opportunity is a $2 billion-plus small business Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quality (IDIQ) contract designed to help NOAA meet its IT requirements. The NMITS RFP will be released in FY Q2 2019 and awarded in early 2020. It will have a five-year base period, five one-year option years and the ability to award tasks up to 60 months past the end of the ordering period — for a total of 15 years.

• Is ‘proposal brain’ affecting your work?

  Monday, September 10, 2018

  Do you feel forgetful? Is your thinking cloudy? Are you making mistakes? Are you scrambling your words? If so, chances are you have "proposal brain" or what some call "brain fry." In my experience, working long hours over a stretch of several days without a break causes the problem, and no amount of sugar, caffeine or binge-watching your favorite shows can cure it. So, if you get proposal brain, how can you to get rid of it? Here are five tips that I found helpful.

• Before you burst through the $27.5 million size standard

  Monday, July 16, 2018

  Government has two definitions of a company’s size: large or small. MACs use North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes to classify business size standards. One of the most popular size standards is $27.5 million of revenue, on average, for the past three years. If you are a successful small business, chances are you will burst through the MAC’s size standard midway through the contract.

• Maximize your competitive edge to win more MAC task orders

  Monday, July 02, 2018

  A small group of awardees on a given MAC will earn the lion’s share of the total value of all MAC awards. For example, the top 15 MAC incumbents in fiscal year 2017 earned nearly 21 percent of all MAC dollars spent. To further underscore this point, the top 10 businesses on Alliant Small Business and CIO-SP3 Small Business earned 50 percent of all contract dollars in FY17. So, how do a select group of companies earn most of the dollars on a given MAC, and what can other companies learn from their success?

• What do you do after winning a MAC?

  Monday, June 25, 2018

  Winning a MAC presents a terrific opportunity to grow your company and should not be squandered. Government contractors won't win a sizable share of MAC tasks orders just waiting around for them to drop — it takes careful planning and preparation right from the start. Statistics across MACs indicate the top 10 contractors receive most or all contract awards, approximately 20 percent of contractors will win less than $10 million, and a few will win zero task orders, as indicated by Alliant’s results. So, if you’ve been lucky enough to win a MAC recently, consider implementing these 10 tips to jump-start your competitive advantage.

• How MACs can increase your bottom line

  Tuesday, June 19, 2018

  What are multiple-award contracts (MAC) and why should they matter to you? Simply put, a MAC is a basic contract awarded to multiple contractors against which they compete for task order awards. MACs are also referred to as indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) and governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWAC). Federal acquisition regulations (FAR) govern how government agencies use MACs to procure goods and services. MACs should matter to every government contractor for five reasons.

• 5 tips for proposal professionals going through mergers and acquisitions

  Tuesday, June 12, 2018

  Every year, mergers and acquisitions impact the positions of many proposal industry members. For example, this year, General Dynamics acquired CSRA, a $4.3 billion company. Like many proposal professionals, I have gone through several acquisitions and mergers. In one five-year period, I worked for three companies that were acquired by larger companies. If you find your company is being acquired or merging with another company, here are five tips to consider.

• Bids with no capture

  Monday, June 04, 2018

  I confess. I have bid work without any previous capture effort and no firsthand knowledge of the customer’s requirements. I understand that I just violated every proposal industry best practice. It is clear, bidding without any knowledge of the customer requirements greatly diminishes the chance of winning and increases transition and operational risks. So why do companies bid work without any capture effort when, on paper, it makes no sense?

• Congratulations, you won an IDIQ! Now what?

  Monday, March 26, 2018

  In the past year, two major governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWACs) — Alliant Small Business and CIO-SP3 Small Business — had major on-ramps. On Feb. 14, the General Services Administration (GSA) announced it awarded 81 vendors small business contracts.

• Best-in-class contract vehicles and why you need them

  Tuesday, March 20, 2018

  ​The federal government is encouraging agencies to use best-in-class (BIC) governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWACs) to better leverage their buying power. In a Jan. 5, 2017 report, "​Improving Government Operations, Helping Agencies Be More Effective and Efficient," the General Services Administration (GSA) stated: "OMB named several governmentwide contracts, including a GSA contract, as best-in-class federal contracting vehicles for procuring laptops and desktops. This initiative has already produced negotiated savings of up 27 percent on IT Schedule 70 contracts."

• 5 tips for improving your business pipeline and bottom line

  Tuesday, March 06, 2018

  ​Highly profitable businesses are agile. They devote time to researching new bids and pruning their pipeline to maximize their win rate. Their bid staff keep a challenging workload, yet they have enough time to focus on each bid.

• Top 20 ‘super’ IT task orders with combined ceiling values over $4.4B

  Tuesday, November 21, 2017

  ​In FY18, 20 "super" information technology (IT) tasks orders with combined ceiling values of more than $4.4 billion and spending to date of more than $4 billion will exceed their ultimate expiration date and become eligible for competition (see chart below).

• How strong is your business ecosystem?

  Tuesday, October 24, 2017

  ​Achieving a consistently high proposal win rate requires a highly capable bid and proposal team, in addition to a strong business ecosystem consisting of contracts, finance, human resources, recruiting, technical and project management, communications, partners and suppliers. If one or more of the components of the ecosystem is weak, your bid can fail.

• Avoid the ‘bad words’ trap while writing your proposal

  Wednesday, October 11, 2017

  ​Bob Lohfeld published an article in Washington Technology several years ago called "100 wo​rds that kill your proposal." He explained, "Inexperienced proposal writers seem to use words that should be avoided when writing proposals. These inappropriate words and phrases can weaken a proposal, annoy evaluators and even undermine the bidder's credibility."

• How government contractors can grow in today’s market

  Tuesday, July 25, 2017

  For the past several years, government spending on contracts has been stagnant or decreased. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) Contracting Data Analysis Assessment of Government-wide Trends Report (March 2017) found "that while defense obligations to buy products and services decreased by almost 31 percent from fiscal year 2011 through 2015, from $399 billion to $274 billion, civilian obligations remained fairly steady" at an average $128.3 billion.