For contractors operating in aviation, aerospace, maritime or defense, whether delivering MRO (maintenance, repair & overhaul), procurement services or full government-contract support, the market is rich but highly competitive. Winning contracts is not simply about responding to an RFP when it drops. It’s about planning early, aligning your value proposition, choosing the right contract types and building defensible proposals. This guide walks you through the contracting lifecycle, explains capture planning, helps you select the right opportunities and describes how to develop proposals built on accurate estimates.
The Government Contracting Lifecycle
Understanding the full life cycle of government contracting helps you see where capture planning fits—and where your firm can add value.
Stage 1: Strategic Sales Planning
Before any proposal is written, successful contractors begin with research and go/no-go decision-making. This phase involves:
- Identifying opportunities using resources like SAM.gov, FedBizOpps, and agency-specific procurement websites
- Gathering pre-RFP data about agency needs, budgets, and priorities
- Evaluating fit against your company’s capabilities, past performance, and profit goals
- Making go/no-go decisions on whether to pursue a specific contract opportunity
In this phase, your team evaluates whether an opportunity aligns with your business strengths. A structured decision-making framework helps you allocate resources wisely. Rather than chasing every opportunity, high-performing contractors focus on bids where they have genuine competitive advantages.
Stage 2: Capture Planning & Award
Once you’ve identified a viable opportunity, capture planning begins, often months before the formal solicitation is released. This phase includes:
- Building relationships with key decision-makers within the agency
- Conducting competitive intelligence on likely competitors
- Understanding customer priorities and evaluation criteria
- Positioning your solution to address the agency’s stated challenges
- Developing teaming strategies with partners to strengthen your offering
- Creating the proposal strategy that guides all proposal development efforts
Capture planning is where many winning contractors gain their competitive advantage. By understanding the customer’s needs before the RFP is released, you can tailor your entire proposal approach to align with what the government values most.
Stage 3: Contract Fulfillment & Reporting
After contract award, execution becomes critical. During this phase, you:
- Monitor time and expenses against the contract estimate
- Maintain compliance with all government standards and regulations
- Track performance metrics to ensure on-budget, on-schedule delivery
- Build a track record for future government business
Strong contract performance directly influences your company’s rating for future bids. Government agencies evaluate past performance closely when making new contract awards.
Stage 4: Contract Completion & Renewal
At the end of a contract, the opportunity for renewal often exists. By delivering on time and within budget, incumbent contractors gain significant advantages for rebids or follow-on work. This phase sets the stage for the next cycle.
Understanding Capture Planning and Why it Matters
Federal opportunities often involve high-value contracts, long procurement cycles, and intense competition. Without a strong capture strategy, contractors can end up submitting proposals that miss the mark or fail to differentiate from stronger competitors.
Capture planning delivers concrete advantages:
- Time to understand the agency’s mission and align your positioning accordingly
- Opportunity to tailor messaging so your proposal directly addresses what the government values
- Reduced last-minute scrambles that compromise proposal quality
- Positioning your company as proactive, not reactive—a distinction that evaluators notice
- Higher probability of winning, as preparation often makes the difference between success and loss
When to Start Capture Planning
The most effective capture efforts begin early—ideally as soon as you identify an opportunity. In fact, many successful contractors initiate capture planning 6 to 12 months before the anticipated RFP release.
Early capture planning allows you to:
- Build relationships before competition becomes visible
- Influence scope and requirements through agency engagement
- Develop a detailed understanding of the customer’s constraints, priorities, and decision-making criteria
- Identify and mitigate risks before proposal development begins
- Secure teaming partnerships with strategically important subcontractors
The longer your capture window, the more intelligence you can gather and the stronger your positioning becomes.
Building a Proposal Grounded in Credibility
When the RFP finally hits, your proposal becomes the execution of all your previous work. But its strength depends heavily on one underlying element: credible, defensible estimation of cost, schedule, resources and risk.
Your proposal must reflect more than a well-defined narrative; it must demonstrate you understand the customer’s pain points, have experienced the work, can deliver, and have quantified how you will do it. The estimate forms the backbone of this story.
Start with historic data: how long did past MRO jobs take? What were the manpower hours, materials, and logistics delays? Break the work into a work‐breakdown structure (WBS), labor, materials, suppliers, subcontractors, overhead, and build your cost-model accordingly.
For fixed-price scenarios, include contingency and risk buffers; for cost-reimbursement, you must ensure your cost accounting system meets compliance needs and you can justify labor rates, indirects, and overhead. The government will evaluate your basis of estimate, assumptions and ability to perform.
Your proposal must then weave together:
- A clear narrative of how you meet the technical and mission needs.
- Management approach: how you’ll organise, monitor performance, manage subcontractors, and quality assurance.
- Past performance: Show you have done similar work in aviation/aerospace/maritime/defense.
- Cost/price: Transparent, defendable.
- Schedule and deliverables: How you will meet readiness, uptime, and lifecycle goals.
- Risk mitigation: How you will handle parts obsolescence, supply-chain delays, and regulatory changes.
Estimate Best Practices
- Use historical data: past MRO hours, materials usage, maritime sustainment cycles.
- WBS (Work Breakdown Structure): decompose work into discrete packages for labour, materials, subcontracting, and overhead.
The better your capture planning, the smoother this proposal phase will be: you bring insight from your upstream work into the bid, enhancing credibility, reducing bid effort and increasing your chance of winning
