Writing Proposals | Interview With Expert Brandy Foster (Podcast Transcript)

Richard C. Howard: Hey, guys, Richard here with the government sales momentum podcast. Today we have a special episode. We are interviewing Brandy Foster. Now, Brandy is hands down one of the best proposal writers that I've ever worked with. Her and her team has an amazing win rate, and you're going to hear all about that during this podcast. She also has an amazing background. She's a senior lecturer for the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Wright State University. She runs a student lab that focuses exclusively on writing proposals for government contracts and federal grants. Additionally, she's the executive director of the O'Neill Center. But we're going to get into all this and more during this episode, so stick around. Also, if you're a small business owner and you're ready to develop a focused strategy so you can consistently win contracts in the federal marketplace and targeted agencies, I urge you to go to Dodcontract.com, fill out a consultation. Neither I or one of my associates will talk to you about the products and services that you offer and what we think your best approach to the federal marketplace looks like. Okay, now onto the show. This is Richard here with Richard C. Howard and associates. And this is the government sales Momentum podcast. Or it's the video if you're watching it on YouTube. And today I have someone I would consider a coworker, someone I work with in the industry, Brandy, and I'm going to butcher your last name. Is it Foster?

[02:31] Brandy Foster: Foster.

[02:33] Brandy Foster: Like the logger?

[02:34] Richard C. Howard: Like the logger. Brandy Foster. I'm never going to get that wrong again. So Brandy, who I should have been able to pronounce her last name before I started this. We've done a lot of work with a couple of different clients over the years, and Brittany does a ton of stuff awesome at writing proposals. She has a student lab she works with a lot of different companies, doing a few different things I thought would be great to have you on here, Brandy. So first, thank you for coming on and agreeing to give us some of your time.

[03:03] Brandy Foster: Sure. Thank you for inviting me. I'm really excited.

[03:06] Richard C. Howard: Yeah, no, it's good to I like this format because we've done a lot of professional work together, but I never really dug into your background. So this is going to be interesting for me to kind of learn how you got where you are. And for those listening and Brandy, we talked about this beforehand, but I get a lot of questions from people that want to do this line of work. And one of those questions is, hey. Or one of the assumptions is you have to have a military background or a government background, or you had to be involved with the acquisitions process somehow, but that's not the case. And usually the example I cite is yourself, because you didn't work for the government or the military. And you really seem to be one of the most plugged in individuals I've met and excellent with proposals and whatnot. So maybe you could give us a synopsis of kind of what you're doing now and we could talk a little bit about how you got here.

[03:55] Brandy Foster: Sure. So you'd mentioned the student lab that I run. So I'm currently a senior lecturer in Computer Science and Engineering at Rate State University, despite not being a computer scientist or engineer. We'll talk about that, maybe, but in that role, I teach technical communication, and I have also attracted a large corporate gift from O'Neill and Associates to found the O'Neill Center. And it's a really innovative, experiential learning sort of workforce development center where I train students from different academic programs and how to transfer their skills to serve the small business community and the research community. So I take English majors who have never written a proposal in their life, who have had no interaction with the defense community, and they come out of their internship with a really impressive success rate, a win rate of writing defense proposals for our clients. So, for example, in the last two years, even during the Pandemic, my student team of mostly undergraduate English majors has won our clients about $40 million in federal funding, in defense funding.

[05:22] Richard C. Howard: That's amazing. One of the things you are saying that you focus on as something I've had podcasts on, is the SBI our process? Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

[05:32] Brandy Foster: Yeah. So we work with a lot of small businesses on the SBIR proposals, and that stands for Small Business Innovation and Research Proposals. And it's a funding instrument that helps small businesses to commercialize the technology, usually a dual use technology that would be of interest to the government. And so we have worked with clients across different federal agencies. Almost every federal agency has its own SBIR program. And they're all different, right? So they all have different requirements, different submission requirements, widely different page counts, and things like that for the actual proposal. So we've had some success in helping a local small business here in Dayton, Ohio to win a silver from the USDA to commercialize some technology that's really cool and is of interest to the commercial sector, to the government sector, and even have some applications in the defense sector.

[06:42] Richard C. Howard: Yeah, I think the SBIR program is really one of the best programs out there because it's also a lot quicker than your traditional contracting timeline. So if you have a technology that is new, a lot of times there isn't a requirement for it. So you can go to a Sam dot gov and search for opportunities, but of course your technology is not going to be there because it's new. So if you have an innovative way to solve the problem, just a really great way to go after it. So, yeah, that's awesome. And what's also striking about what you do is that gives me a little bit more affordable option than a company's used to going with if you're using a lab like that. I know that it can be prohibitively expensive for companies to put proposals together, especially for the larger ones. But if you're going out for something like an SBIR or maybe a smaller government contract, it can make a lot of sense to go with a writing style like you're running over there.

[07:37] Brandy Foster: Yeah, thanks. I agree, because we pay attention to the changing requirements across all agencies and we've tried to make our process as efficient as possible, right. So that we can serve our clients. And so we have developed templates already. We pay attention to those changing requirements. So it used to be you submitted a proposal, now they're more wanting a short deck, right, a PowerPoint deck or something. And so our costs are just dirt cheap. And I say that because we are a student run center. You're going to have students doing the work, students with an impressive track record, but still students. So typically the companies that work with us meet either one or two categories. One, they don't have very much capital, right. And they could use some help. And so are really low prices attractive to them and or it's a company of really any size that really believes in our mission because we're developing the next generation of proposal writers to support these companies as they grow.

[08:51] Richard C. Howard: Yeah, no, that's important. It's so hard to find someone that actually understands the process. And I think really what companies are looking for, the same thing that me and you probably look for, right, is that win rate into bringing success in. Right. I don't care if it's a student or someone that's been doing this for 40 years. If you're bringing me a government contract, you're helping me win in the process. That's someone that I'm going to go to over and over again.

[09:16] Brandy Foster: Yeah, and it's interesting you should bring up the win rate currently, and I say currently because it could always change, right. But currently we have an extraordinary 100% win rate for federal contracts that we've done through the O'Neill centers. So we've worked with a local small company and on federal contracting and we're six for six with that company. And so the impact that makes on our regional economy, right, injecting about $10 million or so into the regional economy, and the students are the ones doing that work. So we don't have 100% win rate across all of the different vehicles. But I'm really proud about that one.

[10:02] Richard C. Howard: No, that's awesome. I mean, even a company that has been doing this very successfully, that I would say in this, in the top tier, they're usually around a 25% win rate. And don't get me wrong; their company is higher than that. But 25% win rate when we're talking about proposals is extraordinary. So when you're talking about 100% in a certain part where silvers or certain types of contracts, that's an amazing statistic to be able to bring up. And you mention regional, what region are you in?

[10:28] Brandy Foster: So we're in the Dayton region, which is where Bright Patterson Air Force base is located. So we have a lot of activity in our region around the defense. And I should note too that the company that we have 100% success rate with, they were already an established company and they probably fell into that category of our clients who really believe in our mission and will support us. So it was easy to write winning proposals when it was for such a great company.

[11:02] Richard C. Howard: Yeah, I know. It's a win-win, really, for the company and for your students to be able to kind of work with each other like that, going after those contracts. Now, of course I knew you were from the right path area before I asked that question, but it's really and I'm kind of going off of subject here, but that is really an amazing area as far as technology is concerned, government contracting specifically when we're talking about the Air Force and you are very plugged into that area. Do you want to talk for a couple of minutes about maybe some of the organizations that you work with in that area and why it's right past that part of Ohio just seems to be a hotbed for government contracting activities.

[11:43] Brandy Foster: Oh, sure, yeah. Dayton has a rich history of innovation anyway, right? So we look at the region even outside of the Air Force base, the Wright brothers were from Dayton and so rich history of innovation. And then you bring a giant base and all of the contractors that kind of spring up and want to be around the base. We have a lot of great companies, national scale companies with offices here that are doing research. The 7th, 11th human performance wing moved to Dayton not too long ago in the scheme of things. So we have a really robust AFRL presence. And so a lot of organizations have been formed in the area over the years to support the defense mission. Some of the ones that I work with would include the Entrepreneur Center. So they have funding from the state of Ohio and some federal dollars, and they incubate small businesses. They don't have to have a defense focus, but many of them do, and they certainly have a defense track. They're doing a lot of great work in helping connect these businesses to SBIR opportunities and helping them to commercialize their products and services. Another great organization that's been around almost 20 years is the Wright Brothers Institute. They actually have a partnership, intermediary agreement with the Air Force. So they're sort of this partner that can accelerate that commercialization process pretty quickly. And they're doing amazing work. I just had a meeting with their Director of Innovation today and getting caught up on some of the great things that they're doing. And they've just hired the O'Neill Center, my center, to be their proposal support partner. So they're going to be all of their proposals where I work. Right state. We have a satellite site called Calamityville, which is just an amazing facility. It started out as the National Center for Medical Readiness. Now it's reverted back to the Calamityville branding, but it occupies like 50 plus acres on a former cement, like cement company grounds. Right. And so it's a really sensor rich environment out there. And they do search and rescue simulations. They bring in first responders from all across the nation and maybe even internationally, I think. And so they do drills out there. They have the military there. AFRL has a small presence. There really great facilities around the Dayton region. A lot of organizations that play a support role to the innovators in the region.

[14:55] Richard C. Howard: Yeah, that's amazing. And you mentioned a role a couple of times, which is the Air Force Research Lab, which for those that are unfamiliar, the Air Force Research Lab. That's where a lot of our innovative budget goes. Innovation budget goes where we're trying out new ideas. And sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. They're working on everything from unclassified to the most classified programs that the government has. And sometimes those programs turn into funded, what we'd call a funded program that has a five-year budget associated with it and someone runs it. But they're doing some amazing work there. Combining that with all of the centers that you mentioned, the base, and the fact that right. Pat is the acquisition hub for the entire Air Force, that is the center and all the companies, I mean, it really does have energy about it as far as this subject is concerned.

[15:49] Brandy Foster: It does. And you know, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Soci, which stands for Southwest Ohio Council of Higher education. And so she is a nonprofit that serves a consortium of institutions of higher education in the region, and it's this huge sort of workforce development organization. It's a nonprofit, and Dr. Cassie Barlow runs that, and she's now retired, but she was the former base commander at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. So she's taking all of her knowledge of defense in the base and investing her time in the region's future through this major workforce development program that we're really fortunate to have.

[16:37] Richard C. Howard: Yeah, that is awesome. So I think my question right now is, how did you learn so much and get to the point where you are now? Because not only do you know how to write proposals, but you're teaching students how to write and you're winning. And you are extremely familiar with the government program, so much so that we've joked about it before. But I obviously spent 20 years in the Air Force, and now I've been consulting since I retired. And it very commonly someone on the call will be asking me if I have someone in my network, in a certain organization and I might know someone, and then all of a sudden, you know the leader of that organization. It's almost like a one up battle. But how did you get to the point where you are right now? Very curious.

[17:21] Brandy Foster: Yeah, it's quite a story. So I'll go back to what I said when I introduced myself, is that I'm a senior lecturer in computer science and engineering without being either of those things. Right. And so my story goes back to when I was an undergraduate, and I was studying day in Austin by day and studying proposal writing and Super cavitating torpedoes later in the day. And what I mean by that is I was recruited as an undergraduate English major who really was focused on 19th century British literature. I thought that was my career track, but I was recruited by a mechanical engineering professor at Wright State who had a rather large and prolific and pretty successful graduate research group. He was a non-native speaker of English. Most of his students were as well. So he was hoping to get an English major who could come in and edit their documents. Right. So having never read anything remotely technical to that level, and certainly nothing within the defense space, I was suddenly learning about these new technical genres like proposals and white papers, and I was reading and editing dissertations and mechanical engineering. I remember the Super cavitating Torpedo was a project that they had with the Navy at the time, and my imagination just, like, caught fire. It was like this whole new world. Right. That was so exciting. So they all relied on me because they saw me as having the language skills. And my first boss said, I need you to massage the language. And now I would tell him, you don't want me to massage it because that loosens it up. Right? Right. Postal rating needs to be really tight and focused and the process of informal learning, experiential learning. I was fortunate to keep that internship for a couple of years, and so I went from simply doing copy editing of information that they had written to leading proposal teams as I went through the rest of my internship. I graduated first with my bachelor's and then with my master's, and because of the College of Engineering and Computer Science, was so familiar with me by that point because they're also collaborative when they do research. And I was that student who was helping them. I was offered a job in the college as the proposal writer and they never had that as a standalone position before. In that first year, I did 150 proposals.

[20:22] Richard C. Howard: Wow.

[20:23] Brandy Foster: There were days when I don't think I left campus for two or three days at a time because we had all of these deadlines and I was serving all of the faculty in the entire college, so all of the different departments and focus areas. So I've learned a lot about mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering and computer science. Right. And as I was learning all this information, my skills as a proposal writer increased because I was in the room, I was at the table, I was hearing how the researchers described their work and I could get them to describe it to me as someone who was not a technical expert. My career just sort of blossomed from that. There was an opportunity to work in central administration at the university, in grants administration. Right. So I have been really focused on writing proposals and searching for opportunities. The next job I held at the university was related to grants administration, putting together budgets and pricing and compliance and the submission and reporting and all of that. So I really learned about the entire life cycle and I got good at it because the whole life cycle because I'm really competitive. Right. So if you think about a proposal, everybody starts at the same place. You all have the exact same number of pages with all the formatting, right. So no one has an edge over anyone else. It all comes down to the idea and how well you communicate it. Right. So I really like that part of it. I love learning new things. So I've really had the privilege of sitting in the room with really brilliant people, hearing their ideas and learning from them firsthand. And I really like knowing that the work that I did in helping these innovators and research gets the funding, that they were really like moving the needle forward. Right. They were accomplishing really great things that benefited society, whether it was a new piece of medical technology or it was something defense related to keep us all safer. So I really liked playing my own small part in that way.

[22:53] Richard C. Howard: That is an amazing story. One thing that struck me is because you're right. You start off with some pretty strict parameters when you're writing a proposal. Right. I always talk about the difference between influencing requirements through an RFI or source of thought. Which is very I don't like the term loose goosey. But there's a lot of gray area there and a lot of things you can do that aren't asked for that you could submit versus the structure. The very stringent structure of an RFP or solicitation because you talked about the idea and how well you can communicate it within the constraints of a solicitation. Do you have a couple of recommendations or a couple of places you would recommend to somebody to focus on, maybe make theirs stand apart from the other proposals that are coming in?

[23:42] Brandy Foster: Yeah, I think that we tend to take a literature review kind of for granted. Right. They're a really common feature of the kind of research writing that we do. But that's really the place that I think people miss the opportunity to actively compare and contrast their idea against the ideas that have come before it. Right. So I think that's one place and then another kind of overlooked place would be or two overlooked places. Anytime that you're going to attach a resume or describe the personnel on the project. I feel like we take that section for granted too, and because we'll treat it as boilerplate and we just kind of plug in our small bio that we keep on hand for such occasions. But really there's an opportunity missed if you don't directly tie your specific experiences to the statement of work or to the problem that's being solved in a really compelling way. Right. So you notice that when you come across someone's bio in a proposal and it's not just their boilerplate. But it's really customized to that specific opportunity. It jumps out another place too. Like that. That's often overlooked and we treat it as boilerplate is the budget justification. Which seems like such a weird place to focus because we often treat that as just the pros explanation of the numerical budget. But again, it's a missed opportunity if you don't use that space to elaborate on the project in some way. Right. Because that's usually the space where it's the most underused and we have the most space left that we could use for that section. So fill it up with things that help to promote your idea. Does that make sense?

[25:48] Richard C. Howard: That makes a ton of sense. And just coming from the government, we have very strict ways of writing. We have performance reports, everything from that to the acquisitions documents that we put together. And artists like musicians’ talk about this too.

[26:03] Brandy Foster: Right.

[26:03] Richard C. Howard: So a lot of times constraints is what fosters, no pun intended, the most creativity. Right. So you have these constraints, whether it's a word count or something, you can get very creative there. And again, you mentioned you could maybe take for granted being able to attach a resume or some of the budget justifications or whatnot. But you're right, those are great places to really focus in and maybe give some tidbits that your competitors aren't. And that's really going to come across to the government personnel reading them on the other side, who, by the way, read them all the time and they know when they're just being placated with a cut and paste job versus someone that's really put the time into it.

[26:47] Brandy Foster: Yeah, and I would like to say, too, because again, I would be remiss if I didn't, and I don't want to assume that everyone knows that that abstract or that introduction has to be just as compelling as you can make it because they're not even going to get all the way to the resume or the budget justification if you haven't grabbed their attention with the abstract. And I think one of the things that I was shocked by, because they didn't learn this until much later in my career, probably just a few years ago, is that how important it is to grab their attention. Like, we know that as writers, but when I've talked to colleagues who have volunteered for reviews, right, for different government agencies which will not be named here, they said, not only are you competing with everybody else who submitted a proposal, you're competing with anything else going on in that person's life at that moment. They might be reviewing your proposal at the airport or in front of the TV or whatever, depending on how the review process goes for that particular opportunity. And so to think that you could be competing against external factors just for their attention with something new to me. So I've taken great care to write something that would draw someone's attention away from the football game on TV.

[28:20] Richard C. Howard: Yeah, that's extremely important. We took podcast back depending on when people are listening to this. I did one on a client of ours that won a spot in the App Work Challenge. And I think one of the things just to touch on your point is when you have an abstract or you have a small introductory statement or paragraph, a lot of companies focus on what their product is or their services, instead of focusing on what the government problem is and how this is really a solution for that. If you really take the time to understand what the government problem is and I've said this about capability statements and solicitations and everything else, which is what if I put my government hat on? The number one thing I cared about is can this company solve my problem? That's really all I cared about, to be frank with you. And then all the other things that you need to bring up can come in, whether you have set asides or a contract vehicle like GSA or something, NASA Soup or something that we could utilize. But first and foremost, do you understand the government's mission and what their real problem is, and then how does your solution really fix that problem? And if you're really describing how you can do that in an abstract or an introductory, I think that is one way of grabbing attention where a lot of companies fail.

[29:37] Brandy Foster: Absolutely. That reminds me that I developed and have taught a PhD level course in proposal writing that I sort of developed further from these workshops that I give locally and at the university, and I call it Proposal Writing 101. And that's really one of the major points that I hit, is that it's not about you, it's about your client. Right. It's about the government. It's about the agency that has a problem that needs solved. And so I really like to talk about empathy as the primary characteristic of a really effective proposal writer. We tend to think about empathy as feelings, right? Like machine feelings. But no, empathy is exactly what you described as being attuned to your government clients pain points. What is it that they need solved and paying attention to that and framing everything that you tell them in the proposal in such a way that you're signaling that you're solving a problem, you understand their problem, why it's a problem, how big a problem it is, and you think you've come up with this solution that's going to help them. So being empathetic, being a good listener when you're in meetings, and being a good reader and attentive to the request for proposals where they describe the problem to you, that's so critical.

[31:16] Richard C. Howard: Yes. I mean, that is well said. Certainly as a combat aviator, I wasn't throwing the word empathy around, but that's exactly what I was getting at with understanding the problem. And I think that's definitely a better way of really describing what a company has to do to approach proposal writing and the problem set that they're trying to solve. We're coming to the end of our time here, Brandy. Just wondering if you have anything that you wanted to discuss or any thoughts you might have for somebody new that's just coming into either military or government sales and just wants to stick their feet into it for the first time. Any advice you have for them.

[31:52] Brandy Foster: Yeah, so I think my advice is start small, right. So if you're just getting started, you're not going to want to go after a really big grant, right. You want to start small, and it's really important to collaborate, right. So before you feel like you're ready to go as a prime, collaborate with other companies that have a robust history of winning these things. Learn from them, be a sub to them. And I think that's really an assured pathway to success instead of striking out on your own, because this can be a pretty overwhelming space to work in. There's so many players, so many different contract vehicles, so many different topics, right? So start small and. Collaborate and collaborate as much as you can. Once you get into this space, you realize that you're part of an entire community who are competing against each other sometimes, but also collaborating and supporting each other because we all share the same goal of doing great things to benefit our country.

[33:07] Richard C. Howard: That is awesome. Well said. Brandy Foster, thank you for being here on the Podcast Day episode, working with you in the future. If you did enjoy the episode, please subscribe to the podcast. Again, leave a review. It's very much appreciated. If you're interested in selling products and services at the Department of Defense, I have something for you that you're not going to find anywhere else in the world. The team and I created a program that takes everything you need to win defense contracts and put it into one place. Up until now, only large defense companies and a small amount of people in the know have had access to how products and services are really sold to the Department of Defense. I've taken all of that information and put it in a step-by-step training module that shows you how to consistently sell to the US. Military. If you join our membership, not only do you get the model, but you get weekly sessions with former DOD acquisitions officers for training and guidance to answer your questions, and a community of like minded business owners that want to partner on different opportunities to bid for subcontracting and teaming, or just to discuss general strategy on how to sell to the DOD. You'll have access to every course I've created, every coaching session I've ever recorded, and every interview with an acquisition professional that I've ever conducted. And we covered topics that range from defense sales planning and competitor analysis to SBIR and STTR foreign military sales. The list goes on. Go to Dodcontract.com if you are interested, and I would love to see you in the membership.

If you enjoyed this episode, you can also check out my blog on How I Closed my first Government Contract in Five Weeks. Thanks.