Posts by Chelsea Roberts
Stop Running Your Company from Your Checking Account | Bud McDonald
Your bank account cannot tell you what next month looks like. A forecast can. Bud McDonald has spent 35 years proving the difference is the whole ballgame.
Most small business owners manage by their bank balance. Bud McDonald, founder of McMay Business Services, spent more than three decades leading turnarounds, managing P&Ls, and running large teams before he started helping small businesses do the one thing that separates the ones that grow from the ones that stall: see their money before it arrives.
In this episode, Bud and Chelsea get into the 13-week cash flow forecast, why a four-page business plan beats no plan, the receivables conversation every founder dreads, how to price the outcome instead of the hour, and the real signal that tells you when it is time to make your first hire. Practical, unglamorous, and exactly the kind of thing nobody hands you when you start a company.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:00 35 years of turnarounds, and why Bud started McMay
02:00 The business plan that fits on four pages
03:00 Budget, forecast, and the 13-week cash flow
04:00 The bank-balance trap
06:00 Chelsea’s spreadsheet lesson
07:00 Bookkeeping as the foundation
08:00 QuickBooks, Wave, and picking a scalable tool
10:00 The mistake behind most turnarounds: processes nobody uses
13:00 A turnaround story: communication first
20:00 Receivables, and the conversation nobody wants
22:00 When to fire a customer
25:00 Pricing: value your time, then price the outcome
30:00 There is no magic number for your first hire
34:00 Working on the business vs in the business
36:00 Where to find Bud
Resources:
Other resources:
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Is SLED Contracting Worth It for Federal Contractors? by David Fine
Over the course of a rocky FY26, every federal contractor has been hearing the same thing: diversify. Look at state and local. Stop betting the company on one buyer.
It’s good advice. It’s also incomplete, because “diversify into SLED” is not one decision. It’s a different decision for a highway contractor than for a software company, and the gap between those two cases is enormous.
So instead of arguing about it, we went and counted. What follows comes from open, live solicitations across state, local, and education buyers, the ones sitting on procurement portals and city websites this week.
How many state and local contracts are there in my NAICS code?
Start with the simplest question a contractor can ask. For every open federal opportunity in my code, how many open state and local ones are there?
Same advice, opposite outcomes, and the only thing separating them is which code you happen to work in.
Are state and local contracts smaller than federal contracts?
Yes, and by more than most people expect.
We compared the median published contract value in the same NAICS code on both sides of the fence:
A federal IT services firm accustomed to pursuing four-million-dollar computer systems design(opens in new tab) contracts will find the state and local equivalent sitting around a quarter of a million. That is a sixteen-fold difference in deal size, inside the same code, for what is often very similar work.
The gap narrows as the work gets more commoditized. Janitorial services(opens in new tab) runs less than two to one. Software publishers, under three to one. But the direction is consistent. The same capability sells for less to a city than to a federal agency.
That sounds like bad news. It isn’t, necessarily. It just means you have to be honest about what you’re buying. You are not buying a replacement revenue stream at your current deal size. You’re buying more shots, at lower stakes, with lighter competition, in a market where a small win still counts as past performance.
For a company trying to build a record rather than defend one, that trade is often worth making. For a company that needs to replace a $4M contract that just went away, it isn’t. Know which one you are before you commit a business development quarter to it.
How long do you get to respond to a state or local RFP?
Federal contractors bracing for a frantic scramble tend to be surprised here. State and local solicitations stay open a median of 29 days from posting to due date. Federal, 19.
You get about ten more days. The pressure in SLED is not the response clock. It’s everything that happens before the clock starts, which is the part nobody warns you about.
Who actually buys in the SLED market?
Ask a federal contractor to picture a SLED buyer and most describe a state agency. That’s not what the market looks like.
State governments account for under a quarter of open solicitations. Cities alone outnumber them. Add counties and K-12 school districts and you have close to sixty percent of the market sitting below the state level entirely.
This matters more than it sounds. If you’ve looked at state-level procurement and decided you know how SLED works, most of the market still looks nothing like what you saw. A city of forty thousand people might post a bid on its own website, give you a phone number, and award it in six weeks. Plenty of these buyers run a handful of solicitations a year, and the process reflects that.
How local does “local preference” actually get?
Every federal contractor eyeing SLED has heard that local preference exists. Almost nobody knows where the line gets drawn.
When a solicitation carries a local preference, it’s drawn at the city limit or the county line about two-thirds of the time. State and regional boundaries are the minority.
And the tighter the boundary, the harder the rule. Preference drawn at the city limit is roughly twice as likely to be a hard requirement, an eligibility gate rather than a scoring nudge, as preference drawn at the state line.
The practical translation: “we’re going after Texas” is not a SLED strategy. Being a known, registered, physically present vendor in three counties is a SLED strategy. The geography that matters is far smaller than most federal contractors assume, which is bad news for a spray-and-pray approach and very good news for anyone willing to pick a patch and own it.
How should a federal contractor start bidding on state and local work?
Four things, in order.
Look up your own ratio first. Before you commit any BD time, count open SLED solicitations against open federal ones in your primary code. If that number is under three, the diversification case has to be made on relationship risk, not volume.
Reset your deal-size expectations before your first pursuit, not after. Going in expecting federal contract values guarantees you’ll conclude SLED “isn’t worth it” after two bids.
Pick counties, not states. Then register as a vendor in each one, because most agencies search their own vendor database before anything gets posted.
Fix your discovery problem before your proposal problem. Your win rate is not what’s limiting you here. There is no SAM.gov for state and local work. The opportunities are scattered across tens of thousands of individual government websites, and the ones you never see cost you more than the ones you lose. You can start by pulling up the open solicitations in your own NAICS code(opens in new tab) and counting how many of those buyers you’d never heard of.
The federal contractors doing well in SLED right now aren’t better at government contracting than you are. They just did the arithmetic on their own code before they committed.
David Fine is the founder of Bidscope(opens in new tab), which tracks state, local, and education solicitations across more than 50,000 government sources and matches them to contractors by capability rather than by keyword or NAICS code. Bidscope also surfaces signals on upcoming opportunities, drawn from forecasts, published budgets, and expiring contracts.
The Capital Stacking Playbook: How Defense Founders Fund Hard Tech Without Losing Equity | Mollie Jahner
Hard tech is hard, and the money you raise to build it can quietly decide which customers you are allowed to serve. This week on GovCon Unscripted, Mollie Jahner makes the case that most defense founders reach for venture capital by reflex, when a stacked strategy of non-dilutive federal, state, and local funding, plus smart teaming, gets them further with more control.
Host Chelsea Roberts sits down with Mollie Jahner (Mission Cultivate, founder of Raise, formerly founder/CEO of Spring & Forge) on capital stacking, why the wrong investor can trip a CFIUS or foreign-ownership review and block your end customer, how teaming unlocks solicitations a single company cannot reach alone, and where Raise fits in helping founders find non-dilutive money faster.
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why working moms make great operators
3:00 Getting government and industry in the same room
6:00 Founding Mission Cultivate and the Raise platform
10:00 Teaming and consortia: unlocking bigger contracts
13:00 The capital stack: non-dilutive funding beyond VC
15:00 The VC trap and the wrong kind of capital
18:00 Why human relationships beat AI noise
21:00 Who Mission Cultivate serves and the Raise launch
26:00 Wrap-up
Resources:
Other resources:
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The Money Isn’t Where You Think: How to Read Federal Contract Data | Eileen Kent
Everyone reaches for the free federal databases. Almost nobody reads them correctly, and the wrong read sends a whole pursuit in the wrong direction.
In this week’s episode of GovCon Unscripted, Chelsea Roberts sat with Eileen Kent, the Federal Sales Guide and President of Custom Keynotes, LLC, who has pulled the SAM ad hoc report thousands of times over twenty years.
She walks through the free public data that most contractors misread: why “place of performance” often shows the vendor’s address or the manufacturer’s plant instead of where the work lands, why “dollars obligated” is the only money figure worth trusting, why a string of negatives is usually an adjustment rather than a vendor being pushed out, and how to hunt for patterns of who buys what you sell from whom.
She makes the case that AI and paid aggregators can accelerate a bad decision because they cannot interpret dirty data, and that the deal is still closed in the field, through relationships. She closes on the discipline she cares about most: a real bid/no-bid process, and the strength to walk away when there is no relationship.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro · 01:00 The Three-Step Program
02:30 Early tools (FPDS, USASpending, FedBizOpps, CCR)
06:30 Free vs paid · 07:30 The place-of-performance problem
12:00 Inside the SAM ad hoc report
15:00 Reading patterns (DHA, VA VISNs, CMOPs)
20:00 The 2025 shift of commodities to GSA
23:00 Why outreach bots fail
28:30 Dollars obligated and negative adjustments
33:00 Bid/no-bid discipline.
Resources:
Other Resource:
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The $50M Company That Almost Couldn’t Be Sold | Robert E. Jones
A $50 million company with 600 employees almost fell out of its own sale. Not because of revenue, but because every decision still ran through two people.
Most owners think exit planning starts when they call an M&A advisor. In this episode of GovCon Unscripted, host Chelsea Roberts talks with Robert E. Jones, CPA and Principal Advisor at Corvata, who has spent 20+ years in government contracting, and says that by then the value of the business is already fixed. The real work happens two to five years earlier, left of the transaction, where structure, discipline, and decision flow still can be changed.
In this conversation, Robert breaks down his Enterprise Readiness Operating Model, the seven decision failure modes that stall companies, why owner-dependency scares off buyers, and how tightening operations can move an EBITDA multiple from the low end of a 6 to 9x range to the high end. He also shows how tools most contractors already pay for can cut a 12-hour payroll run to two or three hours.
Timestamps:
00:00 Does anyone actually plan the exit?
01:00 “You will exit your business”: on your terms or not
02:00 Left of the transaction: where value is still changeable
03:00 The Enterprise Readiness Operating Model (structure, discipline, decision flow)
06:00 The seven decision failure modes
11:00 Due diligence: documents that “magically appear”
13:00 The $50M company that almost couldn’t be sold
20:00 Policy vs procedure vs work instructions
21:00 Getting off paper: SharePoint, Planner, and the tools you already own
25:00 Value growth: profitability, the multiplier, and the multiple
29:00 The 10-year math: working backward from the day you want out
33:00 The three kinds of optionality this work buys you
Resources:
Follow Robert E. Jones
Follow Chelsea Roberts
Other resources:
$30 Million, One-to-One Match, Five Agencies: Inside the Strategic Breakthrough Award
More thoughts on SBIR Strategic Breakthrough Awards
I keep getting lots of questions and requests about how to get one of these $30 million Strategic Breakthrough (SB) awards.
Well first, let’s break it down a few very pertinent facts:
SB awards are ONLY authorized (by PL 119-83) at the following SBIR agencies: DOD (DOW), HHS, NSF, DOE and NASA. None of the other SBIR agencies can even consider SB awards.
SB awards are FOLLOW-ON Phase II awards (based on the previously implemented Air Force STRATFI program). This means to be eligible, a company must already have an SBIR/STTR Phase II award.
Before finalizing an SB award, an eligible company must show evidence of a 1:1 match of the proposed award amount.
An SB award will come from the awarding agency SBIR budget. That is, PL 119-83 did not appropriate any new funds for SB awards, it simply allows SBIR dollars to be spent via SB without requesting permission.
MY THOUGHTS… (not facts!)
NIH & NSF have said they would likely use the new SB authority to expand their existing Phase IIB awards on a case by case basis. But both expected that IF they used the new SB authority, the award sizes would be more like < $5 million, not close to the $30 million maximum.
My personal view is that only the largest DOD components (AF, Navy, Army, MDA) will entertain anything near the $30 million maximum. Any SB award nearing $30 million would simply chew up too much of the overall SBIR budgets. Keep in mind that one $30 million award would be more than 10% of the individual NSF, NASA & DOE annual SBIR budgets.
So what should you do?
The four requirements will likely filter out most of those interested in pursuing an SB award.
If your firm DOES meet all the requirements above, then it is in your best interest to talk with your agency program staff to inquire how to pursue these larger awards.
Final thought:
This new authority gives the 5 agencies listed additional flexibility on how to use SBIR budgets to further their agency mission. I LIKE this new authority!! However, actual implementation of the authority will likely be limited in both scope (which agencies actually use the SB authority) and scale (the actual dollar amount of any resulting SB awards).
Connect with Jerry Hollister
BBCetc Website: https://bbcetc.com/
Additional Resources:
Public Law 119-83 DSIP (Defense SBIR/STTR Innovation Portal): https://www.congress.gov/119/plaws/publ83/PLAW-119publ83.pdf
SBA FAST Program: https://www.sbir.gov/community/fast
Design-Time vs. Runtime AI in Government: Why Most Agencies Get It Backwards | Doug Averill
Your AI pilot probably isn’t failing because the model is weak. It’s failing because you pointed it at the wrong end of the process.
Doug Averill has spent half his career in government and half in technology, and now serves as Vice President, Global Industry Market Leader, Government at Pega. In this episode of GovCon Unscripted, he draws a line most modernization teams never think to draw: the difference between runtime AI (burning tokens to execute the process you already run) and design-time AI (reimagining the process from the source policy before you build anything).
Apply AI at runtime to a broken workflow, Doug argues, and you pave the cow path: you carry the skipped steps, the noncompliance, and the suboptimal outcomes straight into the new system, only faster. He and Chelsea get into why the fix starts with the source policy document rather than the current application, why the power users have to be in the room from the first pilot, why procurement belongs at ideation and not at the end, and why speed, from OTAs to fast pilots, is never the same thing as the outcome you actually needed.
Timestamps:
- 00:01 — Why the US is now leading on AI uptake while process and policy slow everyone down
- 00:04 — Context is the ceiling: why the smallest gap derails an AI tool
- 00:11 — Blueprint for Government, source policy, and paving the cow path
- 00:13 — Design-time AI vs. token-maxing runtime AI
- 00:16 — Local models, warrants, and where a contracting officer should focus
- 00:24 — Dropping point solutions on the front porch of IT
- 00:25 — Getting procurement, CISO, and ISOs in the room to go idea-to-live in 90 days
Resources:
Doug Averill’s LinkedIn profile
Chelsea Roberts’ LinkedIn profile
Other resources:
You Don’t Control Innovation. You Manage It. | Harlan Bennett & Rick Fernandez
Kodak’s own engineers built the first digital camera, and its executives shelved it to protect film. The gap between having ideas and managing innovation is where organizations quietly die.
In this special episode of GovCon Unscripted, Chelsea Roberts sits down with two of the people writing the international playbook for innovation management. Rick Fernandez is President of the American Network for Innovation, chairman of the US technical advisory group to ISO TC 279, and a veteran of Florida Power & Light’s Deming Prize win, the first awarded outside Japan. Harlan Bennett is CEO of Ever Evolving, Inc., VP of the American Network for Innovation, and vice chair of the same US advisory group.
Together they take apart the most common misreads in federal innovation: that innovation equals technology, that more ideas mean more innovation, and that a standard is just another compliance flow-down. Rick contrasts idea-driven programs (14,000 employee ideas collected, roughly 100 developed, 13,900 contributors alienated) with value-driven innovation that starts from strategic intent. Harlan shows SBIR performers how to escape the one-lane trap by validating adjacent customers before the build starts. And both make the case that ISO 56001, built on the same harmonized structure as ISO 9001, is a management system, not a control system.
They also preview what’s next: innovation ecosystem management, IP-sharing contracts between primes and subs, and why innovation is no longer an individual game.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Welcome and guest introductions
01:00 Harlan Bennett: Ever Evolving, Inc. and the American Network for Innovation
02:30 Rick Fernandez: from FPL’s Deming Prize to ISO TC 279
04:00 Why innovation needs standards now: the three S’s
07:00 Innovation is not a technology: something new that creates value
09:30 The garage tinkerer problem and the one hit wonder
11:00 Managing innovation vs controlling it
12:00 Idea-driven vs value-driven innovation: the 14,000 ideas story
14:30 Innovation portfolio management
18:45 SBIR: escaping the one-lane trap
23:30 The recipe: maximize value, minimize risk, resources, and time
24:45 Ambidextrous organizations: innovating without dropping daily operations
25:30 Case study: an innovation management office, 100 projects narrowed to 3
29:00 Ecosystems: innovation is no longer an individual game
31:00 Primes, flow-downs, CMMC, and fair negotiations
37:45 Standards as enablers, not regulations
39:30 The harmonized structure: why ISO 9001 shops are halfway there
42:15 Where to find Harlan and Rick
Resources:
Harlan Bennett’s LinkedIn Profile
Rick Fernandez’s LinkedIn Profile
Chelsea Roberts’ LinkedIn Profile
Other resources:
Manufacturing Is Not a Dirty Word: Reframing the Jobs Rural Communities Need | Chrissy Marrucci
Say the word manufacturing and a lot of people picture something old and dirty. For rural communities, Chrissy Marucci argues, it is something else entirely: jobs and the federal dollars that come with them.
On this Special Episode of GovCon Unscripted, host Chelsea Roberts continues the #RoadtoHUBZone series with Chrissy Marucci, President and CEO of Elevated Consulting & Development.
Chrissy lives in an entire HUBZone county in the mountains of Appalachia and has spent years connecting rural residents to real federal contracting careers. She and Chelsea talks about what HUBZone was designed to do (bring federal spending back into the communities that need it), why the program is about the place and the people rather than the owner, how the 35% employee-residency rule actually works, and why manufacturing deserves a serious rethink as a source of rural jobs. She also lays out the community development corporation she is building to keep that money at home.
2026 National HUBZone Conference, July 21 and 22 (golf outing July 20) at the Westfields Marriott in Chantilly, Virginia.
Timestamps
00:00 Welcome and who Chrissy is
01:00 Elevated Consulting and Council back-office support
02:00 An entire HUBZone county in Appalachia
03:00 Building the HUBZone Workforce Program
05:00 What HUBZone does for rural areas
06:00 Manufacturing and construction in rural HUBZones
09:00 Advocacy, land use, and changing the narrative
10:00 Manufacturing is not a dirty word
15:30 Place-based and employee-based: the 35% rule
18:00 Remote work and unlocking rural talent
19:00 The community development corporation
21:00 Conference mode and see you in Chantilly
Resources:
- Chrissy Marucci’s LinkedIn Profile
- Chelsea Robert’s LinkedIn Profile
- Elevated Consulting & Development’s Website
Other resources:
- Holler to Hilltop (community development)
- HUBZone Contractors National Council
- 2026 National HUBZone Conference (register)
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Same Work, Different Words: Why Federal Contractors Misread State and Local | Jonathan Santana
A multimillion-dollar services contract, awarded in two weeks, with every I dotted and every T crossed. It was not federal, and that is exactly the point.
This week on GovCon Unscripted, Chelsea Roberts sits down with Jonathan Santana, founder and lead consultant of Excelsior Consulting Services, LLC, an SBA HUBZone and Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned small business supporting federal, state, local, nonprofit, and commercial clients. Jonathan earned his contracting warrant in the Air Force in 2003, bought through hurricane prep at Langley Air Force Base, deployed to Balad Air Base in Iraq in 2005 as a contingency contracting officer, and later worked procurement at Miami-Dade County before founding his own firm.
The conversation covers the translation problem between federal, state, and local buying (acquisition becomes procurement becomes purchasing, while the terms and conditions stay nearly one to one), how NASPO ValuePoint works as a state-level analog to a GWAC or federal supply schedule, what it means to compete with Big Four consultancies that have pivoted to state and local, creative contracting inside the FAR (performance work statements over statements of work, FAR 13.5 procedures), why state and local can award in weeks when the incentive exists, and forensic governance, Jonathan’s discipline of getting adversarial with program data before leadership bets on it.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro and Excelsior Consulting Services
00:02 The verbiage gap: federal vs state and local
00:03 NASPO ValuePoint and entering state markets through a multi-contractor alliance
00:07 Competing with the Big Four at the state and local level
00:10 A contracting warrant at Langley: hurricane prep on the clock
00:11 Deployed at Balad Air Base: contingency contracting in Iraq
00:14 SF-44s, purchase cards, and buying under pressure
00:19 Creative contracting inside the FAR: PWS vs SOW, FAR 13.5
00:23 How fast state, local, and nonprofit buying really moves
00:27 What is forensic governance?
00:31 AI, governance, and decision risk
00:35 Where to find Jonathan
Resources:
Other resources:
- Excelsior Consulting Services’ Website
- Excelsior Consulting Services’ Instagram
- Excelsior Consulting Services’ Company LinkedIn Profile
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