Start with a working session.
The offer is deliberately small. Thirty minutes, free, not a sales call. Bring one proposal you have already submitted: past, releasable, and public. Nothing CUI, nothing ITAR, nothing tied to an active competition. On the call we map a slice of the bid/no-bid or capture judgment behind it, live, while you watch. You keep the map, whether or not we work together after. It is built on a past bid and pointed at your next one.
Plain answers.
Why not just buy proposal software?
Drafting tools automate the work downstream of the decision. The bottleneck this practice targets is upstream: bid/no-bid and capture qualification, the judgment that decides which proposals exist at all. We build that judgment into tooling you control, so there is no new SaaS holding your data and no new compliance surface. If a drafting tool serves you after that, good; the map tells you where it fits.
Do you need our CUI?
No. Never. The full rules are in writing: Data Boundaries.
Are you a proposal writer?
No. The deliverable is capacity: your senior people's judgment, mapped, encoded into tooling your team runs, and your designated person trained to run it.
Do we need CMMC to work with you?
No. Nothing in the engagement touches controlled information, so your compliance posture is unaffected in either direction.
What if you already work with a firm in our market?
Then we will say so before anything starts, and one of two things happens. If your work and theirs could meet in the same competition, we finish that engagement before starting yours; the queue is the policy, and it is why each client gets a consultant with no divided attention. If the lanes are genuinely separate, we take the engagement with the disclosure in your SOW. Either way you get the answer in writing before you commit to anything.
How does your fee get booked?
Under FAR 31.205-18, bid and proposal costs are an allowable indirect cost. We structure the SOW and invoices so your accountant can make the allocation call cleanly and defensibly. Whether it is recoverable turns on your indirect-cost system, which is a fact about your firm. We will not promise it unconditionally, and we will say so up front.
Who owns the work product?
You do. Maps, tooling, and training materials: yours outright, whether or not we work together again.
What happens when the engagement ends?
The person you trained runs the cycle, and everything built stays with you; nothing needs to be retrieved, because nothing left. One thing some firms choose to keep: an outside seat at their bid/no-bid and gate reviews. Review discipline is strongest when the person in that seat has no stake in the outcome, and inside a small firm that neutral seat is hard to fill from within. If you want it kept filled, we offer a standing facilitation arrangement, renewed each quarter on purpose, that takes custody of nothing. Optional either way; the handoff is complete without it.
What does it cost and how long does it take?
The first pass is weeks, not months. Fee structure is discussed in the working session. The session itself is free and produces an artifact you keep either way.
Teaming, referrals, speaking, or a question that does not need a calendar: ryan@sixblocks.co. Replies within two business days.
Not a sales call. Bring one past releasable proposal, keep what we build. No releasable proposal handy? Bring your last three bid or no-bid calls from memory and we will map from those.