J.R. MullisThere is no single person who can say yes to a federal purchase. A requirement owner decides that a problem is worth solving, a resource sponsor decides whether it gets money, a program manager executes it, and only a contracting officer can bind the government to a contract. A company that treats an enthusiastic end user as the decision maker will spend a year on a deal that was never funded.
Almost every stalled federal pursuit I have looked at has the same shape. The company found someone in the government who loved the technology. That person was genuine, and they were encouraging, and they said things like “we need this.” A year later there is no contract, and the company cannot work out what happened.
What happened is that they were talking to one node in a chain of five, and it was not the node that holds money.
The five roles that matter
The end user
The person with the problem. A maintainer, an operator, an analyst, a squadron. They know the pain better than anyone and they have the least ability to buy anything. Their value to you is enormous and entirely evidentiary: they can validate that the problem is real, describe it in operational language, and tell you who upstream cares about it.
What they control: credibility and the description of the problem.
What they cannot do: commit money, commit a requirement, or commit the government.
The requirements owner
The office responsible for deciding that a capability gap is real, defining it, and putting it in the queue against everything else that command wants. In the services this is a formal staff function with its own process and vocabulary.
This is the first person in the chain whose paper matters. If a requirement never gets written and validated, no amount of enthusiasm downstream turns into a program.
What they control: whether the gap is recognized, how it is described, and its priority
relative to other gaps.
What they cannot do: fund it.
The resource sponsor
The office that owns the money line. In practice this is the single most under-courted role in federal business development, because it is the least visible from outside and the least fun to find. The resource sponsor decides what makes it into the program objective memorandum, what survives the internal fights, and what shows up in a budget request two years from now.
If you are trying to work out why a program everyone loved never happened, the answer is usually here.
What they control: whether there is money, in what year, and in what appropriation.
What they cannot do: award a contract or dictate a technical solution.
The program manager and the technical point of contact
The program manager executes: they hold the schedule, the technical baseline, and usually the funds once they have been programmed. On research and innovation programs you will also deal with a technical point of contact, often the government engineer or scientist who wrote the topic or owns the technical evaluation.
These are the people you will spend the most time with, and they are usually the ones who can tell you plainly whether your technology fits, whether the money is real, and what the acquisition strategy is likely to be. They are allowed to talk to you. Ask them good questions.
What they control: technical direction, the acquisition strategy recommendation, and
often the execution funds.
What they cannot do: sign a contract, or promise you one.
The contracting officer
The only person in the entire chain with the authority to obligate the government. Not the program manager, not the general, not the person who told you they “really want to get this on contract.” A contracting officer’s warrant is a specific, dollar-limited delegation of authority, and everything that has not been done by a warranted contracting officer within their authority is, in a legal sense, a conversation.
I held that warrant. The thing I wish more companies understood is that a contracting officer is not an obstacle to route around. We are the people who can tell you which pathway will actually work, what will survive review, and what will not. Companies that talked to us early got better outcomes, because they stopped proposing things that could not be awarded.
What they control: the contract. Whether the pathway is legal, whether the price is
fair and reasonable, whether the award happens.
What they cannot do: create money, or create a requirement.
Two more roles worth knowing
The transition sponsor. On the innovation side, the office that will own your technology after the prototype ends and pay for it out of a real program. If you are in a SBIR or an OTA prototype without a named transition sponsor, you are building something with no address to send it to. Start looking for that office in the first quarter of the work, not the last.
The small business professional. Every buying activity has one. They are helpful, they are well connected internally, and they are not the buyer. Treat them as a guide to the building, not as the customer.
The order to meet them in
The instinct is to start at the top, with the most senior person who will take a meeting. That is usually wrong. Seniority is not the same as ownership, and a general officer’s enthusiasm does not create a funding line.
- Start with the end user or the technical point of contact. Learn the problem in their words, and find out whether your technology actually addresses it. This is where you earn the right to everything else.
- Move to the program office. Understand what is programmed, what stage the requirement is at, and what the acquisition strategy is likely to be.
- Find the resource sponsor. Ask, directly and politely, where the money for this would come from and in what year. If nobody can answer, you have learned the most important thing about this opportunity.
- Engage contracting early. Not to sell. To find out which pathway can actually award what you are proposing, and what would disqualify you.
- Then work seniority, once you have something for a senior leader to act on. Senior attention applied to a mapped requirement with an identified funding line is powerful. Applied to a capability brief, it evaporates.
“If this went well, whose budget would it come out of, and in which fiscal year?” Ask it early, of everyone. It is a polite question, government people answer it honestly, and the answer tells you whether you have an opportunity or an admirer.
What to do when your champion leaves
They will. Military members rotate, civilians move offices, and priorities follow people. Plan for it from the beginning.
- Know at least three people in the office, at different levels. A single point of contact is a single point of failure.
- Get things written down. A white paper the office holds, a request for information response, an entry in their market research file. Documents outlast people.
- Ask your champion, before they go, who is taking their portfolio, and ask for a warm handoff. Most people are glad to do it. Almost nobody asks.
None of this is about who you know. It is about knowing how the decision gets made, which is a different thing, and the only one of the two that transfers when the people change.