Capacity to Compete: Right-Sizing Your Federal Pursuit Engine
Format: Live webinar (on-demand recording available on November 5, 2026)
Date: October 27, 2026
Time: 1:00 p.m. EDT
Duration: Approx. 90 minutes
Presented by: Amber Hart (The Pulse of GovCon™)
Learning Credits: 1.5 CPEs, 1.5 ATCs
*Your registration includes access to the on-demand recording.
Capacity is a capture issue. Every pursuit competes for a finite pool of time, money, personnel, expertise, executive attention, and operational support. Spread those resources across too many bids, and proposal quality drops while stronger opportunities go unseen.
Right-sizing does not mean shrinking. It means matching pursuit resources to the company’s strategy, pipeline, and growth goals. A right-sized pursuit engine connects opportunity selection, capture, proposal development, oral preparation, and the transition to performance. It gives leaders and teams a consistent way to identify gaps, secure support, and decide when to proceed, pause, or pivot.
This discipline is increasingly important as oral presentations, demonstrations, challenge scenarios, and AI reshape proposal strategy. They change who must participate, how teams prepare, which tools they can use, and what oversight sensitive information requires.
This masterclass gives leadership and pursuit teams a shared framework to evaluate readiness and make defensible investment decisions. Participants will learn how to assess pursuit demands, estimate the true cost of a bid, apply consistent gate criteria, and direct resources toward opportunities the company is prepared to win and deliver.
By the end of this training, you’ll be able to:
- Determine the personnel, roles, rehearsal time, technical support, and executive involvement required for oral presentations, live demonstrations, sample tasks, and challenge scenarios.
- Distinguish proposal activities that AI can responsibly accelerate from work requiring human judgment, and apply controls for accuracy, review, data privacy, and proprietary information.
- Evaluate capture readiness, proposal capacity, performance risk, and organizational bandwidth before committing to a federal pursuit.
- Estimate the full cost of a pursuit, including internal labor, executive attention, outside support, partner coordination, oral preparation, and opportunity cost.
- Apply evidence-based criteria to make and document a Go, Conditional Go, Hold, or No-Go decision.
- Develop a right-sized pursuit-support model by determining what to build internally, buy externally, borrow temporarily, address through teaming, or decline.
Who This Training Is For
This training is for government contractors who want to make better pursuit decisions, improve proposal support, or grow their federal business.
Speaker
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Amber HartFounder and CEO, The Pulse of GovCon™Amber Hart is the Founder and CEO of The Pulse of GovConTM (The Pulse), a women-owned market intelligence and advisory firm serving more than 100 agencies, contractors, trade associations, law firms, and academic institutions. With 16 years in federal policy, proposals, business development, capture, and market research, Hart helps growth-focused contractors compete in a complex market with sharper discipline, clarity, and confidence.
Before founding The Pulse, Hart managed growth and proposal operations for multi-billion-dollar federal programs, giving her a practitioner’s understanding of how opportunity identification, capture strategy, compliance, pricing, messaging, and proposal execution work in the real world. Today, she advises executives, growth teams, agencies, congressional stakeholders, and market advisors on anticipating and translating policy signals, budget activity, procurement behavior, and mission priorities into actionable government sales strategies.
Hart is the architect of the BD 360° methodology and author of BD 360°: A Fresh Spin on Federal Sales (2023), the definitive playbook for modern federal business development. Her approach pushes contractors beyond reactive opportunity tracking toward a fuller command of the federal sales lifecycle, from policy inception through proposal execution.
Hart’s influence reaches beyond client advisory work into national policy and industry leadership. She testified before the U.S. House Small Business Committee on Governmentwide Acquisition Contracts and Small Business participation (2022), contributed to the Biden Administration’s Supply Chain Ministerial Forum (2022), and was a featured speaker at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Women’s Symposium (2023). She has headlined more than 60 industry programs for organizations including the General Services Administration, the National Veteran Small Business Coalition, GovExec, APMP, regional chambers of commerce, and international government and supply chain forums.
Hart has authored more than 40 publications, including the APMP John Elder Journal Award-winning article “A Case for Diversification in Proposal Consulting.” Beyond her corporate leadership, she currently teaches as an adjunct at James Madison University. She serves on the Advisory Board for the Greg and Camille Baroni Center for Government Contracting at George Mason University. She is an active member of the Professional Services Council and the Women’s Procurement Circle. Hart served as President of Women in Technology (2022–2023) following four years on its board (2020–2024).
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