Michael Swartz has successfully served as a Capture Manager and an integral part of capture leadership teams for 20 years, and has facilitated the capture of over $7 billion in proposal wins. He has guided both corporate giants and smaller companies targeting contracts with a myriad of federal civil and defense agencies, providing him with an expert understanding of the federal government acquisition process—and how to win. He has been a leader in capturing contracts ranging in nature from Health IT to financial management to consolidation, from IT infrastructure support to software engineering to enterprise transformation.

Mr. Swartz is an expert at assessing opportunities, and then at conceiving actionable strategies and tactics that lead to winning. Assessments include organizational “fit” examination, price-to-win and associated ROI estimates, competitive analysis, risk assessment, and an evaluation as to whether the company has “permission to win” from the government. Assuming these assessments lead to a decision to bid, Mr. Swartz follows them by developing and enacting those strategies needed to win, including a win strategy, customer contact plan, positioning (win theme and messaging) strategy, initial technical and management approaches, pricing strategies, teaming strategy, and proposal strategy.

Winning recompetes is a specialty of Mr. Swartz’s. IDC recently reported that incumbents lose 70 percent of the time when “meaningful competition is present”, which today is always. Mr. Swartz has learned that recompete losses can be explained, in general, by program performance, business development efforts, and even corporate attention that tend to deteriorate over time in ways that are subtle but profound. As such, Mr. Swartz has developed and is practiced at utilizing a proven methodology aimed at determining and then improving a company’s recompete readiness.

Capture teams are multi-disciplinary, and Mr. Swartz is expert in a variety of the disciplines required to win federal contracts. Ultimately, however, winning requires participation from personnel who possess subject matter expertise and knowledge that transcend that of the Capture Manager. As illustrated by his win record, Mr. Swartz has repeatedly been able to form, meld, lead, and drive functionally diverse teams that win—to leverage internal and teammate knowledge resources that together create and write winning technical, management, and pricing approaches. Mr. Swartz’s success in this regard isn’t only a matter of organizational and management skills, but also of leadership, mentorship, and training capabilities.

Many have referred to Mr. Swartz as a capture process guru. Beyond determining processes for his own capture efforts, Mr. Swartz is also regularly asked, as a standalone service, to review and improve companies’ capture processes—and for indoctrinating those companies’ personnel in the use of those processes and related tools. Although Mr. Swartz believes certain processes and activities are prerequisite to winning, he sees the best capture processes for a given company or even opportunity as situational to that company or opportunity, depending on such things as the sophistication of the capture team, the geographic dispersion of the capture team, the proposal schedule, and other such things. In recent years Mr. Swartz has successfully lead an increasing number of virtual capture and proposal efforts, developing unique processes and tools for doing so.

Mr. Swartz is a skillful oral and written communicator, able to and comfortable with briefing and otherwise interacting with client and company personnel at the highest level—as he has been doing his entire career. His communication skills are at the core of his ability to develop and provide capture-related facilitation and training, whether facilitating win theme development or other strategy workshops or reviews, or developing and providing training to a given capture team on things such as process, tools use, storyboard/outline creation, or writing.