Michael Swartz has successfully served as a Capture Manager and an integral part of proposal leadership teams for 20 years, and has facilitated the capture of over $8 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.

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 proposal 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.

Mr. Swartz believes in performance within process. 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.

Part of Mr. Swartz’s success in the capture and proposal arena stems partly from his experience and understanding of the business development process. He has been a marketing representative for then Martin Marietta, Director of Client Services for I-NET, and most recently Vice-President of Business Development for Altum, Inc. In this last role Mr. Swartz was responsible for all activities needed to attract and win new customers and penetrate existing markets. Toward this end, he oversaw all Altum Business Development resources to successfully perform the following and other related activities:

- Assess marketing opportunities and target markets
- Develop product/market strategies
- Form strategic alliances with potential partners
- Gather intelligence on customers and competitors
- Generate leads for possible sales
- Perform follow-up sales activity
- Develop formal proposals
- Develop sales policies and processes
- Perform account planning and performance monitoring.