There is a persistent belief in small business federal contracting that the way to grow is to find new opportunities, bid aggressively, and win on price or technical merit. Find the solicitation, write the proposal, submit, repeat.
That approach works occasionally. It also explains why most SDVOSB firms have a win rate that hovers somewhere between 15 and 25 percent on open bids. They are competing on a level they did not create, against incumbents who already have the contracting officer's confidence, existing relationships with the agency, and four years of institutional knowledge about how the work actually gets done.
The firms with consistent federal revenue are not doing this. They are working recompetes, and they start working them long before the RFP drops.
What a recompete is and why it matters
A recompete is the re-solicitation of an existing contract when the current period of performance ends. The government is required to re-compete most contracts when they expire. The existing contractor, called the incumbent, bids again alongside other offerors.
Roughly 70 percent of federal contract dollars are spent on recompetes rather than new requirements. This is not a minor feature of the federal market. It is the market. And the firms that understand how to work recompetes treat the other 30 percent as a bonus, not a primary strategy.
Why does the recompete percentage matter so much? Because it changes the competitive equation entirely. On a brand-new requirement, every offeror starts from the same baseline. Nobody has an inherent advantage except what they can demonstrate on paper.
On a recompete, the playing field is not level. The incumbent walks in with something nobody else has: a track record at that agency, with those contracting officers, on that specific scope of work. If the incumbent has performed well, they are enormously difficult to displace. If they have performed poorly, or even adequately but unremarkably, they are beatable, but only by a firm that has been paying attention.
The timeline most firms get wrong
Most SDVOSB firms first learn about a recompete opportunity when the solicitation appears on SAM.gov. At that point, you have the proposal timeline, typically 30 to 60 days, to produce a compliant, competitive response.
That is too late. Not too late to submit, but too late to win on anything other than price or luck.
The firms that beat incumbents on recompetes are the ones who identified the opportunity six to eighteen months before the solicitation dropped, then spent that time doing things that cannot be done in a 45-day proposal window.
Here is the preparation that actually moves the needle:
- Building a relationship with the program office and, where ethics rules permit, with the contracting officer
- Attending industry days, pre-solicitation conferences, and any public meeting where the agency discusses the upcoming requirement
- Responding to Sources Sought notices and Requests for Information to get on the agency's radar before the formal process starts
- Researching the incumbent's performance record through contract databases, past FOIA releases, and public agency reports
- Identifying specific weaknesses or gaps in the current contract performance that your firm could credibly address
- Recruiting or confirming access to any key personnel the agency values and the incumbent may not retain
None of this happens in 45 days. All of it is available to any firm that starts early enough to do it.
How to find recompetes before they hit SAM.gov
The USASpending.gov database is publicly available and searchable. Every federal contract with an end date is in there. You can search by agency, by NAICS code, by set-aside type, and by period of performance end date.
What you are looking for is SDVOSB set-aside contracts in your NAICS codes that expire within the next six to eighteen months. A contract that ends in fourteen months is on your radar now. You have time to prepare. A contract that ends in six weeks is a proposal sprint with little strategic advantage.
FPDS.gov (the Federal Procurement Data System) contains similar data with additional detail on contract modifications and extensions. If a contract has been modified multiple times and extended repeatedly, that tells you something about the incumbent's relationship with the agency and potentially about performance issues.
SAM.gov itself publishes upcoming contract opportunities through its forecast tool, though the data quality varies by agency. The Department of Defense uses different planning systems. OSDBU (Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization) offices at major agencies often publish their own procurement forecasts.
The research takes time. Tracking twenty potential recompetes across multiple agencies and updating your database monthly is a real BD process, not an afternoon task. But the payoff is competing on opportunities where your preparation is your advantage, not just your proposal.
Understanding the incumbent's position
Before you commit to bidding a recompete, you need to understand who you are competing against and what position they hold.
A strong incumbent is one with documented excellent performance ratings, an established relationship with the program office, deep institutional knowledge of agency-specific processes, and key personnel who are known and valued by the government team. Beating a strong incumbent requires a genuinely superior technical approach or a significant price advantage, neither of which is easy to develop without the incumbent's four years of operational experience.
A vulnerable incumbent is different. Signs of vulnerability include:
- Performance assessment ratings that are Satisfactory or below (obtainable through FOIA requests on CPARS data, though with limitations)
- High staff turnover on the contract, visible through LinkedIn and other public sources
- Agency complaints or issues documented in public records or reported through industry contacts
- The incumbent growing significantly in size and potentially losing their SDVOSB eligibility at recompete
- The incumbent being acquired or merging with a non-veteran-owned company
- Scope creep or contract modifications that suggest ongoing performance challenges
That last two points are particularly worth tracking. If the current incumbent has grown past the SDVOSB size standard for the relevant NAICS code, they may be ineligible at recompete. If they were acquired by a non-veteran-owned company, they lose their certification entirely. In either case, you are not competing against an entrenched incumbent. You are competing against a firm that is starting over, the same as you.
The Sources Sought positioning play
Most SDVOSB firms see Sources Sought notices as a market research exercise run by the government. Which they are. But they are also one of the most effective tools available to a firm positioning for a recompete.
When an agency issues a Sources Sought before a recompete solicitation, they are asking who is out there that can do this work. A well-written response to a Sources Sought accomplishes several things simultaneously.
It puts your firm's name and capabilities in front of the contracting officer and program office before any proposal is written. It allows you to demonstrate specific understanding of the agency's requirements, which signals preparation and seriousness. It gives you a channel to ask clarifying questions about the upcoming requirement in a format that is not a formal proposal. And it sometimes shapes the final solicitation in ways that favor your particular approach or capabilities.
A Sources Sought response is not a proposal. It should not be treated as one. It is a capability statement tailored to this specific requirement, this specific agency, and what you know about the gap between what the current contractor delivers and what the agency actually needs.
Keep it short. Keep it specific. Answer every question they asked, and include nothing they did not ask for. Contracting officers reading Sources Sought responses are looking for firms that understand the work, not firms that sent a form letter.
Pricing strategy on recompetes
On new requirements, pricing is often a primary differentiator because nobody knows the true cost of performance. On recompetes, the agency has four years of data on what the work actually costs. They know what the incumbent charged. They know what they thought was reasonable. And they have a view on whether price or technical capability matters more for the next period.
Do not assume you can win a recompete on price alone if the incumbent has performed well. The government generally does not want to risk service disruption to save a modest amount on a well-running contract. They will pay a premium for continuity and proven performance.
What they will not do is pay a premium for an incumbent who has been mediocre. If the performance record is mixed, pricing becomes a real factor. A technically equal or superior proposal at a meaningfully lower price gives the contracting officer a defensible reason to make a change.
The pricing question on recompetes is not "what is the lowest price we can survive on." It is "what price reflects the value we bring relative to the incumbent's track record." Those are different questions, and they require different analysis.
The compound advantage of building a recompete pipeline
One recompete win builds the past performance record that makes the next recompete more credible. A firm with a $1.2M VA IT services contract, performed well over four years, is a plausible offeror on a $3M recompete at a different agency in the same NAICS code. Without that first contract, they are speculative. With it, they are competitive.
This is the compounding logic that separates federal contracting firms that grow from ones that stay small. Each contract, well-executed, becomes the credential for the next tier.
The discipline is to identify that pipeline early, select recompetes that fit your current capability profile, perform at a level that generates strong CPARS ratings, and build toward the next tier before the current contract ends.
It is not a quick strategy. There are no shortcuts in this business that do not eventually catch up with you. But a firm that works three recompetes per year, wins one or two, and executes them well is on a trajectory that open-bid hunting simply cannot match.