You've been winning commercial contracts for years. Partnerships form naturally, project structures shift as work evolves, and teams come together based on whoever's available and capable. It works.
Then you bid your first federal contract using the same approach, and everything breaks.
The government rejected your prime contractor bid. Not because your solution wasn't good. Not because your pricing was off. Because you couldn't prove you'd done this exact work before, at this exact scale, under these exact circumstances.
