Why Capture and Business Development Teams Love OnFrontiers.

How OnFrontiers Works

If this is the first time you have heard about OnFrontiers, we will start by offering some background and context. The OnFrontiers platform helps business development professionals and researchers Identify and engage with subject matter experts in the specific areas of focus they need. You can add consultants to your team for capture support, technical writing, or even fulfillment on won contracts. 

OnFrontiers offers a new way to recruit qualified key personnel candidates in the US and abroad. Without having to board a plane, you can use experts to help you build a foundational understanding of the agency, buying office, or opportunity. Experts can answer technical questions specific to individual opportunities, provide competitive intelligence and price-to-win scenarios that will give you a key competitive advantage.

Our Guests Share Stories About Their Success with the Platform

Joining us for the webinar were Troy Wray and Charles Painter. Troy is a Principal with Washington Business Dynamics. He partners with executive teams and stakeholders to build and execute strategies positively impacting organizations. Troy originally joined the platform as an expert and has since become one of our more active and strategic users of the platform, sourcing other experts who can help WBD achieve its growth goals. 

Charles Painter is Vice President of Business Development for Infinisource Consulting Solutions. Charles has significant experience working within the federal sector both as a government contractor and as a former senior-level government employee. 

The Fastest Way to Expand Knowledge and Subject Matter Expertise

By Troy Wray, in his own words: 

OnFrontiers originally reached out to me several years ago when I was completing a project in Indonesia and asked me to join the broader network and be available for consultations with various people who were interested in learning more about opportunities in Indonesia. That was really my first experience with OnFrontiers and a very positive one. Fast forward several months later, I joined Washington Business Dynamics in Washington and I was charged with, among other things, helping to develop new international business for the firm.

I felt as though the firm should not be limited by the knowledge and network that I had. It was important to me to look at broadening the reach of the firm so we looked at a number of tools and looked very seriously at OnFrontiers to support our firm growth and our strategy. A few months later, we found some very interesting opportunities coming from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and we knew with the right team and the right ability to reach back to different experts, we could put together a strong proposal. In fact, we did put together a winning bid, and thanks to OnFrontiers we’ve been able to meet the needs of the client and make that project really work for us. Over the last year and a half, we’ve used OnFrontiers in different ways. It allows other people within our firm to use this really powerful tool for their own business development efforts. We’ve expanded our use of OnFrontiers both to meet the needs of clients we currently serve — in other words, to be able to build our knowledge network, reach back and have consultations with experts.

We’ve used OnFrontiers to help get smarter about opportunities in different countries, understand the landscape a little bit better and build our competitive intelligence. 

We were very lucky to have OnFrontiers as the pandemic hit and travel opportunities were closed off. We had international clients and projects and activities that we were trying to pursue and deliverables to meet and all of those kinds of things as you would expect. OnFrontiers was able to help us identify local expertise where it was required, and in a couple of specific cases, we were able to source local experts for our ongoing work. I would say that we’re excited about everything that the platform brings us. We found it to be agile, to really deepen our capabilities. We’re sold on the power of it.

Stronger Bids, Deeper Expertise, and Excellent ROI 

By Charles Painter, in his own words: 

ICS is a small business. Our work is divided between army commands, federal civilian agencies, and some federal law enforcement. We’ve been part of the OnFrontiers platform for two months. It was not an insignificant expense for our company and we’ve been very satisfied thus far with the support we’ve received, not only from the OnFrontiers staff but the results that we’ve gotten through the expert marketplace.

I first came across OnFrontiers through the Capital Business Development Association, a group I founded in June 2018. It turned out to be one of the fastest-growing Gov-Con BD organizations, certainly in the D.C area and we’re spreading out around the country. OnFrontiers presented at our CBDA function and the description of the tool really touched on several challenges that small businesses face in business development, particularly in capture and proposal operations: 

• A lack of resources
• The inability to develop the level of customer intimacy that you’d like to have in your bid
• Developing a real window into the customer’s hot buttons, what their concerns really are
• Insight into incumbent performance, conducting effective technical solutions
• The ability to bring a real differentiator to bear. All of these are challenges that ICS faces as a small business, and all small businesses face this

Frankly, I was skeptical at first. How could a single platform really bring the type of talent you were talking about? How could it help ICS given the wide variety of customers that we’re targeting from the intelligence community to the Department of Defense, to Federal Law Enforcement, to Federal Civilian Agencies? We’ve had the opportunity to use the platform three times in the last two months. We used OnFrontiers to support a Coast Guard bid, a bid for NASA LaRC, and also a piece of work that we did at a National Laboratory.

In each case, using the expert marketplace we conducted what I would refer to as a precision search, looking for individuals with specific experience in specific agencies and specific subcomponents of those agencies. In every case, we were able to find individuals very rapidly, with knowledge of the programs and processes involved. In two cases we found recently retired government officials. They were familiar with the contracts, they were familiar with the incumbent personnel. They were able to give us the names of incumbents and government managers in charge of the technical management of the programs.

All of this was invaluable data for our solutions as part of our capture and proposal process. We’ve been very, very pleased with the support we’ve received from OnFrontiers.

Try OnFrontiers for Your Next Federal Contracting Business Development or Capture Process

Want to learn more about how OnFrontiers can help your business gain an advantage and increase your win-rate on federal contracts? 

To learn more about how to build out your knowledge network using OnFrontiers, email [sales@onfrontiers.com]