Should we
pursue this opportunity?
Before a capture team spends real hours on an opportunity, a handful of questions usually decide whether the hours are well spent. This page answers them in plain language, and gives you a planning tool that maps your own pursuit: customer fit, set-aside status, facility and clearance dependencies, competition and proposal burden. It does not tell you to bid or not to bid. It tells you what is open, what would take time to close, and what to ask before you commit further capture time.
The problem: pursuing before qualifying
A federal opportunity looks like one decision: bid it or do not. In practice it is several smaller decisions stacked on top of each other, and most of the cost of a pursuit is spent before anyone reaches the actual proposal.
A capture team commits people to an opportunity on the strength of the headline: the agency, the dollar value, the subject matter. What decides whether the pursuit was worth it is quieter than that. Does your NAICS code and size standard actually match what the solicitation is scored against. Do you hold the set-aside status it calls for, if any. Does the requirement quietly carry a facility or a clearance dependency that will not close on the proposal's schedule. Is the proposal itself a burden your team can actually carry in the time available. None of these show up in the headline, and all of them can end a pursuit that looked strong on day one.
This page does not make the bid decision for you. It maps the open items so the decision, when you make it, is made with the facts in front of you rather than after the proposal is half written.
What usually goes wrong
A DD-254, or a customer conversation that only happens after the proposal is submitted, reveals that the work is classified, or that it carries a facility or storage requirement nobody scoped. Reading the solicitation for this before committing capture time is cheap. Discovering it after award is not.
A facility clearance, secure space, or a personnel clearance runs on its own clock, and that clock rarely lines up with a period of performance that assumes cleared people and accredited space on day one. A pursuit that does not check this early inherits a schedule problem it cannot fix after award.
A short solicitation summary can hide a heavy proposal: many volumes, a long page count, and a compliance matrix that takes real staff-hours to answer well. Teams that scope the writing effort late end up trading proposal quality for the deadline, on a bid that may otherwise have been winnable.
What you need to know
How do security requirements affect bid strategy?
What should a prime verify about a subcontractor's secure infrastructure?
What does a DD-254 tell you before you bid?
How do set-asides work, at a high level?
Check this pursuit
Answer what you know about one specific opportunity. Anything you leave blank, or mark as not sure, becomes a question worth asking rather than a mark against you. The tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is transmitted unless you ask for a summary at the end.
Your pursuit picture
Twenty-two questions across six areas. The result is a plain picture, not a decision: strengths, open gaps, long lead-time dependencies, and questions worth asking the contracting officer or the prime.
This page does not replicate Salian's dedicated capture tools. If you want a closer look at this specific opportunity, run the opportunity through RFI Hawk, a Salian-operated venture separate from this planning checklist.
Methodology
This tool has no model behind it and nothing on it is ranked. Each answer becomes a strength, an open item, a long lead-time dependency, or a question worth asking the contracting officer or the prime. Nothing you enter leaves your browser unless you ask for a summary. This is a simplified public assessment; it does not replicate or expose the scoring or data-source methods behind Salian's dedicated capture tools.
This pursuit picture is for informational and planning purposes only. It is not a bid decision, and it does not constitute legal or contracting advice. It does not determine set-aside eligibility, size standard eligibility, Facility Clearance eligibility, or eligibility for award, and it carries no assurance of award. Those determinations rest with the contracting officer, the Small Business Administration, and, where a facility clearance is involved, DCSA or the applicable Cognizant Security Agency. Do not enter source-selection-sensitive, proprietary or classified information. Planning-level answers only.
What Salian does
Reading a solicitation or a DD-254 for what it actually obliges you to build, sizing the security and facility scope inside a bid, and telling you plainly where a pursuit does not fit yet. We can advise on this because the same people scope, build and document secure facilities and compliance postures elsewhere in the business.
Facility clearance readiness and sponsorship path support, and secure facility scoping through to accreditation, for the pursuits where the dependency this tool surfaces turns out to be genuine rather than a false alarm.
A pursuit does not end at award. Contract administration, staffing, and the compliance posture the contract requires still have to hold up on day one, and the readiness map linked below covers that ground as well.
What Salian does not control
The determinations belong to the government, and no consultant, this page included, can make or promise them. There is no assurance of award.
The contracting officer and the Small Business Administration determine set-aside and size standard eligibility; DCSA, or the applicable Cognizant Security Agency, determines facility clearances; the applicable Accrediting Official or Cognizant Security Authority accredits facilities.
Source selection itself, including who is evaluated as the winning offeror, is the contracting officer's decision on the government's own timeline. This page maps what is open on your side of that decision. It does not, and cannot, decide the outcome.
What happens next
- Run the pursuit picture above and read the open items in the order that matters most to you.
- Where the facility question is live, work the gates in the FCL readiness self-check.
- Where the broader cleared-work picture is still open, map it in the cleared work readiness map.
- Where a facility or secure space is genuinely implied, scope it in the project readiness tool before anyone commits to it.
- If you would like a person to read the picture with you, send the summary from the tool above. We reply within one business day, and we will tell you plainly if the honest answer is that this pursuit is not a fit yet.
Sources
The authorities behind the questions on this page. All retrieved 2026-09-02. These are a starting point for your own reading and for legal review, not a substitute for either.
- SAM.gov contract opportunities System for Award Management, GSA. https://sam.gov/content/opportunities
- FAR Part 19, Small Business Programs Federal Acquisition Regulation, small business set-aside programs including 8(a), HUBZone, SDVOSB and WOSB. acquisition.gov, FAR Part 19
- DD Form 254 (DD-254) Contract Security Classification Specification, referenced in the facility clearance process, Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency. dcsa.mil, NISPOM rule and DD-254 process
Talk to Salian
Run the tool first. If it tells you plainly that this pursuit is not a fit yet, that is a real answer and worth acting on rather than talking past. If the open items are real and you would rather not work them alone, describe the opportunity and we will tell you which problem it actually is.