Laura’s Winning Ideas

Anatomy of a Winning Grant
from Jerry Buonanno of Executive Consulting Group

Stimulus funding has targeted industries and providers who aren’t the usual government contractors. In order to meet the objectives of the program, “shovel ready” projects are required, and DOE has targeted energy initiatives that will move the US away from foreign oil importation and develop new energy industries.

Our client was interested in the goings-on because they had been working on a new way to make a key ingredient for high technology batteries. BUT they weren’t accustomed to writing government proposals, and in fact didn’t know what they would have to do to manage a government project. And of course, only one person on the team had ever written a proposal. The rest had only seen one that was over 15 years old, and from a long-ago division that wasn’t even in existence any longer.

ECG was asked to provide some modest help, and Don Street flew in to help them set up the budgets and begin evaluating the changes needed to meet government accounting requirements. Once they saw the work required for the budgeting, they decided Don would have to stay with the project to the end.

As they began wrestling with the RFP, they again asked ECG to send in some help, and Laura Ricci was selected to work with them on the proposal. When she arrived, they had organized themselves and set a schedule, so they were doing pretty well. But some of the government language was cryptic and Laura translated the needs of DOE to maximize their score.

They had also set a figure for the request which they based on the available funding in the RFP, and were struggling to get internal support for a project that would require additional resources to meet the government schedule plus manage the risk of fast-tracking a large project.

Laura recommended they double their request and actually ask for the complete cost share amount needed rather than the amount they thought DOE would be willing to provide. “Their invention is critical to the mission of DOE.” said Laura Ricci. “If we could explain this clearly, I felt DOE would organize around funding this project.” and she continued, “The worst case would be the DOE offering a lower amount, but likely more than the “fair share” the client had estimated.”  This was a scary proposition since DOE was completely unaware of this ingredient before being briefed by the client a few weeks before the Stimulus package was released, and the RFP didn’t mention ingredients.

Announcements were just made and this client was happy to hear that they had been awarded the full amount requested and are off and running to meet an aggressive deadline in support of DOE objectives.