This chart vividly illustrates the significant challenge many 8(a) firms face post-graduation. While revenue typically shows strong growth during participation in the 8(a) program (2020-2025), a dramatic 70% revenue decline often occurs immediately after graduation (2026-2027) as firms lose access to set-aside contracts. This stark 'revenue cliff' underscores the critical need for a proactive and strategic transition plan to sustain growth in the unrestricted market.

Our Mini Strategy is purpose-built to provide these answers with undeniable clarity. In a focused, complimentary session, we meticulously map your current federal footprint, expose critical risks, and illuminate your most lucrative post-graduation opportunities.

It’s a strategic blueprint that instills confidence, proving you possess a defined federal strategy—not merely a collection of past contracts.

Theodore Stearns brings a vantage point rare in federal growth: Founder, CEO, Investor, and Advisor. He evaluates companies through every lens that drives enterprise value — enabling him to see not just short-term growth, but the structural levers that make scale durable and transferrable.

This snapshot benchmarks your current federal posture — certifications, vehicles, obligations, and buyer mix. It highlights both your anchors and your exposures, setting the stage for the transition plan beyond 8(a).

Strong roots, but room to expand: Most revenue flows through Army Corps of Engineers and USDA Forest Service, with added traction in Air Force, Interior, and Defense Commissary — a solid base that can be broadened into new buyers.

Past wins show the playbook — future wins scale it: Your growth to date has been driven by SAPs, sole source, and select open-market bids — proving fit. The next step is converting that traction into predictable, vehicle-driven revenue.

We study how revenue is won because procurement lanes reveal the maturity of the business: This view shows whether growth is built on opportunistic awards or on scalable, repeatable channels like vehicles. In due diligence, it’s a proxy for revenue durability: heavy reliance on sole source signals risk, while diversification into vehicles signals a platform investors can trust.

Summit Healthcare's portfolio includes engagements with 6 agencies, but over 75% of obligations are concentrated with the Army Corps, FS, and DeCA. Relationships span 8 unique awarding offices (5 recurring), falling short of the 15+ target, indicating limited expansion. A critical vehicle gap exists with only 1 BPA (Coast Guard) and no active task orders, increasing reliance on non-vehicle methods. This poses a significant risk to growth and sustainability as the 8(a) certification approaches expiration.

In diligence, the first step is pressure-testing where a business breaks: This analysis quantifies the structural risks that limit scale and compress valuation — set-aside dependency, buyer concentration, operational fragility, and pipeline volatility. By scoring each area, we expose the pressure points that investors would discount heavily — and create the roadmap for turning those risks into enterprise value drivers.

We benchmark like investors — to see if the business is built to scale or set to stall: This analysis compares current positioning against platform benchmarks across agencies, vehicles, relationships, and institutional maturity. The purpose is not just to score gaps, but to reveal whether the company has the structural foundation for compounding growth — or whether it faces a revenue cliff without decisive action.

This is the pattern every scaled federal contractor shares: Firms that reach $50M+ consistently anchor around 5 agencies, 5 vehicles, and 20+ task orders per year. Those that build this structure scale predictably and attract premium valuations. Those that don’t remain trapped below their potential.

Every scaled platform follows a sequence — not random wins: The Ascent-5 is the proven step-by-step pathway to federal scale. Starting with quick wins through SAP and sole source, each stage compounds — from deepening buyer relationships to securing vehicles, building predictable cadence, and ultimately creating a transferable, valuation-ready platform.

Each step builds on the previous one, creating momentum toward the 5-5-20-50 benchmark:

Growth comes from targeting the right buyers — not chasing every opportunity: The play is to anchor around federal buyers with deep, recurring demand in your NAICS codes. If you win with these agencies, sub-agencies, and awarding offices, you compound revenue predictably. If you don’t, you stay opportunistic and stall below scale.

Scale starts with anchor agencies: A handful of agencies drive the majority of spend. Embedding deeply with them creates the buyer concentration that fuels long-term growth and attracts investor confidence.

Predictable revenue is built at the sub-agency level: This is where dollars truly move. Owning relationships with a few high-value sub-agencies turns access into repeatable task orders.

Contracts are won where awards are written: Awarding offices are where opportunities become backlog. Building trust with contracting officers here is what separates tactical vendors from embedded growth platforms.

Understanding the procurement preferences of federal contracting offices is crucial for strategic engagement. By aligning your approach with their established buying patterns, you can significantly increase your win probability and streamline the contracting process. This section highlights key insights into how top offices prefer to award contracts.

These offices consistently use SAP for medical and allied staffing—lead with "rapid SAP onboarding", readiness for small-dollar urgent orders, and local/remote surge proposals.

The chart illustrates agencies that heavily utilize Simplified Acquisition Procedures (SAP), indicating opportunities for rapid, small-dollar contracts.

Best traction with teaming or direct BD to contracting officers who show recent history of 8(a), SDVOSB, or Buy Indian sole source—particularly for urgent gaps or contract cycle "bridge" buys.

This chart highlights agencies with a significant proportion of sole-source awards, often indicating specific set-aside or direct award opportunities.

This table spotlights the federal awarding offices where your company can most credibly move the needle—using actual obligated spend, historical win rates, and procurement patterns. Each row shows not just who buys, but how they buy (proportion SAP/sole source), and quantifies your real revenue potential if you focus your BD where contracts are actually awarded.

If you shift even 2–3 of your next BD moves into these offices, you can dramatically elevate not only your pipeline, but also your valuation and post-graduation bargaining power—by anchoring revenue in the offices proven to move dollars at scale, year after year.

This table identifies the federal contract vehicles that move the most real dollars—and that are most accessible to your company’s service offering. For each vehicle, you see not just the theoretical ceiling, but also how much is actually flowing to contractors (recent 3-year obligated value), how many TOs are distributed each year, and the actual paths your team can use to get on board.

Contract vehicles are the backbone of predictable, scalable growth in federal services. Getting on just one or two of these platforms—paired with discipline and targeted BD—can unlock millions in recurring annual revenue and insulate your company from single-award or regional buyer risk. This is about turning tactical wins into institutional pipeline and platform value.

This slide shows how your revenue mix evolves over the 5-year growth arc. Early years are driven by opportunistic SAP and sole-source wins that create traction. As credibility builds, revenue shifts toward vehicles — the engine of predictable, repeatable task orders. By Year 5, vehicles dominate, signaling maturity as a scalable federal growth platform.

This slide illustrates how enterprise value expands as a company matures from a tactical vendor into a true federal platform. Holding EBITDA constant at $10M, the multiple grows from ~2x to 8.5x as systems, vehicles, and buyer diversification are institutionalized. The takeaway: valuation doesn’t scale with revenue alone — it scales with maturity, predictability, and transferability.

As a contractor matures from a tactical vendor into a federal growth platform, the pool of potential buyers — and the multiples they will pay — expands dramatically.

The table below shows how the buyer universe evolves by stage of maturity — with typical multiples, buyer profiles, and the strategic rationale each type of acquirer applies.

Recent GovCon acquisitions illustrate the premium buyers pay for platform characteristics: diversified agencies, embedded vehicles, and institutionalized capture. These deals prove the market rewards firms that evolve beyond opportunistic contracting into transferable federal platforms.

Acquirers reward the companies that graduate from “opportunistic vendor” to “federal platform.” They pay for momentum that outlives the founder—built on multi-agency access, high-velocity contract vehicles, and institutionalized BD that repeats with or without the original management. That’s why premiums reach 7–10x EBITDA, and why firms that never evolve plateau at tactical pricing.

If you want premium value, you must build it—it doesn’t come from one big win, but from embedding across multiple agencies, securing recurring contract vehicles, and making your BD rhythm transferable, forecastable, and scale-ready.

This is the roadmap we’ve mapped for you—because waiting or “coasting out 8(a)” is what the average firms do, and they trade at a discount. The future platform outperforms because it builds with this exit in mind.