Method, disclosure and limits
How I work
You are about to hand a stranger a document your quarter depends on. You should know how it gets handled and where the edges are.
The method
Seven steps, every file, in this order.
- Conflict screen, before anything else. The first thing I ask for is the solicitation or notice number, before you tell me anything about your approach or your pricing. If somebody else already has that number with me, you find out in the first two minutes rather than the third week.
- The shred. Every sentence in the document that carries an obligation comes out into a matrix: every shall, every must, every at a minimum, every instruction to offerors, every evaluation criterion. Each one gets a requirement number, a source section and page, a type, and the place in the response where it will be answered. Done by hand this is eight to sixteen hours. This is where most of the leverage in the practice lives.
- The outline. Built in the agency's order, not mine. The response follows the sequence of the instructions and mirrors the evaluation criteria, so the person scoring it can find the points without hunting. Evaluators are tired and on a schedule. Making them work is how you lose.
- The draft. Written to the page limit, from your material: your past performance, your personnel, your approach, whatever you already have on paper. I do not invent your company.
- The addendum watch. Every addendum gets diffed against the live matrix and what changed gets flagged. Failing to acknowledge an addendum is the single most common way a compliant bid dies, and it dies for a reason that takes ninety seconds to prevent.
- Red team and consistency pass. The draft scored against the evaluation criteria as written. Then a sweep for acronym drift, numbers that contradict each other across a hundred and fifty pages, names and tenses that wandered. People are bad at that check across long documents. It is worth running properly.
- The submission checklist. Forms, signatures, notarizations, addenda, page and format limits, file naming, packaging, separation of price from the technical volume, registrations current, portal mechanics tested before the last hour. Signed off line by line.
Disclosure
Yes, I use AI. Here is exactly where, and exactly where I do not.
I would rather you hear this from me than wonder about it. AI is why a $500 compliance review is possible at all, and it is why I can price against firms that bill a hundred and fifty dollars an hour for the same reading. It handles extraction, coverage and first drafts of prose. That is real leverage and I use it deliberately.
It does not touch facts. Ever.
The rule this whole practice runs on
AI produces structure, coverage and prose. The client supplies and attests to every fact. That line is in the engagement letter as an explicit client responsibility, and it is there because it is true, not because it protects me.
Never generated, never automated, no exceptions:
- Past performance references
- Contract values and dates
- Agency names and points of contact
- Project outcomes and claims
- Key personnel credentials and degrees
- Certifications and licensure
- Employment dates
- Certifications and representations, which are sworn
- Pricing, at any time, in any form
- Legal terms and exceptions
- Insurance limits and indemnification
- Citations to statutes and standards
A made-up past performance reference is not a typo. It is a misrepresentation to a government entity, and the road from there runs through disqualification, contract termination, False Claims Act exposure and debarment. Nobody is putting a client on that road to save an hour.
And the other direction: a growing number of funders restrict AI generated content outright. The National Institutes of Health will not accept applications substantially developed by AI, the National Science Foundation has restrictions of its own, and state and local solicitations are beginning to carry AI representations. Checking for an AI clause is a standing line on my shred checklist, treated the same as addendum acknowledgment. Where a funder prohibits it, the work is done without it and priced accordingly. You will know before we start.
Limits
Things I am not, and will not pretend to be.
- LAW I am not an attorney and this is not a law practice. I do not represent anyone before a board, a commission or a court, I do not draft appeals of records denials, and I do not give legal opinions. Tennessee defines law business broadly enough that acting in a representative capacity to secure property rights is a lawyer's job, and I keep clear of that line by a wide margin. When a question needs counsel, I will say so and stop.
- INV I am not a private investigator and I will not research people. Tennessee law reaches anyone who accepts employment to obtain information about a person's business, honesty, integrity, credibility or character, and there is no exemption in it for public records research. My records work is about government: solicitations, awards, contract terms, evaluation summaries. If somebody asks me to pull a file on a competitor or a person, the answer is no and I will tell them why.
- LOB I am not a lobbyist and I will not advocate for your award. Preparing and submitting a written response to a published notice is professional service, expressly carved out under 31 U.S.C. 1352, and a written response is not a lobbying contact. Calling a program officer to argue your case is a different activity entirely. I stay on the writing side of that line by working in writing.
- FUND I never touch your money. Fund-raising counsel registration in Tennessee comes before I take nonprofit work. That status means I may advise, plan and write but never receive, hold or control contributions, and never directly solicit. The difference between that and a professional solicitor is not cosmetic, and it is written into every nonprofit engagement letter.
- WIN I cannot promise you a win and will not imply one. Nobody in this field can. Most grant applications lose and everybody in the sector knows it. What I can promise is that your submission will be responsive, that it will answer the criteria in the order they were asked, and that if I think you should not bid I will say so before you have spent the money.
Who this is
Jeff Goddard, Union City.
Twenty years of buying, renovating and holding residential property in Obion County, which is where I learned what a small operator's week actually looks like and why nobody has an extra eighty hours for paperwork. Before that, a career in healthcare informatics, where the job was reading dense regulatory documents and turning them into workflows people could follow without a manual. That turns out to be the same job as this one, aimed at a different set of documents.
Reelfoot Bid & Grant is a Tennessee corporation based in Union City. I work across Tennessee, and in Georgia, where the public records regime supports the same approach. The firm is new, my prices reflect that, and the standing offer on the front page is how I would rather prove the work than by telling you about it.