Business Development

A joint webinar presented by Nia Mahallati, SVP Shipley Associates Professional Services and Dr. Dolores Kuchina-Musina, CEO of REXOTA Solutions, LLC

Don't miss this chance to bring your toughest OTA and CSO questions directly to an industry expert during a live Q&A at the close of the webinar.

OTAs and CSOs are two separate routes to federal innovation funding: OTAs function entirely outside the FAR, using diverse solicitation methods to promote innovation, whereas CSOs are a unique solicitation approach that spans both FAR and non-FAR frameworks, supporting commercial acquisition (FAR Part 12) and innovation funding.. Each comes with its own rules, timelines, and evaluation criteria, and competing effectively means understanding both individually and in relation to each other.

This webinar walks participants through the full lifecycle of both vehicles, from market intelligence and consortium engagement through solicitation response, negotiation, and post-award administration, highlighting the risks and opportunities at each stage. Drawing on Shipley's Business Winning Process and Dr. Kuchina-Musina's research and practitioner experience, this session equips capture managers, proposal professionals, and BD leaders to compete more effectively for both.

Attendees will learn:

• How OTAs and CSOs have expanded in authority and application across the acquisition lifecycle

• Strategies for consortium engagement and positioning ahead of solicitation release

• How to structure compliant, competitive responses under both frameworks

• Common pitfalls in negotiation and post-award administration

• How to build organizational readiness to pursue both vehicles at scale

Plus: a live Q&A with Dr. Kuchina-Musina to address your specific OTA and CSO challenges

Dr. Dolores Kuchina-Musina is the CEO of REXOTA Solutions, LLC, where she leads training and strategic advising on high-stakes OTA and CSO pursuits. She is recognized as a leading subject-matter expert on OTAs, having authored two publications with Routledge titled Public Procurement for Innovation: R&D at the US Federal Level and Rethinking Innovation in Federal Procurement: A History and Practice of Other Transaction Authorities (coming December 2026). Her Ph.D. dissertation examined the innovation policy impact of alternative DoD contract vehicles, and her research has appeared in the Journal of Public Procurement, Politics, and Policy. Her honors include the Jacques S. Gansler Fellowship and recognition as an NCMA Fellow. She currently serves as an Adjunct Professor at George Mason University and as a Research Scientist at the Stevens Institute and previously held an Adjunct Professor appointment at the College of William & Mary, with prior industry positions as Director of Growth at Boone Group and in contracts at Huntington Ingalls.

The RFP drops. The clock starts. And suddenly, every gap in your BD-to-proposal pipeline is impossible to ignore. The capture intel was never documented. No one validated the pricing assumptions. The proposal manager just heard the customer's name for the first time. For most organizations, rapid response requirements don't create issues. They expose problems in the process.

The solution is not more people or longer hours. Success lies in a coordinated system where BD, capture, and proposal teams operate from the same process, language, and decision points.

Join Shipley's SVP of Professional Services, Nia Mahallati, for a webinar where we present insights and tools that you can use immediately. She will discuss where coordination breaks down under pressure, reveal frameworks that help restore this breakdown, and provide practical insights you can apply to your next opportunity.

What You Will Learn in This Webinar:

• Why rapid response requirements expose process gaps that longer timelines allow you to ignore, and the specific patterns most organizations share
  
• How streamlined processes create the foundation for fast, coordinated action across BD, capture, and proposal functions
  
• Where the critical handoff points are, and the practical steps that keep teams aligned and moving at exactly those moments
  
• What rapid response readiness looks like in practice, and how to start building it without a reorganization or a headcount increase
  
• How a shared BD language and structured certification baseline directly improve response speed and proposal quality across your team
  

Who Should Attend:
Anyone who touches the business-winning process at any phase, including contracts, pricing, HR, procurement, BD, capture, proposal, operations, engineering, subject matter experts, program managers, and functional leads. Because when every phase is connected, stronger alignment across all of them means higher performance with less time.

In 2025, Shipley formally reviewed and analyzed hundreds of competitive proposals across agencies, incorporating formal evaluations, agency debriefs, GAO decisions, and direct client feedback. Viewed collectively, this data revealed consistent, repeatable patterns in how evaluators documented weaknesses, justified ratings, and supported award decisions.

Across this dataset, the same proposal deficiencies surfaced repeatedly regardless of agency, customer, or solution strength. Proposals with strong technical approaches still received lower ratings when content failed to align clearly to Section L and Section M requirements or when claims could not be substantiated with data and documentation sufficient to support evaluator findings. In many cases, these weaknesses drove lower subfactor ratings, non-selection, and evaluation records that could not withstand protest.

In this webinar, Shipley’s SVP of Professional Services, Nia Mahallati, will walk through these recurring weaknesses and the specific, pre-submittal processes and tools teams used to eliminate them before submission, including:

Section L/M traceability processes and supporting tools
Evaluation-aligned color team review criteria and scoring methods
Documentation and data-quantification practices that support defensible source-selection decisions

Who Should Attend: Executives, technical leads and SMEs, capture and BD professionals, proposal managers, volume leads, writers, pricing, contracts, and compliance professionals.

Join us this October 1st, 2025 for a live webinar on Other Transaction Authorities (OTAs), complete with fast, practical insights and a dedicated Q&A session so you can get your OTA-related questions answered in real time. You’ll gain a strategic advantage by understanding how OTAs differ from traditional and FAR-based procurements, why agencies such as DoD, NASA, and DHS are increasing their use, and what that means for capturing innovation-driven contract opportunities.

Our panelist will be Patrick Barrett, a Business Development SME with 28+ years in defense and aerospace, including over 23 years at Lockheed Martin developing awareness of the Government shift to streamlined acquisition and winning OTA contracts in the C4ISR domain, VP of BD at Infinity Systems Engineering and OMNI Federal securing OTA awards, and as CEO of Catalyst Campus for Technology and Innovation driving OTA growth.

In this webinar, we will guide you through practical OTA strategies, ranging from contracting structures (firm-fixed-price‑like models to milestones and cost-shares) to compliance essentials (data rights, IP, audit-readiness). You’ll walk away with clear, actionable steps to shape, bid, and execute OTA opportunities effectively in today’s fast-moving federal acquisition landscape.

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AI adoption is not just a technology shift. It's a leadership challenge.

This session explores how to lead proposal teams through AI integration in a way that supports productivity, builds trust, and minimizes disruption. Amy McGeady and Monty Racker will share the real challenges organizations face—from resistance and unrealistic expectations to workflow redesign—and how leaders can guide their teams through the transition with clarity and confidence.

You’ll get practical guidance rooted in real-world experience, not hype. Whether your team is just starting out or struggling to get results, this session will help you lead the way forward.

What You’ll Learn

• Why AI adoption often stalls—and what leaders can do to fix it

• How to identify the cultural, operational, and training gaps that undermine success

• How to lead change in a way that aligns with your strategy and engages your team

• What strong AI leadership looks like in a proposal environment

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Join Shipley Associates for an exclusive webinar on mastering long-range business development (BD) strategies in complex and competitive contracting landscapes.

Discover Our Proven Long-Range BD Approach:

Strategic Planning: Craft winning long-range and annual business plans.
Market Intelligence: Identify and analyze key clients, competitors, teammates, and opportunities.
Strategic Positioning: Establish your company as a trusted partner.
Opportunity Assessment: Prioritize the right opportunities for your business.
Pipeline Development: Build a pipeline of potential contracts based on high Pwin (probability of win).
Capture Planning: Develop targeted win strategies for each opportunity.

Regardless of our role, we are all selling! Join this webinar for insights on how to focus on the customer when positioning your solutions to potential customers. Learn to avoid common traps that capture managers, account teams, and sales professionals fall into when trying to generate revenue.

Too often we’re “too busy” moving onto the next pursuit that we don’t take time to evaluate why we won or lost our most recent opportunities. Finding value in conducting win/loss analyses is important and takes discipline. Learn some tips and best practices from industry leaders by joining us for this webinar.

Industry leaders in this webinar will discuss and show how business winning organizations improve performance, gain efficiencies, and attract the best talent. We will walk through an industry-proven framework for evaluating and measuring organizational effectiveness based on the fundamentals of a Capability Maturity Model® customized for business development (BD-CMM™).

Trust must be earned and maintained. Building trust with our internal teams is a critical building block to success in any industry. Trust breaks down barriers, accelerates performance, and leads to better employee morale and retention. Building trust internally and with our customers will lead to success.

Join a discussion about the different types of business winning reviews and ways to make them more effective – from pre-capture through lessons learned.

Join us as we discuss how to be flexible in your business winning approach while applying the necessary rigor and discipline to win the RIGHT business.