Amtower Off-Center Federal News Network | Hubbard Radio

This week on Amtower Off Center, host Mark Amtower is joined by Brian Stauffer, CEO of Paperless Innovations at Actus, for a wide-ranging discussion on issues regarding the government purchase card- SmartPay.
Topics include:

The possible increase in both micro-purchase and simplified acquisition threshold

Issues confronting the agency comptroller regarding audit-ready data

Oversight and audit issues from a cost and burden perspective

This week on Amtower Off Center, Dr Bob Frey, author author of Successful Proposal Strategies On-the Go and principal of Successful Proposal Strategies LLC, joins host Mark Amtower for a discussion on winning proposals.
Topics discussed include:.

The six functional areas needed for winning proposals

What do evaluators across the spectrum (DOD, military,IC, civilian) care about when reviewing proposals

Differences in federal vs commercial and international proposals

Key elements of and the importance of the executive summary

This week on Amtower Off Center, host Mark Amtower is joined by capture guru Jennifer Namvar, CEO of The Peerless Group. Namvar developed a multi-point "cheat sheet" on the capture process, which we discuss on the show.
 Topics include:

The fundamentals of opportuities

Acquisition timing and capture process

Corporate capabilities to win

Customer intelligence 

This week on Amtower Off Center, GovCon expert Katie Helwig of MildRed joins host Mark Amtower to discuss the value of GovCon associations.
Topics include:

Creating visibility in GovCon

The GovCon association landscape

Criteria for selecting the association which will be best for you

Getting involved with your association

This week on Amtower Off Center, host Mark Amtower interviews Fergal McGovern, CEO of Visible Thread.
Visible Thread(VT) provides support tools and processes for the contractor side of the proposal community, especially in the evolving area of generative AI.
Topics include:

Fergal's background and what VT offers to the contractor community

An overview of generative AI's impact on the GovCon ecosystem

Why hallucinations occur and some potential work-arounds

Two questions to ask when applying generative AI

Prompt engineering & retrieval augmented generation and how to get better results

This week on Amtower Off Center, host Mark Amtower starts year 18 at Federal News Network with guest Kevine Jans, president of Skyway Acquisition and host of the Contracting Officer's Podcast.
Topics include:

Kevin's background as a DOD contracting officer prior to Skyway

Starting his podcast 10 years ago

Proposal "do's and dont's"

The Aristotelian method of RFPS (ethos, pathos and logos)

Why Kevin prefers LinkedIn to conferences