And I said yes.

Because the audit log of a federal contracting system records who looked at what and when, and a woman who spends Monday morning querying every record relating to her husband’s company is a woman who will spend the following year explaining it.

I have thought since that this is the single most useful thing anybody said to me in the whole of that year, and that she said it inside six minutes, and that it is not in any training I have ever taken.

Part Ten: The Capability Statement

The thing that I had been afraid of on the Monday morning turned out to exist, and it turned out to be worse than I had imagined in one respect and much better in another, and the gap between those two took eleven months to resolve.

Every company that sells to the federal government has a document called a capability statement.