What's the biggest misconception people have about government contracting? For me, it seems like a lot of people think they need a huge company before they can compete. Interested to hear what myths you've run into.

If you could go back to the day you started government contracting and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be? Not a book.Not a course. Just one lesson that would have saved you time, money, or frustration. I'm curious to see what experienced contractors would tell their beginner selves.

I want to introduce you to Atley Settles out of Georgia. Four months ago, Atley had never heard of DLA. He drives trucks for a living — 12-hour shifts on a flip-flop schedule — and like a lot of people in this community, he was looking for something he could build for himself with that same energy he was giving his employer. His lady came across the DLA product side on social media and brought it to him. He did his research, liked what he saw, and got to work. Four months in, Atley has 9 contracts under his belt. Here's what he said about the journey: "I'm actually seeing a transformation from when I first started to now. And I can imagine what's going to be coming for me down the road, and it's exciting." What makes Atley's story stand out isn't just the wins. It's the approach. He started small, got his reps in, learned every aspect of the fulfillment process himself, and built from there. He watches the training videos step by step, side by side with his work, and it shows in his results. His plan from here? Scale to 5–10 contracts a month, replace his full-time income, and eventually bring people into the business who have been watching him build. That's what this is about. If you're ready to build something like Atley is building, here are your two next steps: 👉 Try Contrax AI free for 7 days — the tool Atley uses to find and analyze winning bids: https://www.contraxai.tech 👉 Book your spot at Nomyad's May 30–31 Bootcamp (25% off right now) — two days covering VSM, CMMC, Contrax AI workflows, and the best practices that are working right now: https://info.nomyadllc.com/book-nomyad Atley's in the early stage and already seeing results. You could be having this same conversation a few months from now. Let's go, Day

What was the biggest thing that confused you when you first started government contracting? For me, I realized there was a huge difference between understanding the process and actually executing it consistently. Curious to hear what others struggled with in the beginning.

I want to give you an inside look at something we've been quietly building for the past several weeks inside Contrax AI. It's called the Batch Upload Submission feature — and it's almost ready. Right now we're in active testing with three companies we work with directly. And what we're seeing in those tests is exactly what we hoped for. Here's what it does: Instead of going solicitation by solicitation and manually filling out every single field on DIBBS, you'll be able to load an entire group of solicitations inside Contrax AI, fill out only the fields specific to each bid, and export the whole thing as a TXT file that uploads directly to DIBBS in one shot. The tool auto-fills your cage code, return dates, compliance fields, discount terms, ADR — everything that lives in your onboarding and SAM profile. The required fields that need your attention are highlighted in red so you go straight to them and skip everything else. In our testing, nine solicitations were batched and submitted in the time it used to take to do one manually. And that's just the start of what's coming. We're also building an AI agent that sends your RFQs out automatically, brings vendor quotes back to your inbox, and auto-fills your batch submission sheet for you. The manual pricing and availability work you're putting in right now? That's getting fully automated. On top of that — DLA's full forecast data is being built directly into every solicitation page, so you can see exactly how many units DLA is projected to buy for any NSN before you spend a minute on it. Nobody else in this space is building all of this under one roof. And you're hearing about it first. 👉 Get on Contrax AI now and be ready the moment this feature drops: https://www.contraxai.tech More details coming in the next email — including how we're previewing all of this live at the bootcamp this weekend. — Day Cantave, Nomyad