The RFP is not where federal construction procurement begins — or at least, it shouldn't be. By the time a solicitation hits SAM.gov, the contracting officer and facility manager who have done their homework already have a clear picture of what qualified performance looks like in their specific context. Those who haven't done that work often find it out the hard way: through a low-bid award to a contractor who underbid the complexity, underestimated the environment, and is now six weeks behind schedule inside an occupied federal facility.

For federal project owners and contracting officers evaluating general contractors for construction and renovation work, the criteria that separate capable contractors from the rest rarely show up clearly in a price column. They show up in past performance records, in the questions a contractor asks during a site visit, and in whether their team has ever actually built inside a functioning VA medical center or an occupied government building.

Carrigg Commercial Builders, the Manchester, NH-based Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business led by Bob Carrigg, has built its federal contracting practice on exactly those differentiators. What follows is a framework for evaluating them — before the RFP goes out.

Past Performance Is Only Useful If It's Relevant

Past performance is a standard evaluation factor in federal source selection, but the way it gets evaluated often flattens distinctions that matter. A contractor who has successfully completed ten ground-up warehouse builds in an industrial park has a strong record — but that record tells you very little about how they'll perform inside a functioning outpatient clinic with active patients, clinical staff, and infection control requirements.

When reviewing past performance for a federal renovation or fit-out project, the relevant questions are specific: Has this contractor worked inside occupied federal facilities? Have they managed construction adjacent to sensitive operations — clinical areas, data centers, secure spaces? Do their references come from facility managers who had to live with the contractor's work on a daily basis, or from project owners who handed over a key at the end?

The depth of that experience matters more than the volume of completed projects. A contractor with 20 relevant projects in comparable environments is a fundamentally different risk profile than one with 100 projects that don't translate.

Bonding Capacity and Financial Stability Are Non-Negotiable — But Often Under-Examined

Federal construction contracts require performance and payment bonds, and most contractors bidding on federal work can produce them. What contracting officers should look more carefully at is the contractor's bonding capacity relative to their current backlog — not just their theoretical single-project limit.

A contractor who is bonded to $10 million but currently carrying $9.5 million in active work is operationally stretched in ways that their bid price won't reveal. Their superintendent is overcommitted. Their purchasing power with subcontractors and suppliers is constrained. And when your project hits an unexpected condition — as federal renovation projects reliably do — their ability to absorb and respond is limited.

The question worth asking before the RFP: what does this contractor's current workload look like, and do they have the operational bandwidth to give this project the attention it requires?

Experience in Occupied Environments Is a Distinct Skill Set

This point deserves its own category because it is consistently underweighted in federal source selection — until something goes wrong. Occupied-environment construction is not simply a matter of putting up temporary barriers and posting signage. It requires a superintendent who understands how the building functions operationally, a project manager who can coordinate utility outages with facility staff weeks in advance, and a company culture that treats disruption to building occupants as a primary constraint rather than an inconvenience.

"The contractor who has never built inside a running hospital will treat it like any other job site. The contractor who has done it twenty times treats it like a different discipline entirely."

For federal healthcare facilities in particular — VA medical centers, military treatment facilities, federally operated clinics — the stakes of getting this wrong extend beyond schedule and budget. Infection control failures, life safety interruptions, and inadequate coordination with clinical staff can create patient safety issues and regulatory exposure that no contract clause can fully address after the fact.

Bob Carrigg's team at Carrigg Commercial Builders has completed multiple renovations inside active VA medical facilities across New England, including mental health clinic renovations and electrical infrastructure upgrades performed without disrupting ongoing patient care. That experience is not incidental to their value proposition — it is the core of it.

SDVOSB Status and What It Actually Signals

The federal government's small business set-aside programs — including the Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business designation — exist to create competitive opportunities for firms that might otherwise be crowded out by larger contractors. For contracting officers, SDVOSB set-asides are a procurement tool. But for facility managers evaluating who is actually going to run their project, the designation carries a different kind of signal.

Veteran-owned firms that have earned and maintained their SDVOSB certification have been through a verification process. More practically, companies led by veterans — particularly those with combat or special operations backgrounds — tend to bring a specific operational orientation to construction management: clear accountability structures, direct communication, and a default toward solving problems rather than escalating them.

That is not a universal guarantee. But it is a pattern worth weighing when evaluating contractors whose soft qualifications are otherwise difficult to quantify on a source selection scorecard.

The Pre-RFP Conversation Worth Having

The most useful thing a federal facility manager or contracting officer can do before issuing a solicitation is talk to contractors who have done the work — not to sole-source a contract, but to pressure-test the scope, the phasing assumptions, and the schedule. An experienced contractor will identify risks in a statement of work that an internal team may not have the field experience to anticipate. They will tell you whether your phasing plan is realistic, whether your budget is structured in a way that will attract qualified bids, and whether there are sequencing constraints in your facility that need to be built into the solicitation.

Carrigg Commercial Builders welcomes those conversations. Robert Carrigg, Manchester NH's veteran-owned commercial construction leader, has spent more than two decades working with federal clients across New England — and the questions asked before a project is procured are often the ones that determine whether it succeeds.

Carrigg Commercial Builders is a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business providing commercial construction and general contracting services throughout New England. To connect with Robert Carrigg's team, visit carrigg.com or call (603) 252-4343.