Quick answer
The most common Black Hat mistake is underestimating competitors — treating fixable gaps (weak writing, thin past performance, an M&A distraction) as permanent weaknesses. In a Black Hat review, almost every “weakness” a team assigns to a rival is closeable through hiring, teaming, consultants, or time. Assume every competitor is capable of winning, and build your capture strategy against their best case, not their worst. Avoid these common lies that teams tell themselves during a Black Hat review.
What is a Black Hat review?
A Black Hat review is a competitive intelligence exercise in which your capture team steps into the shoes of each likely competitor and builds their bid for them — their probable strategy, win themes, pricing posture, strengths, and weaknesses — so you can strengthen your own approach before the RFP drops. Done well, it sharpens your discriminators. Done carelessly, it becomes an echo chamber of comfortable assumptions.
We regularly conduct Black Hat reviews across many teams, federal customers, and service areas. Below are the ten traps we hear most often — the same self-defeating stories we dissect in our Deadly Sins series of real protest case studies. We’re sharing them so you can catch them in your own competitor analysis.
When in doubt, remember the line from author Lee Child: “Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”
1. “The incumbent owns the customer relationship”
Incumbency and customer familiarity do not guarantee a win — every incumbent was once a newcomer. Much is made of who is “on the inside” and who is “outside looking in.” So what? How does that translate into a quantifiable benefit? A relationship gap is closeable through teaming, targeted hiring of key personnel, and time. We’ve watched it play out in protest after protest — see There Is No Guaranteed Win With the Incumbent Behind You, where leaning on incumbency instead of leading with a solution came up short.
2. “They can’t write a good proposal”
Weak proposal writing is a fixable gap, not a durable weakness. We hear this in nearly every Black Hat session. Even a competitor who won’t produce Shakespearean prose can close the gap by hiring a few capable writers and pairing them with technical experts. How would you quantify this “weakness” as meaningful on evaluation day?
3. “They’ll perform incumbent capture”
No competitor can guarantee incumbent capture. Non-incumbents love to cite the percentage of incumbent staff they expect to retain. But incumbent personnel are often more inspired by the agency mission than by any single contractor — and we’ve seen a departing incumbent take a scorched-earth approach, pulling its superstars out and leaving the new awardee an awkward transition. Retention is a hope, not a lock — and complacency about “our people will stay” is exactly the trap in Failing to Recognize Your Incumbent Bid Is a Rom-Com.
4. “Nobody else can do this work”
Assume nobody is irreplaceable — including you. Every competitor that made it into your Black Hat is there for a reason: they’re a viable threat. A new contractor may face a learning curve on day-to-day operations, but they will very likely figure it out. Challengers unseat “irreplaceable” incumbents more often than you’d think — as in Challengers Taking Risks Can Win a Best Value Tradeoff, where the presumed outsider took the award.
5. “Any non-incumbent is a transition risk”
Transition risk applies to every non-incumbent, yet non-incumbents win awards constantly. Many competitors field a defined low-risk transition plan, a dedicated transition team, or even a standing transition office. A stronger transition story may legitimately sway an award — but painting all non-incumbents with the “risky transition” brush is hubris. A challenger with a detailed, merit-based management and surge story can beat an incumbent outright, as it did in Why Vague Proposals Fail to Defend Incumbency.
6. “They don’t have the BD or B&P resources”
A competitor’s thin BD or B&P bench is easy to assume and hard to verify. This trap is usually wishful thinking. Consultants can be hired to lead or augment a pursuit. And even if a competitor’s internal resources really are limited, do you know they won’t aim every one of them at your opportunity?
7. “The competitor doesn’t know anything about this”
Never assume a competitor is ignorant of the opportunity, system, or customer. We often hear that a rival knows nothing — or isn’t even interested. A single key hire or one knowledgeable teammate can flip the script overnight, moving them from (presumably) knowing nothing to knowing everything.
8. “They’re distracted by their merger”
M&A turmoil is real but temporary. After a transaction, you’ll see personnel loss, constant re-org, and uncertainty about what “normal” becomes. Black Hat teams love to point at this. It may all be true — but assume the competitor is pursuing your opportunity with the full strength and combined resources of the new company.
9. “They have no relevant past performance”
Thin past performance is often survivable. This story comes up most with smaller competitors. Yet strong technical and management solutions, plus well-matched key personnel and SMEs, can compensate for gaps. Before you crown this the competitor’s undoing, check how heavily past performance is actually scored in the evaluation criteria — and see how much management strength can offset a past-performance knock in More Risk, Management Complications and Past Performance Issues…Oh My!.
10. “Their brand is damaged”
A competitor’s ethics violation or public contract failure only matters if it’s recent, relevant, and material to this evaluation. Weigh when it happened, who was involved, and how it bears on this specific customer and procurement. The reality: most large businesses have a transgression somewhere in the rearview mirror.
Recognizing the problem is the first step to correcting it
If your Black Hat review drifts into one of these traps, come back to four (4) principles:
- You are not a special little snowflake. You have competitors, and they can and will beat you.
- You cannot afford to discount competitors. Every one of them is capable of winning.
- Assume competitors are operating at their best. If they aren’t, they’ll self-select out of the competition anyway.
- Assuming a weak competitor and losing anyway is an expensive tuition bill. Don’t pay it.
A good Black Hat pushes back — so you don’t fool yourself
Every one of these traps is comfortable, which is exactly why they’re dangerous. Left unchallenged in a room full of your own team, they harden into assumptions — and you build a capture strategy on top of them.
That’s the job of a FedSavvy Black Hat facilitator: to push back the moment a team starts talking itself into an easy win. We surface the closeable gaps, pressure-test the “they can’t do X” claims, and keep your capture aimed at your competitors’ best case — not the weakest version you’d prefer to imagine. It’s the difference between validating what you hope and understanding what you’re actually up against.
→ Engage a FedSavvy Black Hat Review to bring that discipline to your next pursuit.
→ Contact us to talk through where your team might be walking into one of these traps right now.
