Noah King
In federal contracting, past performance is more than a compliance box in Section L and M. It is one of the most powerful levers you have to influence how evaluators see your risk, credibility, and fit for their mission. The question is not whether you have past performance, but whether you have a deliberate past performance strategy that is working in your favor.
A deliberate past performance strategy starts with understanding how agencies actually use past performance information in source selections. Contracting and evaluation teams are not just reading your narratives; they are looking at CPARS records, checking references, and comparing your contract history across similar NAICS, PSC codes, and contract types. They are asking whether you have successfully delivered work of similar size, scope, and complexity for missions that resemble their own. Every rating, every comment, and every contract you choose to highlight contributes to a long-term story about your reliability and value.
One of the most effective ways to take control of that story is to identify a small number of “anchor” projects that will serve as the backbone of your portfolio. These are contracts where you can drive excellent performance, build strong relationships with the customer, and secure high CPARS ratings and detailed positive narratives. Anchor projects should be as close as possible in scope, customer type, and technology to the future work you want to win. From there, you intentionally build around those anchors by targeting opportunities in the same or closely related agencies, NAICS, and domains so that your portfolio looks focused rather than scattered.
Teaming and joint ventures play a critical role in filling gaps while you build this portfolio. If you are missing a particular agency, contract type, or technical element, you can pursue work as a subcontractor or as part of a mentor-protégé joint venture that puts you in the performance history for that mission space. The goal is not just to “get on a team,” but to ensure your role is meaningful enough that you can credibly claim and document contributions in future proposals. Over time, this allows you to move from supporting roles to prime positions while still presenting a coherent, targeted past performance record.
Within active contracts, every task order becomes an opportunity to reinforce your strategic story. Planning performance with the end in mind means aligning deliverables, stakeholder communication, and risk management to the evaluation factors you know will appear in future solicitations: quality, schedule, cost control, technical innovation, and customer satisfaction. When it is time to write the past performance volume, you are not improvising; you are selecting and presenting examples that directly map to the evaluation criteria and the agency’s mission outcomes. You highlight metrics, problem resolution, user impact, and customer endorsements that speak to what evaluators are instructed to score.
The contractors who consistently win are not simply the ones with the longest list of contracts, but the ones whose past performance tells a clear, intentional story about readiness for the next award. If you want to examine whether your current portfolio is helping or limiting your future wins, a FEDCON advisor can work with you to assess your past performance, identify anchor projects, and design a strategy that aligns your future pursuits with the record you are building today.
