Small defense manufacturers face a relationship continuity problem that costs them contracts: your primary contact at a base rotates out every 2 years with no formal transition to their replacement. Trevor Scott, Senior Procurement Manager at HHI Corporation, rebuilds these institutional relationships through a three-pronged approach: trade shows, on-site base visits to understand actual problems, and strategic cold calling to find new decision-makers. His procurement workflow runs from initial customer contact through estimate facilitation to drawing release, where production management takes over.
Trevor reflects on how his welding background creates bidding advantages invisible to pure engineers, including revealing cost traps in RFP drawings that can sink profit margins. He explains how his team uses AI specifically for proposal refinement on government contracts by writing base content themselves, then using AI to clean language and verify requirement coverage across 50-page submissions. He also offers his management test: can the team run independently for 3 weeks without you? For teams built on respect and accountability rather than micromanagement, the answer is yes because people care about outcomes, not merely compliance.
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