Stephanie Rank is the founder of Updraftco, a proposal consulting firm that supports multiple small businesses in the government contracting space, spanning sectors from construction and facilities management to missile defense. Her clients typically lack dedicated proposal teamsand rely on Stephanie to manage the entire proposal lifecycle, from compliance through final submission.

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The nature of independent consulting creates a unique set of compounding pressures. Each client comes with different past performance libraries, different templates, different agency requirements, and different levels of proposal maturity. Stephanie was managing this complexity manually, which meant that compliance packages alone could consume 12 to 18 hours for a basic proposal and 60 to 80 hours for complex efforts. Proposal outlines took full workdays. Every hour spent on one client was an hour unavailable for another.

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Beyond the time pressure, Stephanie needed tools that could help her work faster without sacrificing the quality and compliance rigor that wins contracts. Generic AI tools fell short. Copilot, for example, could not grasp proposal-specific workflows like generating schedules or understanding evaluation criteria. And the small businesses she works with are often competing against much larger firms with dedicated proposal teams, making every efficiency gain critical.

Purpose-Built for Proposals

Stephanie evaluated several AI-enabled tools in the market before landing on GovEagle. Other solutions she tested felt clunky and hard to use, with interfaces that required significant configuration before delivering any value. GovEagle was intuitive from the start. And unlike generic AI assistants, GovEagle understands the nuances of government proposals, from compliance matrices to evaluation criteria to past performance alignment.

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If you're a small business or working like I am, GovEagle is the right tool. It's intuitive, it's purpose-built for proposals, and everything else I tried just couldn't keep up.

Stephanie Rank

Founder, Updraftco

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The Excel Add-In as a Differentiator

For Stephanie, the ability to work directly within Excel was a decisive factor. Compliance templates, self-scoring worksheets, checklists, and formulas all live in spreadsheets, and GovEagle's Excel add-in lets her generate and refine these artifacts without leaving her workflow. She can ask GovEagle to analyze an entire worksheet, build formulas for complexcalculations, or produce a full compliance matrix, all from within the tools she already uses.

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The compliance templates and the various tasks that I have it do in Excel are spot on, Stephanie noted. Sometimes it misses things, but that's where having someone experienced comes in. It's a huge distinguishing factor.

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Security That Small Businesses Can Trust

One of the biggest barriers Stephanie encounters with her clients is the perception that AI isrisky, particularly around data security. GovEagle's CUI-level platform addresses this directly. Stephanie has seen no information bleed between the multiple client projects she manages simultaneously, and the system is transparent when it lacks context, letting her know exactlywhat information it has and what it needs rather than fabricating responses.

Compliance Work That Used to Take Days Now Takes Minutes

The efficiency gains have been staggering. A basic compliance package that previouslyrequired 12 to 18 hours of manual work now takes Stephanie roughly 30 minutes with GovEagle. For complex proposals requiring a full compliance package, including pink team, red team, and gold team checklists, contract management plans, and subcontracting documentation, the process dropped from 60 to 80 hours to approximately one hour.

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Proposal outlines tell a similar story. For a standard small business proposal of 15 to 20 pages with one to three past performance references, what once consumed an eight-hour workday now takes five minutes.

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The compliance matrix and all these things take so long. Five minutes to do a proposal outline compared to an eight-hour cycle. It's a huge, huge big deal.

Stephanie Rank

Founder, Updraftco

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New Capabilities Beyond Traditional Proposals

GovEagle has expanded what Stephanie can deliver for her clients. She now uses the platform for self-scoring proposals, such as the Oasis Plus vehicle, where compliance is everything and there is minimal narrative writing. The tool excels at analyzing scoring criteria and building outthe supporting spreadsheets. She has also used GovEagle to generate Gantt charts and critical path schedules, produce kickoff slide content, and condense narrative, a task she describes as consuming enormous amounts of proposal managers' time.

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I asked it to condense narrative by 50%, and it told me that wasn't going to work, but we could do 30%. I said I'll take it. And that's 90% of the effort gone.

Stephanie Rank

Founder, Updraftco

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More Clients, Same Quality

GovEagle has freed Stephanie to manage more client relationships simultaneously. She currently supports clients across construction, missile defense, and other sectors, each with distinct requirements and agency expectations. The tool's ability to keep client projects cleanly separated, while still offering the same depth of proposal intelligence across all of them, makes this possible.

The measurable results speak for themselves: a 97% reduction in compliance package turnaround, proposal outlines in five minutes instead of full workdays, and the capacity to serve multiple clients across different sectors without sacrificing quality. But Stephanie sees theintangible value as far greater.

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GovEagle has fundamentally changed what a solo consultant can deliver. Stephanie operates with the output capacity of a small proposal team, serves clients across multiple sectors simultaneously, and maintains the quality standards that win contracts. For the small businesses she supports, many of whom are competing against much larger firms, that combination of speed and quality is a strategic advantage they did not have before.

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Businesses, especially small businesses, who are not making this investment are already behind. I love this tool, and I really don't want to have to do this job ever again without it.

Stephanie Rank

Founder, Updraftco

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