I worked for a company doing SBIRs. The overhead for taking advantage of these is insane. You need people who understand how to get through the contract proce

I worked for a company doing SBIRs. The overhead for taking advantage of these is insane. You need people who understand how to get through the contract process and all the legal requirements. You have to use incredibly bad time tracking software and deal with yearly time tracking and budget audits. Your IT systems must be locked down but in a way defined by the government, not necessarily industry best practices. Finally, as others have mentioned, you have to deal with the politics of defense contracting. Ultimately you'll just be beat out by one of the many small or medium size companies that literally exist to farm these if it hasn't already been given to a large established DoD contractor.