We are a small structural firm with 3 structural engineers including 2 PEs that tried to go prime and submitted responses to RFPs for public projects but have not been successful. We have not even gone past the shortlist phase because of our size even though due to the slow economy our competition and quite possibly some of the big name firms have no bigger staff than us. The goal is to add more staff if needed once the contract is won. How does a small firm compete under these factors? In terms of experience, I believe we are competitive because we used to work for these big name and large firms.