The personnel section answers one question, and it is narrower than founders expect. Not "is this an impressive team" but "can these particular people do this particular work." A distinguished resume in an adjacent field scores worse than a modest one that shows the applicant has built the exact kind of thing being proposed.

Write for relevance, not for status

Biosketch formats vary by agency and the current solicitation dictates the template, page count and required fields — follow it exactly, because personnel documents are a common source of administrative rejections. Within that template, select ruthlessly. Weak: "Dr. Chen has over 15 years of experience in materials science and has published widely." Strong: "Dr. Chen developed the deposition process used in Task 2 during prior work on thin-film barriers, and holds two granted patents on the coating chemistry proposed here."

List prior work that maps onto named tasks in your work plan. If a publication or a shipped product proves you can do Task 3, say which task. Reviewers should be able to draw a line from each person to the tasks they own, and an entry that supports no task is padding.

The PI and their time

The principal investigator carries specific obligations, and they differ between the programs. Under SBIR, the PI's primary employment normally has to sit with the small business; under STTR, PI arrangements are more flexible and the research partner's role is defined differently. The current rules are in the SBIR Policy Directive and each agency's solicitation, and the practical differences are summarized in SBIR versus STTR. Confirm your specific situation with the agency rather than with an article; employment and effort questions can also have tax and employment-law implications you should run past your own counsel or CPA.

State committed effort as a real number and make it consistent with the budget and the work plan. A PI showing a token commitment on an ambitious plan is a visible problem, and a PI whose committed effort across all active awards exceeds a full-time schedule is a bigger one. Reviewers do add these up.

Naming the gaps

Nobody expects a three-person company to hold every skill in-house. What sinks proposals is a plan that silently requires a capability the team does not have. If your work plan includes regulatory testing, clinical measurement, or a manufacturing process nobody on the roster has run, name the consultant, the subaward, or the vendor who will do it, and include their commitment letter.

Subaward and consultant arrangements carry their own rules — cost share limits, the minimum work share the small business must perform, and how the partner is priced — and those flow into the budget, where they cause the errors described in budget mistakes that sink an application. If a university lab is the right partner, the practicalities are covered in partnering with universities and research labs.

Facilities belong in the same argument. Saying you will use a specific characterization instrument is stronger when you name where it sits and who operates it. If the whole package feels beyond you, the tradeoffs are weighed in hiring a grant writer, alongside the broader application guide.

Projects House often serves as the engineering capability a small applicant team is missing. Ask about a subaward role through the contact form.