From federal insider to a 17-course academy

How Dr. Lori Smith turned 41 years of government contracting expertise into a 10-bundle content library, then into an academy that teaches it at scale.

41 years in federal service
CEO, Acu-Elligent
$143-150B in contract actions signed

Dr. Lori Smith's GovCon Master Library bundles

10: specialist bundles in her GovCon Master Library
17: academy courses built from the library
165: lessons in one federal-contracting curriculum
57: animated explainer videos, none of them filmed

The client

41 years inside federal contracting, and a calendar full of one-on-one calls.

Dr. Lori Smith spent 41 years in federal service. As a contracting officer she stood up the VA's $128B community care portfolio and held signature authority over roughly $143-150B in contract actions.

After retiring she founded Acu-Elligent, helping small, veteran-owned and minority businesses win government work. The knowledge was rare and in demand, but it lived in her head and her calendar: referral calls, panels and weekly shows, one person at a time.

The challenge

Expertise too valuable to stay locked in one-on-one calls.

Government contracting is opaque and jargon-heavy, and the people who most need help are drowning in surface-level guides written by people who have never signed a federal contract.

Lori wanted a resource that could reach hundreds of businesses at once and position her as the expert: not one book, but a complete body of work she could build consulting, training and an academy on.

“Can you put this on steroids?”

What we built

First, the GovCon Master Library.

Ten specialist bundles for small businesses entering government contracting, each drawn from her 41 years of first-hand experience.

Ten specialist bundles

Certification, pipeline building, teaming, subcontracting, financial planning, DOT/DBE and more. Each bundle pairs an ebook with a mini-course, guides and checklists.

Built over 21 months

Not a one-off project. Bundle by bundle, from December 2024 onwards, around her schedule and her growing practice.

Complete, not just good

"It was the quality of the content and the completeness. You know, not only was it high quality, it was complete."

Then, the academy

The library became a 17-course academy.

Built on Fayne, our white-label academy platform, under her own brand: 165 lessons in one curriculum, with interactive tools, downloads and explainer video in every course.

GovCon Master Library · Academy

Dr. Lori Smith's academy, course catalog

From bundles to courses

Everything we'd built for her, turned into one curriculum.

Her brief was simple: every piece of content we had created together should become part of the academy, not just a single ebook.

01
One curriculum, not a pile of courses
Five shelves that follow a firm's real journey: start here, get certified and convert it, find and win the right work, deliver and grow, and a dedicated DOT/DBE shelf.
02
Every bundle has a home
Each ebook became the backbone of its course. The mini-course, guides and checklists were folded in as bonus lessons, interactive tools like calculators and scorecards, and downloads.
03
Rebuilt for 2026 rules
The 8(a) course was rebuilt against the 2026 SBA rules, and the DBE bundle became two courses under the new DOT certification rules.
04
Video that never goes stale
57 animated whiteboard explainers in her brand colour, narrated in a voice she chose. Nothing needed filming, and a lesson can be updated the day a threshold changes.

Seeing it laid out as one curriculum rather than a pile of separate courses made something click for me; that structural decision was the right one.

The videos work. The pacing is good, the brand colour looks sharp, and the fact that nothing needed filming and nothing goes stale when a threshold changes is exactly what I was hoping for.