Wicked Bionic, LLC.
Dana Arnett is the Co-CEO of Wicked Bionic, a multicultural marketing and advertising agency in Los Angeles California. Wicked Bionic was established in 2015 and began to engage in government contracting about 2 years ago starting with the City of Los Angeles. Looking to expand her business, Dana attended a presentation on government contracting from University of La Verne SBDC consultant Rene Cota. “I looked at him on Zoom and said ‘that’s the guy I want to work with - the amount of knowledge he had, blew me away,’” Dana said, describing Rene's knowledge and experience with helping small businesses in the government contracting space.
Wicked Bionic dabbled in writing a few proposals a quarter but wanted to expand into contracting with the state and federal government. Dana felt overwhelmed writing each proposal from scratch with all the information and research involved and couldn’t keep up with the opportunities they found. “We were writing unique proposals for every RFP and we didn’t use any templates,” Dana explained. Through contacts in the Los Angeles area, Wicked Bionic was connected with the Local SBDC office and eventually worked with Rene Cota and Mario Rojas at the University of La Verne SBDC.
The power of an agency to support small businesses in any way, from the start-up person to a small business like us is invaluable. That encouragement, honing our capabilities, and understanding how we can compete, are the things that start with SBDC.
Once Wicked Bionic worked with Mario Rojas they began to get opportunities sent to them based on their specific capabilities. Mario then showed Dana templates that could be customized for faster turnaround time containing all the information they needed for a complete proposal. “The first one was very hard for us because there was a lot of information he had to get out of me and that I had to pull from other places,” Dana said. Once Wicked Bionic had a few proposals completed with their own templates, they were able to focus on addressing the questions and ultimately winning a contract.
Wicked Bionic’s first contract was with the California Citizens Redistricting Commission. The agency was looking to contract with small business advertising firms for outreach with the 2021 redistricting efforts as a result of the 2020 census. “It was a multicultural media buying campaign, which is what we specialize in. They needed an advertising campaign in 5 languages on radio, billboards, and buses.”
The proposal needed to be scaled back from what Wicked Bionic normally does because of the limited timeline of the project. Once the contract was won, Wicked Bionic was inspired by Mario and Rene to propose a new tagline for the Redistricting Commission project which was added to the campaign for the whole state. “We pitched the ads and the tagline that has been used throughout the State of California in every medium.” Wicked Bionic won the Redistricting Commission contract for $238,931 and generated $1.2 million in revenue in 2021, a substantial increase from the previous year.
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