In this solo advisory video, Stacy L. Chin warns deep‑tech founders that many SBIR proposals contain a common budgeting error: inventing arbitrary PI/key‑person salaries. She explains that SBIR salaries must be defensible, not wishful. The correct process is: (1) use Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data for the relevant role and location to find a median or 75th‑percentile wage as an anchor; (2) calculate the salary by multiplying the anchored hourly rate by the actual effort (hours) the person will devote to the project. If a higher salary is truly needed, founders must either provide solid comparable data to justify it or cost‑share the excess with other funding sources. She also clarifies that grant salary caps limit only the amount the SBIR can pay, not the total compensation, which can be supplemented elsewhere. The video’s purpose is to prevent reviewers from flagging unrealistic salaries, which can lead to budget cuts, loss of credibility, and proposal failure. Stacy ends with a call to share the advice with fellow founders.
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All right, no one's talking about this, and I am tired of seeing this mistake. But are you deep tech founders just making up your salary number when you write your SBIR applications? Please tell me you're not doing this because this is the one mistake I've seen tank so many otherwise solid proposals. Here's what most founders kind of do. They think, in this SBIR grant, I want to make a $200K salary on this project, so they just put it down the budget. But that's not how it works. Your SBIR salary as a PI or a key personnel isn't based on what you want. It's actually based on what you can defend. So here's the actual process to ask for your salary in an SBIR grant. Step 1, go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, find your role and your location, and then find the median rate or the 75th percentile for someone with your experience and expertise. That's your anchor. And then step 2, calculate your salary based on the real effort. It's your hourly rate times the time that you spend on the application and the level of effort required. Because if If you just throw in a random number because it sounds good for a salary, reviewers will notice, and then they'll question it, and then your budget will get cut during the due diligence, and then you lose credibility, and no one really wants that, right? But if you genuinely need a higher salary, you do have 2 options. One, you can provide a rock-solid justification with comparable data to back it up, or just cost-share the difference yourself with other sources of funding. Because in the world of federal grants and contracts, you don't get You don't get paid for what you want. You get paid for what you can justify with data. And by the way, grant salary caps only limit what the grant pays, but that can't— it doesn't have to be your total compensation. You can use other funding sources to beat up whatever salary you want. But bottom line, make sure you base your salary numbers on reality, not just wishful thinking. And that's how you should propose your salary in an SBIR budget to make sure it gets that approved. If you're looking for more content like this, make sure you follow and share this with this fellow founder so that you both can learn how to keep your with it.
