Profiles in Success...Volume 10 eBook

Copyright 2016 © Gordon J. Bernhardt, CPA, PFS, CFP®, AIF® ISBN: 978-0-9972483-0-2 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, or to obtain additional copies of this book for $29.99, contact the publisher below: Gordon J. Bernhardt, CPA, PFS, CFP®, AIF® 7601 Lewinsville Road, Suite 210 McLean, VA 22102 703-356-4380 Toll-free: 888-356-4380 www.BernhardtWealth.com First edition – Volume 10 All profits from the sale of this book will be donated to a qualified charity, including but not limited to BEST Kids, Inc. (www.bestkids.org), YouthQuest Foundation (www.youthquestfoundation.org) and Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (www.nfte.com).

Gordon Bernhardt conducts interviews of business leaders in the Washington D.C. area who come recommended by their peers. The enclosed profiles are a result of these interviews. As a result of these additional insights Mr. Bernhardt has published these case studies. Gordon Bernhardt is President/CEO of Bernhardt Wealth Management, a registered investment adviser with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration is mandatory for all persons meeting the definition of investment adviser and does not imply a certain level of skill or training. The business leaders may or may not be clients of Bernhardt Wealth Management. These interviews are independent of investment advisory services and do not imply any endorsement of Gordon Bernhardt or Bernhardt Wealth Management by the business leaders.

This book exists because of all the inspirational individuals who so graciously shared their stories with me. I am thankful for the opportunity to get to know each and every one of you.

To my team at Bernhardt Wealth Management—Tim Koehl, Solon Vlasto, Olivia Dewey, Trent White, Bonnie Armstrong and Emily Burns—I would never have been able to do this without your efforts and support throughout the process.

I am deeply grateful to Les Smolin, Founder of Executive Leadership Forum, and Peter Schwartz, Host of Executive Leaders D.C. and President of Peter Schwartz & Associates, for your help and encouragement on this project. Thank you. And lastly, this book would not have been possible without the guidance and creative support of the Impact Communications team.

Contents

1 Foreword

87 Francis H. (Frank) Kearney, III

3 Introduction

91 Tracy K. Kenny

Profiles in Success

95 Lexy Kessler

5 Stephanie Alexander

99 Bob Kipps

9 R. Gore Bolton

103 Larry LeDoyen

13 Christine Bond

107 Nancy Leopold

17 Donna Boone

113 Scott MacDonald

21 Matthew Buchert

117 Linda Mathes

25 Andy Burness

121 Catherine Meloy

29 Bobby C. Christian

125 Carla Percy

33 Pete Coughlin

129 Duane Piper

37 Tony Crescenzo

133 Craig Pippin

41 Jennifer V. Dalton

137 Victor Pirowski

45 Gordon Davidson

141 Michael “Mike” Ricciardi

49 Paul Dinte

145 Lisa Rosenthal

53 Ben Edson

149 Rebecca R. Rubin

57 Paul D. Fauser

153 Jody Ruth

61 Brian Flood

157 Ola Sage

65 Kirsten Grove

161 Gary E. Shumaker

69 Carroll Hauptle

165 Todd Stottlemyer

73 Chris Hayes

77 Elena Howard

169 From Gifford to Hickman

by Gloria J. Bernhardt

83 Chris Jones

Foreword Success in my world is measured by the impact you have on the people you work with and in turn their impact on the lives of those they touch.

For the past 22 years, I have been working with Vistage Worldwide, an organization of over 20,000 CEO’s, Company Presidents, Business Owners, and Senior Executives from around the world. Vistage provides a forum for its members to become better leaders and lead more fulfilling lives. We do this by challenging and supporting one another to achieve more with their companies, communities and families than they could on their own. From the moment I engaged with this organization, my life and trajectory has been so much more rewarding and meaningful because of the level of engagement, intimacy, and impact we have on each other’s lives.

Today, I run three peer advisory Vistage groups and have worked with hundreds of successful leaders from companies around the D.C. metro area. Every month, we meet to learn from experts in various disciplines and to support one another in building and growing thriving businesses and in enriching each other’s lives and the communities in which we live. Several of these leaders are profiled in this and prior editions of the Profiles series.

Their stories serve as examples of the kind of leaders our communities and country hunger for - people with passion and purpose, and who care deeply and serve as role models for those they work with, in their communities, and their families.

I have also been fortunate to be involved as a host on Executive Leaders Radio, where each week we interview business owners, CEO’s, Presidents, and Senior Level Executives. As in my work with Vistage, we create a very personal connection through these interviews to better understand the people, places and events that influenced them and created the arc across time that explains the success they have today. Their stories are filled with challenges, obstacles, good fortune, and choices

made that have guided them along their own path, along with the people who supported and encouraged them, to reach the place they find themselves today.

Looking back over my life, I also realize how my family, friends, colleagues, and others I have admired from afar who influenced my life in ways I could never have imagined. I carry their stories with me as I navigate through the landscape of my life, helping to guide and support me as I deal with the many choices - large and small - that I confront on a daily basis. And I would not be where I am in my life today without their advice, support, and encouragement.

So to the stories of the wonderful people profiled in this Volume. These individuals, as in other editions, seized or happened upon a problem or opportunity needing attention, and turned their energies towards addressing it. As I read the stories, I am humbled at what they have accomplished in their lives. I am also reminded, and my faith is renewed, when I see what we can do to make a difference in people’s lives. The influences that shaped their view of the world and put them on the path to where they are now are different for each of them as it is for each of us. They forged a path that created something greater than them – companies and lives that would nourish, encourage, challenge and inspire others to do the same.

Gordon and his team have so artfully captured the journey of these leaders through the twists and turns of the road they traveled to arrive at the place profiled here. My hope is that as you read these profiles, you find inspiration, courage, a compass, or a spark that illuminates the difference you make in peoples’ lives, and encourages you to continually seek out new opportunities to engage more and have a greater impact in the communities in which you live and work.

Foreword

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Les Smolin Vistage Group Chairman, Vistage International Founder and CEO, Executive Leadership Forum Host of Executive Leaders Radio Les.Smolin@Vistagechair.com

Les Smolin is a Chairman in the D.C. metro area with Vistage Worldwide Inc., a global organization that organizes and runs private advisory

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boards for CEOs, senior executives, and business owners. He serves as an executive coach, mentor, and advisor to these executives and other companies throughout the region and nationally. He is also a Host of Executive Leaders Radio, the largest business talk radio show in the mid-Atlantic region and broadcast nationally. The show helps to tell the stories of the people and experiences that shaped the guest Executives interviewed and contributed to their success as leaders in our communities today.

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Introduction I often recall people and stories from my childhood; most deeply imprinted on my brain. These were the experiences that often explain why I make the decisions I do, why I behave the way I do and even why I chose the career path I’m on today.

I attribute my passion for giving back to a particularly memorable event I witnessed when I was eight years old. One hot summer evening my father and I were heading home along a narrow country road after working all day in the fields on our Nebraska farm. We were waved down by a Native American in a pickup truck coming toward us from the opposite direction. The man needed money to replace a damaged chainsaw that was used to cut cedar trees to make posts, which he sold to farmers and ranchers. He promised he’d give my father a great deal on cedar posts if he could help out. We didn’t have much money when I was growing up, so I could hardly believe my eyes when my father reached into his wallet and pulled out the bills. It was a life defining moment. From then on, I had this feeling that my life’s purpose was to help people. My father and mother both cultivated in me and my sisters the innate desire to give back.

Since starting the Profiles book series, I’ve interviewed over 415 highly successful executives and business owners. Through their stories, they have expressed various philosophies, managerial styles and backgrounds. However, I’ve also been curious to identify any significant similarities among these effective leaders…and there have been several. Perhaps feeling nostalgic for my own family – some no longer with me and others spread out around the country – that I found myself noticing how often individuals mention family. I am not alone in attributing my success and best parts of myself to loved ones.

Bob Kipps, the cofounder, CEO and Managing Director of KippsDeSanto & Co., the largest investment banking boutique specializing in the aerospace and defense industry, credits his father for his natural competitive streak and for introducing him at a young age to the language and logic of the defense contractor industry. While discussing

his parents, Bob says “Although he can definitely be rough around the edges at times, calling it like he sees it without any filter. I got my work ethic from him. From an early age, he taught me that you have to balance doing the work and getting the work to grow the business.” He describes his mother as the picture of professionalism, intelligence and etiquette who gave him and his five older siblings the freedom to be enterprising and investigate the world around them.

Tracy Kenny is the President of Lift Me Up!, a nonprofit organization that provides therapeutic horseback riding, and also a partner at KPMG LLP, a Big 4 global tax, audit and consulting firm. Tracy is passionate about public service thanks to her parents and grandparents. “My mother, father and grandmother always believed in me and gave me the sense that I could make my own decisions,” she reflects. “They wouldn’t have let me make a critical error that could ruin my life, but they allowed me the space to figure things out for myself, which in turn let me discover that I could believe in myself and my independence.” Now each year, Tracy takes time to reflect on her life by asking herself if she likes what she’s doing, who she’s working with, and if her kids are happy. If the answers are “yes” she keeps going in that direction.

Everyone experiences difficult times at one point or another. Some leaders have shared stories of very tough situations while growing up. But still they appreciate those people and circumstances for instilling characteristics such as resilience that have served them well through life’s journey.

Retired Lieutenant General Frank Kearney grew up in a dysfunctional home with a father who struggled with domestic violence and problematic values. “He wasn’t the best person, and through observing him early on, I learned what I was not going to be as a man, leader and father,” says Kearney. He grew up to serve 35 years in the United States Army and his final active duty assignment was Deputy Director for Strategic Operational Planning at the National Counter-Terrorism Center.

Bobby Christian broke free from the chains

Introduction

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of addiction that had shackled the men in his family for generations, including his alcoholic father.

“Through the good and bad times in my life, I’ve always had people around me that have somehow pushed me to the next stage of life, helping me overcome obstacles and giving me opportunities I otherwise wouldn’t have had,” he recalls. Bobby realized he wanted to become that kind of person for others. He wanted to share all his mistakes and lessons learned for the benefit of others. Now, as the founder and CEO of iMPACT Ventures his life mission of “breaking the cycle” is expressed by providing businesses the information they need to avoid repeating mistakes and achieve success.

Family and relationships are themes often repeated in the profiles of leaders. When discussing his first official job in business, Todd Stottlemeyer says, “I was really struck by the power of building authentic, mutually beneficial relationships.” The CEO of the Inova Center for Personalized Health credits the support of his high school sweetheart who became his wife.

The network of Profiles in Success is also about relationships. I feel fortunate to have built such a strong community of unique leaders with inspirational stories. I hope those of you who I’ve inter-

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viewed have enjoyed the process as much as I have, and that all of our readers will enjoy learning from your lessons. It continues to be my goal that Profiles in Success will inspire and strengthen relationships with family, colleagues, customers and community.

Gordon J. Bernhardt, CPA, PFS, CFP®, AIF® President and Founder Bernhardt Wealth Management, Inc. www.BernhardtWealth.com

Since establishing his firm in 1994, Gordon Bernhardt has been focused on providing high-quality service and independent financial advice in order to help his clients make smart decisions about their money. He specializes in addressing the unique needs of successful professionals, entrepreneurs and retirees, as well as women in transition throughout the Washington, D.C. area.

Over the years, Gordon has been sought out by numerous media outlets including MSN Money, CNN Money, Kiplinger and The New York Times for his insight into subjects related to personal finance.

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Stephanie Alexander Proving Your Point When Stephanie Alexander graduated from college, she knew two things for sure. “I knew that I was going to own my own company someday, and I knew it would be making $2 million in revenue by the time I was forty,” she says now. “Back then, $2 million seemed like a lot of money, and forty seemed really old. I had no idea what the company would be, but that’s what I saw for myself.”

Despite her firm conviction, life flowed along at an even, unremarkable pace for a while. She tried a couple different office settings and settled at a company she came to love, enrolling in an MBA program to augment her skills. Everything was going well—until she and the CEO started butting heads on strategy. “I was watching the environment around us and developing an idea of where I thought things were headed. We had different ideas about the right way to operate,” she recalls.

“At a certain point, I was no longer singing the corporate song, and I wasn’t onboard with what was going on. Then I walked into the conference room one Monday morning and was told I was being terminated without cause. It was an absolute shock.”

Stephanie had just bought a second home close to the office, adding to the financial pressures of her graduate school debt. Even more staggering, her work had become an integral part of her identity. She had spent the past seven years investing all her time and energy into the company, only to wake up to the brutal realization that it wasn’t hers. Shell-shocked, she went home. The company had seized her laptop, which contained all her work for her MBA program. Her corporate email account had been shut off. She was cut off from her previous existence, cast out in an unknown sea.

That night, Stephanie woke up and reached for the notepad she kept on her bedside table but never thought to use. Clarity and purpose filled her thoughts, as it had when she graduated from college and declared what her future would hold. “I drew up a business model and went back to sleep,” she recalls. “The next morning, I looked at what I had written and was pretty sure it was what I

wanted to do. I assessed my savings and decided I was at a point in my life where I could take a risk.”

Stephanie decided to give herself a year, resolving to get a “real job” somewhere if it didn’t work out. Now the founder, President, and CEO of BOOST LLC, the successful company born from that effort, Stephanie counts the traumatic experience of losing her job as among the best things that has ever happened to her. “It gave me the gumption to be an ‘F you’ entrepreneur,” she says confidently. “For me, part of entrepreneurship is about wanting to help the world and accomplish something better, faster, and stronger. But it’s also partly about proving a point. Sometimes, proving your point goes a long way.”

The business model Stephanie composed in that late-night moment of lifechanging lucidity remains more or less unchanged today. An acronym for Back Office Organizational Support Team, BOOST serves around 75 clients today, specializing in companies that have just passed the startup phase and are looking to build.

“We act as the CFO and HR department for our clients because most of them aren’t big enough to have their own full-time functions, or not agile enough to meet their immediate needs in these areas,” she explains. “Federal contracting is a dense thicket of rules and regulations, and it’s absolutely essential that you stay legitimate and compliant. The standard engineer or IT entrepreneur needs to focus on getting their job done, so we take care of the back office functions and work to help align their business development, operations, and corporate matters. We know how to speak CFO, HR, Business Development, Operations, and CEO, bringing these various facets of the company together around the same conference table. Companies of all sizes struggle with communication and making sure these areas are aligned, and that’s our expertise.”

In this way, BOOST seeks to establish the cohesive, harmonious dynamic that allows a company to truly flourish, in much the same way that Stephanie’s own peaceful upbringing allowed her to grow up grounded and focused. She was raised in Hampton Roads, Virginia,

Stephanie Alexander

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in a house in a cul-de-sac of the suburbs. Her upbringing was stable and drama-free, full of reading, volleyball, and Sunday gatherings with cousins at her grandparents’ house after church. Her mother, a driven go-getter known for getting things done, put herself through college while Stephanie and her younger sister were small children and got a job as a school teacher. Stephanie, however, took after her father, a keen businessman working as a general manager in the marine industry. Stephanie was never interested in playing school as a little girl, instead opting to carry around a large calculator and pretending she was a businesswoman. “I’ve just always loved business,” she reflects. “It’s my gift.”

Stephanie’s parents divorced when she was 13, and her mother remarried a sports writer who acted as a wonderful stepfather to her. “My parents are all just really good people who always put family first,” she says.

“It was always expected that my sister and I would go to college and that we’d take advantage of in-state tuition by going to one of the great schools in Virginia. When I graduated from high school, I enrolled at Virginia Tech and absolutely loved it.”

She had been shy growing up, but Stephanie came into her own in her new environment, joining a sorority and becoming more outgoing and friendly. She was also profoundly changed by her experience studying abroad, which opened up her mind to the points of view that exist beyond America’s borders. “This was before cell phones, so I was making my way with just a travel book,” she recalls. “Figuring out the euro rail, navigating the train stations in Italy, not knowing the language—it was an education in independence and self-reliance.”

During the course of her college career, Stephanie switched her major from business to finance, but she graduated just as committed as ever to entrepreneurship and the idea of starting her own company. “I knew I didn’t want to be reporting to someone else my whole life,” she remarks. “I wanted to be independent. My father always wanted his two daughters to be strong, empowered young ladies who didn’t need boys. My mother didn’t let us play with Barbie’s when we were kids because she didn’t think they represented true women. My parents both believed we had great futures out ahead of us, and that was very influential for us.”

Stephanie landed her first job out of college at a telecom startup in 1998, when the industry was hottest.

After a year, she transitioned over to MCI-WorldCom, which went down in flames shortly thereafter. She did a short stint doing finance for a public relations firm on K Street, but the 9/11 tragedy spurred PR budgets to shrink, and the company was forced to consolidate its account6

ing and finance staff to its headquarters in New York. In March of 2002, she took her first job in government contracting and had several incredible mentors who took the time to teach her the ins, outs, and acronyms of the industry. During her time there, she transitioned out of finance and into program management, learning a new skill set through trial by fire. The person who hired her left in 2005, and in 2006, he invited her to come work at his new company. “It was an opportunity I couldn’t turn down,” she remembers. “It was the company I completely fell in love with—the experience that preceded the creation of BOOST.” When Stephanie showed up for work that first day as Business Manager, it didn’t take her long to realize that the company had no infrastructure and little organization. Their bookkeeper quit two weeks later, so she suddenly found herself wearing that hat as well. They began winning contracts, and Stephanie commenced molding the structure into a formidable operation that could handle the influx of work with efficiency and skill. She converted their accounting system and started bringing in contracts experts. As time passed, she assumed a leadership position wherein all corporate personnel reported to her. “At times I was wearing two or three hats,” she recounts. “But I’m a very collaborative person, and I made a point to reach out to hear what others had done to help prevent some of the common mistakes. Of course, we still made a ton of rookie mistakes because we simply didn’t know any better. In part, that’s the founding impetus of BOOST—helping companies avoid those mistakes so they can reach higher levels of success earlier.”

When she started with the company, it had 40 employees and was earning less than $6 million in revenue.

By the time she left in 2011, it had grown to almost 200 employees with revenue near $30 million. “It was a great ride, and I learned how much I love helping people get to the next level,” she reflects. But as budgets began to dwindle with the federal government’s austerity efforts, margins began to matter much more. Tensions rose within the company, and when Stephanie was fired, her comfortable, stable lifestyle was plunged into a future that was anything but certain.

At the time, Stephanie was midway through her high-intensity 18-month Executive MBA program at Virginia Tech. And while she didn’t have a safety net to fall back on when her employment was terminated, she had a cohort of exceptional classmates who were happy to act as sounding boards and coaches as she began to flesh out her vision for BOOST. “Folks were generally supportive of my idea in the beginning, but when you get into the dirty details of what you hope to do, the nay-

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

sayers come out,” she says. “When you haven’t earned any money, you don’t know what you’re doing, and you haven’t built up an expansive network yet, it can be hard, and people will doubt you. But my business school cohort was incredibly supportive.”

Stephanie filed the paperwork to incorporate BOOST in February of 2012, but she wasn’t quite ready yet to buckle down and make it happen. Her MBA program took an international residency trip to Italy in July, and when she returned, she began fumbling through the process of putting together an elevator pitch and hitting the pavement. She used her remaining MBA classes to crowd source solutions to the problems she encountered along the way, gathering invaluable feedback on everything from what to name the company, to what the business cards should look like, to how to design her website.

In this way, she laid the foundation for a lean, dynamic, high-functioning company, keeping her overhead low and keeping the entire effort self-financed.

In designing BOOST, Stephanie made the wise decision that she was only going to work with government contractors. This differentiated her from many other startups, which are often less discriminating about the work they accept in the early stages. “When you need to pay a mortgage, you’ll take on things that aren’t in your wheelhouse,” she explains. “But one of my lessons learned from my last company was the importance of being very clear with what kind of work you do and don’t do. From the beginning, I knew I wanted to be fully focused on the back office, whittling our areas of expertise down to the four key components of accounting, contracts, HR, and recruiting.”

BOOST landed its first customer in 2012, bringing in a whopping $984 that year. It was arguably the hardest time to start a company in the government contracting industry, with steep automatic cuts decimating the federal budget and government shutdown threats shaking the contracting industry. She was starting at the literal square one, with no connections, clients, or consultants.

She began networking constantly, attending every gripand-grin in the area to get to know the subject matter experts and potential clients. “My approach is rooted in connecting people in whatever way I can,” she says. “It’s good karma, and it pays itself forward exponentially. You never know where the next client is coming from, and I came to realize that the people who end up helping you the most are often the people you’d least expect.”

Today, the company has four full-time employees and up to 25 consultants at a given time. It has more than doubled in revenue each year, and as it expects to bring in

over $1 million in revenue for 2015, Stephanie may realize the vision she had as a 22-year-old to own a $2 million company by the time she turns 40 next year. She remains the lowest-paid person on the team, believing instead in reinvesting back into the company to achieve growth. “I’m here to build a company,” she affirms. “My business model is always to hire great people, make money on the margins, and reinvest, even when it means living the Ramen noodle life. I’ve been frugal since I was a little girl, always opting instead to save for retirement or invest in something that can grow. BOOST is that thing now.”

Before BOOST, and even in the company’s infancy, Stephanie knew what it was to be uncertain, clinging to all ideas and prospects in the hopes that some would amount to something. Experience has cemented an unrelenting confidence, however, and she now readily discerns the promising from the pointless. “We have documented past performance,” she says. “We have an identity and a brand and a clarity in terms of what we do and why we do it.” She’s just as strikingly certain about the company’s future, mapping out the development of three sister companies that will expand the BOOST legacy into government contracting, a software iteration, and an entity that helps U.S. companies do business with foreign governments. And as she grows BOOST, Stephanie continues to serve on the Board of Directors for the DC Chapter of the National Veterans Small Business Coalition, co-hosting a matching initiative that helps veterans market to large clients.

In advising young people entering the working world today, Stephanie focuses on the importance of passion as the driver that allows us to make it through the grind. Know who you are, and make sure you’re having an honest conversation about the demands of starting your own company before jumping off the deep end to do it. “Entrepreneurism is talked about all the time,” she says. “It’s as American as apple pie, and people love the idea of it. But very few people have a sense of how truly hard it is. It takes an incredible investment of time, energy, and passion to actually run a company.”

If you have the desire to do it, however, don’t be deterred by the obstacles. “I started my company because I absolutely love watching other people grow their businesses,” she says. “Everyone has a story, a take, a business model all their own. Everyone has a difference to make and a point to prove. And as I help our clients master the art of growing, scaling, hiring the right people, finding clients, building pipelines, and meeting corporate goals, I get the opportunity to prove mine every day.”

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R. Gore Bolton The Basics When six-year-old Gore Bolton stepped off the school bus each day, he knew his grandfather would be there to meet him. He knew they’d walk home together, and he knew they’d sit down to examine the large piece of cloth his grandfather had fashioned into a trading board.

The old man had graduated in finance from Yale University in 1915, advanced on to a successful career at the Pentagon as a military officer, and become a skilled entrepreneur and business owner. Now, he was committed to teaching his grandson how to play chess, read the Wall Street Journal, and trade the markets, from futures to penny stocks to blue chips.

“He would stack pennies on each ticker symbol I selected,” Gore remembers now. “The next day, we’d read the prices in the paper and add or remove pennies based on the trades I had made. It was an exercise in financial planning and strategy that went on for several years, cementing the business basics that would sustain me my whole life.” Now the co-founder and CEO of Diversified Advantage Group, Inc. (daGROUP), a firm providing private equity to Main Street businesses to help them reach the next level of success, Gore has built a business around these core principles, setting his sights on revitalizing the economic fiber of American society.

Small businesses are America’s most powerful job creators, yet they have comparatively scant access to capital and expansion opportunities. Gore wanted to change all this, providing avenues for accessing cash and expertise. After launching an engineering consulting firm from scratch and investing in dozens of businesses throughout his career, he has a keen sense of just how expansive the possibilities are, and thrives off of opening these doors for clients. Operating in a climate of baby boomers who want to retire but don’t have a succession plan, paired with millennials who have limited access to capital to fund business ventures, Gore wanted to invest in good, solid businesses while leveraging relationships to cross-pollinate ideas and best practices, helping the middle market thrive to revitalize the very structure of American society.

Since the launch of daGROUP in the beginning of 2015, the firm has invested in eight companies. daGROUP invests in small businesses and startups, especially those with the diversity advantage of being of women, minority, or veteran-owned services companies with existing staff and resources that need a modest investment—generally under $200,000—to take that next step.

The firm is keenly interested in Benefit Corporations and other types of structures that create and strive to reach a higher purpose. “Businesses often reach their limit and then don’t know how to partner, ask for help, or reach across the aisle,” Gore explains. “We’re all about figuring out, what’s next? What needs to happen now to make you successful three months from now? As Economic Development Advisors, we’re able to help these businesses actually identify, implement, and execute approaches garnered from our multi-billion dollar project histories, extensive experience, licenses, and certifications.”

Today, one of daGROUP’s most exciting projects is the Piranha Tank (PiranhaTank.com), a direct competitor to Shark Tank. The series, now in its pilot stages, films and broadcasts live at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “We see this as a sustainability model in business and finance because it’s pushing the triple bottom line value proposition via branding, event planning, and a TV show wrapped into one venture,” Gore explains. Piranha Tank had dozens of applications for only six slots on its first show, and two of the companies that pitched have already received funding. “The goal is to build a network of promotable investors in each community that can build their track record and then facilitate their own deals, reaching into their networks to bring more people to the table,” he says.

“And it establishes daGROUP’s prominence in the conversation of capital, assessing who’s raising, who’s looking, who’s making deals, who’s applying, and how those trends and ideas are evolving.”

In many ways, daGROUP aims to celebrate geographic and cultural uniqueness to help it thrive. It’s founded on the principle that Washington, DC is no

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New York City or Silicon Valley. Rather, it’s a force all its own, with unique needs that provides geographic-specific yet fertile soil for businesses to flourish. Of all people, Gore should know. Born in Washington, DC, and having grown up on a small farm in Maryland, he considers himself “an original DMV.” Gore’s family has always been the kind to be revolutionary. His eighth-great grandfather, Thomas Marshall, had a colonial mansion on the Potomac River called Marshall Hall (www.marshallhall.org/history. html) across from Mount Vernon, and his seven-great grandfather John Dent was a General in the American Revolution, a contemporary of George Washington. “My mother still has letters between Marshall and George Washington, politely sparring over real estate,” Gore laughs. “There is a legend in our family of a letter from Washington describing the lighthouses that were set up along the Potomac to signal a British invasion, and explaining that they didn’t think it was worth it to worry about the Patuxent River because they couldn’t imagine the British marching through the marshy bogs of the Upper Marlboro. Of course, that was the route the British used to succeed in the burning of Washington in 1814.” Several hundred acres of the land remain in the family today, including a small house built in 1752 before America was even a country.

Growing up on the farm as the youngest of four children, Gore remembers an active agricultural lifestyle where he learned early on how to drive tractors and fix machines. His father was also a serial entrepreneur who wielded his talent for business across a number of industries, including excavation and construction, automotive repair, and real estate. His most pervasive venture, however, was the general contracting and earth moving company that would build much of the Beltway and early foundations of Washington, thanks to relationships with Congressmen fostered in an underground Capitol Hill bar that his great uncles ran during Prohibition. Gore’s mother, a very traditional lady with finely-tuned manners and sensibilities, took care of the books while his father ran the businesses. She taught her children etiquette and simple civility, and was the picture of industriousness, always making sure that the laundry was done, the house clean, and dinner ready on time.

As a boy, Gore would help neighbors and family to earn pocket money, but the real work was done on his family’s own farm, where he earned wages for bailing hay, tending chickens, and selling eggs. When he started fifth grade, his father began paying him a dollar a week to move tires at his auto garage. Then, for Christmas when he was in sixth grade, his parents relented to his persis10

tent pleading and got him one of the first home Commodore 64 computers, which came with a dot-matrix printer and Print Shop Deluxe software. He spent the rest of his holiday break pouring through the software manual, teaching himself how to make greeting cards, calendars, and custom book covers. When he returned to school with his new wares, his friends wanted in on the action, and by Valentine’s Day, he had set up a rudimentary business making custom cards for his classmates. His teachers began hiring him to make classroom decorations, and in no time, Gore had taught himself to buy low, sell high, and account for his production costs in his pricing. “I had goals,” he recalls. “I wanted a new bike, and I knew exactly how much I’d need to sell to get it.”

Gore always performed well academically, but he was a troublemaker. He finished assignments quickly and would then look for fun things to do, often distracting other students. Teachers would give him extra assignments or even have him fill in as a substitute teacher when they were absent, just to keep him occupied. Always one to see the opportunity in every situation, he began negotiating deals between teachers’ aides and students looking for advanced notice on quiz and test information, and was soon brokering valuable information. “When the dealings were discovered, thankfully the teachers and administrators saw the creativity, ingenuity, and humor in it,” Gore recalls. Though he was ultimately given the “Ivan Boesky” award for those innovative antics, he quickly learned that one shouldn’t necessarily pursue ways to make money, even if the opportunity is there. “I didn’t want another award like that,” he laughs.

While he was in ninth grade attending boarding school at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, Gore’s beloved grandfather passed away. It was a sad time in his life and he looked for new creative habits to fill the void. It was that winter that he fell in love with all manner of sports and remote controlled airplanes, a hobby that led him to engineering. When he returned to public school, he lettered in varsity football, basketball and track, and still managed to plow through all the math classes available by the time he was 16. He enrolled at the local community college during his junior year, and by the time he graduated from high school, he had already finished his first semester of college. In search of an athletic scholarship that might lead to a future in the NBA, Gore applied far and wide, accumulating a shoebox full of letters from coaches across the country recruiting him to play basketball. During the last week of football season during his senior year of high school, however, Gore suffered an ankle injury he never fully recovered from. “An injury report like that

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

really dings your stock, and a lot of my prospects dried up,” he remembers.

Gore ended up accepting a risky walk-on spot at the University of Maryland to play for Coach Bob Wade.

He enrolled in a summer engineering class and began his tenure on the team, only to be kicked off when Wade was fired two weeks before the summer started. Thanks to his accrued credit, Gore was already considered a sophomore. “I had four years of engineering school to finish and only two years of eligibility left, so I decided to stay put,” he recalls. “But I wouldn’t be kept off the court.

Joining forces with some of the other guys who were cut, we started an intramural team and had a ball clobbering every other team in the league. One fraternity had won the championship every year, and we beat them 96 to 6.”

Meanwhile, Gore worked studiously on his engineering degree—something he likely would have given up if his schedule had been subject to the rigor of playing on the official basketball team. Having cultivated an innate understanding of the built environment through growing up on the farm and observing his father’s construction business, Civil Engineering was a perfect fit, and he got a job early in his college career with the State Highway Administration. During his last semester of engineering school, he was a member of the Chi Epsilon Honor Society and President of the Student Chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers, mastering the art of establishing a work/life balance that accepted wins and losses in stride.

Gore graduated from college in 1993, and by the time he was 26, he had accumulated a multitude of experiences that included work at a small consulting firm in Baltimore, as well as a larger firm. In 1999, he decided to partner with Tony Latham to launch his first LLC, raising $50,000 from local investors to get started. “I went down my list of relationships, and 18 of my top twenty clients decided to come to our new company,” he remembers.

“In hindsight, I was an irrationally-exuberant 26-yearold, and some of those clients were eager to capitalize on that inexperience.”

Gore and Tony had planned to bring on only a couple support staff, but by the end of their first year, they had accumulated so much work that their team had grown to 24 employees. The challenges they faced were fairly common for new business owners, until tragedy struck: Tony was almost killed in a car accident in 2001, transforming Gore’s concept of responsibility and commitment virtually overnight. “He was in a coma,” Gore recounts. “His wife was our CFO, and his father-in-law was our VP of Sales, so they were out of the game. Suddenly, everyone was depending on me

to keep the ship moving and the paychecks coming.

In a small business setting, those moments of disaster, trauma, and organizational upheaval become extremely defining as you decide if you’ll go into hiding or really put your nose to the grindstone. You realize what you stand for, and you show others they can count on you. I worked harder than I had ever worked in my life, and I was surprised at who I had become: a loyal, dedicated, persevering leader who did everything I could to take care of the people depending on me.”

Fortunately, Tony recovered with time, and the team came back stronger than before. Gore went on to launch his first investment LLC, calling all his friends to see who would sign on as a member. They reached out through their network to find people looking to launch new ventures, advance their business, or flip a house, and they started private lending. “We found people tired of a commute who wanted to work locally by starting a roofing business,” he reflects. “We found people who wanted to open a retail store. We trusted them and knew them in their community, so we learned how to use convertible notes and fixed income payments to help them follow their passions.” Through this time, Gore evolved not into a serial entrepreneur, but a parallel entrepreneur. Eager to be engaged in multiple pursuits simultaneously, he would become involved in hundreds of ventures over the years, adding value through his ability to examine deals from a range of perspectives garnered over time and with experience.

By the fall of 2014, Gore and his partners decided to take their impact a step further by pursuing their belief that the small businesses of Main Street deserved access to the same resources and firepower that larger entities enjoy. In daGROUP, they envisioned a partnership firm distinguished by the honed entrepreneurial thinking they bring to the table. “Our partners love that we look at their businesses not just as service providers, but also as business owners,” Gore says. “I’m an engineer by training, and now I see myself as an engineer of businesses, aiming for excellence through establishing the appropriate formula of strategy, finance, business development, and organizational deal making.”

Engineering school didn’t prepare him for the human aspects of management and leadership, nor did Gore’s earlier upbringing. Indeed, his greatest challenge in business has been overcoming the independence deeply ingrained in him during his childhood on the farm, which was reinforced by the engineer’s process of working through problems in a sterile laboratory instead of in the colorful, emotional world of interpersonal connections. But his grandfather and father had a natural emoR. Gore Bolton

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tional intelligence, and Gore cultivated that same strain in his own character—a defining factor that allowed him to lead teams through the inevitable ups and downs of business. “As leaders, we have to manage change through strategic planning,” he says. “Change is inevitable, so you can either be subject to it or part of it. I firmly believe that success is the product of a thousand failures, so it’s important to show your team that a failure does not define you or negate one’s future. In some ways, it’s even wonderful to fail, because success can be the enemy of future success by breeding overconfidence and a skewed perspective of reality.” These impassioned, transformative leadership principles have won Gore a CEO of the Year Award, a SmartCEO Future 50 recognition, a National Innovation Award from Chief Executive Network, and several designations as a Best Firm to Work For. Gore’s leadership also radiates a sense of integrity which stems directly to the influence of his loving wife, Sunny. The pair married in December of 2014, and Gore never ceases to be amazed by her kindness, reliability, and life choices. “She has more integrity than anyone else I’ve ever met,” he remarks. “She’s carried this into her work to reform the largest child development center in the Department of Defense, where our military leaders entrust their children. She poured her heart and soul into that mission, and last year was honored to receive the highest civilian award from the Army at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall. “Considering my grandfather was in the Army, it’s fitting that my wife works to serve the needs of the children of our nation’s heroes,” Gore says. “I get to live with that level of integrity and caring everyday through her, and it definitely creates a standard I carry into the workday.”

In advising young people entering the working

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world today, Gore underscores the advice he would have given himself. “Don’t be afraid to try what you want to try,” he says. “It’s important to do this when you’re young, and to really take ownership of those early successes and failures. Figure out your comfort level, how much of yourself you can invest in something, and whether it makes sense to pivot to a new approach at some point.

Be mindful of your own expectations, and set milestones and goals to assess whether you’re moving in the right direction. Don’t underestimate the power of positive thinking, and envision in your mind’s eye how you want your life to look.”

Beyond that, Gore reminds us that business is a marathon, not a sprint. His professional accomplishments are a testament to the pursuit of perfect form, learning the lessons of longevity to hopefully make the road a little easier for the businesses to come. As a person, he remains committed to mindfulness and continual self-improvement—cognizant that leadership is something that, by definition, is never truly mastered.

“Over the course of my career, the mind-body-spirit connection has been the most influential thing,” he affirms.

“Whether you’re a solo artist, a member of a team, or a leader of your organization, psychological health and awareness are absolutely key to being able to engage effectively in your work and achieve success. This mental agility allows you to pivot in your worst days and make them your best days. It’s what allows you to expand your own limits every day and inspire others to do the same; stretching beyond what you thought was possible or imaginable. From every company I’ve worked with, I’ve come to know that it’s a process to get people to see their own potential. It’s a process well worth the work, and it all starts with the basics.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Christine Bond The Power of Draft One fall afternoon in 2010, as Christine Bond was sitting out on her deck working on the layout of the team that would form the network of her new company, she looked up. Passing overhead was a V-formation of geese headed north for the winter, each bird catching the updraft cascading over the wings of the bird ahead of it to help save strength through the long journey. “I love bike racing, so I understand the power of the draft,” she reflects today. “Leaders can trade off, allowing others to keep advancing the team forward and utilizing the talents of all. You need solid people around you, and you need to position and time your formation and movements in a way that allows everyone to lift each other up.”

That company is now The X-CEL Group, LLC, and Christine serves as its founder, CEO, and Chief Transformation Officer. And as the firm creates updrafts for its client organizations by helping them build their concept, her own success is inextricably bound to the updraft her team provides her, and which she provides to them in return. “For years, I thought I was driven by the goal of simplifying the complex,” she says. “But now I realize that my core ‘why’ is developing trusting, meaningful relationships.

Everything I do is predicated on solid, deep relationships that I trust.”

Christine launched X-CEL, an executive coaching firm that helps organizations set and achieve financial success goals, with the vision of reaching a broad platform by serving corporations as opposed to individual clients. Within two years, her business model expanded to strategic transformation and then naturally extended to financial planning. “I was helping organizations set up these phenomenal five year plans, but when I’d come back to check on their progress later on, I’d find that the plan had become shelf work because the companies didn’t have the money to make them happen,” she explains. “So I decided to get my Series 7 and 66 licenses to be able to go beyond P&Ls for my clients, offering deep skills and understanding of the investment policies and law associated with what I bring to the table.”

With this knowledge, Christine excels at helping mature organizations with between $50 and $100 million in revenue looking to either sell or expand. As they seek capital, develop relationships with banks, and prepare for the changes ahead, she designs and implements strategies for success. Her company and impact is the sum of the close relationships she’s built with other professionals offering complementary skills, allowing each client seamless access to an extensive and sophisticated network of knowledge and expertise.

While her creative professional achievements are remarkable by any measure, their significance is increased tenfold by the reality that Christine was born and raised in a small town in Michigan, 45 minutes North of Detroit—a place that most of her peers never left. Her parents both worked at manufacturing plants, lucky to have jobs in an area with high unemployment. They divorced when she was young, and only later in life would Christine gain a deeper appreciation for the sacrifices her mother made as a single parent, finding ways to send her four children to private school even though she only received $100 a month in child support. “She did the best she could, taught us a strong work ethic, and made sure we had a moral compass,” says Christine.

Faith was an important part of her life growing up, though she wasn’t partial to her father’s evangelical practice of going door-to-door. Her mother sent Christine and her brothers to a Presbyterian Church, but Christine most enjoyed going to Bible study on Sundays with a friend. “My faith has been the one thing that has kept me going and encouraged me through my whole journey,” she says. “It’s been the pillar that gave me incredible courage later in life when I faced my fears or when I wrestled with the challenges of the corporate world.”

Her senior year of high school, the year she spent with her grandmother, was perhaps the best year of her adolescent life. “She was a pretty woman who had a very simple, down-to-earth lifestyle,” says Christine. “She could eat greens, cornbread, and chicken every day of

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the week. She worked at a hospital and always saved her earnings to give to her family. It was a very special time where I got to know her and love her.”

At that point, Christine had no life plans and no roadmap. Thankfully, her basketball coach, Mr. Robinson, saw great things in her and helped her land a scholarship to play basketball at Michigan State University.

Looking for ways to help cover the rest of her tuition, she signed up for the Air Force reserves, dreaming of becoming a firefighter. But when she finished her eight weeks of basic training, she was sent to Colorado to learn the art of food service—something she had absolutely no interest in.

With that, Christine set her mind to starting over, hopping in her car at the age of eighteen and heading to Washington, DC, where one of her brothers lived.

She was foregoing her Reserve obligations as a cook, but at that point, she didn’t care. She got one job at a video store, another at a post office, and a third in the HR department of a wholesaler called Macro. Within a month, she had saved enough to rent a room.

Eighteen months passed before she came to terms with the gravity of what she had done by abandoning her responsibilities with the Reserves. “I was working odd jobs, taking care of myself and getting by, but I was completely foregoing my responsibility to Uncle Sam,” she said. “I was terrified to deal with the consequences, but I knew I needed to.” With that, she decided to report for duty as a cook at Andrews Air Force Base, knowing full well she could be facing jail time.

When she showed up that morning and uttered the words, “Airman Bond reports as ordered,” the Chief Master Sergeant of the base marched her to his office and asked what was going on. She explained that she hadn’t wanted to be a cook and made some stupid choices, but she was here now to deal with the consequences. He could have come down hard, but instead, he invested in her. Thanks to his belief in the strength of her character beneath the bad decision, her jail time was dismissed, and her record was scrubbed clean. Most remarkably, she was ultimately given the opportunity to prove herself as a firefighter as she had always dreamed. At 5’1” and 95 pounds, she had to have special gear purchased for her, but she survived basic training and went on to serve six wonderful years as a reserve firefighter. “That was where my heart was,” she says. “I loved putting my mind to something, having that strong desire, and then making it happen.”

Later, Christine spent eleven years in Business Services for Siemens, which she fondly refers to as the best company she’s ever worked for. As the Director of 14

Product Development, she would handle the sale of new technology management solutions to companies like Koch Industries or Mellon Bank. She completed a master’s degree online, and the role required her to travel the world, which she loved. Eventually, however, she decided she wanted to be home with her daughter. With that, she took a job at Unisys running its Siemens Security Operating Center. She ended up spending as much time on the road as she had in her previous position, eventually opting to move on from there as well.

Christine started work at HP in 2003, serving as a transformation executive responsible for the dynamic implementation of new systems and processes. She excelled in her work as a high-level technical executive, but in 2008, she decided to start rounding out her skill set by taking on a completely new challenge: sales. As a Chief of Staff, she set up a new organization called the Strategic Sales Center, running deals of $100 million or more. She then became an Executive Capture Manager, setting her sights on winning a multi-billion dollar NASA contract that had been held by Lockheed Martin for a full decade. Her efforts were successful, landing the deal and resulting in the largest government contract takeovers in history.

Christine has always been a servant leader, content to work behind the scenes to help others shine. But people had been telling her to start her own business for years, so she decided to give it a shot by starting The XCEL Group on the side, diving headlong into the process of transformation that would lead to a second career that was, for the first time, truly in step with her heart. Meanwhile, at HP, she took on a new role handling an organization’s finances, mastering new skills while developing and operating the organization’s financial management system. “I look back and appreciate every single situation I had in corporate because it really helped me understand how to navigate as a business owner,” she affirms.

“I spent my last three years at HP going through a very painful transformation, but it was necessary, and when I left in 2013, I was fully ready for life as an entrepreneur and small business owner.”

Faced immediately with the need to expand her network with a focus on building local relationships, Christine spent the next six months highly focused on networking. She came to find, however, that she did much better when she instead focused on forming a core group of people she could develop business relationships with. She began networking with a purposeful intention of acquiring a deeper connection to those partners and their business models so she could then engage in warm handoffs when opportune moments arose. “Since

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

discovering this philosophy, I’ve developed great friendships and partnerships that are now the crux of X-CEL,” she says. “Now, X-CEL has garnered so much support and interest that I’ve actually had to put the brakes on my growth to make sure I have the structure in place that can handle so much increased volume.”

Developing close relationships with partners certainly marked a fundamental shift in her approach and identity as an entrepreneur. One of Christine’s most transformational experiences, however, has been her role as a mother. “I never thought I’d have children, but the growth I’ve gone through in raising my daughter has truly been a revelation,” she says. As well, her identity as a global citizen, forged through corporate travel and her yearly mission trips to places like Romania, Israel, and African countries, forms the crux of her worldview. “I’ve had the opportunity to understand people from all over, and I see that prejudice is rooted in ignorance,” she says.

“When you go to a different country and develop deep relationships, you understand why they do what they do, and it really changes your perspective.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Christine stresses the importance of asking as many questions as possible and surrounding yourself with people who are much smarter than you. Abiding by such principles and laying out goals for yourself sets you up for success, whether you’re the young person looking for mentoring or the mentor looking to learn a thing or two about how to stay relevant in a constantly evolving culture. Such has been the relationship between Christine and her mentee, Jamila Corbett, the woman she

took under her wing several years ago. “The process of reverse mentoring is truly incredible, allowing the people involved to learn from each other regardless of age, experience, or creed,” says Christine. “Really, it’s about collaboration, and it feeds into our businesses. I take everything I’m learning and experiencing in life and bake it into X-CEL because I believe my journey is one that can, has, and will provide value to other organizations looking to develop.”

At its essence, X-CEL is a business devoted to change—at times painful, yet absolutely necessary for survival. Drawing on memories of her own periods of gut-wrenching, soul-shaking, spirit-transforming change when she was put out on her own at age sixteen, and again when she left the corporate world behind to start her own business, Christine’s work is dedicated to leading others as they design and embark on the next chapter of their lives and business. “To me, leadership is very much about being able to see and support the potential in others,” she says. “By tapping into the power in the people around you, you can place them on a continuum of growth. And in order to do that, you have to try to know people. That’s why, when I meet a business owner who’s a potential client, I try to know their why. What makes them tick? What keeps them up at night? When I go into the initial sales call, I never bring an agenda. For me, the only agenda is getting to know the other person.

The only agenda is finding that perfect geometry between us—that configuration that allows my draft to lift their business and ease their journey.”

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Donna Boone Embracing the Adversity Though Donna Boone grew up with a pool in her backyard, she was always extremely fearful of the water.

A bad experience with a cold-hearted swim instructor at age seven underscored the apprehension she had always felt—that embracing the water was giving up a sense of control for the cautious, intelligent little girl. It wasn’t until she turned eleven and saw her friends joining swim team that she decided to take the plunge, realizing a natural affinity for swimming that propelled her from last place to champion after just a few short months of practice. As a sport, and as a life philosophy, swimming became a way for Donna to connect, evolve, strengthen, and succeed.

It wasn’t until many decades later, after Donna had founded the Potomac Swim School in Loudon County, Virginia, that she heard her lifelong process put into words. Having launched a successful business teaching children crucial swimming and safety skills, she attracted a number of competitors to the area, who began waging business-to-business cyber bullying against her before the term had even been coined.

“It felt like being hit over the head by twenty baseball bats that wouldn’t stop,” she recalls.

“Competitors were logging hundreds of negative reviews against the company, the water quality, the coaches, the curriculum—anything that might put us out of business.

After calling a host of experts for advice on how to deal with it, I ended up calling my friend, Verne Harnish, on Thanksgiving Day of 2010. He said that, legally, there wasn’t much I could do. The best option, as is often the case, was to embrace the adversity.”

It was an eye-opening conversation for Donna because it gave her the vocabulary to talk about the life philosophy she had adapted early on. From a young age, she had been taught to doubt and discount herself, letting others define who she was based on how they saw her. It created a cycle that led her elementary school teachers to underestimate her, overlooking her when selecting students for the Gifted and Talented Program in fifth grade.

Stung by her elders’ failure to see in her what she knew was there, she began performing better in school, and by

the time she reached seventh grade, the stage was set for a personal revolution.

It was the first day of school, and Donna had been put into Vic Sanniota’s math class. To kick off the course, he addressed the girls in the class, emphasizing that they could actually test just as well, if not better in math and science, than boys. “Don’t ever let anybody tell you that you can’t do something,” he told them. “You can do whatever you want to do, and planning is the key to success, so plan for your future.”

In that moment, Donna’s inherent intelligence dawned on her, and she resolved to never again let someone else dictate the grade she got or the success she achieved.

“I was tired of other people putting me in a box where they wanted me,” she recalls today. “I always wanted to perform the best I could, and though I didn’t fit the mold of what most people thought excellence looked like, I was determined to prove that I was. I began dreaming of becoming the CEO of my own company, and though I never told anyone about it, I never let it go.” By putting faith in God and herself, Donna has since moved through life with an unshakable strength and grace, embracing adversity wholeheartedly and meeting challenges head-on with the conviction that nothing could knock her off course.

It was a foundation that became particularly important through her divorce in 2001, as she considered the next chapter in her life. Two weeks after completing her master’s in education toward the end of 1991, she gave birth to her daughter, Brittany. “You only have your kids once, so I wanted to stay at home through that time to give all I could to my daughter,” she says. During that time, her husband had gone to work selling roofing systems for hospitals, manufacturing facilities, and schools, while Donna handled all the finances and the family’s investments. When they decided to divorce, Donna had considered going back to school to pursue a professional career in psychology or psychiatry. But when a friend suggested she start a swim school, her interest was piqued, and she

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felt herself drawn to the basic building block of life to rebuild her own life.

Since falling in love with the water as a girl, Donna had never strayed far. She had always taught swimming lessons and coached, instructing Brittany’s friends in the water at no charge as they were growing up. The concept of a swim school, however, was foreign to her, so she began researching. The idea had taken root in places like Australia, Texas, California, and Florida, so she began hopping on planes to visit the facilities and hear about their operations. “God had sent me to DC, which had no swim school,” she recalls. “I knew it was an idea that could truly thrive here, so I put together my business plan and began moving forward.”

With that, Donna leased space at Sport and Health, a Tysons Corner health and fitness club, in the fall of 2001, where she began accepting swim students. She drew interest from near and far, and before long, had built up 120 students, the maximum clientele allowed for the time and space. As Donna’s reputation developed, she continued to refine the curriculum while building her own location in Ashburn. She approached landlords and banks, educating them on the concept of a swim school and what her vision could become. The liquid assets from the divorce provided cash for the construction, and when the facility was ready to open in December of 2003, she migrated her business to the new location. 85 percent of her clients from Mclean, Great Falls, Oakton, and Vienna came with her, including hundreds of children from the Loudoun County area, allowing her the great honor of opening her doors with 520 students.

At Potomac Swim School, Donna and her team set to work teaching swim lessons to children from age 2 months to twelve years. Just like Donna, many of their students start off extremely fearful of the water, so the instructors start off slowly, building trust with the children and teaching them how to enjoy the water. Classes are supplemented with safety instruction, preparing them for accidents that might occur around water or in a boat. “We want to take the panic out of any situation that might arise, giving our children the best skills possible to save their lives,” Donna explains. “There are no words to describe the feeling I get when a parent tells me that their child used safety skills they learned here to save their life or someone else’s. At Potomac Swim School, we work for a higher mission than ourselves: drowning prevention and enjoyment of the water.”

Within the first year, Potomac Swim School’s enrollment quickly escalated to 900 students, almost doubling in size. By the third year, it had reached 1,400 students. Then, around 2010, other swim schools started 18

opening in the area—some within only several miles of Donna’s location. The company went through a period of adaptation, especially given the bouts of cyber bullying, but Potomac Swim School was a powerhouse with an impeccable reputation, and it quickly became apparent that nobody was going to put Potomac Swim School out of business. Indeed, with her bubbly personality and affinity for fun, Donna’s tenacious business acumen is easy to underestimate but impossible to topple.

The steel and perseverance in her approach to life was forged from the earliest days of her childhood, growing up in an atmosphere that demanded she take a certain path. Donna always knew without question she was going to attend college—a luxury her parents had missed out on. Both her mother, an accountant, and father, who worked in the HVAC industry, worked very hard to put her through school. Thanks to their tenacity and financial support, Donna was able to graduate without any student loans, and with gratitude that continues to do this day.

Donna was born on Groundhog’s Day in 1966 in High Point, North Carolina, amidst a blizzard so severe that her parents thought they wouldn’t make it to the hospital. “My mother is a very strong, financially savvy woman,” Donna reflects. “My parents had high expectations for me because they knew I had the ability, intelligence and internal motivation to achieve any goal I set for myself.”

Growing up, Donna and the neighborhood kids had the freedom to roam all day long, stopping at home only to grab a sandwich for lunch. Her summer days were filled with mud pies, scavenger hunts, tree climbing, Red Rover, and kick the can, except for Sunday mornings and Sunday and Wednesday evenings, when the whole family attended church. “I can still remember the pastor standing before the congregation at the end of the service, asking people to come up if they wanted to accept Jesus Christ as their Savior,” she recalls. “At eleven years old, I walked down that aisle as if God was leading me, completely at ease, completely believing in the Holy Spirit. It was internally motivated; nobody was telling me it was something I had to do.”

So, too, was Donna’s work ethic. Also at age eleven, she started babysitting and picked up a newspaper route, and has held a job ever since. Whether it was lifeguarding, swim coaching, mowing lawns, or working at PuttPutt Golf and Games, she learned the art of service and quietly assimilated the finer details of business management through her jobs and through observing her mother, father, and many business mentors.

Donna always had the same internal drive to suc-

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

ceed academically, but it was initially overshadowed by the context within which she was forced to operate.

Because finances were tight, her mother made clothes for her three daughters, and she had sown a dress for Donna’s first day of first grade. Not wanting to hurt her mother’s feelings, Donna didn’t tell her mother how the older kids would make fun of her. Each day, she withstood the bullying on her own, cried in the privacy of her room without telling her parents, and got up the next day to return to school and do it all over again. That cycle was eventually broken as Donna grew older and surrounded herself with the kids she shared a genuine mutual affinity with. By the time she got to high school, she had worked her way into advanced placement classes and was wholly focused on her academics, activities, and her goal of attending a top-notch university.

A daddy’s girl at heart, Donna had learned from her father to love music and sports. “We would jam out together in the car, and me being very curious, I would question my parents to death,” she recalls. “We would cheer for North Carolina sports, frequenting football games at Chapel Hill whenever we could.” Donna came to love the school and always knew she would attend college. Knowing attendance at a great university was the surest way to a great future, she set her sights on UNC Chapel Hill.

When Donna got into Chapel Hill, everything seemed to be going just as planned. But in February of her senior year in high school, she began getting headaches every day. Doctors discovered a tumor behind her right eye, embedded within her pituitary gland. Surgery would have been fatal, so medication was her only option, and she was advised never to have children, as it would require her to go off treatment and risk growth of the tumor. “That experience reinforced for me what I’ve always believed, which is that things are going to happen to people, and you just have to get up and keep going,” she says. “I’ve been able to handle anything that’s come my way through God’s strength.”

Through embracing the adversity of her health crisis, Donna remained a laid-back, friendly, competitive, fun teenager, and was given the senior superlative of “Best All Around” when she graduated from high school. Her mother wanted her to major in accounting, but she got a C in her Accounting 101 class at Chapel Hill and decided she was too social to spend her life working 80 hours a week in front of a computer screen. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew it wasn’t going to be that,” she remembers. “I asked myself, what can I do just for the heck of it?”

Donna was phenomenal in math, having aced her

freshman year business calculus class. She decided instead to focus on her weaknesses, majoring in English to help her become a faster reader and stronger writer. She had always loved politics and decided to double-major in political science. She had come to Washington, DC with her parents at the age of eleven years old, and her attention had been most captivated by the energy, beauty and diversity of DC, specifically a distinct moment when they stopped at a streetlight and she looked out the window, noticing an Indian man in traditional Indian dress riding a motorcycle in the adjacent lane. “I fell in love with the city and decided that I’d move here someday,” she recalls. During her freshman year at UNC, she visited the DC area again with her roommate, realizing beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was the right place for her.

It would be a long road, however, from that moment to graduation. Donna was date-raped on two separate occasions in college, both of which she kept to herself. At that time, such crimes were rarely discussed, and the lack of awareness led young women to feel that they were at fault. “I just got up the next day and kept going because I had no idea what to do,” she reflects. “I had never even heard the term ‘date rape’ before, and didn’t know it was a crime. Now, I think it’s important to bring that conversation out into the open and make sure our young people have the tools they need to recognize the danger of these situations and prevent them.”

Despite these setbacks, Donna did well in school and went on to graduate in 1988. True to her word, she hopped in her little red Nissan with everything she owned, feeling God leading her north to the D.C. metropolitan area in much the same way she felt Him lead her down the aisle at the church when she was eleven.

She didn’t know anyone in the area, but she had landed a job at Ferguson Enterprises. Through her senior year, she had interviewed with a whole host of white collar firms, but having learned HVAC from her father growing up, she was drawn to the idea of working in a warehouse and learning about piping and plumbing.

While there, Donna met Tim Boone, and the two were married in 1989. The company didn’t like the idea of having a husband and wife working together in the office, so Donna decided to bow out. She instead took a job at the Special Education School in Fairfax, which served emotionally disturbed adolescents. “I absolutely loved those kids,” she remembers. “They had been through some incredibly difficult, horrific experiences. Maybe one of their parents was in jail for killing the other. Most of them were medicated, and there were a lot of outbursts, but they compelled me to truly take an interest in teaching and education.”

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After working there for a year, Donna took a job at Edison High School in Alexandria and was awarded a full scholarship by George Washington University to get her master’s in education. Then, at age 24, she became pregnant with her daughter, Brittany, and promptly went off her medication. Though she was warned that the tumor could blind or even kill her, it was a risk she was determined to take, and several weeks after she finished her thesis, Brittany was born.

Three months later, Donna waited anxiously at the doctor’s office as her physicians reviewed the MRI scans of her brain to assess how much the tumor had grown.

The looks on their faces made her feel she should brace herself, but nothing could have prepared her for the news they delivered: the tumor was gone. “Why me?” Donna remembers thinking. “I was so grateful to God that I’d be there to raise my daughter.”

Recognizing that she seemed to be the exception to every rule, Donna saw herself within the context of something larger and dedicated herself to a higher mission. And now, through Potomac Swim School, she has the opportunity to connect with children and teach them fundamental skills that will last a lifetime. Her immediate focus is on the local families who trust their children in her care, and the business was voted the “Best of Suburbia” top swim school for the past four years in Posh Seven Magazine, a lifestyle magazine for women. But the school’s legacy of safety, quality, and loving care extend far beyond the local community, where immigrants from all over the world have settled. Many of the Indian, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern families that learn from Donna end up returning to their home countries where swimming and safety skills aren’t taught, bringing vid-

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eos of their children learning to swim at Potomac Swim School. A small business with subtle global reaches, Potomac Swim School has big goals that will continue to unfurl over time.

Donna balances these goals with her philanthropic commitments to causes close to her heart, like the Loudon Abused Women’s Center and Smashing Walnuts, an organization dedicated to child brain cancer research.

And all priorities fall second to her daughter, Brittany.

“She’s grown up into an extremely intelligent, driven, persistent young woman, who’s strong both mentally and physically,” Donna says warmly. “She’s just amazing. Brittany is one of the people I admire the most in the world for her strength, love, and compassion.”

In advising young people like her daughter entering the working world today, Donna underscores the importance of lifelong learning. “Leaders are readers,” she says, echoing a swim school friend. Her own success as a leader comes from her steadfast commitment to service leadership, focusing on making each individual’s day better and meeting each child where they are. She leads by example, always willing to fill in at the front desk or in the pool if an employee is out sick. She keeps herself grounded and focuses on building a positive company culture, never putting herself above anything and never giving up.

“Above all else,” she emphasizes, “know who you are. Don’t forget it, even as others try to override it. Always believe in yourself and your ability to define who you are by embracing adversity. Learn to love the waters of life, even when they get rough, because you know how to swim and how to succeed.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Matthew Buchert Skipping to a Different Beat 18-year-old Matthew Buchert had always thought of himself as a team sport kind of guy. On the way to baseball and basketball practices, he would sometimes stop to tussle on the mats with his friends on the wrestling team, but he never took the sport seriously. That is, until the day the wrestling coach, Dale Egger, suggested he might want to try out. Matt protested, but Dale insisted, so he showed up for practice one day.

Surprisingly, one of the most memorable moments of Matt’s life occurred soon afterward—not when he hit the wrestling mat, but when he picked up the old leather jump rope Dale gave to him.

“You’re always skipping to a different beat,” the coach said. “Practice with this to learn how to get your footwork in rhythm.”

In wrestling, as in business, you have to learn the fundamentals. Over the years, Matt has taken the time to master the basics in both challenges. But in wrestling, as in business, it’s also important to keep the unique moves and signature edge that sets you apart as a competitor, ultimately making or breaking a match. Now the cofounder and CEO of MBL Technologies, an IT consulting firm serving federal and private sector clients in the areas of cyber security and information assurance, Matt has built a successful career and business out of the tenets he learned in wrestling all those years ago. “I realized that, in many ways, wrestling is the most teamoriented sport you could ever be a part of, and a perfect metaphor for business,” he says. “You practice together, strategize together, and sacrifice together, preparing for those few minutes alone on the mat where your skills are put to the test and the rest of the team is counting on you. In those moments, when the heat is on, relying on your training while skipping to your own beat is the only recipe for success.”

In high school, skipping to his own beat often met leveraging his height to take down opponents—a move that often proved successful and only once gave him a broken nose. Today, MBL relies on its price point to win.

It was launched as a virtual company, and now that it employs a team of over fifty, it remains far ahead of the curve

in terms of savings and simplicity. “Of course, it’s hard to get that water cooler talk and share thoughts sometimes,” Matt remarks. “But we have people all along the Eastern Seaboard and into the Midwest, and we’re all connected through technologies we’ve grown from the beginning.”

MBL specializes in security project management, continuous monitoring, privacy, cyber security, cloud computing, operational resilience, and emergency management, offering comprehensive services that address the entire life-cycle of risk management. With projects at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and a number of commercial companies, and its work poised to almost double in the coming months, the firm was recognized in 2013 as Inc. 500’s 76th fastest growing IT services firm, the 27th fastest growing Maryland company, and the 49th fastest growing company in the DC metropolitan area.

A Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business, MBL is a corporate sponsor of the Center for Secure Information Systems at George Mason University. The company’s President, Bryan Laird, specializes in the delivery side of the business, while Matt focuses on facilitation, financial matters and administrative concerns.

Together, they’ve worked to build a quality-of-life culture that promotes a balance between business, family, and personal development. “We want each and every employee to feel that they leave MBL a better, happier, more skillful person than they were when they started,” says Matt. “We have a lot of self-starters, and we invest in allowing people to take risks and try things. Failure’s okay, as long as you learn something from it. With this mentality, I hope our employees always have the sense that they’re part of something bigger.”

Though MBL operates in an urban region, Matt brings a small-town feel to his work, emphasizing relationship-building and trust. He spent the early years of his life in Chicago, but his character underwent its most formative experiences in the nearby suburbs, where his family moved when he was six. The open farmland was

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a playground for the four Buchert children during the day, and they were always home by eight o’clock when dinner was served. “It was a simpler time back then,” he remarks. “But you have to remember that everything’s evolving all the time. You can’t get set in your ways; you have to keep moving.”

Matt’s father, a disciplinarian, was a finance manager at a steel company while also working two other jobs on nights and weekends to support the family. It was an era when people were accustomed to smoking cigarettes at their desks, and Matt hated the smell so much as a child that he resolved he could never work in an office.

His mother was a housewife until she got her first job in 1978, a stint at McDonald’s that meant free cheeseburgers for Matt and his brothers. She advanced in that line of work for a while and then decided to enroll in college to become a legal secretary. From there, she landed a job in a law firm, working her way up to paralegal status. “She was always looking for that next step and never stopped pushing herself to be better,” Matt recalls. “It was a really inspiring thing to watch as a kid.”

Sports were a big part of his life growing up; though his mother always made sure the children did their homework at the kitchen table before going out to play.

A mischievous boy, Matt would explore amidst the construction that always seemed to be going on in his neighborhood, and was often found in tractors or stuck at the top of scaffolding. He made his first buck in fifth grade as a caddy at a nearby country club, earning $7 for each golf bag he carried. Later, he got jobs at fast food chains, movie theaters, and clothing stores. In high school, he began working construction during the day and busing tables in the evenings, saving up enough money to eventually buy his first car. The rest of his earnings were saved for his college years.

Matt’s relatively strict upbringing and studious high school years were shelved once he tasted the freedom and independence of college life. Neither of his parents had gone to college, so higher education was a challenge he would have to undertake alone. With a full class load, an intense rush period for his fraternity, and the pressure of having to work to pay his way through school, Matt quickly found himself going 24/7. His academics suffered to the point that he soon found himself on the verge of failing out. He had to leave the University of Illinois to move back in with his parents and attend junior college, yet when he hit rock bottom, he decided to launch himself skyward again rather than settle into defeat. “I just resolved firmly that I needed to get it together and pull myself out of that situation,” he recalls. “I set my sights on graduating, and everything I did from that mo22

ment on was designed to achieve that mission. I put that mission into achievable steps and wrote out a timeline. It was a defining experience for me because it changed the very chemistry and mechanics of my mind, to the point that I became goal-oriented in all I did.”

Once Matt was back on his feet again, and this time with a discipline and ability he had never known before, he enrolled at the University of Illinois at Chicago to finish his degree in Economics. Graduating into a recession, however, he decided to enlist in the Navy to jumpstart his career. As a combat operations specialist, he learned ship driving, radar monitoring, and navigation. “I absolutely loved my time serving our country,” he says. “It helped me realize that everyone should do something to give back somehow, whether it’s time in the military or time spent volunteering.” Today, Matt continues that tradition of giving back by supporting Habitat for Humanity and wounded veterans through his company, and contributing to Saint Jude’s and Little Sisters of the Poor for his personal interests.

While he was stationed in Yokosuka, Japan, he met the woman he would marry several years later. She was an officer, and once the couple started dating, they decided to transition into civilian life. She had family in Maryland, so they decided to settle down in the Washington, DC area. Matt began consulting for a small company called Business Information Systems (BIS), where he felt an immediate affinity for the small business lifestyle. “I was a small town guy who had run amok in the big city for a while but was ready to come back,” he reflects. “I realized it was important to me to be in a place where everybody knows your name and everyone’s friendly. I also loved the idea of wearing multiple hats and having more responsibility, which really allowed me to develop my skill set. The company encouraged us to grow and develop, so I took as many certification classes as I could through that time.”

When BIS was acquired in 2001 by a larger company called Cyber Systems, Matt began to realize that the dynamic small business edge and intimate environment he had loved so much was fading away in the assimilation. He hoped that, one day down the road, he’d be able to replicate the BIS atmosphere in other work environments he found himself in, and maybe even start his own small business one day. That opportunity came when Matt and his wife decided to launch a government contracting firm. Matt took a job with Landmark Systems and then worked as a database programmer consultant for USDA to help fund the venture.

“When you’re trying to launch a business and work on the side, it can be hard, especially when you don’t get

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

paid for a few months,” he remembers. “We had a child at the time too, which raised the stakes even higher. But the business turned a corner the following May, and it’s turned into something truly great.”

Inspired in part by the success he had helped cultivate through his wife’s firm, Matt first conceived of the idea for MBL in 2005. He and Bryan Laird played around with the idea for several years, finally deciding to take the leap and launch the company in January of 2007. The business wasn’t profitable right away, but Matt had been through this before, so he knew what to expect this time and was able to streamline the whole process.

They won their first contract within three months, and eight months later, they had money in the bank and revenue coming in. “I only wish we had started the company when we first thought of it in 2005, rather than procrastinating for two years,” says Matt.

Despite their positive experience together, Matt and his wife decided to part ways in 2009, around the same time MBL won a large contract. In the dark ages of the wake of the 2008 economic downturn, banks weren’t giving out loans, and it wasn’t a good time to be a startup. The company expanded from 10 to 34 employees, but Matt quickly found that many of his resources were locked up through the legal process of divorce. “My assets were frozen, so I couldn’t finance it,” he remembers.

“It was one of my biggest challenges. I was draining my 401k, and at one point I had the bankruptcy papers ready to go. I definitely lost a lot of sleep through that time period. But I was all-in and hell bent on making it work.”

By skipping to his own beat through those hard times, Matt was able to see the company through to the other side, and MBL was profitable in its first year. In October of 2010, he got his first paycheck from the fledgling company. Around that time, the federal government and

government contracting realms began to shudder amidst sequestration cuts, debt limit crises, and shutdowns, bringing MBL to the brink of layoffs. The company was closed for three weeks without revenue, taking a quartermillion dollar hit. “Thanks to that experience, I always make sure we’re prepared for a rainy day,” Matt says.

“We’re ready for the next government shutdown or the next big contract that requires massive financing. We’re ready for the next 2009.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Matt aims to sooth the misunderstanding and tension that so often arises between older and younger generations. “Millennials are the future protectors of our networks,” he points out. “Let them grow and see what things are like in the industry, and soon enough they’ll come back down. They’re a different breed that operates at an entirely different wavelength, so it’s important to engage. To millennials, I would say it’s important to take chances, find a cause, and be part of something. I had two kids when I started to take big chances in life— don’t wait as long as I did! Have the confidence to embrace the unknown of life, rather than the certainties.”

Through it all, Matt’s motivation and purpose has remained an evolving concept. Now, it’s the strong relationships he shares with his employees and clients, founded on the bedrock of interpersonal communication and trust that’s built up over time. “I love seeing these guys develop, hearing their stories, and watching them grow,” he says. “What gets me out of bed in the morning is the opportunity to help people, giving them an opportunity and letting them run with it. It’s easy to pick someone up if they fail, so I don’t worry too much about trying to control outcomes. At MBL, it’s everyone skipping to their own beat, and the alignment of those beats is the sound of success.”

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Andy Burness Communicating Social Change Looking back on his life, Andy Burness can mark the roads not taken. He knew early on that advocating for causes he cared about would be his calling in one form or another. But it wasn’t clear until well after college that his path would take him to leading one of the nation’s most respected public interest communications firms, where he would do just that.

Earlier, as the sports editor of Duke University’s newspaper, he was named Best Columnist in the Southeast, and passed up an opportunity to interview with the New York Post as he neared graduation. “I was basically told that a successful future in sports writing was mine for the taking, and I imagined my stories one day being featured in Sports Illustrated,” Andy recalls.

“But I ultimately decided not to go through the interview process. I knew I had to be on a different path. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it had something to do with social justice, and I was hoping that I would find it.”

Nor did he take the road that would have led to graduate school in Clinical Psychology, after a college professor singled him out for admission to a highly selective program. Again, Andy made the decision not to apply. He knew that he wanted to make a difference—but on a larger scale.

Sometimes, the roads not taken are determined by a road taken years earlier. Such was the case with Andy when, as a high school junior, he decided to apply to be a foreign exchange student through the American Field Service. “The odds of being selected were basically zero,” he remembers. “I was an OK student trying to get in to this exceptionally competitive program, where one student at most was accepted per high school per year.”

Andy was one of twenty interested students invited to an evening at the high school, where he and the others were vetted by faculty and parents. There, the conversation drifted to how the students might best represent the U.S. abroad, given the context of the ongoing Vietnam War. “It’s a complicated issue given the balance of powers in the world,” Andy said, echoing conversations he had heard at home.

Several days later, the phone rang, and Andy got the news that he was one of two students being nominated by the school. And several weeks later, he was informed that he would be living as an only child with a family in Chile—a country neither Andy nor his parents knew anything about. “It was 1970, and high school kids just didn’t study abroad,” Andy remembers. “It was hard for my mom and dad to let me go away to this country, which was very foreign. What parent wants their high school kid to spend a year five thousand miles away? But they let me go.”

And though he didn’t realize it at the time, it became one of the most defining experiences of his life. “I learned there was a world and language beyond my own,” he recalls. “I went from being a stranger from another land to a family member in every sense. As my Chilean hosts cared for me for a full year—including nursing me through an illness while there—I later supported them when they were dying. It’s fair to say that we grew to love each other.” The relationships with his Chilean parents would be the first of several with mentors, teachers and guides to whom he credits much of his success.

In Rancagua, Chile, Andy experienced a bigger world for the first time—not as a tourist or as a thrillseeking adventurer on a drive-by excursion, but as a young person experiencing a different way of life every day. Rancagua, the hub of the country’s world-leading copper industry, wasn’t poor by global standards, but the empanada vendors and apricot juice salespeople lived far more modestly than Andy had experienced growing up in West Hartford, Connecticut. The Chilean experience reconstituted his priorities, redefined his concept of humanity, and bent the curve of his life’s trajectory toward social change for public good. “That experience changed the way I would see the world,” he says. “From that point onward, I’ve seen myself more as a citizen of the world than as an American, a Jew, a white person, a professional, a male or any other category that defines me narrowly. I’ve tried to embrace different ideas, experiences, and cultures, knowing that at the end of the day, we all

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have similar wishes and aspirations. I came to really understand that all of us—not some of us—should have the same basic ‘givens’ in life.

Today, at the company that bears his name, Andy and his 60-person staff promote causes, not products— giving voice to researchers, innovators, and activists who seek to fight poverty through policy change. Some call for reforms to improve the U.S. health care system or seek to share information about the world’s most advanced malaria vaccine. Others advocate for indigenous people’s rights in the Amazon forests or new research on sustainable crops in Africa. Still others seek to empower Latino youth through access to high-quality, post-secondary education. And a growing movement is making progress against the childhood obesity epidemic in the United States.

When Andy decided to launch his own company in 1986, he knew it would be the sum of his previous professional experience, falling at the intersection of philanthropy, the nonprofit sector, public policy, government, and the media. At that time, the field of Public Interest Communications was virtually unknown, and while his vision was expansive, Andy’s entrepreneurial goals were modest. He wanted to work in a small office setting with a small community around him—peers and young people he could mentor who had the will to do great things. He also wanted to build a business that would allow him to get on one international flight each year to work on projects overseas. Now, three decades later, Burness is the largest company of its kind in the United Sates, and Andy has advised malaria researchers in Malawi, lectured university students in Argentina, and advocated for solutions to combat blindness-causing trachoma in Morocco.

Burness has partnered with some of the biggest names in American philanthropy and the nonprofit world, including leading foundations such as Robert Wood Johnson, Gates, Kellogg, Ford and Rockefeller; respected institutions such as the Aspen Institute and the Brookings Institution; and universities such as Duke, Northwestern, Harvard and Johns Hopkins.

Domestically, Burness has been involved in causes vast and varied, including reforming Medicaid to give more choice to individuals with disabilities. Recognizing that doctors and hospitals play an important but limited role in the overall health of an individual, it has supported a movement to bring diverse voices into the conversation about health improvement. “Health depends on housing, income, educational opportunity, and space to get outside in a community,” Andy points out. “There’s no excuse that where you live—something as seemingly 26

insignificant as your zip code—is more predictive of your health than your genes or your insurance status. If we’re going to improve health in America, it must be through engagement with those who don’t wake up in the morning thinking about their health.”

Burness is involved with a range of other initiatives aimed at social justice in the United States —improving access to dental care for people in Indian Country; showcasing the nation’s best community colleges as models for low-cost, excellent higher education; working with advocates to reduce recidivism by improving the continuity of care for people who cycle in and out of our jails; and recognizing scientists through the Tyler Prize, the “nation’s Nobel” for environmental discovery.

Perhaps what’s most important to Andy is that his company walks its talk. It is regularly named one of the best places to work in the Washington area, most recently by the Washington Post in 2014. “We’re able to run a profitable business that provides a good livelihood for our employees, but that’s not why people come to work in the morning,” Andy says. Despite holding an MBA, Andy insists that running a business was never the main goal. “It’s not first and foremost about money for us,” he says. “It’s the mission that rules, and the work environment we’re able to create. For me, leadership starts and ends with values, but these values can’t be imposed topdown in an organization. They’ve got to come from each employee.” He’s clear that people should be paid fairly, so that compensation issues, to the extent possible, are taken off the table as a distraction to the mission at hand.

A believer in face time, shared credit, and open access to company leadership, he emphasizes proactive and direct communication with his employees and strives to treat employees and clients alike as he would wish to be treated. He believes in a company culture in which people genuinely care about one another, fostering the free-flow of idea-sharing and collaboration that keeps the atmosphere fresh and lively. “I try to make sure people feel free to be themselves in our workplace,” he says. “It should be a kind, fair, and low-stress environment, but we hold ourselves to high performance standards.”

This approach stems directly from his upbringing, mirroring the way his parents applied a set of standards to his academic performance. “I remember coming home from school one day with an 89 on a French test, and saying that I wish the teacher had given me a 90 so that I could get an A,” he recalls. “But my mom said, ‘This is about you.’ My parents expected me to be accountable for my own record, with no excuses or apologies. I came to understand that, whatever happened, it was on me. I saw that the bar was high, and if you’re self-motivated

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

and buy into the mission and vision, you’ll want to reach that bar. And at the end of the day, all you owe is the best you can be. I didn’t necessarily have to get all A’s, but I needed to do my best. I’m very grateful for that message, and today I expect our excellence as a company to flow from each team member owning the quality of their work and being self-motivated.”

It was the experience in Chile and the opportunities that presented themselves at Duke University that shaped his professional ambitions. At Duke, Andy studied under Dr. Samuel DuBois Cook, a distinguished political scientist and a close personal friend of The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Professor Cook, in his own right, went on to become the first Black trustee at Duke, as well as the first Black head of the American Political Science Association and the President of Dillard University in New Orleans. “One could not pay attention in that class and emerge without a commitment to social justice,” Andy remarks. “Though he didn’t proselytize, you felt as if you were in Ebenezer Baptist Church. I was totally taken by his political philosophy, and his teachings about social justice and the ‘beloved community’ remain central to my values. His vision for a good and just humanity is my guide for the issues we take on and the policies we support.”

Through student leadership positions at Duke, he met Terry Sanford, the University’s transformative president. Sanford had served as North Carolina’s Governor from 1961 to 1965 and then assumed leadership of the university in 1969. In that capacity, he worked to calm tensions over the Vietnam War and the 1970 Kent State shootings. Sanford would become a role model and friend of Andy’s, and when Andy graduated in 1974, he landed his first job working for Sanford’s presidential campaign.

Working directly out of the candidate’s home was a heady experience for a just-graduated 21-year-old.

Sanford inspired “outrageous ambitions” in Andy, the willingness to take risks and the vision to push big ideas that played out years later, such as opening his company’s office in Kenya or creating a communications fellowship for minority college advocates in Washington, D.C. But when Sanford’s campaign failed to gain traction, Andy decided to take his ambitions directly to the nation’s capital. Happy to help, Sanford connected him with Elizabeth Hanford, a Sanford political loyalist who was a Federal Trade Commissioner. She immediately connected him with the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was looking for clerks to do entry-level work. Andy laughs, remembering the brutally hot days during that Washington summer and the joy of landing a job—any job.

“Thankfully, they offered me a position on the spot,” he says. “Elizabeth Hanford, the Democrat, went on to marry Bob Dole, the Republican Senator from Kansas and Republican presidential candidate. She too became a Republican Senator and presidential candidate. Who would have predicted that?”

Andy worked for the Intelligence Committee as his “foot in the door” job in Washington before being hired by Richardson Preyer, a progressive North Carolina Congressman who needed someone to handle his Health Subcommittee work. The former federal judge was an honorable, bipartisan, low-key Member of Congress, and Andy spent the next three years learning about the sausage-making of federal policy. He then accepted a position in media and external relations with the President’s Commission on Medical Ethics in the Carter Administration, where he communicated the Commission’s findings on profound ethical questions like the right to die, genetic engineering, and research with human subjects. Working with great minds in philosophy, science, law, and medicine, Andy was generating front-page media content in the nation’s major outlets.

Three years later, Andy accepted a position in media and government relations with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the largest private healthcare philanthropy in the U.S. There, he became well acquainted with the world of private foundations and had the privilege of forming another life-altering relationship—this time with Frank Karel, the nation’s pioneer practitioner of public interest communications. Through senior positions at the Robert Wood Johnson and Rockefeller Foundations, Karel raised the public profile around solutions to homelessness and living with HIV, later becoming the world’s most ardent champion of agricultural research to feed the world’s poor. Andy’s friendship with Frank was both professional and personal, and as much as any in his life, shaped his vision for how he would try to be a leader.

Despite three privileged years at the Foundation in New Jersey working alongside Karel, Andy wanted to return to Washington. Having built a reputation as a successful communications professional in philanthropy and health, he could have landed a solid position in communications at a university-based medical center, but he envisioned a life where he could wake up every morning to the unknown. To what cause would he contribute that day? Which corner of the world might have a project that would be both fascinating and in the interests of people’s health and well-being? For him, the answer was to start the company he runs today.

Since 1989, Andy has enjoyed the partnership and support of his wife Hope Gleicher. The two met when Andy Burness

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she was running an organization called Healthcare for the Homeless in Baltimore, and their professional lives have been aligned ever since with the goal of improving conditions for people in need. “She challenges me to be the best I can be, and her support also comes with constructive criticism and substantive insight that have been really helpful over the years,” he says. He also leans on his wise 20-something children, Alex and Molly, for his world beyond work. They, too, are citizens of the world, engaged in journalism and the health professions, respectively, as channels for living their values.

In advising young people entering the working world today, Andy emphasizes the importance of passion.

“Even if you aren’t quite clear what your ultimate passion is, follow something that moves you,” he says. “It should be self-motivating to the point that you almost feel like you’re on vacation while you’re getting paid. Immerse yourself in the content of what you’re doing to make yourself knowledgeable, and then focus your energy on being the best writer and communicator you can be, regardless of your profession. My mom taught me that.”

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Beyond this, Andy professes the power of openness, and the importance of being flexible with one’s life plan if, indeed, one has a plan in the first place. “Even though the end goals for me were somewhat predictable, there’s a fair amount of gray in the journey,” he says. “If you can be clear about your particular vision for where you want to go, and then be flexible about how you get there, you can ultimately build an exciting and dynamic future for yourself and those you most care about. You can earn a living doing something for the betterment of others.”

Staying true to the vision and the worldview of Dr. Cook, fighting poverty and working on behalf of the world’s have- nots, Andy Burness is about bringing hope and possibility to places where they are scarce. It’s the worldview that human beings should not have miserable and poor lives, and that the quest for equity and justice can be more than a philanthropic pursuit or a personal side project; it can sustain a professional journey as robust, enriching, and fruitful as any other.

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Bobby C. Christian Breaking the Cycle High up in the sacred thin air of the Sandia Mountains in New Mexico, 13-year-old Bobby Christian received the clearest directive of his life. “It was almost audible,” he remembers now, decades later. “I heard the words, “My job in life is to break the cycle.”

Bobby was visiting his Aunt in Albuquerque and had attended a nearby church. During a nighttime worship service with the church’s youth group, the words had come to him at the moment of conversion that would transform the rest of his life. He didn’t fully understand the message at first, but through prayer and contemplation, he came to realize that his mission in life was, in part, to break free from the chains of addiction that had shackled the men in his family for generations. His alcoholic father was the most recent case in a long history of family members who had fallen victim to substance abuse, leading them to unhealthy relationships with spouses and untimely ends. “I believe the Lord put me on this Earth to demonstrate, through my life, that we have the power to end the tragedy of that kind of cycle,” Bobby says today. “We have the power to define our own identities and futures.”

To Bobby, “breaking the cycle” also came to mean transitioning from a scarcity mentality to an abundance mentality. He came to understand that, when measuring life through the lens of worldly possessions and material gain, one never achieves abundance. “That’s because true abundance is about creating healthy, loving relationships,” he says. “As I’ve created a socioeconomic lifestyle that grants access to more resources, I have appreciated those opportunities, but I’ve also come to learn that true abundance is waking up in the morning to a life where you feel happy, connected, and nourished by the positive people around you.”

Now, as the founder and CEO of iMPACT Ventures, LLC, his life mission of “breaking the cycle” has gained even more dimension. After selling his first company and completing a three-year earn-out, Bobby took time to think deeply about his next step. He thought back through his life, realizing that it had been graced time

and again by mentors and helpers who paved the way for his success. “Through the good and bad times in my life, I’ve always had people around me that have somehow pushed me to the next stage of life, helping me overcome obstacles and giving me opportunities I otherwise wouldn’t have had,” he recalls. “I realized I wanted to become that for others. I wanted to take all the mistakes I’ve made through my career and my life and share those lessons learned for the benefit of others, so that they might be able to avoid them in their own lives and businesses.”

In a sense, iMPACT Ventures is about giving businesses the information they need to avoid mistakes of the past and achieve success, in much the same way Bobby learned from the example of his father to avoid mistakes of the past and live a better life. Growing up in a lower middle class household in Falls Church, Virginia, his mother provided consistent support and unconditional love. This juxtaposed sharply with the example set by his father, a tragic figure whose good heart and strong work ethic were obscured by the disease of alcoholism. Bobby’s parents separated when he was nine years old yet held out hope that they’d be able to find a path forward for their family. “Several months later, my mom told us Dad was doing better, and that we were going to try to move on together to a new chapter in our lives,” Bobby says. “I can still remember the day Dad was supposed to come home so we could formalize those goals and begin planning to move out of our apartment and into a new townhouse. But when he showed up, he was completely intoxicated. That was the end of any hope that our family would stay together, and I remember saying to myself, ‘That’s not going to happen to me.’ I made a commitment that I would lead an addiction-free life.”

That commitment planted the seed that would grow into a remarkable strength of character—one that would be tested later in his junior year at JEB Stuart High School by the arrival of a new basketball coach.

The team had lost every single game the previous year, and in the first meeting of the year, the new coach, Ed

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Tiernan, ordered everyone to clean up and wear respectable clothing, including a tie on game day. Of the almost 40 boys at the meeting, only a portion followed the directive and came back the next day. At the second meeting, the coach laid out the grueling trainings they would have to do, prompting more students to drop out. By the time tryouts formally began, he had whittled the team down to only those students most committed to success. “I don’t think half of us knew what the heck was going on,” Bobby laughs. “He taught us that success is the feeling you get when you’ve done everything you can possibly do to achieve a worthwhile goal. According to that definition, the concept of ‘success’ became something within our control—something we were free to define based on what we thought was worthwhile. To this day I am indebted to Ed Tiernan for making me a better person.”

Thanks to this groundbreaking leadership style, the team won 9 of 24 games during Bobby’s junior year.

During Bobby’s senior year, they were 21-5, advancing beyond their district to become regional runner-up. “It’s amazing what you can do with very little talent but a commitment to win,” he muses. “None of us were superstars, but Coach Tiernan came in and taught us that we could achieve success through unparalleled discipline.

We held ourselves to a higher standard than other teams did, and our hard work allowed us to achieve some amazing things. It was truly phenomenal, and taught me that even marginal strategies and tactics executed with passion almost always outpace brilliant strategies executed without it. Ever since, I’ve lived my life believing in the transformative power of hard work.”

Despite his commitments to God and hard work, Bobby was still a troublemaker through his senior year of high school. He would go out drinking with friends, get into fights, and even spend the night in jail from time to time. His mother, desperate for a way to set her son straight, consulted Sam Espinoza, the pastor of Bobby’s Methodist Church who was known for being small in stature but big in personality. One evening, as Bobby sat in his room doing homework, he was shocked when Sam walked in, grabbed him, and threw him on the bed. “I was ready to fight him, but I saw the anger in his eyes,” Bobby recalls. “He ordered me to stop the drinking and straighten up my act immediately, and then walked out. My life is full of those moments when people walk into my life to give me the guidance I need.

I had friends who wound up with bullet wounds or life sentences, but thanks to people like Pastor Espinoza, I am where I am today.”

A wake-up call just as jarring as the pastor’s reprimand came during his freshman year of college at Vir30

ginia Tech, when Bobby’s father had to sit him down and break the news that he couldn’t make his son’s tuition payments. Having worked a paper route at the age of 13 and maintained multiple jobs at once ever since, Bobby was no stranger to hard work, but he hadn’t saved up much from his years of lifeguarding and waiting tables.

Still, he wasn’t deterred. “I walked away from that conversation saying, ‘This is on me now.’ I was going to figure it out. I asked for a thousand-dollar loan from a dear friend’s parents, and I got student loans and Pell grants to cover the rest. I worked double shifts on the weekends, finding a way to pay for my education.”

Although he was more of a right-brain thinker, Bobby had excelled in math and science in high school and decided to pursue mechanical engineering in college at the advice of a friend’s father. The coursework was extremely difficult, and by his third year, he began to consider dropping out. “It was the first time in my life when I truly felt lost,” he recalls. “But through prayer, I realized I needed to just buckle down and finish that degree. At the same time, some friends urged me to join their fraternity, connecting me to athletics, a rewarding social life, and leadership.” As his studies allowed him to cultivate and master a more structured way of thinking that enabled the analysis of complex problems, Bobby went on to become President of the fraternity.

As Bobby prepared to graduate and enter the workforce, a fraternity brother told him about Andersen Consulting, later to become Accenture. Bobby’s engineering degree, paired with his passion for business, made him an ideal candidate for the best management consulting firm in the world, and he landed the job in July of 1991.

Several months later, he married the love of his life and his childhood sweetheart, Patti. The two had met when they were twelve years old, staying best of friends through high school and dating through college. “Patti has always had a lot of confidence and trust that whatever I decide is the right thing to do,” he remarks. “Like my mom, she’s a wonderful and powerful influence in my life. Even after all the years I’ve known her, I can’t say a single bad thing about her. Spiritual, warm, welcoming, and consistent, she’s the perfect balance to my personality, which is more of a roller coaster.”

Through his earlier years, Bobby’s professional life was driven by a desire to prove he could escape his underprivileged roots, compelling him to work long hours and pursue elusive measures of abundance and success.

Seven years into the job, he had moved Patti and their two small children to Chicago and was on track to become a partner, working 80 hours a week and loving the job. It wasn’t until a friend resigned that he paused to really as-

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

sess what his future would look like if he maintained the status quo. “I realized I wanted to be able to control my own calendar and dictate my own terms,” Bobby remembers. “I wanted a better work/family balance. With that, I decided to pursue an entrepreneurial opportunity with Netrex Secure Solutions, a Midwest company headquartered just outside of Detroit, Michigan.”

Despite a lack of experience, Bobby was appointed the East Coast Regional Director and began growing the business in the DC Metro area. He was part of the management team, allowing him a front row seat to the decisions and strategies of the CEO and COO. Tasked with creating a national service model for the $7 million company, Bobby and a former Accenture colleague were instrumental in helping the company grow tremendously over an 18-month period. The company was acquired, and Bobby was surprised to find that he had been awarded stock options when he was originally hired at Netrex.

“It was my first taste of equity,” he explains.

In 2000, as the now-public company began scaling back its services division to focus on its product offerings, Bobby decided to launch a services company to fill that widening gap in the market. With that, he partnered with the best salesman and techie he knew, forming his first company, True North Solutions. “We had a great run,” he remembers. “After being a sponge for 18 months at Netrex learning from incredible mentors, we each funded the business to start the company that would serve a need created by Netrex’s shifting focus. From the very first quarter, we were profitable.”

Bobby and his partners grew the company to $35 million over four years. They went from a team of three to a force of 120, and from one location to eight around the country. “It was a fantasy dream run that I would do over and over again if I could,” he muses. “We created an organizational chart and filled it with the names of people we wanted to work with, setting our sights on bringing in those ideal people to create an ideal company. We gave our employees an extremely entrepreneurial environment, such that many of them went on to be Presidents and CEOs of their own companies. It culminated in my first liquidity event, and when I woke up the next day, I realized I was still the same person. You think everything is going to be different after that, but it’s not.

You’re still the same person—you just have a little more money in the bank and a lot more experience on which to base future business decisions.”

True North was bought by AMERICAN SYSTEMS, and Bobby agreed to stay on for three years. Six months into that time period, the CEO passed away and was replaced by Bill Hoover, a man who epitomized lead

ership in such a resonant manner that Bobby decided to stay on an extra year after his earn-out was up. Then, after leaving AMERICAN SYSTEMS and taking time to pray about his next move, the vision for iMPACT Ventures came to him in the form of a triangle. He saw three roles through which he could help companies achieve their goals: one as an active participant, one as a passive objective observer, and one as a board member. Through these approaches, he envisioned investing himself in companies the way others had invested in him throughout the years. He saw his life’s goal etched in the company’s name—an acronym that affirms, “I Make Peoples’ Aspirations Come True.”

Through iMPACT Ventures, Bobby gets down in the trenches with CEOs and executives by becoming an executive management team member. With a focus on growth strategies, he’s not satisfied unless he’s helping a company grow at 30 percent a year or more. This approach is influenced by the work he does through his nonprofit, Unsung Heroes, which traverses into the darkest regions of South Africa to support individuals doing incredible work to build their communities. For over a decade, Bobby has taken frequent ministry trips to the country, providing these remarkable heroes with mentoring, management skills, and money, otherwise known as the M-cubed approach created by the Founder and CEO, Ted Carr. “The Unsung Heroes ministry is at the center of the triangle that led me to launch iMPACT Ventures,” he explains. “Through these experiences, I came to view mentoring as an extremely deep relationship and commitment. You accomplish things armin-arm, experiencing the setbacks and successes right alongside the people you’re mentoring. I have a heart for people that want to build companies with real meaning behind them, so I look for those opportunities everyday through my company, and I join them side-by-side in those efforts.”

Bobby officially launched iMPACT in 2008, offering his services for either a retainer fee or equity. So far, he’s seen two separate companies through entire life cycles. In both instances, he transformed scarcity to abundance, starting with nothing more than ideas scrawled across a sheet of paper during a lunch meeting. The first company went from $0 to $30 million, and the second went from $0 million to $25 million. “I get so much energy from having that kind of impact and creating that growth platform,” he remarks. “It absolutely thrills me to go into a business with great people and a great model, providing that element of leadership that takes it to the next level.”

Beyond these successes, Bobby has invested in Bobby C. Christian

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eight additional companies—businesses chosen because he believes in the people, the model, and the mission.

He’s also testing a new model as the CEO of WATERFALL SOFTWARE, a venture he shifted the focus of and is now in the process of taking in a new direction. The idea is to personally mentor each and every employee he hires, beginning with their first day on the job. “My goal is to build a team of 25 people who come without a lot of experience, but with tremendous entrepreneurial drive,” Bobby explains. “They’ll use that drive to build the experience, and will then go out in the world to become great leaders with positive impacts elsewhere in society, breaking the cycle of failure or poverty or addiction in their own way.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Bobby points out that most people spend more time brushing their teeth than they spend thinking about their passions in life. “Spend more time thinking about what makes you tick, and less time thinking about other things,” he encourages. “I find that young people today are more willing to pursue meaning and fulfillment over financial gain, and that’s a good thing. Once

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you find your mission and passion in life, everything else becomes easy, because you’re willing to do whatever it takes to get there. You have to pursue meaning over a paycheck in order for things to fall into place.”

This formula for success has been reinforced by the grounding support and love of his mother and wife, and by the countless individuals who appeared in his life just when he least expected them but most needed them. It’s reinforced by the memory of a tough kid, no stranger to street fights and jail cells, who finally got enough sense knocked into him to leave one life behind so that a new one could take root. And it’s reinforced by the flag that was flown at his father’s funeral, which came too early because of an addiction he couldn’t break. “The flag reminds me that we all have our struggles—the things we can and cannot control in life,” Bobby says. “It reminds me to be thankful for what I have, and for the opportunity just to live. I don’t know why I was born into this life, but I feel as though I’ve lived the joy and excitement of a hundred lifetimes. It reminds me that success isn’t about where you start, it’s about where you finish—and the cycles you break in the process.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Pete Coughlin The After-Action Review “Pete Coughlin, you are an Ironman!”

The year was 2014, and Pete had just endured his fifth and final attempt at crossing the finish line after a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a 26.2-mile run.

“When I came out of the military, I was used to walking 25 miles with 50 pounds on my back,” he recalls today. “I thought I was invincible. Then I started doing triathlons with my wife, who is now a four-time Ironman finisher.

When I started, I thought, what’s the big deal?”

During his first attempt, the swim went well.

During the bike ride, however, the heat began getting to him. Seven miles into the run, he was toast. “My body shut down,” he says. “The experience really made me step back and reassess my selfconcept and approach.”

At that point, Pete engaged in a practice that had led him to success time and again through his years in service: the afteraction review. He reflected on his preparations, assessing what he had done right and what he could have done better. “The military teaches you to do after-action reviews to learn from your mistakes and reinforce your successes,” he explains. “I had gotten out of the habit of doing them, but I realized I could apply that mentality to everything I do, personally and professionally.”

It was this methodical, committed, reflective process that ultimately compelled Pete to victory, and the announcer’s proclamation that day in 2014 was one of the most rewarding accomplishments of his life. Now, he brings that same grit and determination to his work as cofounder and Managing Partner of PiperCoughlin, LLC (PiCo), a Veterans Affairs (VA) verified Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business serving U.S. government defense, intelligence, and civilian customers.

Pete met his partner, Duane Piper, in 2006 at SAIC, a large government services and IT support company headquartered in Tysons Corner, Virginia. The two had different backgrounds and experiences that allowed them to work well together, complementing each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Duane left SAIC to take a job with GDIT and then with Silverback7 in 2010, where he

recommended they bring Pete onboard. Pete accepted the position, and together, they helped grow the firm’s intelligence and analytics work, transforming the company from a small to mid-sized business.

Toward the end of 2013, over lunch, Pete and Duane got to talking about the possibilities. They had achieved success for companies big and small, so why not try venturing out on their own? “I had always thought about doing it,” says Pete. “We wanted to take what we had learned across the various business contexts and see if we could be successful doing it for ourselves.”

The idea lay dormant for a while, but periodically resurfaced, and Pete and Duane began fleshing it out on napkins when they’d meet to talk. Momentum grew, and by September of 2014, they were ready to pull the plug. While Duane finished the year out at Silverback, Pete focused on putting the pieces in place, and in January of 2015, PiCo became operational in earnest.

Today, PiCo specializes in the core competencies of multidisciplinary intelligence analytical support, financial integrity services, security support services, and program support services for Department of Defense and federal customers. With a developed and mature business operating platform, the firm is always on the lookout for the new tools and technologies it needs to stay viable and grow. “Duane has built a very strong back office support infrastructure, and with adequate financial resources, we’re well-positioned for success,” says Pete.

“But timing and opportunity are key in the contracting world, so we do all we can to maximize that.”

In leading PiCo, Pete brings a tried-and-true approach that revolves around common sense, hard work, discipline, and a commitment to do the job right—qualities he’s honed since he was born at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where his father was serving in the Army. His mother was firm, fair, and caring, and his father was a patriotic, stern, and ethical man. Both believed there was a right way and a wrong way to do things. They had high expectations for their children, which were instrumental in shaping them into the people they are today.

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When his father retired from military service, the Coughlin family settled in Montgomery, Alabama.

Growing up, Pete’s family savored the conversation around the table during family meals and the fun of getting together to watch a TV show on Friday nights. They weren’t rich by any means, but they had what they needed, and the kids got that one present they really wanted for Christmas. The parents modeled a strong work ethic, and the kids were expected to work around the house.

Pete also spent grueling summers mowing lawns and doing plumbing and HVAC for a mechanical engineering company. “I still remember the unbearable heat of doing that kind of work in Alabama in the summer,” he says.

“As the smallest guy on the team, I’d have to crawl up in the attic to fix things. For $2.25 an hour, I’d carry pipe up staircases all day on a hospital remodeling project, and I’d come home so tired I’d pass out immediately. I knew I didn’t want to be doing it for the rest of my life.”

While his parents never pushed any certain future on their kids, Pete knew they were expected to finish high school, attend college, get a job, and move out. After high school, Pete enrolled at the University of Alabama with dreams of becoming an eye surgeon. He had ploughed through three years of Latin in high school to prepare for the medical field, but he was ill-prepared for the fun and freedom of college, and his grades suffered from all the distractions. “It was a sacrifice for my parents to put me through college, and I still remember how bad it felt when they saw my grades after my freshman year,” Pete recalls. “The university put me on academic probation and told me to take a semester off. I knew I had to turn things around.”

Pete went back to work for the dreaded mechanical engineering company during his time off, underscoring the importance of buckling down and exercising discipline. He would never be a straight-A student, but he knew how to work hard, and his diploma would be a product of that conviction. On the lookout for every opportunity to boost his GPA, he and his roommate enrolled in an ROTC leadership class as an elective during their sophomore year—a decision that would change the course of his life forever.

As the semester neared its end, Pete’s instructor, Captain Alsup, invited him and his roommate to attend a ROTC camp for the summer. He had no intention of going into the military at that point, but he and his roommate liked the idea of getting paid to go to Kentucky together for the summer. “It wasn’t at all what we thought it would be,” he laughs now. “We were on different planes, and I didn’t even see Adam until we had been there for a week. By that time, our heads were shaved.”

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When the camp ended, Captain Alsup asked Pete if he was ready to sign up for military service. “I ran out of his office and went straight home,” Pete recalls. “Then I started thinking. My freshman year career assessment said I might be good in the military, and I knew my parents would be proud that I’d have a job when I got out of school. The next day, I went back and signed the papers.”

Pete was commissioned in 1984 and went into active duty in May of 1985. He began his career in the Army as an infantry officer with the 82nd Airborne Division. It was during that period that he met Leah, the sister-inlaw of a lieutenant in his company. After a dinner date by the bay in Mobile and an exciting evening together at the greyhound track, she had taken his heart. Within a year, they were married.

Soon thereafter, Pete re-branched into military intelligence with a concentration in counterintelligence. He asked to be sent to Korea at a time when forecasted danger in the region was compelling many to seek other assignments. As fate would have it, Desert Shield launched just after assignments had been made, so everyone assigned to Europe and Germany wanted to be rerouted.

Eager to serve in the regions of greatest needs, Pete asked to switch, but he was locked into Korea.

Pete then returned to Fort Bragg to serve another four years as an intelligence officer, followed by a threeyear stint in Tampa at the United States Special Operations Command. He spent the next two years in the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, and then spent a year overseas as the Commander of a Counterintelligence detachment in Kuwait.

When he returned from overseas, Pete spent four years working as the Director of Security for the White House Military Office, where he managed a comprehensive security program in support of the DOD officials traveling in support of the President. He and his wife liked the Washington Metropolitan area, so Pete decided to retire as a Lieutenant Colonel in 2006. “By the time we moved here in 2002, my kids had been in four different schools in a five-year span,” he recalls. “I think they’re more social and adaptive because of it, but we were ready to lay down some roots.”

Reflecting back on his 21-year career in the military, Pete was given every assignment he ever wanted, and he contributes his success to the quality of the noncommissioned officers working for him. He connected with these officers deeply and genuinely, to the extent that in every assignment, an enlisted soldier would ask if he, too, had ever been enlisted. “To me, that was a huge compliment,” he reflects. “Soldiers often feel that officers don’t care about them, so I was honored that they found

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

me relatable and engaged. I truly cared for the men and women serving their country and working under my command.” His attitude and poise, which he attributes to his father, set him apart as a leader who felt responsible for his team and deeply invested in each individual team member’s success.

With this trademark approach to leadership and work, Pete envisioned a natural transition into a corporate environment that would allow him to continue supporting national security interests and our men and women in uniform. Drawing on his military intelligence and counterintelligence background, Pete accepted a job with SAIC managing Army programs in support of the Intelligence Community. But at first, the sailing was hardly smooth. “Making my start in the corporate world was like being a Second Lieutenant in the Army all over again,” he says. “I knew nothing about their processes or acronyms, and I wasn’t getting much guidance. I was nearing the end of my rope, trying to decide if I should tough it out or move on to something else.”

Fortunately, Pete got a call from a fast-paced division manager who didn’t have the time of day for people unless they were on his team. To Pete’s surprise, he offered him a program management job, where he flourished for the next two years supporting large intelligence contracts. He was promoted to division manager, where he worked happily for another couple of years before receiving the call from Duane Piper to join Silverback7, a training and exercise development company. “I hadn’t planned to leave SAIC,” he says. “I was comfortable in that skin—not necessarily happy, but content. If Duane hadn’t reached out, I probably would have worked there another 20 years and retired.”

At Silverback, Pete served as the VP for Analytics and was charged with growing the intelligence division.

“I could do business development, but my passion was the people-side of the house and delivering the product in a quality manner,” he recalls. “Over the next year, we grew the division from a 13-employee, $2 million venture to over 100 employees and $16 million in annual revenue.” He then made the leap to PiCo, where the future remains to be written.

Through it all, Leah’s love and support have been critical ingredients in Pete’s success. She was fully behind him in the launching of PiCo, and Pete finds himself constantly in awe of her vigor and strength. “She had the toughest job I can imagine, raising two kids when I couldn’t be around much,” he says. “She’s the most disciplined person I know, and I’m so appreciative of everything she’s brought into my life. I wouldn’t have had the Ironman on my bucket list if it wasn’t for her. I’m incredibly proud of all she’s done.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Pete underscores the importance of genuine connection and interaction despite the constant pressure to be on our phones. He also encourages balance between hard work and quality of life, recognizing that relationships and health are important to maintain along the journey to success. Above all, his example is a testament to his unshakable character, and to those periodic after-action reviews that serve as stepping stones along the way. “Leah and I talk sometimes about how we never thought we’d be where we are today,” he says. “Back in Alabama, I had no idea what I wanted to do. Yet somehow we’ve arrived here, successful and grateful and looking toward the future.”

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Tony Crescenzo No Playbook As a young Marine, Tony Crescenzo served in some of the world’s most unnerving landscapes, but combat zones in the Middle East were nothing compared to the independent duty station in Trenton, New Jersey, where he was presented with a choice. The gunnery sergeant he worked for offered him a way to make fast, easy money through embezzlement, creating false ID cards and cashing checks. “There’s no playbook for that kind of situation,” he recalls today. “I had to feel my way through it, and I figured I had three options. I could throw in. I could do nothing. Or, I could do the right thing.”

The next morning, Tony hopped in his car and drove to the Naval Investigative Service station in Philadelphia to report the incident. A battalion commander put him on undercover duty to gather intelligence on the questionable activity going on at the station—a fortuitous decision, as Tony was soon approached by a sergeant in a motor transport pool who had witnessed marines using cocaine. When Tony began following that thread, it led deep: ten marines were smuggling drugs into Warminster Naval Air Station from Panama. When the Marine Corps ultimately brought the individuals to justice and asked Tony to testify against them, he felt his life was in danger. And to make matters worse, the Marine Corps failed to transfer him out of the station. It had been a tight-knit group, and the Marines that hadn’t been implicated in the smuggling ring avenged their busted brothers by making Tony pay.

Through that period, Tony was hit with a number of false or ill-intentioned charges, including a courtmartial for being twenty minutes late to work. In search of reprieve, he wrote letters to the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps, the Commandant, and his Congressman, but heard nothing back. “I was completely alone,” he remembers. “So I just kept my head down and kept at it, doing what I thought was right.” Finally, his Congressman intervened, and the Marine Corps agreed to transfer him anywhere in the world he wanted to go. Disillusioned almost to the point of giving up, he asked to be transferred home.

Tony spent the next eight months at a station in Garden City, New York, as an isolated counterintelligence marine stripped of his security clearances and stuck doing filing. But his nature kept him going, and his reputation and name were exonerated when the Commandant of the Marine Corps finally walked through the doors of the drab facility with a medal, a certificate of commendation, and four-page apology letter to Tony’s mother.

“That marked my get-out-of-jail free card,” he says. “My court-martial was overturned. My file was updated. My assessments confirmed unlimited potential. I could do anything I wanted at that point, so I went back to my counterintelligence duties. The whole experience taught me not to quit. If you stay on track and do the right thing, eventually things will work out. Maybe not today, or next week, or next year, but they will.”

Now the President and CEO of IntelliDyne, an enterprise infrastructure management company serving critical missions of the federal government, Tony continues to measure his success in the moments where he stays semper fidelus— always faithful—to his ideals and integrity. Many times throughout his career, both in the service and later in the private sector, he has paused in difficult situations to ask himself what one of his mentors or role models would do. And now, he recognizes himself as that person for others, helping them to understand their moral compass and use it toward successful navigation. “This is more than a job to me,” he says. “It’s a vocation. It’s about being the kind of guy people think of in difficult situations and ask themselves, ‘What would Tony do?’ It’s about pulling people up the mountain to new heights, so they can in turn reach behind them and pull up someone else.”

A mid-tier company that holds no special competitive designations but runs entirely on might and craft, IntelliDyne is symbolized by the pirate flag. “We’re too big to be small and too small to be big, so we’re the guys you need to look out for,” Tony says with a smile. “As our tagline reads, we want our clients to experience above and beyond.” That commitment extends to the experience

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of the firm’s employees as well. When federal government funding authorizations expired in 2013 to cause a several-week shutdown, Tony developed an IntelliDyne program to allow executives and employees to donate 2,000 hours of vacation time to prevent loss of wages for new employees under furlough. The innovative solution was picked up by the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, the Washington Post, and the Washington Business Journal, demonstrating the kind of synergy that can be created when a company cares enough about its employees to put skin in the game. “We wouldn’t take no for an answer, and we wouldn’t settle for what everyone else was doing,” he remembers. “It was one of my proudest moments.”

Such strategizing for the common good is almost a Crescenzo family tradition. Indeed, Tony grew up watching his father and grandfather respond to any and every personal request for help that came their way. When his grandfather stumbled across a man who had cut his wrists in an alley during the Depression, he took him home and set him on a better path, creating a lifelong friendship. “If someone brought a problem to my grandfather, he was the kind of guy who would find a way to solve it, no matter what,” says Tony.

Tony’s grandfather had come to America from Italy at a young age and was raised on his family’s farm in South Jersey, which he hated so much that he ran away to Philadelphia at age 17 to learn how to be a mechanic. The automobile was still a rare commodity at the time, but his enterprising spirit set the stage for his family’s success for generations to come. In October of 1929, he decided to finally buy his own car, so he withdrew all the money from his bank account. The next day, the stock market crashed and the banks closed. He decided to instead invest the funds in real estate, buying two city blocks of commercial real estate to start his own business. It was so successful that he retired at 45, handed the business off to Tony’s father, and came full-circle by purchasing a farm, where Tony would spend weekends throughout his own childhood. He also helped out at the shop, cleaning tools for his father, uncles, and cousins. “They were always incredible mechanics and visionary people,” Tony says. “My father told me it was lucky I was smart, because if I had to make a living with my hands, I’d starve. He knew being a mechanic was never in the cards for me.”

Tony’s parents divorced when he was five years old, but the big Italian family absorbed the ripple and remained tight-knit. His mother remarried a Navy Commander, and they moved with Tony to Beltsville, Maryland in 1972 while his stepfather attended Naval Postgraduate School for a year. They then spent four years in Hawaii, followed by several years in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. He was of38

ten the youngest in his class, and his smart mouth and constant moving around landed him in plenty of fights.

“I didn’t really mind it,” he recalls. “Moving from place to place, you learn how to get along with people, fit in, be independent, and keep your own counsel.”

Tony would return to South Philadelphia in the summers to work in his father’s shop until the summer after his junior year of high school, when he landed a job as a mountain guide on Mount Washington in New Hampshire. It was the beginning of a lifelong passion. “I came to realize that, if you concentrate on the summit, you fail,” he explains. “But if you watch your feet and just stay at it, eventually you look up one day and you’re at the top.” It’s a mindset that would guide him to the helm of companies and industries later in life.

Around that time, Tony’s mother and stepfather retired to Scotland, giving him the opportunity to stay with his father and spend his senior year of high school in his hometown. And in ending grade school where he had begun it, he came to see himself in a new light.

Though he clocked in at only 135 pounds, he earned a starting spot on the school’s football team because he was the kind of kid who saw things through, no matter what was coming at him. “Even back then, I felt like I was 42 years old, and I think other people could see that in the way I carried myself,” he reflects. “I’ve always been the guy driving things, both in business and beyond.”

Tony’s intensity carried him forward to Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, where he took up fencing and was the Under-19 National Champion in sabre in the 1979 Pan American Games. “I would drive everyone crazy, practicing ten hours a day whenever I got the chance,” he remembers. “When I get my teeth into something, it’s hard to get out of it. I always wanted to be the guy that drives the ship and pushes the envelope, whether that meant working full-time while I was in college, or testing myself through long-distance running.” His was always the mindset of a Marine, and it would find its path forward one evening when Tony took a wrong turn on the way to a Jack Welch lecture. He ran into a Marine Officer recruiting table, and though he had always planned to become a history professor, he couldn’t resist the challenge set before him.

The Marine Corps training program consisted of an eight-week torture session at Quantico during the summer after his sophomore and another the following summer. The rigorous emotional, physical, and intellectual challenges were designed to weed out those unfit for Marine Corps leadership, but Tony withstood the grit and grind. “When I finished, I knew that’s where I wanted to be,” he recalls. “I wanted to be doing hard things

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

in hard places. I wanted to be putting my energy toward challenging myself.”

In all, Tony spent eight years in the Marine Corps, traveling all over the world and working in cities like Rome, Paris, London, Hong Kong, and Mexico City.

Then, in 1987, he was recruited out to work as a Director at Trecom Business Systems, a new Wall Street firm founded by Frank Casagrande, Russ Powell, and Manny Arturo. “They were the smartest, craziest people I had ever met,” says Tony. “They taught me that there’s a whole other dimension to life beyond the eight-hour workday.”

Two short years later, they sold the firm for $160 million, and Tony joined a small startup in the Washington, DC area doing education and consulting on the AG products he had learned in the Marines. He was then recruited over to Software AG Federal by Dave Eaves, the Managing Director at the time. “We were complete opposites in every way,” Tony recalls. “I was a young, skinny, irreverent, loud-mouthed kid from South Philly, and he was this big, introverted, religious Texan. But we were a great team. When he left the company, I wrote to him thanking him for being such a good mentor to me. Two weeks later, he called saying he thought I was the one mentoring him. It was a match made in heaven.”

Tony served as COO at Software AG for three years and then worked another three years internationally, helping to open the Asia Pacific Region and turn around failing divisions. As part of their Global Services Counsel, he started working on technology intersection and then left to help a friend launch and sell a company before it even opened its doors. Thus marked Tony’s involvement in a series of startups, and his first job as CEO at age 33. “People would say I was pretty young to be a CEO, but I’d tell them that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at age 33, so what’s the problem?” he laughs. He was running Inline Software at the time, a venture-backed company putting out the first model-driven development technology for Java. But the dotcom blowup rendered the business an abysmal failure—something Tony’s Marine mind couldn’t wrap itself around until it was too late. “The one thing they never taught us in the Marine Corps was how to retreat,” he says. “I couldn’t see that we were never going to have a working model. I ultimately lost a lot of money and got walked out of the company. It was just awful, but I never learned more than I did through that experience. It completely changed the way I look at business, showing me that even a moderate success can actually be a failure.”

Tony went on to serve as the President and CEO of Illumitek, and then took a position as Vice President at Initiate Systems, a Chicago-based company looking to

open a federal division. In that capacity, he worked on master data management in the healthcare sector, pushing software that could disambiguate a patient’s identity even if their name or social security number was entered into the system wrong. Three years later, he took a job as the COO of IMTS, an 8(a) in West Virginia, where he sought to apply this technology in the defense and intelligence spaces to disambiguate identities of targets in the Middle East. He got funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture fund, and built the technology to find people who didn’t want to be found. The technology was used to build an application called the Law Enforcement Information Exchange for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and was later used to capture, implement, and win an FBI program, Index.

Business was booming for IMTS until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Faced the need to reframe the company, Tony hired Achievence LLC, a management consulting firm. He hit it off so well with the firm’s partners that, when he was ready to make his next move after five years at IMTS, he sought their advice. A week later, he was a partner at Achievence, where he consulted with CEOs and Boards on strategy. In 2009, he began work on a strategy for IntelliDyne. When Tony tired of being an “outside guy,” drawing up robust plans for companies that often failed to implement them, he decided to get back in the game and landed there as COO. “IntelliDyne’s CEO was looking for someone who had real passion for the business,” Tony reflects. “He could see that in me, and in June of 2013, I transitioned into the CEO role.”

Shortly afterward, Tony married Kim, a brilliant and driven woman who has allowed him to fully flourish into his full potential. Kim graduated second in her class at Virginia Tech, earned her MBA from William and Mary, and got her masters in Environmental Science from Johns Hopkins. After a successful career working for Accenture, Booze Allen Hamilton, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, she decided to follow her heart and transition over to The Nature Conservancy. And now, even as she works long days saving the world, she is the perfect sounding board and support system for Tony. “She’s smarter than me, even though she’d never say that,” he laughs. “She’s just awesome.”

Today, IntelliDyne has a team of 260 employees concentrated in the national capital region, and with offices in Aurora, San Antonio, San Diego, and Chicago to best support its clients. They support the Justice Department in prosecuting antitrust violators. They run the Defense Health Agency, ensuring that active duty military get the quality healthcare they need and deserve. They Tony Crescenzo

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support the technology used to run background checks for airline passengers. And because so many veterans work for the company, its philanthropic focus is on giving back to the veteran community, with highlights including launching a website chronicling 365 acts of kindness for veterans, and the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors. “We work for the government and citizens of the United States,” Tony affirms. “We run data centers, enterprise operations, application development, and security and network operations. But at the end of the day, we provide a good night’s sleep to our clients. We strive to be the company you don’t have to think about, and the company who can always be trusted to act in the best interest of the client. Our job is not to write code or make sure the network is up and running—rather, it’s to make sure your mission gets accomplished.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Tony highlights that definitive moment on a person’s first day of work, when they’re handed a list of tasks to execute. As their career goes on, they’ll be given more responsibility, longer task lists, raises, and promotions. One day, they may find themselves a CEO. Will they have the will, the perspective and the character to be the list-writer? “At the end of the day, I do what I do because it’s in my nature to lead,” he says. “It’s in my DNA,

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as it was for my father and grandfather, who were leaders their entire lives—in business, in the community, and in our family. Leadership is a completely different mindset from management, which is more about the minimization of deviation from a plan. It’s a hard job, but leadership is about figuring out what that plan is, and getting others to believe in it so much that they’re willing to take it as their own.

“The real work of business isn’t done by grinding away eight hours a day in an office,” he continues. “It’s done by creative people thinking outside the box and making it up as they go. That’s where the fun stuff happens. That’s going beyond execution to see the big picture. But it’s hard. Everyone wants to sit in the CEO office, until they get there and close the door and realize there’s nobody else around. There’s no playbook. You make it up as you go. And hopefully, you carry a moral compass with you that always points in the right direction. When you’re the top decision maker, you live in gray—there’s almost never a clear right or wrong. Having a strong compass means understanding what North really means to you. There are no absolutes in life, but as long as you’ve defined what your own absolutes are—what you will and won’t do—you’ll find your way.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Jennifer V. Dalton Finding Your Voice Actors will tell you that the challenge of performing William Shakespeare is an all-engrossing art that demands the allegiance of both body and mind.

Through careful articulation of sound, vowel, and consonant, one reaches and conveys the content and life of the words and story, bringing poetic form and powerful expression to the audience. This, as fourteen-year-old Jennifer Dalton came to realize, is what it feels like to find your voice.

Shakespeare was one of Jen’s favorite authors, so when the Community Play House in Augusta, Georgia, put out a call to audition for its production of Romeo and Juliet, she answered. The lines and feel came naturally to her, and even though she had never acted before, she landed a speaking part as Romeo’s mother. “It was just four lines, but it was a big deal for me at the time,” she remembers today. Her performance drew the attention of the drama teacher at the nearby fine arts high school, who encouraged her to transfer over from the public school she was attending. Thus began a passion for theater, and as she became more and more adept at finding the voices of her characters, she grew more and more connected to her own.

Now the founder and CEO of BrandMirror, a branding and reputation strategy firm, Jen helps individuals and businesses find their own voice, amplify their message, and make good on their promise.

“Whether I’m working with CEOs, or college graduates, or people going through career transition, it’s my job to ask, what is it you want to say?” she affirms. “We all have a voice, and my goal is to help each person learn how to use it with as much clarity, relevance, and impact as possible.”

Jen formally incorporated BrandMirror on April 27, 2012, on her son’s birthday, so that when she graduated from her executive MBA program a few short weeks later, she was ready to hit the ground running.

The company’s tagline reads, “your promise delivered,” and she has since focused on helping individuals and companies define and convey their unique purpose and

value. “I believe everyone has a purpose,” she affirms.

“We are more than cogs in machines, and we all have a responsibility to figure out what our gifts and talents are to best leverage them. It’s about having clarity about who you are and what you want to achieve so that you can live an authentic, intentional life.”

Financially speaking, such clarity pays off in spades because it allows businesses and individuals to stand out amongst competitors and peers, identifying the unique promise they can deliver and the value they bring to clients, employees, and the community. Whether she’s working with a golf instructor, a bank CEO who’s never had a social media account before, or the leadership team of a company preparing to launch a new product, she helps achieve relevance by cutting through the noise to truly shape the conversation. “Everybody’s out there saying something,” she describes. “The challenge is, ‘are you saying something valuable in your own words, and in a way that your audience will care?’

We achieve thought leadership through knowing what we want to say and then owning it with intentionality and authenticity.”

Sixty percent of her time is spent with individual clients, identifying key things they want to be known for and formulating those words into the story they were meant to tell. Drawing on her experiences in theater growing up, she helps them understand their audience and how best to convey value. The rest of her workday is dedicated to companies who might want to rebrand the reputation of their leadership team, allowing others to better make emotional connections with the faces or products of the company. “Branding is about identification, and trust, and how people describe you when you’re not in the room,” Jen explains.

“What’s the personal experience of the customer? Are they getting your promise of value? If you’re hired, are you actually delivering on that promise? I help companies clarify that promise, and then ensure they have the processes, policies, communications, and marketing to consistently deliver, thereby building reputation.”

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After helping clients find their voice so they can talk their talk, Jen then ensures they have the clarity and capacity to walk their walk. “If you want to influence the market and show a certain customer segment that you care about something, you can’t just write a check to a certain charity,” she insists. “You have to be out there, showing up, leading the way, and actually adding value. Oftentimes it’s hard for people to talk about their purpose because it forces them to be declarative, but the more you say ‘this is what we stand for,’ the more you can connect with your customers emotionally. There’s more foundation on which a relationship can be built.

There’s more room to go big, and live on the cutting edge, and really lead the next discussion or influence the next conversation in a given industry.”

Jen was pushing the envelope from the very moment she was born, entering the world a full two-anda-half months early. “I came out on my own terms,” she laughs. Her parents moved from Florida to Georgia when she was a year old, where they pursued their entrepreneurial drive by opening a shoe store in Augusta. Her father, an extroverted salesman, was a perfect match for her mother, who focused more on maintaining the store’s books and product stocks. They had worked in a shoe store in Florida and operated a store with Jen’s grandparents, earning a positive reputation and later offering to open a location in Augusta mall.

They later left the mall to open a 7,000-square-foot location and offer more choice to their customers, which they still run today.

As an only child, Jen grew up in a very adult world, and called her parents by their first name until she was five. The small family unit of three developed a strong bond, so that today, Jen’s parents are among her best friends. As a child, she would accompany them everywhere, from shoe shows to fancy restaurants, and when she was eight, she began helping out her mother in the store’s stockroom. “I learned an incredible work ethic from her, which has been absolutely essential to success,” she says. “At dinner, we would all talk about employee issues and other things going on with the business. I watched them gauge the market, choose stock, and set prices. Mom and I would really get in the zone, working full days non-stop. At the end of the day, I’d write down how much we made in cash and charge cards to let my parents know if it had been a good day or a bad day. I saw them open a store in Charleston and then have to close it because of damage from a hurricane. A lot of what I’ve learned about management and values comes directly from them.”

Other aspects of her character developed along 42

with the muscle and might she built through rowing, a sport she picked up in eighth grade. Beginning in a single, she became an avid racer, eventually moving on to a double with her friend, Maura Bailey. The girls hired a coach, trained mercilessly, beat all the local challengers, and picked up a habit of traveling in search of competition. Once they won the high school nationals competition in Delaware, they set their sights on making the junior national team. Up to that point, Jen’s success was founded in economy of movement, but she eventually hit a wall because she wasn’t as tall as other rowers. Undeterred, she decided to switch to coxing, placing her in the stern of the boat to coordinate the power and rhythm of the rowers. With that position came new responsibility and a new perspective on life and work. “My job was to help make each person in that boat be the best they could be, “she explains. “I was a good coxswain because I had been a rower, so I knew what the rowers were going through. I had been in their shoes and knew what was going through their mind, so I wasn’t just barking orders. I learned you’re a much more effective leader when you’ve been in the trenches yourself.”

The junior nationals race was held in Munich, and though Jen found one door closed for her due to her height, she found another open as she realized there was a whole world out there. She had college on her mind, and she began to consider schools that had academic programs and rowing programs of equal caliber— schools like Harvard, Princeton, and Georgetown. At different points in time, she envisioned her future taking different forks. She wanted to be an astronaut and went to space camp twice and also held ambitions to be president. As well, musical theater inspired in her a love of theater so strong that she told her father she was going to become an actor. By that time, however, she had gained admittance to Georgetown, and she compromised by agreeing to get her business degree first.

Jen never did pursue acting professionally, though she auditioned for American Idol in 2005. “It wasn’t about winning,” she reflects. “It was about being gutsy, which is my life mantra. I always want to go big or go home. If there’s an opportunity, I’m going to go for it.

You’ve got to take those risks and chances in life. Long odds have never scared me—actually; they empower me and make me want to prove them wrong.” It’s a philosophy that drives her to excel with her clients today, focusing on their “superpower”—that one word that reflects who they are and gives them clarity for how they make decisions.

Though Jen didn’t come to identify her own

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

superpower word—gutsy—until later in life, its influences shows through around the edges of her choice to attend Georgetown. Globally-minded, the school’s elite ranking was matched with an atmosphere that immediately felt like home to Jen. She had loved growing up in Augusta, but the prejudiced undertones permeating her community were disheartening. “I remember a time in middle school, when I was touring with our church choir,” she reflects. “We stopped at church in Annapolis with a predominantly black congregation, and several of the families had arranged to host us for the night.

Most of the choir members wouldn’t do it, refusing to accept the hospitality simply because these nice families were black. I was shocked and heartbroken that people could be so trapped in the past.” It was then that Jen decided she wanted to get out of the south. Once she left Georgia, she never looked back.

Her horizon expanded even further during her junior year of college, when she studied abroad in Vienna. It quickly earned a place in her heart as her favorite city in the world, allowing her to see her home country with new eyes as she incorporated the perspectives of the many people she came to call friends. “Talking to people from Austria, Turkey, Georgia, Germany, Slovakia, and all over, I saw new and great things about America, but also things we can work to fix,” she remarks. “It was the first global perspective I had gotten, and an opportunity to learn about world history that wasn’t U.S.-centric. I visited the Republic of Georgia as well, where I met the former head of the Georgian KGB and witnessed firsthand a former Soviet Union country.

It was a totally different world.”

When Jen graduated from Georgetown, she thought she might go into international business, but instead landed a job as a frontline manager at Capital One Bank in Richmond, Virginia. Managing a team of 24 people at the age of 22 had its challenges, especially when her counterpart was a 60-year-old gentleman who wasn’t readily able to see a young college graduate as an equal. Still, as Jen learned the subtle nuance of integrating into a workforce, the two developed a mutual respect.

Jen advanced from production, to payment processing, to embossing, but she had her sights set on breaking into the marketing space. She also dreamed of moving to Northern Virginia, where she often visited her boyfriend, Jerrod. Both goals were realized when he asked her to marry him and she landed a job on a Capital One marketing team in McLean. She spent the next several years taking the lead on developing marketing materials, doing customer segmentation, building di

rect mail and telemarketing campaigns, and working as a product manager. She was then promoted to Chief of Staff, which challenged her to run a team and steer its communication and culture, and then to Director, where she took on more of a strategic role. “That’s when I transitioned from being a doer to being a leader,” she reflects. “I had a team of product managers reporting to me, all of whom I’m still friends with to this day. It was a great company that truly shaped and molded me as a leader and thinker.”

As she approached her ten-year anniversary with Capital One, however, she decided it was time to step back and get her bearings. She had had a good run, but she knew it was time to move on to something else, and she resolved to make that move with serious reflection and intentionality. “I realized I didn’t want to work in the corporate chain anymore,” she remembers. “I wanted to go do my own thing. I knew I was here for a reason, and I wanted to get really clear on what that was.”

Through that transitionary period, and all through her career, Jerrod has remained a true rock and invaluable sounding board, never once holding her back. “He has a quiet intelligence and strength,” she says. “He thinks so differently than I do, and that’s one of the things I love most about him.”

Jen gave birth to her second son, Logan, and did some marketing for a Children’s Media Company while spending time with the baby and her first son, Wyatt.

Having majored in International Management and HR in college, Jen knew she wanted to work with people and companies to make a difference, and she had realized later in life a true love of learning that compelled her to return to school. With that, she landed a spot in Georgetown’s Executive MBA program, embarking on a journey that became so much more than learning business finances and general management. It marked one of the greatest turning points of her life—the moment she truly took control of her destiny and embraced the “gutsy” superpower.

In many ways, the executive MBA program resembled her experience in Vienna, designed to open her mind and expose her to global thinking beyond the day-to-day. The program entailed international residencies in India and Turkey, where she opted to spend four months working with entrepreneurs and small business owners. “I realized my strong passion for working with people who were trying to break into a new market,” she says. “I’d help them assess every single aspect of their business, and I then put this to work in a business planning residency, which entailed a venture capitalist pitch competition. My team didn’t necessarily have the top Jennifer V. Dalton

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students in the class, but we were the best-functioning team, and I learned how valuable that can be. We took the time to walk through every piece of the project as if we were really going to launch it. We did hardcore market research, got the numbers, talked to partners, put together our story, and actually won the competition, landing two offers of actual investment.”

Though the program’s students were brilliant, Jen noticed that many of them didn’t know how to present their story and skills as they looked to pivot into a new role post-graduation. She knew she wanted to pursue an entrepreneurial career in marketing and strategy, but the work she began doing to help her own classmates sparked her interest in personal branding. “My classmates had invested all this time and money in pivoting, but they didn’t know how to show other people what they were capable of,” she reflects. “They didn’t know how to build credibility or tell their story. That’s when I started researching personal branding, and I just fell in love with it.”

BrandMirror has since built up credibility and reputation of its own, with a story to tell that inspires even those who are most disillusioned by their workplaces. The company was nominated for a Small Business of the Year Award in Loudon County, and Jen has plans to grow it into a small tour de force. She complements this work as the Vice Chair of Homestretch, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering homeless families in Virginia to find their own voices and purpose through achieving stability and self-sufficiency. The organization signs two-year contracts with homeless families, wherein they provide housing, credit counseling, job training, employment placement, or scholarship as-

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sistance, in exchange for a genuine commitment to succeeding. The accompanying Kidstretch program provides childcare for adults as they work to develop the skills they need to land a job, helping adults address the root causes of homelessness. The program has a proven success rate, with 90 percent of its families escaping the cycle of poverty within the two-year program. “The stories these families have to tell are mind blowing, and I find it extremely rewarding that every dollar that goes in acts as a springboard for these families to become self-sustaining citizens again,” Jen remarks.

In advising young people entering the working world today, Jen stresses the importance of thinking bigger. Daring to reach means diverting one’s path from the ordinary to the extraordinary and rendering the farfetched achievable. Keeping one’s eyes on the horizon in this manner should be matched with a self-awareness and diplomacy that allows one to meld gracefully into a workplace dynamic. “Respect the people that are there and remember that everyone has value to add,” she says.

“Figure out what you love to do, what reputation you want to build, and why.”

A respectful nature and diplomatic demeanor are nothing, however, without a voice and a vocation. “The clients I’ve enjoyed working with the most, and the people in life who really inspire me, are those who are truly impact-driven,” Jen affirms. “They might need help articulating it, or honing in on the strategy behind it, but they all have that hunger to go out and do something.

They’re lit with that internal fire. Hearkening back to my days performing Shakespeare, it’s never a question of, ‘To be or not to be?’ It’s always about, how to be—as clearly, authentically, and intentionally as possible.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Gordon Davidson Every Experience Counts Over the years, Gordon Davidson’s style of entrepreneurship has deepened, integrating with his spiritual development path so the two are one and the same. A business is a monument to be built, and he finds his bricks in the integrity of his team, the values of his clients, and the lessons of his past. His faith, memories, and aspirations become the building blocks, allowing him to serve society and God with a commitment and drive that far surpass the empty vigor garnered solely by monetary incentive. “To me, success is more than prosperity—it’s the whole process of building something,” Gordon affirms. “Every experience counts toward this end. You can learn from everything that happens, and in that sense, there are no negative experiences.”

While life has no negative experiences, it does have negative space that can, for better or worse, shape its subject. “You can try to run away from adversity, but it’ll catch up with you,” Gordon says. “It’s better to face it. The question is, how?”

He first asked himself this question when he was eighteen and his mother’s health was suddenly thrown into a state of emergency. Thankfully, his life up to that point had been blessed, forming a strong foundation. “I’m so grateful to have been born into a solid middle class American family,” he says. “Like all families, it wasn’t perfect, but my parents had very high standards for themselves and everyone around them, which taught me that character and integrity matter.” If someone needed a hand, Gordon’s parents always offered help. As the youngest of three brothers, he grew up learning from the core values of the people around him through his childhood. “I was a bit of a rebel for a while,” he admits. “But I was inculcated with this value system that really enabled me to discern right from wrong.”

These values became crucial when his mother’s health crisis hit, causing such distress to his father that both parents became incapacitated. Suddenly, Gordon became the glue holding together the family as it dealt with grief and financial distress. He chose to take the challenge head on and stay off the streets, focusing on

his family and continuing to excel at sports during high school. His high school basketball coach, Jim McDicken, inspired him to stay focused and positive, but the ordeal lasted far beyond graduation. For the next six years he would become the main caretaker of the family, a weight that crushed what would have been the carefree days of his college years. Instead, Gordon found himself struggling through his biology major at school while living in a condemned house, warming Campbell’s soup for dinner on a hot plate. He dropped out of classes twice to make some money at the paper mills, just trying to regain some footing. “Life can be difficult—sometimes exceptionally so,” he states, “but it is the difficulties that prepare you for your career, because business is not easy either.”

While other people might have walked away, Gordon stayed, finding in himself a core strength he didn’t know he had. “Nothing prepares you for those kinds of hardships, but I resolved I had to step up and deal with them,” he reflects. “Through that exceptionally trying period, I came to God sometimes, but not often. We had been a churchgoing family, and my father had always had a quiet faith, but he wasn’t demonstrative about it. My mother, on the other hand, never went anywhere without her Bible. She knew it backwards and forwards and prayed all the time with a faith so sincere that she was always trying to help people in need. She even helped start a church. I grew up in that environment, but I walked away from it for a while. I can certainly be very strongwilled, and there were times I thought I was the captain of my own destiny.”

When the relentless hardship subsided and his parents began to regain their health, Gordon finished college and then spent a year getting them settled before heading to Duke University to earn his graduate degree in environmental management. There, he did well and began to prepare himself as a professional. He spent several years working on cleanup sites before being contacted by an engineering firm to lead a turn-around. “I had no experience in turning around a business, but I jumped in head-

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first anyway,” he recounts. “It turned out successfully and helped lay the groundwork for becoming an entrepreneur. It was hard and I learned many lessons.”

From there, Gordon was recruited by the EPA to take on an unprecedented challenge. Congress had passed a law requiring federal agencies to clean up their sites under EPA oversight. The Agency formed a new enforcement program and selected Gordon to build it from scratch, and he became one of the youngest people in its history to serve in the Senior Executive Service. “Taking on the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy nuclear weapons complex was a daunting task, but the law was clear,” reflects Gordon, “so we forged ahead to get these mega-sites cleaned up.” Over the next five years, Gordon’s program negotiated cleanup agreements at over 200 of the biggest sites, resulting in cleanup budgets exceeding $6 billion per year. As Director of the federal facility program he also led a U.S, delegation to NATO to negotiate an agreement on radioactive releases from former Soviet Union sites, and he worked on several pieces of environmental legislation, including testifying before Congress. “Holding such a position at EPA was a huge honor,” says Gordon. “It gave me an inside look from an executive level of how the government works.”

Gordon viewed building the EPA program as an entrepreneurial experience, and once his skills were developed, he turned his attention back to the private sector. He left EPA to form Capital Environmental as a management consulting firm in concert with the mega-law firm Howrey & Simon. “We were profitable our first year, and I assembled a great team,” he says. “The position gave me direct contact with Fortune 100 companies at the C level and allowed me to learn the consulting and legal business areas.”

By all counts, life was good, though in retrospect Gordon can identify that he was largely ignoring the persistent tug of God in his life through those years. “I knew the Bible, prayed, and was sincere sometimes, but I wasn’t integrated fully into a spiritual life at that point,” he reflects.

One day, Gordon received a call from an old friend and former colleague at EPA. “Some days you just never know what may happen, so be ready for anything,” Gordon says, remembering that day with a smile. “My friend and I were working on similar assignments, and we recognized that there was a business opportunity for resolving disputes regarding environmental liabilities worth hundreds of millions.” As a result of that conversation, Gordon went on to be cofounder of IES Corporation.

“We had an amazing run at IES,” says Gordon. “Everything just came together, and, the bottom line was that 46

we created a whole new market. The key was the ability to price the risk and package it in a way that made sense for our clients, the Fortune 100, and the insurance carriers to settle rather than litigate. We bet on our ability to do deals, and over several years our settlements exceeded $3 billion. “ To Gordon, though, it wasn’t just the financial success that was important to him—it was also his relationship to his partners and how they as a group ran the business. “We established a business model where two things were paramount,” Gordon observes. “One was consensus decision making, and the other was dealing with internal issues right away in the context of honesty and love. I attribute much of our success to these two things. We were constantly on a high wire with no net so we had to be on it every day. In spite of this stress we always came together with full consensus decisions and issues never festered.”

Having reached a point where business with their major corporations was winding down, Gordon felt the time was ripe to take a break and do some travelling. He took off for Bosnia, and from there explored Croatia, Turkey, the West Bank and Palestinian parts of Israel, and Egypt, all the while speaking with locals and enriching his world view every step of the way. He came home with a much deeper understanding of the Muslim world and the perspectives held by its inhabitants.

By the time he completed his geographic venturing, he had gathered knowledge and experience from far and wide, but nothing could have prepared him for the ultimate journey that lay just ahead. Indeed, it was around that time that his decade-long sense of spiritual emptiness reached a fever pitch. “That spiritual vacuum reached such great proportions that, even though I looked like a prosperous American businessman from the outside, I was challenged on the inside,” he says. “Finally, on July 9, 2007, I got down on my knees and resolved to give my life to Jesus Christ fully. It was the start of the most important part of my life.”

Soon thereafter, Gordon began a descent into the deepest, darkest valley he had ever known. Mentally, emotionally, and physically, he remained there for seven years. His health, finances, job, and relationships all deteriorated, but he never once let go of Jesus’s robe.

“Some time into that experience, I realized I was amidst a spiritual development process,” Gordon explains. “It dawned on me that this was on purpose, so I decided to go with it. I dove deeper into my faith, and I got the sense that Jesus was separating me from certain things in my life and building my character so I’d be ready for the big plans he had in store. There was very little space

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

between Him and me, and that’s exactly where I wanted to be. I think of it as a training camp that changed everything—my life, my views, my thought processes, and my spiritual connection with Christ. It was by far the most difficult period of my life, but it was also the most important—a building process.”

As the pressure lessened, Gordon was connected to Terje Skotheim, one of the world leaders in infrared technology. “I knew that the world was moving towards measuring and detecting everything,” says Gordon, “and infrared technology was going to be in the forefront— in other words, a cornerstone of the Internet of Things.”

Gordon spent time with Terje, and they decided to come together and form Lightsense Technology. “Our technologies and IP portfolio were breaking new ground,” Gordon observed, “and we felt that the business opportunity was very significant.” The opportunity also provided Gordon with another entrepreneurial challenge—one he was eager for. “To me, an entrepreneurial experience involves three things: creativity, impact, and reward,” says Gordon. “Lightsense offered all three.”

There was also another aspect of Lightsense that was important to Gordon in both a personal and spiritual way. “There is no downside to application of our technologies,” he says. “Our technologies conserve energy, detect and control pollution, and improve a person’s health. It’s rare, I think, to find a business opportunity where there is such benefit to humanity and the planet.

For this opportunity, I give the credit to God. My job is just to continue following Him.” In advising young people entering the working world today, Gordon underscores the importance of

business basics, especially in a tough employment climate. “Work hard, meet your commitments, expand your network, and always treat people with compassion, integrity, honesty, and character,” he advises. “Remember that every person on this planet has their own set of challenges, and that we’re all figuring it out. Persevere even when you have a hard day, even when you’re down and out, and even when an opportunity disappears right in front of you. You have to just keep moving forward, so it becomes really important to be grounded in something beyond yourself that can keep things in perspective.”

Beyond this, Gordon’s example demonstrates the empowerment and peace that comes from leading a holistic life that breaks down the barriers that so often segment a person’s lived experience. Indeed, for Gordon, entrepreneurialism and spirituality are one in the same.

“My faith has deepened over time, to the point that I no longer see it as something separate from my work,” he explains. “When you build a business, you learn so much about yourself and others. This folds into my faith as a Christian. I bring a lot to the table in terms of tough, raw professional experience, and I can use it to help others.

Even more, I can use it to build a better future for people like my two wonderful daughters. In these ways, prosperity is intertwined with a spiritual development that’s very important to me.”

“To me, Lightsense is a confluence,” he continues.

“It’s the coming together of an ultimate entrepreneurial challenge, great products, and wide open markets, all against a backdrop of sustainability and making things better. This is where God wants me to be, and I’m blessed to be following this path that seems to only lead up.”

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Paul Dinte Go for it Mate!

The television in the living room of the Dinte family looked like any other piece of outdated household technology, commonplace and unremarkable. Yet it was young Paul Dinte’s only portal to the rest of the world, and to him, it was sacred. Growing up in Sydney, Australia, was like coming of age a million miles away from the rest of the world, but the English television programs caught by the antenna flooded the room with stories, inspiring Paul to one day live out his own narrative of adventure. “From the earliest age, I yearned to go see the rest of the world,” he remembers today. “I dreamed of getting out there, meeting people, hearing their stories, and becoming a global citizen.”

The sentiment stood in stark contrast to the traditions of his close-knit family, which had never seen a Dinte leave Sydney to pursue a life elsewhere. Yet he grew up in a culture permeated with encouragement, love, and support, in which young people were taught to take chances and pursue their dreams. “From a very early age, my father filled my head with the idea that you only have one life, so you have to go for it,” he says. “If you can create, engage, or bring value by starting a business, you should throw all you have into it.

He said that, whether my passion fell in dry cleaning or coffee cup manufacturing or whatever, I should just give it a go and give it my best shot. That’s been my lifelong philosophy ever since.”

Uninhibited by fear, Paul ventured far from home, crossing oceans and creating new connections on every continent. He found the love of his life, boldly followed his passions from one country to the next, cultivated a life of joy and success from the roots of entrepreneurship, and remains deeply engaged in the meaningful work of raising three children. And now, as the founder and CEO of Dinte Executive Search and the global chairman of IIC Partners, Paul walks the walk and lives the dream of global leadership, thriving as the conduit that connects people and possibilities to create new stories and successes worldwide.

Founded in December of 1993 in Washington,

D.C., Dinte Executive Search has mastered the art of executive search through taking a team-based approach to its work. When a prospective senior executive candidate comes in to interview, the meeting will often include three colleagues with varying levels of experience who will then bounce ideas and insights off of one another to generate a robust picture of the individual and the possible match with the opportunity at hand. “At Dinte, everyone has a voice,” Paul avows. “We operate through discussion and debate. Some of the most innovative and impactful ideas come from the youngest members of our team, so it’s important to harness the knowledge of all. In some work environments, conventional wisdom says young people don’t have the experience to be able to make valuable contributions. But we’ve found that nothing could be further from the truth. We encourage all associates to unleash their voices, and have implemented some extremely innovative and successful programs that came from the ideas of young people.”

Paul’s entrepreneurial insights come from a lifetime of observing his own family members, who have strong entrepreneurial legacies of their own. His father’s father, an engineer, started an aluminum foundry in Sydney during the Great Depression.

His father, the only son of four children, pursued engineering as well and joined the family business, as did two of Paul’s three brothers and two of his nephews. Likewise, his mother’s father was a watchmaker and jeweler who owned his own shop.

While the men worked in these family businesses, Paul’s mother was the person who made it all happen, reinforcing the Dinte values of hard work and striving for greatness. “She made our home a sanctuary—a safe, fun place to be,” he remembers. “She gave us the security and confidence that we could do anything we wanted to do in our lives. Together, our parents gave us the upbringing, family, community, education, experience, and tools for success.”

Paul owes much of his financial savvy to his father, who began giving him an allowance of a dollar each week

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when he was in fourth grade. At that time, schools in Australia operated Savings Banks, where children could learn about saving through making deposits into their own accounts and marking their progress in a passbook.

Then, once a month, each account’s interest would be calculated. Paul’s father told him he could spend 50 cents of each dollar, but he had to save the other 50 cents, and as the young boy complied, he watched the sum in his account grow.

Because education in Australia is free, Paul and his family didn’t have to worry about the cost of college.

Upon graduating from high school, he enrolled in a university close to home, as is the custom there. He worked at his father’s office after classes, cleaning the office, locker rooms, and floors. He also worked Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings in his maternal grandfather’s jewelry shop. After selling jewelry, gifts, and watches at the store, he often accompanied his grandmother home and would tell her about the dates he had been on recently. “I would say the girl wasn’t for me,” Paul recalls. “She would say, ‘Now Paul, you must remember, every cup has a saucer. Just because someone isn’t right for you, doesn’t mean they’re not right for someone else.’ That’s a philosophy that I apply all the time today in executive search. A prospective candidate might not be right for one position, but they’ll be right for a different opportunity.

When Paul graduated from university, with a degree in Accounting, Finance, and Information Systems, he received offers to join several Big 8 accounting firms, ultimately accepting a position in KPMG’s Sydney office because they promised that once he qualified as a Chartered Accountant, they would send him to their London office for two years. “Money and title were no object to me,” he explains. “All I wanted was the chance to see the world I had admired through the TV screen for so long.”

True to their word, KPMG transferred Paul to its London office three years later, giving him four months of travel time before he began work in KPMG’s London Office.

He seized the opportunity to travel and visit his childhood Japanese pen pal, backpacking around the country for six weeks, and having the once-in-a-lifetime chance to climb Mount Fuji. He then crossed the Pacific and backpacked around Canada and the U.S. before settling in London to start his new job.

As part of his two year role with KPMG in London, Paul had the summers off, so the following year, he traveled and back-packed around Europe for three more months. At the end of his second year in London, he was slated to return to Sydney, but by then, his identity as a global citizen had taken root. He wasn’t ready to return to Australia and no longer wanted to live in 50

London—rather, he wanted a job where he could travel the world. With that, he contacted an executive search firm, emphasizing his love of travel and desire to see the world. He was the perfect match for a position at Warner Brothers Movies and Records, which required that he travel to a new location every four or five weeks to review Warner record and movie businesses in different countries and evaluate performance and operating success. As fate would have it, the Warner Bros. executive who interviewed him for the position was also Australian, and the two connected immediately.

With that, Paul was given the job and assigned to the European territory. Several months later, working in Stockholm, he received a call from the Warner Brothers manager in New York, who had heard that Paul excelled in IT. He was needed for a job in Bogota, Colombia, and true to his upbringing, Paul committed to seizing every opportunity that came his way. At 25 years old, he accepted the assignment and jetted off to South America, where he was immersed in a new and vibrant world of youth, energy, and possibility. When the four-week assignment was over, he asked the company if there were any other opportunities in South America. His willingness to ask for what he wanted and direct his own path through life was received with enthusiasm from Warner Brothers, who sent him to Burbank Studios in Los Angeles for two weeks while they firmed up the details for assignments in Bolivia, Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil.

Once the two weeks wrapped up, Paul left Los Angeles on a Friday morning and arrived in Miami that afternoon, in route to Bolivia. When he arrived in Florida, however, he received word that the airport in La Paz was closed because of a coup. “My boss said that, if they didn’t open the airport by Sunday, they’d cancel the assignments and bring me back to London,” Paul remembers.

“An intern from New York had been assigned to work on the project at the last minute, and that Saturday night, she arrived in Miami to wait as well. We got drinks that night, and the next morning, the airport in La Paz reopened. Because the coup ended, we were able to do the assignment, and because we were able to do the assignment, I had the opportunity to get to know that intern, Eve. She turned out to be the love of my life.”

After six weeks on assignment in Bolivia, Paul and Eve went on to work another six-week assignment in Uruguay, and then completed projects in Argentina and Brazil. At that point, Eve’s internship ended, while Paul was assigned to a project at Warner Bros. in Tokyo. His time in Japan lasted six weeks, when he would return to work in London. In route back to London, he visited his family in Sydney and then stopped in New York, where he met Eve’s

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

family. “Her father was also an entrepreneur, who owned a delicatessen in New York City,” Paul explains. “For him, it was all about family and making sure the kids were well taken care of, received the best possible education, and set on the right path to success. The more time Eve and I spent together, the more we realized that, even though we grew up on different sides of the world, the value systems given to us by our parents were identical.”

His next assignment was with Warner Bros. in Brussels, and fortunately, an airline offered special roundtrip ticket deals to travelers under the age of 26.

He found himself flying to New York from Belgium for four weekends in a row to visit with Eve. At that point, he called the New York Warner Bros. manager and asked to be transferred over. “Three weeks later, I was working and living in New York City,” Paul remembers. Eve and Paul were married a year and a half later, in 1984, and he received his green card.

Shortly thereafter, in 1984, Paul decided he was ready to try something new and accepted a position in the IT consulting practice of BDO Seidman, a management consulting firm in New York. The partner there, Herb Goldstein, was a transformative mentor through that time, until Paul went on vacation to Australia in 1985 and happened to look into Sydney job opportunities for individuals with IT consulting backgrounds.

“As a 28-year-old married man, I reasoned that there would never be a better time to return to Australia,” he explains. “I looked in the Yellow Pages and called an executive search firm, just to get a sense of the job market in Sydney for IT consultants if I decided to return in a few years. After 15 minutes of conversation, the executive search firm CEO urged me to come work for him.

I declined enthusiastically, pointing out that I was in the business of IT consulting, not executive search. After our vacation was over, Eve and I returned to New York, but I stayed in touch with the Sydney executive search firm owner, and over the next two years, we’d get together for a coffee or a drink each time we visited the other’s city.” In 1987, Paul was asked again to come back to Sydney and work for the executive search firm. Eve, a CPA by that time, was excited about the prospect, so he agreed.

Paul and Eve relished the next three years as they lived and worked in Sydney. Yet Paul’s ancestors had left Eastern Europe in the 1860s thinking they were bound for New York’s Ellis Island, though they ended up six months later in Sydney, Australia. Something about America was calling him back. “I missed the challenges, the opportunities, the culture and business savvy of the United States,” he recalls. “There’s this mutually-reverential relationship between the two countries that makes it

wonderful to be an Australian living in the U.S. America reveres, encourages, promotes, and advocates for people who come from different walks of life and want to give it a go. It’s unlike any country in the world, and after three years away from it, I was ready to come back.”

Faced with the prospect of losing a star partner, the Australian Executive Search firm proposed something different: if Paul wanted to return to the U.S. anyway, why not empower him to open a branch of the firm there? They would start in Washington, DC, and could then move to New York after Paul got the flagship location up and running. It was a thrilling prospect, and the Dintes took them up on it in 1990, several months after their first child, Samuel, was born.

At first, Paul was thrilled to be opening an executive search firm in the nation’s capital. He soon realized, however, that he was starting with no clients or connections. Serendipitously, someone suggested he meet with the head of human resources at Amtrak. When the individual found out Paul had only been in town for a month, he reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a stack of business cards secured with a rubber band. “These are all my relationships with executive search firms,” he said.

“You’ve just arrived off the boat, and you have no contacts. Why would I work with you?”

Paul asked for all he could ask for: a chance. Perhaps it was his genuine love of relationships that shone through the din of transaction-minded competitors.

Perhaps it was his innate passion for the work—his affinity for both telling and receiving the stories that are the lifeblood of economic and spiritual prosperity. Whatever the motivator, Paul received a phone call from the same gentleman a month later, offering him an opportunity to conduct the search for Amtrak’s Vice President of Engineering, to be based out of Los Angeles. Over the next two years, that same individual gave him 35 more searches to work on. “If it hadn’t been for him, I would have had to go back to Australia,” Paul says definitively. “That one individual helped me get my start.”

Another defining moment came a couple years later, in 1992, when Paul was connected to another Australian in the DC metropolitan area who worked for a law firm downtown. The two met for coffee and talked about their origins—Paul from Sydney, and he from Perth. Before long, the two made the shocking discovery that they were distantly related. “We connected like there was no tomorrow,” Paul remembers. “One day, over lunch, we got to talking about how I owned 30 percent of the business I was running here in the U.S., while my 18 partners in Australia owned the other 70 percent. Through discussion, I set the goal of becoming 100 percent owner of the Paul Dinte

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company I was working so hard to build and lead. That relative helped me undertake that process and transaction, paving the way for the formation of Dinte Executive Search in 1993.”

Paul was shepherded through those early years of business ownership and management by four advisors he sought to serve on his board. John Toups, the former CEO of PRC; Tom Ferguson, the former President of the Washington Post; Bob Mulligan, the retired Vice Chair of Woodward and Lothrop’s; and Peter Kahn, a partner at Williams & Connolly law firm, all pledged to meet with Paul once a quarter, and upon request. “As a new entrepreneur, I was running into situations for the first time that they had seen a hundred times,” Paul reflects. “They provided incredible insight on how to handle things, allowing me to connect with prospective clients and lead my team with authority and wisdom beyond my years.”

Through those definitive years, Paul created the company culture that would set Dinte apart from competitors in the coming years, cultivating deep and long-lasting relationships with clients while taking the time to ensure each employee was mission-focused and aware of the “why” behind any task.

In building the business, however, nothing could compare in value and meaning to the sage advice Paul received from his three young children. When he drove them to school in the morning, he would explain a problem he might be having in the office, and then take their perceptive advice to heart. Oftentimes he would follow their guidance and then report back on the way to school the next morning, letting the children know if their advice had worked as planned or not. When his son, Sam, was only nine years old, he asked to accompany Paul to work on one of his days off of school. The boy donned a shirt, tie, and blazer, he informed his father that he wanted to conduct some interviews, and then proceeded to invite Dinte employees into the boardroom for a oneon-one exchange. There, he asked if the individuals liked working at Dinte, and what exactly they did. “They were completely mesmerized by him,” Paul laughs. “My kids always had something valuable to contribute, and could respond to problems with incredible clarity of thought.

They taught me that everyone has a voice and a pivotal role to play in an organization’s success.”

As the firm grew, so did Paul’s desire to connect to a global executive search community, and he attempted to foster relationships with foreign firms every time he traveled abroad. But nothing seemed to truly click—that is, until the representative of a global executive search

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network came knocking on his door. IIC Partners had fifty member firms around the world, and the Vice Chair asked Paul to be their Washington partner. True to character, Paul seized the opportunity. He joined in 2002, and in 2012 was appointed the global chairman by his partners around the world. “We meet three times a year in different parts of the world to talk about our businesses, our clients, and the challenges of working across borders,” he explains. “The network gives us all global access so that we’re able to serve our clients no matter where their needs may be across the world, and it gives us the opportunity to create the future of our industry together.”

Now, even though Paul never imagined he would end up in executive search, he couldn’t imagine a more thrilling or satisfying career. “This is the most fascinating and enjoyable role I’ve ever played in my life,” he affirms.

“My source of energy is people, and every time I conduct a search for a CEO or a President or a C-level person, the most remarkable individuals come into my office and tell me their stories. In order to help them find out where they’re going, I have to understand where they came from and why they’ve chosen this path. I have to learn about businesses and people and what makes them tick.

It’s all about relationships, substance, integrity and truth in helping our clients build, grow, and leverage their businesses I couldn’t imagine anything more rewarding.”

In advising young people entering the work place today, Paul emphasizes the importance of observing, learning, contributing, and unleashing your voice. “Give it a go,” he says, echoing his own father. “Be engaged, open, and passionate. Believe you have something to offer, and surround yourself with others who have been down this road before you and can help guide you along the way.” These are the messages embodied in the international golf trips he takes with his children, always to a transformative new landscape. Whether they tee off in Australia, Iceland, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, China, Argentina, Brazil, France, Spain, Japan, or some other foreign destination, the experience compels the Dinte family to participate in other cultures and then recreate meaningful pieces of those value systems within their own character. And more than anything, the experiences teach them to learn about their own paths through life by learning about the world through which those paths travel. “Life is a process,” Paul affirms. “I’m very optimistic, in that I don’t believe there are right or wrong answers, but rather trade-offs. Life is about figuring things out, giving it a go and seeing what works.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Ben Edson Close to Something Bigger In his modern and pristine DC office, Ben Edson keeps an old black-and-white photograph of scruffy, unkempt children lined up in front of a truck and caravan in Argentina. Ben was one of those kids, and the truck, caravan, and campground beyond were what he called home. “For four years, we traveled around preaching the Gospel. We put on shows, were homeschooled, and didn’t have much beyond our faith and each other,” he recalls.

“It was a hard life, with cold showers, no indoor plumbing, and laborious chores, but it was certainly a coming of age that developed a lot of character.”

Allen and Katherine Edson, Ben’s parents, had met in Israel. He came from a Jewish background, and she was an atheist, but together, they were born again Christians. Wanting new names to symbolize their new faith, they became Philip and Ester Quenchnot, shortening the surname to simply Q. Committed to preaching the gospel all over the world, they started in Iran, where their first child was born, and then moved to Italy, where Ben was born.

The Qs moved to Greece shortly thereafter, where they had another son, and then to France, where they had several more children.

They weren’t funded by any organization or church, but rather lived by the grace of God and others. At five years old, Ben helped raise money by selling Christian pamphlets on the streets of France. He and his brother would ask for donations, and when they handed the funds over to their father, they were allowed to keep ten percent.

“One of my earliest recollections is standing outside the local shopping center, receiving a 10-franc coin,” he recalls today. “I put it in my eye and winked with it, and my father was so proud. I remember that sense of monetary worth and achievement, which helped me understand the value of money and develop an air of responsibility at an early age.”

Now the founder and CEO of VariQ Corporation, a technology services company with core competencies in cyber security, software development, and IT infrastructure, Ben’s path has diverged from the religious, purist, and simple life of his upbringing. Yet the values of his

childhood are sown into the fabric of his life today, both personally and professionally. “As an adult I’ve developed my own belief system, but this invariably comes from the values I grew up with,” he says. “We’re surrounded by influences on a daily basis, and we build our values based on whether we absorb, reject, or modify those influences. Personally, I’m very positive-minded and tend to see value in all I touch, so I do a lot of absorbing rather than rejecting. I find that mistrust limits potential—a philosophy that underpins much of VariQ’s success and our ability to broaden possibilities while still making sound decisions.”

The truth in this sentiment is memorialized in the very name of his company, which draws the Q from his surname growing up. Ben didn’t learn until later in life what the letter stood for, or what the word meant. “Quenchnot was taken from a Bible verse in I Thessalonians—‘Quench not the Spirit,’” he explains. “Also, from the time I was little, people remarked at the various things I was interested in, or my very enterprising nature, yielding the ‘Vari’ in VariQ. In a sense, it means embracing new experiences while maintaining family inclusion as a strongly held value.

Ben and his team specialize in the design, integration, and operation of high-end systems for large enterprises. The company’s excellence and integrity have landed it a spot on the Inc. 5000 list for five years running, and its 75 percent compound growth rate through that timeframe earned it the 25th ranking in Washington DC’s Fast 50 Companies list for 2014. Today, VariQ has 170 employees and another 130 full-time subcontractors, up from only 28 total employees in early 2012 and only two employees in 2008. For the five years prior, it was just Ben. “I still feel that we’re just a startup and we’re close to something big,” he remarks. “It’s the same feeling I had when I was five years old. It’s the motivation that drives me to take on new challenges.”

Ben officially launched VariQ in 2003, but the company’s roots extend back to the day he decided to leave the missionary organization. He didn’t feel spiri-

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tually called to evangelize, nor did he feel the pure and selfless drive to help humanity, and he was wary of the marked poverty that had defined his young life. He was, first and foremost, a doer—driven to go out in the world and actively pursue his limits or lack thereof. “I had a sense that, in the business world, I’d be able to sustainably drive my own future, and the future of others,” he remembers. “When you lead an organization to success, you get to elevate an entire ecosystem.”

VariQ’s technological excellence is a reflection of Ben’s lifelong fascination with technology. Though he grew up in a modest environment, his father sometimes splurged on electronics, and Ben taught himself to touch type on his father’s electric typewriter when he was eight.

When his father got an Apple computer, Ben fought for time on it with the nine siblings he had at the time (his family would later grow to 15 children).

Some of his most profound memories, however, revolve around moments that cast the human condition into sharp focus. As an eight-year-old in Argentina, he observed how, no matter how poor they were adults had to have coffee. With time, he came to understand how subtle currents of addiction can shape lives. “We lived off of donations and food, eating what was given to us,” he remembers. “But this thing called coffee was a musthave. For a period of time, nobody could afford any, but someone had donated 50 kilos of wheat in a bag. I remember watching in horror as some of the adults charcoaled the wheat kernels and then filtered it through a sock just so it would seem like coffee. The same wheat was also cooked for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I knew I didn’t want to be that way in life, so attached to things that I would go to such extremes. This mindset created a strong sense of independence in me, which allows me to operate regardless of external factors.”

Ben’s defiant, independent nature gave him the confidence to venture forth on his own at age 14, when he left home to attend boarding school in Buenos Aires. By that time his parents had divorced, and his mother had moved to northern Argentina. The school was a self-sustaining ministry-driven establishment. Scholastics were not a focus for my age group—rather, students learned trades like construction, yard care, childcare, kitchen skills, and farming. When Ben turned 16, his responsible and reliable nature earned him the lead role at the farm, where he manually milked cows, tended to the livestock, and plowed fields with horse and plow. That same year he was given a thank-you letter from a manager he worked with, spelling out the superior’s thoughts on Ben’s future success. “When someone trusts in you, you tend to want to prove them right,” Ben reflects. “Having the opportu54

nity to shoulder responsibility early, and then having a mentor articulate his confidence in me in writing, was really transformative. Having someone believe in you is a truly powerful thing, and I still have that letter.”

Aside from trade skills, the school also focused on deep-dive studies into Biblical teachings, where students performed conceptual analyses into ideas of character and ethics. “We had an entire training on the nuances of negative thinking,” Ben explains. “We explored topical areas like trustworthiness, honesty, productivity, caring of the weak, and the importance of team. Our time was extremely regimented, down to when you went to sleep, when you woke up, and how long you showered. I cared less for some ideas, and more for others, like adapting the good habits of punctuality and the ability to understand and work with people of all different temperaments.”

After learning and developing a great deal, Ben decided to end his stay at the school at age seventeen to move into a service center that produced Christian literature and media materials sold in homes throughout the country. There, he had the opportunity to work on production and IT for the first time, and also immediately took over the operation’s finances. In this capacity, he realized that the home was $3,000 in debt—a figure the likes of which he could hardly fathom at the time. “I didn’t know how to handle it,” he remarks. “In my family, there was no such thing as debt. We always lived within our means, and I was faced with a huge responsibility I didn’t know how to cope with. I had a mental breakdown over the situation—the only one I’ve ever experienced. I was depressed and disengaged for two months, though I ultimately adapted. To this day, VariQ doesn’t carry any debt, has no investors, and keeps the management ecosystem streamlined and as worry-free as possible. I’ve always considered money to be something you respect, and something to manage responsibly.”

When he turned 18, Ben and his older brother decided to see what the United States held for them. “It was a hard choice for us because we were raised believing the U.S. wasn’t a mission field,” he explains. “It wasn’t a place where lost souls existed, so there was no reason to go.” With $20 dollars between the two of them, the young men flew to Miami with a duct-taped suitcase. An uncle paid for them to fly to California and then to Minnesota, where their grandparents were. Ben set his sights on obtaining a social security card, a driver’s license, a bank account, and a birth certificate, the cornerstones of a rooted American life. Having previously finished only an 8th grade equivalent education from his homeschooling, he tested and earned his GED when he was 18, but college wasn’t a focus at the time—in fact, it discour-

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

aged and considered not relevant to ministry. In Minnesota, he and his brother opened up the Yellow Pages and landed three different minimum wage jobs—one on a potpourri assembly line, another at a plastics company, and another delivering coupon books. Fifteen hours a day, seven days a week, Ben worked toward his dream of being able to afford a laptop, while his brother hoped to save enough to return to Peru. After a month and a half, Ben had saved $3,000—the same figure that had seemed so insurmountable a year earlier.

His brother did indeed return to Peru, while Ben decided to move to Washington, DC to work on computers. He began honing his IT skills and soon landed a job at a service center in Dallas that was affiliated with the Christian organization he grew up in. There, all members received a $15 monthly allowance. Ben, however, made extra money each month by working a part-time job at an event called First Saturday. There, people bought, sold, and assembled computers, giving Ben the opportunity to learn all about hardware and software while augmenting his income further by buying and selling computer parts, laptops and formatted disks. “Through that period, I learned that business is a simple concept,” he reflects.

“You get something for one price, figure out what margin or markup is needed, resell it, and keep the difference.”

At 21, Ben decided to move out to California, where he was invited to be the business area manager for a group of Christian homes. In addition to managing the finances for the community, he handled the IT work, helping homes optimize or tweak their programs.

Based on this experience, he set his sights on forming a traveling IT group with two of his brothers and his girlfriend. They envisioned traveling around Latin America to help out at various mission centers, resolving to collectively raise around $7,000 in three months to cover the cost of the trip. Ben and his brothers decided they’d earn the cash on commercial fishing ventures in Alaska, where they spent three months on the high seas as factory processors. Working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, they didn’t have much time left over to spend any of their hard-earned funds, allowing them to save up a sizeable sum.

In the end, the trip to Latin America fell through, and Ben returned to Alaska for a second fishing trip to save more money. He then moved to San Antonio, where his life adventures had only just begun. He launched a successful eBay business and then hired a brother to help with operations, freeing up his time for more studying and leisurely pursuits like windsurfing. He quickly realized, however, that active participation and vision by a venture’s owner is crucial to overall success. He also sus

pected he didn’t yet have the experience to know how to grow an organization that could sustain the business and earn him his goal of $100,000 a year. He decided to take an aptitude test with the Navy, which showed he was exceptionally capable in virtually any area. He wanted to go into nuclear engineering, a six-year program with an academy in Maryland. It required a year of college credits, so Ben enrolled in community college, all the while picking up IT certifications and studying at a bookstore where staff didn’t bother readers and sample tests were readily available.

During that time, one of Ben’s sisters introduced him to someone at Symantec, a large security firm whose clear tracks to success intrigued Ben. He landed a position in the Security Operations Center, where he took a nighttime shift. He moved into the firm’s consulting arm a year later, and by the following year, he was training senior security engineers and traveling the country as an IT integrator working on product implementation and configuration. During that time, he completed his bachelor’s degree online, and once he hit a ceiling at the company, he posted his resume on Monster.com. He was contacted by a headhunter, who placed him in a bid that landed him in the U.S. Senate in June of 2003. “I was charged with designing and managing the existing antivirus system used on two systems. I redesigned the solution for 7,000 systems, which could support the entire Senate’s 137 offices and committees,” he explains. “At the time, each office had their own systems administrator and haphazard antivirus setup. I presented my solution and ideas and was told I was doomed to fail because no one wins over 137 offices in an organization that adopts technology voluntarily. It was like, welcome to government.”

Setting aside the short projects and quick gratification he had enjoyed in the commercial world, Ben set to work, and within six months had secured volunteer adoption of a new enterprise IT system by 60 percent of the Senate. A year later, it would be 100 percent. “It was an entirely new concept to these offices, so I decided to build something that worked and could prove the value of the idea,” he says. “Coming from the security deepdive that was the Symantec experience, I knew how to solve events in real time.”

Feeling more confined than inspired by his employing company, Ben approached his Senate customers, who all indicated that they were happy to work with him directly. Rather than move forward as a government employee or a prime contractor, he decided to become a subcontractor of one of the six companies that already held a contract. Once he signed his subcontract, VariQ was officially born.

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Under VariQ, Ben continued to build a solid IT security program for the Senate—an endeavor that took five years to build out. Despite his best efforts, he felt somewhat pigeonholed within that environment and beyond. “People always want to know what you do, not what can you do,” he remarks. “They’re interested in seeing experience in a particular area instead of future capability.”

In 2007, Ben and a colleague pitched an idea to integrate security services under a single vendor. They titled the presentation “IT Security Strategic Vision” and pitched it to the CIO, who liked the idea. Rather than directing the work to Ben’s company, however, the Senate put out a cybersecurity procurement that a small business of two individuals could never win. Ben teamed with Lockheed Martin, and his colleague partnered with another large business, but neither won the contract, which was instead awarded to the lowest priced offer. “I had put so much personal effort into that initiative that it was hard not to be disillusioned,” he says. “I had been entrenched in that organization for five years and had connected a lot of dots, with 137 organizations interfacing with me on a daily basis because they were all tied into the system I had deployed. It was a hard loss to swallow.”

Despite the defeat, Ben didn’t let the new company’s momentum wane. VariQ was retained by the new awardee, and Ben backfilled his position with his second employee. Lessons he had learned from working with Lockheed throughout the bid were enough to teach him the basics of contract bids. With more time to focus on business development, Ben started seeing rapid growth.

In 2012, VariQ landed its first prime contract, an opportunity with the IRS that led them to be nominated by the agency for a Prime Small Business Contractor of the Year Award for 2015. “Moving from subcontractor to prime contractor was a key milestone for us, and now, we’re 90 percent prime contractor,” says Ben. Ben has always been an entrepreneur and leader, willing to blaze the trail into new territories where others haven’t yet ventured. And in that uninhabited space, he has built and operated structures in accordance with his ideals. Employees, managers, partner companies, and customers treat one another with mutual respect and support. He believes in leading by example and through action, addressing problems in real time rather than put-

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ting them off for later. He’s also built an ecosystem that is structured while keeping hierarchy at a minimum.

Employees are encouraged to engage directly with one another regardless of title, thus facilitating the free flow of information and communication between all facets of the company. “It’s the only way you can get a sense for the pulse of an organization,” he says. “And it’s the best way to create an ecosystem where people can connect in meaningful ways.”

Ben’s home life is designed with the same care to meaning and energetic, positive interaction—something he and his wife, Miu Lin, have worked to build together.

Her parents migrated from Hong Kong when she was 13 and secured jobs as kitchen workers, modeling hard work and perseverance that equipped her with the life skills to excel in school and college. An equally hardworking software developer, she has supported Ben in his pursuit to continually reach for that next big thing, from an advanced degree from Johns Hopkins to new initiatives at VariQ. Her career is just as important to her as Ben’s is to him; and with four children all under the age of nine, sustaining two professional schedules simultaneously has been no small feat. “She’s a great mom who cares deeply about the upbringing and wellbeing of our kids,” Ben says. “What I do today is aimed at building a world class company and a close-knit and happy family that lasts a lifetime.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Ben underscores the importance of being honest with yourself about who you are. “Your life choices should be driven by what drives you, whether it’s financial success, saving the world, or something else,” he says. “Where do you want to be in the future, and how can you make little decisions along the way to keep yourself on that path? Flexibility is also key, because sometimes you can get where you need to go just by being productive and letting things naturally flow forward.

I never thought I’d be the CEO of a 300-person company, but looking back, all the little things I did along the way led me here. I’m so grateful that my path has been personally meaningful and financially productive, while having a positive impact on the people touched by the ecosystem we’ve created. And I’m grateful that it always feels like there’s something bigger just beyond the next bend of life.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Paul D. Fauser What You Were Meant to Do Paul Fauser has always believed that things happen for a reason. But when he and his wife, Krissi, found themselves sitting in the doctor’s office in March of 2015 receiving the news that he had prostate cancer, the method to the universe’s madness was far from the first thought that came to his mind.

Since making a dramatic lifestyle change in 2010, Paul had gotten into the best shape of his life, dropping 70 pounds and taking up a fierce routine of cardio and lifting. His seemingly boundless energy had then waned inexplicably several years earlier, and he had felt for a while that something wasn’t quite right, but he never imagined cancer. “It completely changed me,” he says today. “When someone tells you that you have cancer, you realize you need to take all those things you were pushing off until next year, or five years down the road, and do them now. It shocked me to action, and I began to live life dramatically differently.”

As the Managing Partner of Calaburn, LLC, a government contractor firm specializing in upper tier IT support services like enterprise architecture and big systems and engineering operations, this meant aggressively pursuing the course of action he thought was right for the company. Gone were the days he consulted endlessly with his partners to ensure buy-in and approval. “I started doing what I knew I wanted to do with my business, and ever since, we’ve been incredibly successful,” he says. “It feels like what I was meant to do all along.”

Paul and his partners launched Calaburn’s parent company, Corporate Results Inc. (CRI), in 1999. They had worked together previously at an advanced technology and engineering company called LLD, where Paul served as Comptroller. He reported to the CFO, Ray Schaffer, and worked alongside an independent finance consultant, David Baker. Together, the three of them, along with a team of experts, cost the company $1.6 million a year, amounting to quite a bit of overhead for the $16 million company. They conceived of starting their own business that could perform these services for a number of clients, cutting down on costs for their clients

while allowing them an opportunity to pursue their entrepreneurial interests.

Thus, CRI was launched with one client and with David at the helm while Paul and Ray continued employment at LLD. In 2000, they decided to launch Automation Technologies Inc. (ATI). Six months later, they were doing $500,000 in revenues—a good start, but not nearly enough. Paul was tasked with “making it happen,” going out and really focusing on building business for ATI. Paul quit his job at LLD, accepted the challenge, and landed a year-long subcontract at Fort Belvoir. Working onsite, he developed relationships and lined up a contract with the Department of the Navy in Crystal City.

Over time, he hired eleven employees to carry out work with the Navy and National Achieves before landing another piece of work as a subcontractor with the Department of the Navy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In that capacity, he helped the Naval Infrastructure Support Services cut $600 million from the Navy’s budget while taking great strides to leave the sailors’ benefits largely intact—a strategy that earned him an official commendation from the Commander of Naval Infrastructure.

By that time, there was no question that Paul was succeeding and ATI was thriving. Over his eleven years focused on growing the company, he landed contracts with the National Archives, the Social Security Administration, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Department of Homeland Security, and ultimately a $100 million contract with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. With seven project managers reporting to him, he was billing 120 percent of his time and managing 75 percent of the company. “I was off to the races,” he recounts. “I helped grow the company to $25 million and then said I’d had enough. I was working nonstop and was absolutely exhausted. With ATI on solid, successful footing, I decided to exit and make the transition back to headquarters, where I would focus on bringing in new clients and developing business opportunities there.”

In truth, Paul was growing bored with the monot-

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ony of all the breakfasts, lunches, and networking events it took to achieve the tremendous victory of landing just several new clients a year. Then the federal government issued new rules permitting audits of federal contractors and capping their senior executive pay. CRI had two GSA schedules at that time, so the partners decided to spin those off into a government contracting company that would be a wholly owned subsidiary of CRI. It was just the kind of challenge Paul needed, so when Calaburn was launched in 2011, Paul was at the helm. “For most of my career, I was always the number two guy, which I was very good at,” he says. “But it was exciting to be number one this time.”

By all accounts, 2011 was one of the worst possible times to start a government contracting company. With steep federal budget cuts and sequestration, Calaburn went eighteen months without any revenue whatsoever.

It was a dark time for Paul, and he eventually called on several trusted mentors for advice on how to move forward. “These were gentlemen in their sixties and seventies who had been launching and selling businesses before I was even in grade school,” he says. “They gave me a reality check and told me I needed pull it together, get my head back in the game, and do what I was meant to do. I didn’t need to win ten contracts—I just needed one chance to prove myself, and the success would follow.

Their insight was pivotal for me, and is one of the reasons I’ve made the lifelong commitment to mentor eight young entrepreneurs now.”

With that, Paul stripped his efforts back to the basics by picking one relationship and one contract to focus on. He chose a large business and went in to meet face to face, conveying the simple message that he would be the one to help make their team successful if they gave him a chance. He built a relationship with the program manager, secured the contract, and later hired three employees for the work. Paul then replicated the “one person, one company, one contract” approach and succeeded again on a contract with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, allowing him to hire another thirteen employees as the work ramped up.

Now, Calaburn has five contracts with a diversified sampling of agencies. After several years of no revenue, the company clocked in at $200,000 in 2014, and then blew its previous success out of the water in 2015 by increasing that number to $2 million. “A lot of that has to do with the new approach I took after my cancer diagnosis,” Paul says. “I decided to make independent decisions and just go for it. And now that I’m growing at this rate, I’m staying focused on the goals I have to continue that steady, sustainable growth.”

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While Paul owes his success in part to the twists and turns of fate, he readily acknowledges the early impact of his family life, and particularly the father who always took the time to teach his son the ways of life. Until recently, for instance, Paul Franklin Fauser, Jr., always used a classic shaving set complete with a cup, brush, and razor. He received this from his father whom received it from his father, Harry Fauser, Paul’s great grandfather.

When Paul was only four years old, he would watch him shave in the bathroom on Saturday nights for church the next morning. “I can remember those conversations with my father almost like a videotape in my mind,” Paul remembers today. “My eyes were just above sink level.

He would put shaving cream on my face and describe the process of a task I, too, would take part in one day.”

Paul grew up in Central Pennsylvania with two older sisters. His father had been a Finnish carpenter, but with frostbite suffered during the Korean War preventing him from doing carpentry in the cold, he got a job at Alcoa manufacturing aluminum products like bottle caps, aluminum foil, and nuts and bolts. Paul’s mother, a bright and social woman famous for making friends with anyone in twelve seconds or less, stayed home with the children.

Paul’s father was a blue-collar worker who had never been to college, but he had an inherent aptitude for finance that he began imparting to his son at an early age. Paul can still remember sitting on his father’s lap as a seven-year-old boy, thumbing through the local newspaper and learning how to read the stock reports. The internet hadn’t been invented yet, so they’d go through the paper with a magnifying glass, picking stocks and watching their movement day by day. “He would explain to me what was going on, and I was fascinated by it,” Paul remembers.

Paul also had the benefit of participating in the small business his father started out of their basement, where he sharpened the blades of lawn mowers, chainsaws, and other home items. The young boy got a sense of how a business operated, and when he was ten years old; he rallied a friend next door and invented the concept of a Kids’ Sale. “We put up flyers all over town, and since no one had ever heard of such a thing before, it piqued a lot of interest,” he laughs. “We basically just sold our belongings out on our lawn, and other kids from around the neighborhood would come buy stuff. We did it twice a year, and though it didn’t bring in a lot of money, it felt like a lot to us at the time.”

Paul also made money growing produce in a small garden in the backyard and selling the vegetables to his father. In Boy Scouts, he would go door-to-door selling

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

all manner of things, from pies to light bulbs. He was a great student who never really took an interest in sports, but he loved Boy Scouts—a perfect platform for his natural leadership abilities to emerge. “Kids generally don’t get their Eagle Scout Double Palm until age seventeen, but I got mine at fourteen,” he says. “I was a bit of an overachiever, but I absolutely loved the feeling of being a leader and having the younger boys look up to me.”

Thanks to his athletic cousin, Paul hung with the popular kids in high school, who happened to be the privileged children of upper middle class professionals who were on the college prep track. Paul didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do with his life, but he naturally hemmed toward that track as well. His parents offered to pay half his tuition, convinced the academic experience would be more important to him if he had to come up with the other half. “They weren’t wrong about that, even though I really didn’t like it at the time,” Paul recalls. “I wanted a better chance at a good office job, and I wanted to be independent and have fun, so I decided to go for it.”

With that, Paul enrolled at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, where he very quickly realized he was out of his element as a sheltered, small town kid amongst a sea of rowdy, diverse city guys. During the second semester of his freshman year, he decided to pledge the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity, which provided the platform he needed to integrate with his fellow classmates with selfconfidence. “It forced me out of my comfort zone, and I found myself spending my time with people of every nationality and from all different parts of the country,” he says. “The seventeen other guys I pledged with became my best friends, and I became integral to the organization. I learned a lot about myself, and I definitely changed into a more open, imaginative, spiritual person.

The experience helped to give me the courage later on to move to DC, becoming the first person in my family to leave the five-mile radius where we’d always lived.”

College was a profoundly happy and successful time for Paul, defined by a strong academic performance, an active social life, and two internships for the Pennsylvania Department of State, where he had the privilege of working under Jean Buffington, an important mentor.

The only marked low point came the summer after his freshman year, when his mother suffered a stroke that devastated his father. The incident left her partially paralyzed and unable to speak at first, but thankfully, therapy helped her recover most of her lost functioning. Life eventually returned to a new semblance of normalcy.

When Paul graduated with his BS in public administration, he became the first Fauser in his immediate family to earn a college degree. “I remember seeing

my father in the bleachers that day as I walked down the aisle, jumping up and down and shouting. He was never that kind of guy, so that really meant something to me.”

Paul then moved into his parents’ basement and took a job as a government employee for Lancaster City Housing Authority, where he worked on public housing. With a friend, he also launched his first not-for-profit, a program that provided six interns to the Pennsylvania State Capitol who also engaged in philanthropic work during the length of their internships. “My friend and I had a strict policy of no dating the interns,” Paul says. “That wouldn’t have been a problem for me, except that the love of my life happened to be one of them. Krissi and I started dating, so at the end of the summer, I resigned from the program.”

At that point, Krissi returned to college to finish her double degree, and Paul was soon promoted to the Section 8 program. They dated long distance as she graduated and got a job with the Department of the Navy, while he spent another three years at HUD. He eventually found himself disheartened by the work, however, so with Jean Buffington’s help, Paul landed an entry-level finance position at the Pennsylvania State Employees Credit Union in Harrisburg. There, he floated around and had the opportunity to try many different jobs, though the workplace culture was challenging. Around that time, he and Krissi got engaged, and when she settled in Washington, DC, Paul shifted his focus to finding job opportunities there.

In 1996, Paul succeeded in landing the budget and finance position at LLD in DC. There, he exceled as he observed how specific choices he made for a project corresponded directly to increased profitability.

Two years into his tenure there, his work was proving such a game-changer for his division that he was sent to corporate headquarters, where he would do project analysis and financial support company-wide. There, he began doing some contracts work, a transition largely driven by the willingness of the company’s VP of Advanced Technology and Engineering, Mark Birch, to take a chance on Paul.

With his new contracts responsibilities, Paul began building relationships over the phone with leaders in government, industry, and business. A pivotal moment came one day when he was on the phone with a large company out of New Jersey called DRS, telling them about his firm. “The DRS representative said they needed to run a piece of business through a small company they trusted,” Paul relays. “And I said, ‘Well, you trust me. I’m your guy.’ I was only middle management at the time, and custom would have dictated that one of our VPs would Paul D. Fauser

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have been ‘their guy,’ but we ended up landing the $1.9 million deal. We were only $15 million in size at the time, so it was a huge revenue boost. The company gave me the credit, and that’s when I got my first real taste of doing and landing business in government contracting.”

From then on, Paul set his sights on transitioning from the back office to the front, actively building the business. He took on the role of contracts manager and was then promoted to comptroller, earning him a stable salary and a nice corner office. By that point, he and Krissi were newly married with their own home, and life could have gone on that way indefinitely. But Paul felt the entrepreneurial bug that had spurred him forward all his life, and when the possibility arose for him to start his own business with Ray and David, his imagination was hooked.

“I went to Krissi and told her I wanted to quit my job and start my own business, but that we didn’t have any revenue yet and I was terrified,” he remembers. “I was pacing back and forth, but she was calm and certain. She told me to go for it. She said I’d never have this opportunity again, and what’s the worst that could happen? If I failed, I could just get another job. On my own, I would have gone back and forth forever and never taken action. But my wife’s support was the catalyst I needed to actually go out and make it happen.”

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Now, Paul remains incredibly focused and strategic, with a mental toughness that helps to guide his team forward. “I believe in worthwhile work, in building people up, in providing them the opportunity to do as much as they possibly can with what they’ve got,” he says. “Everyone has strengths, so I try to bring those out. My leadership style has always been to communicate with the people that work with me, encouraging them and showing them that I care actively about their lives.” Calaburn’s work is also rooted in integrity and trust, firm in its belief that organizations are stronger if they work together.

And now, Paul is connected again with the belief that everything, including his cancer diagnosis, happens for a reason. The way it has elevated the relationship between Paul and his father to an entirely different level— no longer buddies, but back to being father and son—is reason enough. The way it has brought Paul an altogether new sense of peace, positivity, and acceptance is reason enough. “It’s given me the gift of perspective,” he says. “In the past, I’d get upset about small things beyond my control, but now I’m like, so what?” It’s an attitude reflective of Krissi’s profound influence and interpretation through the whole ordeal, confirming a love that is grounding and sure. At each bump in the road, she echoes the firm mantra, “We’ve got this.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Brian Flood Doing Better It was during the Christmas Season of 2007 that Brian Flood decided to walk away without a plan. He was physically, emotionally, and spiritually exhausted from working 75-hour weeks for a market intelligence firm, delivering information to help government IT contractors compete for business. Cognizant of how money got from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other, he was so adept at the politics of the government procurement process that his services were in high demand.

But he was burning the candle on both ends, running himself ragged, traveling way too much, and unavailable to his family. And worst of all, he was drinking to douse the stress, just as his father had done while Brian was growing up.

So, like his father, Brian decided to turn his life around. At age fifty, his father gave up alcohol and dedicated himself to a new future—one where he became an incredible contributor to the lives of others.

“Watching my father’s journey through life, I learned the courage to change and evolve,” he reflects. “I learned to never give up on myself. I saw that, when you choose a new path for yourself, redemption is possible, no matter how old you are or what you’ve encountered in the past. It’s never too late to do the right thing.”

With that guiding philosophy, Brian took a leap of faith and left the company to mindfully reassess who he wanted to be and where he wanted to go. He didn’t intend to start his own business, but as his decision gained momentum, he found his life’s course taking its own natural path toward entrepreneurship. Now, after seven years and the founding of two companies, Brian is the owner and CEO of Decision Point Corporation, an IT services firm committed to bringing sustainable solutions to intractable challenges in the most efficient, effective, low-cost approach possible. And while it may seem counterintuitive, launching and leading his business has actually simplified his life, creating the perfect conditions to promote betterment on a day-bay-day, brick-by-brick basis. “Sometimes we don’t plan on taking a given path, but then it presents itself, and we’re given an opportu-

nity we never envisioned or imagined,” he says. “We don’t know what’s going to come next, so I just focus on taking things as they come and doing a little better each day.”

At just over twenty employees, Decision Point’s small size and culture of engagement mean that each employee’s mindset and conduct has a direct impact on the success and direction of the organization. “I view that as a privilege, and I find it invigorating,” Brian says.

“We’ve all probably worked in roles where the overall momentum of the machine wasn’t affected by whether or not we got better on any given day. But at Decision Point, I can take what I learned on a Monday and apply it on a Tuesday to improve our operation, execution, strategies, or relationships. It’s the kind of environment where, if you take care of the little things, the big things tend to take care of themselves, and where a focus on daily selfbetterment impacts the organization and the lives we touch in a very positive way.”

Brian founded his Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business in January of 2011, and while it provides some general IT services and consulting for companies looking to develop an executable growth strategy, its main goal is bringing innovative solutions to some of the most challenging technology missions in government.

Specializing in information management for the U.S. Departments of Defense, State, and Homeland Security, the company has begun to shift to healthcare, intelligence, and analytics. And, while traditional government IT contractors might aim to land a five-person job and grow the project to five hundred, Decision Point believes in reversing that trend through optimization, beginning a technology mission with a set number of people that reduces as it learns to achieve the mission more efficiently. Its mission is accomplished not from increasing its presence, but reducing it.

Internally, the company’s value added comes directly from its people—a reality Brian tries to highlight whenever he can. “Each of our employees is essential, so I try to make sure that’s communicated,” he says. “We’re a company where people matter. We are absolutely com-

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mitted to the success of our clients, but we also put family first. I’ll take time to coach my daughter’s basketball team, or to be available for the things that are important to me, whether that’s spirituality or friendship.” What’s more, Brian focuses on the individuality of his employees, and not their resumes, giving opportunities to people that might otherwise be overlooked through a typical hiring process. “If I believe in someone’s ability to think well, commit, stay nimble, and be part of something bigger than themselves, I’ll give them the chance to contribute and become part of the Decision Point family.

I don’t give up on someone just because their path has been winding, or just because of something in their past.”

Brian bets on the powers of redemption and transcendence because they were so powerful in his own life, transforming him from a rough and defiant kid growing up in the Bronx to the successful entrepreneur he is today. Raised in Inwood, a predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhood in the northernmost part of Manhattan, he spent his formative years largely left to his own devices. His mother, a nurse, was a model worker and caregiver, supporting the family as his father fought to overcome alcoholism. “Drinking was such a part of the culture that many of my friends’ fathers struggled with it as well,” Brian recalls. “My father worked in advertising and then became a freelance writer, which didn’t help.

Through that time, my mother was relentless, carrying a torch of responsibility as she did what was necessary to put food on the table for her four children and keep the family together. She had tremendous compassion for those who suffered, and I still try to emulate her commitment to service and care giving.”

Through playing basketball, soccer, or baseball in Central Park, delivering newspapers, or going out to explore the city with friends, Brian mastered the intricacies of New York public transportation at a young age and developed a strong sense of self-reliance. Subways and buses allowed him to traverse the city, but life revolved around his neighborhood parish, Good Shepherd Church. Catholic elementary school was free at the time, and as a naturally gifted student, Brian did well despite his high energy and restless nature. All of that changed, however, when he received a full scholarship to attend Loyola High School, an upper-echelon all-boys Jesuit school at 83rd and Park Avenue. While all his friends continued at neighborhood Catholic high schools, Brian joined some of the most elite young people in New York City at Loyola, taking a tremendous shock to the system.

“Economically, I wasn’t even at the bottom of the totem pole—I was well off the road,” he remarks. “Every morning, I’d walk the mile to the A train, take that to the lo62

cal 86th, and take the bus across Central Park to go to school with peers who lived in penthouses, summered in Nantucket, and traveled the world. I was intimidated, so I slipped into the persona of being the tough kid from northern Manhattan who got in a lot of trouble.”

Still, Loyola was an incredible school, committed to teaching a love of learning and refusing to give up on Brian. And while he wasn’t a high achiever amongst his classmates, being exposed to students who went on to Yale, Harvard, and Oxford had an effect on him. Even the act of rebelling was meaningful, allowing him to experience the path of most resistance with all its life lessons in adaptation and resilience. “I don’t believe things are predestined,” he reflects today. “I think I got where I am today because every experience, relationship, opportunity, success, and failure brought me here. Each of my after-school jobs through high school, whether it was installing fences, working behind a deli counter, or operating an elevator in Greenwich Village, taught me to respect the value of everybody’s role in society. When my history teacher told me she was going to fail me the Spring semester of my senior year even though I was getting Bs, I learned that you shouldn’t walk away from the gifts you’ve been given.”

His teacher saw something in him—the ability to do better. She wanted to convey that, for a person who works hard to get a B, that grade is a fine accomplishment, yet someone who earns a B while running roughshod has clearly failed to reach their potential. Brian was completely caught off-guard by the proclamation, terrified that he wouldn’t be able to graduate with his class and would instead have to take summer school. In the end, his teacher agreed to give him a C after he completed a series of extra assignments. “It would be many more years before I was ready to hear what she was trying to tell me, but I never forgot the lesson,” Brian remarks. “I wish I had really embraced those opportunities, but that was the path I decided to take, and it’s led me here, so I don’t spend time worrying about regrets. I just focus on doing better each day now.”

Brian spent two years in college at Nova Scotia, where he played football and set out on the premed track but wasn’t motivated on the academic front. He then returned to New York to attend Fordham University in the Bronx, where he began to get the feeling he was going nowhere fast. In search of structure, focus, and a new start in life, he enlisted in the Army. His father had flown B17s in World War II, becoming a Prisoner of War for seventeen months after his plane was shot down in Germany, so Brian had experienced service second-hand in the past. Enlisting as an infantry officer marked his first real

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

job, and the first time he was required to lead. “It exposed me to a whole new set of cultures, people, and experiences,” he says. “It was my first experience with a chain of command, and with being one of many. The world was no longer all about me. I was part of a unit that could only be as strong as its weakest member, and I had to do my job in order for the unit to be successful in executing its mission plan. That was a really powerful realization.”

In his five years of service, Brian spent time at Fort Bragg in Alabama, and also in Korea, Turkey, Pakistan, El Salvador, and Honduras, going places and learning things he never would have experienced otherwise.

In the wake of Vietnam, as America emerged from the Carter Administration and entered the Reagan years, the military had to work hard to meet its recruitment goals.

Brian learned how to get a job done with people who weren’t qualified, and he understood for the first time that, sometimes, you had to do things you didn’t want to do in life. It was an education in teamwork, excellence, and structure that still informs his work and life philosophy today.

Then, in 1985, an injury to his knee in Korea required several surgeries and a reclassification of his physical readiness that meant the end of his infantry days. After three weeks of training, he became a public affairs officer, responsible for issuing press releases and interacting with the media in Seoul. When he decided he didn’t want a lifelong career in the Army if he couldn’t do combat arms, he resigned his commission and returned to the U.S. to pursue journalism. He landed a job in Montgomery, Alabama, as the political reporter for its small NBC affiliate, and though he didn’t know anything about the state or its major players, he soon became close friends with Governor George Wallace and was crossing paths with the likes of then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. Living in a stately refurbished Victorian house in downtown Montgomery near Martin Luther King’s church, he and his wife, Marylen, met the civil rights activists who had bailed Rosa Parks out of jail after refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger.

Immersing himself in the history and politics of the Deep South, the New Yorker found stories of redemption that mirrored his own experiences up North, and none more poignant than that of Governor Wallace.

In 1963, Wallace had blocked the school house door in Tuscaloosa, only to come back and win 90 percent of the black vote in 1982. The man, regretful of his past ideals, had gone from church to church to say he was sorry and ask for forgiveness. “I learned so much from watching Wallace, who at first couldn’t have been more hated in the black community and across the country,” Brian re

members. “I’ll never forget when Jesse Jackson, one of the most successful black candidates in the history of politics, came to visit him at the State House in January of 1987 to speak with him about running for President.

Wallace’s advice was, ‘keep it down low where the goats can get at it,’ or ‘keep the message simple.’”

Brian took that same advice with him when he came to D.C. to work on Capitol Hill in 1988. Craig James, a firebrand trial lawyer from Deland, Florida, had just been elected to represent Florida’s fourth district, and called Brian in for an interview. The two connected over how little they knew about Washington, and James hired Brian as his Legislative Director and Press Secretary. Congressman James had ousted a twenty-year incumbent who chaired the House Armed Services Committee, so he received a lot of attention. He lived to argue and was all over the political spectrum on various issues because, rather than conform to the dichotomous structure of party politics, he did what he thought was right.

Within six months, Brian was promoted to Chief of Staff, and he served in that capacity until James retired from Congress in 1999.

Worn out from the travel and fundraising involved in serving a Member of Congress, Brian decided to get into the market intelligence industry and accepted a position at Fed Sources, which was later acquired by Deltek.

The firm consulted with companies interested in competing for government IT business, and though Brian knew nothing about IT, he knew the nuance of the procurement process. He also knew how inefficient government can be, and how to best execute a strategy to achieve a desired outcome in that context. It was this experience that led to the hyper-speed, detached, destructive lifestyle he ultimately walked away from in 2007. Through the grace of God, the accountability of Alcoholics Anonymous, the support of his family, and his own strength of will, Brian seized the gift spiritual intervention at work in his life and made a commitment to sustain that gift.

“At that time, our son was in college, and our daughters were seventeen and five,” he recalls. “Walking away from Fed Sources was terrifying for me from a financial perspective. It was even more terrifying to tell Marylen that I was thinking about starting my own business. We talked about it a lot, and once we decided that to start on this journey, she’s done everything to sustain and support it through the ups and downs. Without her love, support, understanding, compassion, and forgiveness, there’s zero chance I’d be a successful business owner today.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Brian visualizes two boxes—one with a straight line ascending skyward, and another with a Brian Flood

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winding line that weaves this way and that. The former represents the journey of success for a select few people, who know exactly where they want to be at various stages in life and largely adhere to that vision. The latter represents success for the majority of people—a path of exploration and discovery that’s no less elegant in design.

“It’s never too late to become the man or woman who’s life garners respect and provides true value to others,” he affirms. “Even when times are darkest, you can choose to change and become something different. Never give up on yourself.”

Brian’s sister, especially, never gave up on him, believing in good things for him more than he ever dared believe in for himself. When she passed away several years ago, he spoke at her funeral about the transformative power of this belief, and how much of a difference it made in his darkest hours. “I get to do what I do today because of the love, forgiveness, compassion, and cooperation of others,” he says. “Whether it’s Marylen, my children, my friends, my employees, or my clients, I know that success and growth in business is a ‘we’ propo-

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sition. Without people who are fully invested in trying to be part of something bigger than themselves, we could never be successful by any measure.”

For Brian, that measure gauges the progress made from the days when he was sixteen, talking animatedly with his friends about how extraordinary their futures would be if they could just pay their bills. It’s measured in the margins by which his company is able to expand opportunities for others to succeed. It’s measured in the quiet consistency with which he and his family give time and talents to benefit the lives of others, especially in socioeconomic conditions that mirror his own origins.

And most of all, it’s measured in the trail of burning bushes he sees in his wake. “I once heard someone say he never had one of those epiphany burning bush moments, until he looked back at his life and saw nothing but a trail of burning bushes,” Brian says. “These transformational moments occur all the time, whether we recognize them or not. That’s why I treat every day as an opportunity to transform a little more, doing better for my family, employees, company, and community in the process.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Kirsten Grove A Helping Hand At five years old, Kirsten Grove’s hands were small, but when she slipped them into the hands of patients in Baltimore’s inner-city hospital, she began to learn they had great power. Her mother, a University of Pennsylvania nursing graduate with a stellar academic record, started working as a nurse once Kirsten, her youngest, started kindergarten. Her heart led her to the low-income patients of Baltimore. On holidays, she brought her children in to brighten the loneliest rooms. “We’d bring in gifts for the patients, hold their hands, and sing them carols,” Kirsten recalls. “Just visiting with them and talking with them had a strong impact on me. Their expression of appreciation with a squeeze of their hand provided a feeling of healing that never left me.”

It was one of the greatest lessons Kirsten’s mother could have shared, and now forms the foundation of her holistic chiropractic practice. Nominated by her peers in 2013 as one of the top chiropractors in Virginia, and as the founder, President, and Clinical Director of Grove Spine & Sports Care, Kirsten’s work revolves around tenets that are as essential as they are simple: stop, listen, and care. “Often, people will come to us after seeing half a dozen other providers, feeling that nobody’s listened to them or taken the time to figure out what’s wrong,” she says. “I love diving into problems and sorting them out, considering all components of the body to find a solution that works. And on the occasions when we find we can’t help someone, we actually figure out the path they should pursue to heal. We never leave a person hanging in limbo.”

Through chiropractic school and during her first several years in practice, Kirsten sat down with patients and spent upwards of an hour taking their medical history and listening to concerns. Her core principles were in opposition to the warnings she was given, as she was told time and again by doctors in the field that she’d never make any money if she kept focusing on quality time over volume. She respectfully disagreed, however, and believed so much in her approach that she decided to launch Grove Spine & Sports Care as a sole practitioner

in 1998. “Amazingly, I didn’t have any fear,” she recounts.

“I just knew in my heart it was what I needed to do in order to help patients heal. In order to provide the kind of care I had envisioned, I’d have to do it on my own, and I enjoyed that independence.”

In the beginning, she rented space three days a week and spent the rest of her time doing vacation coverage for other doctors. With over $100,000 in student loan debt from graduate school, banks wouldn’t give her any further loans, so she figured out how to start her business from scratch. Fortunately, it was a feat that her thorough, inquisitive nature had been preparing her for all her life. “Some of my teachers in school were very old-school doctors who would expand their teachings if you came in during lunchtime, so I used to go in as often as I could,” she recalls.

“They told me to keep my overhead low, and I focused on that from day one. For the first three years, I handled everything on my own—the insurance, the scheduling, the phones. It was a pragmatic choice that worked very well.”

When word got out that Kirsten had started her own practice, many of her previous patients sought her out. She made a point to network, getting involved with the Chamber of Commerce and Business Networking International while connecting with the personal trainers at a gym nearby. “I didn’t do much external marketing at the time,” she remarks. “I tried a few things, but they didn’t feel authentic or true to my personality.

Some people would tell me, ‘Look, sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do to get people in the door—that’s just business.’ But that didn’t sit right with me, so I stuck with my beliefs, focusing on face-to-face networking and building my practice through genuine relationships and word-of-mouth.”

Staying true to her values turned into a two-year test of faith as she watched her resources dwindle and tuned out the naysayers who told her she was wrong. She was down to her last thousand dollars when, finally, all her efforts converged and began to pay off and she got very busy, very fast.

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Kirsten’s first employee was Helen, a 72-year-old firecracker who covered the front desk part-time for the next five years. “She reminded me of my grandmother— a very independent Midwesterner with a good heart and soul who always looked out for me,” Kirsten recalls. “Patients would joke that she was my gatekeeper. She really helped me keep track of the finances of the business as I spent more time with patients.”

As the practice continued to grow, Kirsten brought in an independent practitioner. When she moved the business to a nicer location in Tysons Corner, Virginia, she brought on several more associate practitioners, private practitioners, doctors of chiropractic, and physical therapists. “It’s very important to me to have employees whose hearts are in the right place, and who want the best for our patients,” she says. “Our focus is on getting people back to their health as quickly as possible, and then teaching them how to take care of themselves so they can be self-sufficient and independent stewards of their own wellness.”

While each patient has different needs and healing trajectories, the average number of visits per case is five. And while a typical chiropractic office focuses only on spinal adjustments, Grove Spine & Sports Care also takes a lens to the muscles, connective tissue, and other elements that come into play. “Your joints don’t work independently of your muscles, ligaments, tendons, and nerves,” Kirsten explains. “When people have injuries like back pain, herniated disks, or tendonitis, we look globally at how everything functions in tandem. Putting all these pieces together helps speed up the healing process, which is my goal. I love seeing my patients, but I’m always eager for them to regain functionality and be on with their lives, happy and doing whatever they love to do—whether it’s hiking or bungee jumping or hanging out with their families.”

Kirsten accomplishes this goal by making sure her skills are varied and honed. Three hundred hours of extensive post-graduate certified chiropractic sports physician work earned her a diplomate certification, which is currently held by only six other practitioners in the state of Virginia. “As diplomates, we’re held to a higher standard because we’ve had so much additional education,” she explains. “Focusing on sports injuries, the certification prepares us for excellence in working with a variety of sports teams, medical treatment teams, and race settings. As an example, we served as the medical team working the Ragnar 24-hour relay run race from Cumberland to National Harbor in September of 2014.”

Kirsten also takes a minimum of 30 continuing credit hours a year, stays current on the most cutting edge ideas 66

in the field, and makes sure her team has a wide range of specializations and credentials. “Everyone’s body works differently, with a unique set of connections and wiring,” she says. “No one technique works the same for every condition, so the more tools you have in your toolbox, the greater your ability to fix people.”

A patient once joked that Kirsten’s profession reflects a perfect blend of her mother, who was a nurse, and her father, who was an engineer. Growing up in Ellicott City, Maryland, as the youngest of four, Kirsten certainly picked up her father’s analytical skills and her mother’s empathy and insatiable love of learning. “Patients often observe that I focus on the mechanics of the body quite a bit,” she remarks. “To me, it’s a beautiful machine, and I’m trying to restore optimal function. With a focus on empathy and healing, I consider myself a body engineer.”

As a child, Kirsten spent summers with extended family in Pennsylvania. Her mother’s parents from Germany were passionate about music, gardening, religion, and education, while her father’s parents modeled incredible industriousness and strength of character. “My paternal grandmother didn’t have education past high school, but I always believed she could have been the CEO of a company if she had been born in a different era,” Kirsten remembers. “She ran her home and family of seven children like a CEO. She was stern at times, but her love was unconditional. If you screwed up, she would let you know, but she always had open arms. On my dresser at home now, I have a glass tray that was hers.

It reminds me of her every morning, of who she was— a very strong woman who represents a lot of the good qualities I try to bring to my practice today.”

Kirsten lost both grandfathers by the age of six, but thanks to all the time she spent with her family, she has strong memories of the many colorful personalities within her extended family that stuck together even if they didn’t always get along. She also has vivid memories of her mother, an accomplished pianist who declined an invitation to the Curtis Institute of Music to become a nurse. When she started working full time, she taught Kirsten and her siblings how to cook, leading them in ambitious projects to master the art of making sourdough pancakes, blueberry jam, and molasses taffy.

She also loved to take the Grove children hiking, arming them with nature identification books and trash bags so they could help clean the trails as they went.

When Kirsten was 14 years old, the harmony in her life suddenly changed. Her mother passed away unexpectedly at the age of 42, transforming the Grove family forever. “Even though it was an extremely difficult time, I believe those kinds of events either bring families closer

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

or tear them apart,” Kirsten says. “It brought my brothers and I much closer. I believe that positives come out of every negative, even if you can’t see them right away.

In hindsight, I see there was a lot of confidence building that came from knowing that, when things get really difficult, I can still move forward.”

Indeed, Kirsten didn’t crumble or break apart—a success she credits to her wonderful family and friends who helped along the way. She started working as a babysitter and pet sitter, and then got a job at a fast food restaurant. “It taught me what I wanted and didn’t want from a job,” she recalls.

Upon graduating from high school, Kirsten enrolled in the University of Maryland at College Park with the intent of becoming a veterinarian. “But then I realized I didn’t like the idea of having to euthanize animals,” she says. “Everyone told me I should work with people, so I switched my focus to physical therapy. I needed to work about 20 hours a week to support myself, so I started working in a hospital physical therapy department and at a sports fitness physical therapy clinic as a PT Tech.”

After three semesters, Kirsten’s financial situation changed, so she transferred to the University of Maryland’s Baltimore County Campus and kept up to three jobs at a time to cover her own tuition. At the hospital, she served a wide mix of people that included diabetics, paraplegics, burn victims, and drug addicts. At the sports fitness clinic, she worked on a cohesive team of wonderful people in a full rehab environment, mastering the various techniques until she was writing patient rehab programs. She loved the work but noted that the field of physical therapy was somewhat limited by the specific referrals and instructions of medical doctors. When a friend started Chiropractic College and proclaimed it was right up Kirsten’s alley, she investigated and ultimately agreed. “It’s not a field that’s well-understood,” she concedes. “It needs to work on its PR. I knew I would meet some resistance by choosing it, but I’m a free thinker, and I wasn’t concerned—I knew it was right for me.”

Kirsten enrolled in Chiropractic College at Northwestern Health Sciences University in Minnesota at age 26 with a unique base of hands-on experience that prepared her to begin her training on day one. With a focus on joints, neurology, radiology, and nutrition, the med

school curriculum focused on health and wellness without the use of drugs as part of their practice. And for the first time in her life, Kirsten was on her own, responsible only for herself. “I was so cold that I had to wear two sets of leggings and jeans just to stay warm through my first winter there, but it felt so right,” she recalls. “It ushered me into a new age of autonomy—not only in my personal life, but in my practice as well. In this field, you can design your practice however you choose.”

Kirsten chose to build Grove Spine & Sports Care into a patient-centered practice that encourages her staff to think freely, just as she does. “When you build a business from scratch, you know it inside and out, and you’re tempted to give all of your answers,” she explains. “But I’m learning that it’s important to provide the outline, and let others fill in the blanks as they see them. Asking ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions helps people feel more part of the process, so I try to focus on doing that.” Through it all, her husband, Franz, has been her biggest supporter, a trusted confidant and honest sounding board.

In advising young people entering the working world today, Kirsten underscores the importance of regaining the natural curiosity of one’s younger years. “Investigate what you’re doing and think outside the lines,” she urges. “When I interview someone and ask if they have any questions for me, it’s a red flag to me if someone says no. I want to see that people are doing things for the love of them, and that they’ve thought about it.

I want to see them think creatively and get outside of their comfort zone.”

Kirsten, herself, was so famous for her own relentless questioning that her friends in school gave her a shirt with “WHY?” scripted across the front. It’s a question that can convey so much more than it inquires, belonging to those with the courage to reach beneath the surface and consider alternate possibilities. Thanks to this question, hers are the hands examining the details of a musculoskeletal injury until the problem is fixed. “The path is not always clear-cut,” she acknowledges. “But a key part of treatment and healing is showing that you care. Diagnostic skills are important, but you have to develop those people skills. That means spending time with people— genuine time, like holding that sick person’s hand when you’re five and seeing how it makes a difference.”

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Carroll Hauptle Righting the Boat When Carroll Hauptle was asked to come to Berlin in 1977 to work on the production of Samuel Beckett’s one-act play, Krapp’s Last Tape, he was only 22 years old.

There, he worked for Beckett himself, the Nobel Prizewinning playwright who had ushered in the breakthrough to modern drama. “I had no debt, no house, no car,” Carroll remembers today. “We did sixteen cities in thirty days, four performances apiece. We also later played the German international art festivals alongside troupes from Poland, Russia, Italy and Singapore—all over the world.”

Krapp’s Last Tape is a play that examines remorse and frustration over the passage of time. As the 68-year-old protagonist listens to recordings of his former self, the audience witnesses a fragmentation of identity and a sense that life trends toward something unbearable. The arc of Carroll’s own life, however, bends with a different meaning, melding the pieces of his former experiences into a path paved smooth by his proclivity for fighting against entrenched injustices.

In his work as the founder of The Law Offices of Carroll Hauptle, the law has become an art form like the play productions of his youth.

“With law, I do what I do because it presents an opportunity to use analytical, out-of-the-box thinking to create solutions for people and businesses,” he says today. “I see them as works of art. And in the very best cases, they give me the opportunity to “right the boat” and correct some of the world’s injustices.”

Launched in 1993, the firm’s bread and butter is estate planning, but it also takes on business formation and operations work for foreign clients looking to establish or expand their presence in the U.S. Its expertise spans transactions, real estate, copyright, trademark, human resources, and software licensing. “I occasionally litigate, but only if I know I’m going to win, and only if it has some aspect of righting the boat,” says Carroll. “We often use Rule 11 to seek sanctions against attorneys who bring frivolous lawsuits. I’ll never forget a case in 2002, when I was up against one of the biggest law firms in the U.S. and won a six-figure award for my client using that rule. I hope that

the work I do makes people think twice about pursuing cases like that.”

Carroll’s heart, however, remains with estate planning, and the opportunities it affords to provide trusted counsel and advice to clients. Given his ability to see contrary positions, he has no problem navigating challenging dynamics to advocate for the best interests of all parties involved, whether working on the architecture of an estate’s setup, securing the future of a special needs child, or creating the best conditions for peace between siblings that don’t get along. “I get to step a little outside the basic lawyer role and give advice my clients might not be able to see otherwise, which can be the most valuable advice of all,” he says. “Even outside of estate planning, my strategy and inclinations run contrary to how most lawyers operate—often because, in my opinion, they’re focused on the wrong things. They tend to advise people not to take any risks. When other lawyers are telling a client why they can’t do something, I’m the one telling them they can if they are careful, and here’s how.”

These inclinations are reminiscent of his father, who remained extraordinarily compassionate and empathetic toward victims of societal injustice despite the outlooks of many of his acquaintances. His mother, as well, was recruited to be a CIA agent at a young age, and had a strong sense of principles and ethics. Carroll came of age amidst the Vietnam War era, which gave way to what many believed would be a new America—an opportunity to give people a better shot at life. “That era was all about righting the boat, and it helped to shape my worldview,” he says.

Carroll was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the second of four children in a Roman Catholic family. His mother’s family had arrived in America in the 1700s and had been given land near Chestertown by Leonard Calvert, the first governor of Maryland. She was Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Delaware, where she met Carroll’s father, a Delaware football player and coach who had served as a bomber pilot in the waning days of World War II. He graduated with a degree in engineering, and when

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they married, he took a sales job with a plastics company called Hercules, and then with DuPont.

Due to the nature of his father’s work, the family moved frequently throughout Carroll’s childhood, to the extent that he attended eight different elementary schools.

He can still recall the wonderful stone house his mother found for them in Vero Beach, Florida, with Spanish marble floors and two miles of private beach.

The family returned to Delaware for a brief stint and then moved to Hingham, Massachusetts, where they found stability and community over the next three years.

“It was a beautiful town—an ideal New England hamlet with wonderful neighbors, great schools, and free swimming and sailing lessons,” he remembers. “It was a way of life that stood in stark contrast to the move that came next, to Mundelein, Illinois.”

Mundelein was a town of lakes, woods and dairy farms north of Chicago—a place where women routinely ran errands with curlers in their hair, and where people would park a car in the middle of a frozen-over lake to take bets on when the ice would melt enough for it to fall in. “It was a big change for us, especially for my socialite mother who loved to entertain, but we came to make lifelong friends and enjoy living in the country,” says Carroll.

He was entering seventh grade at the time of the move, and he’ll never forget his first day of public school in Mundelein. During recess, the kids were playing soccer in the yard using a makeshift utility ball, large and rubbery.

A 16-year-old boy much larger than Carroll came barreling at the ball, but Carroll saw he had a shot at it too. “I was hell bent for leather, wanting to show the kids I could do my stuff,” Carroll recalls. “Our feet hit the ball at the same time, but thanks to the law of dynamics, my velocity beat his mass, and he flew up in the air. The experience taught me that the odds aren’t always what you think they are.”

Carroll forged a close connection with a teacher who was eager to teach Latin, sticking around for extra lessons once the school day was over. He also had the opportunity to observe how one’s surroundings influence cultural and intellectual development. Carroll’s own development was supplemented by the close relationships he developed with adults, and his incessant eagerness to learn. His mother taught him French at the age of eight, while Mrs. DuPont would invite him to read Moby Dick over tea with her while summering on Block Island. “That was who I was,” he says.

Carroll landed a full-ride scholarship to the Portsmouth Abbey preparatory school in Rhode Island, where he would study the classics from Benedictine monks alongside some of the wealthiest families in the country. And while other kids showed up for their first day of 70

school in limousines and nice cars, Carroll had taken a bus from the airport and walked the last three miles with his possessions in his grandfather’s steamer trunk. Despite his socioeconomic disadvantage, Carroll saw that he could hold his own, both academically and athletically. He took up gymnastics and became captain of the team. Throughout his time at Portsmouth, he was at or near the top of his class academically, even taking on student teaching in his senior year.

Carroll and his mother had targeted Portsmouth Abbey as a portal to the Ivy League, and Carroll’s hard work paid off when he was accepted to Yale, again on scholarship. He continued his concentration on languages and decided to major in English literature. He studied hard, fell in with the music crowd, and developed close friendships over games of bridge. They moved off-campus for his junior and senior year, and Carroll managed to finish his classes a semester early, earning him a few months of freedom.

With that time, he continued his work study as head usher at the Yale Repertory Theater, where he saw performances by the likes of Meryl Streep, Henry Winkler, and Christopher Lloyd. Carroll had realized a love of theatre earlier in his college career, which solidified when Patrick McGee, the actor for whom Krapp’s Last Tape was written, came to campus to do a reading of the play. Carroll had interviewed McGee, going on to videotape a performance of the play with himself playing Krapp. “I was twenty years old playing a 65 year old man,” Carroll laughs. “It was probably horrible, but it gives you an idea of how aggressive I was about this theater business. That summer, I worked summer stock in New Hampshire, where a crew of us built an entire stage and performed show after show.”

When he graduated from college, Carroll decided to forego the well-beaten paths toward law, medicine, and finance, instead opting to pursue theatre. He returned to the Chicago area and took a job with the San Quentin Drama Workshop, a theater company formed inside the prison and made famous by Martin Esslin in his introduction to the Theater of the Absurd. The Workshop was captained by Rick Cluchey, who had been paroled after a dozen years behind bars on December 12, 1966 by then-governor of California, Pat Brown. Upon his release, Rick had gone to New York and formed a new troupe which performed Rick’s own play called The Cage, a piece about the damage that imprisonment can do. The Workshop produced the play at the Arena Stage Theater in DC, then for both Houses of Congress, and then took it to Europe, also performing Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. After hearing praise for the Workshop’s staging of Endgame, Beckett asked to meet Rick and invited him to assist in directing a production

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

of Waiting for Godot at the Schiller Theater in Berlin—the first production of Godot to be directed by Beckett himself.

When Carroll first met Rick, he had just returned to Chicago from Berlin with production notes and stage directions for Godot. The Workshop mounted the show at the local American Indian Center, to very good critical reviews. With his good friend and life-long mentor John Jenkins, Carroll found federal grant money to launch a Native American theater company, called Echo Hawk Theater. Rick was then asked to return to Berlin, where he received a grant from the German government to stage Krapp’s Last Tape at the Akademie der Kunste. “Beckett had agreed to direct him, and Rick asked if I wanted to come over and help,” Carroll recalls. “Who wouldn’t? So my friend Bud Thorpe and I got on a plane, hitch-hiked around the capitals of Europe, showed up in Berlin, and started doing plays with Rick and Sam Beckett.”

During that time, Carroll was directly responsible for making sure the show went well on several runs and on tour, including operating the lights, sound, and on-stage machinery. And during that work, Europe had changed him. “When I came back to the States, my mother told me I looked like a well-dressed hippie,” he laughs. “I said yes, but I’m having fun.” He relocated to Minneapolis, where he took a stage management position with the Minneapolis Children’s Theater and independently mounted two small Beckett plays, Not I and Theater II, which were very well received in the press.

Now 28 years old, Carroll decided to go to New York and see what was next. There, he got a “day job” as a paralegal doing patent litigation, his second stint at legal work.

It went so well that he decided to go to law school, enrolling at American University. In his third year of school, he worked in the public interest clinic representing Vietnam veterans seeking service connected disability claims or hoping to upgrade their discharges. Carroll won four out of his six Vietnam veteran cases—an unheard-of track record for a student.

Carroll finished law school in 1987 and was promptly hired by a firm called Landis, Cohen, Rauh and Zelenko. Among his first assignments in that capacity was to work on the Supreme Court brief seeking reparations for Japanese Americans who had been arrested and imprisoned during World War II. A critical footnote citing a report from the general in charge of the West Coast military—the only report on the subject of Japanese American loyalty—had confirmed the utmost allegiance of that demographic. But someone had erased that footnote from the Supreme Court brief. In a classic “righting the boat” scenario, Carroll and his team were dead-set on bringing justice. Although the case was lost

on jurisdictional issues, Japanese-American Senator Inouye was later able to secure reparations for the families of those who had been imprisoned.

Two years later, Carroll followed Mike Rauh, his mentor, to a law firm that turned out to be very poorly managed. “It wasn’t my world, so I got out,” Carroll says.

“I went home and called some people, and before I knew it I had started a law firm.” Carroll sent out postcards to all his contacts letting them know he was launching his own practice. In the first month, he made $64. The next month, he earned twice as much. By the third month, his income had climbed to $700. Then he got word that a Yale classmate was putting together a television company and needed to start a Delaware corporation and fund it with half a million dollars.

Carroll agreed to take on the work, traveling to New York to meet with fellow Yalie John Gavin, and to discuss how the company would air European sports to South American countries. For three years, Carroll served as VP and General Counsel on the project, building up contracts to get the venture off the ground. It ultimately faltered, but it was also exhilarating. “These were smart, fun people, embarked on a wonderful enterprise,” he says. “I regret none of it.” The turn of events allowed Carroll to return to the practice of law, taking on an assortment of litigation, business formation, and telecommunications work. An especially notable case was the wife of Frank Darling, who sought justice for an attack that killed her husband and another, wounding two others, outside the CIA compound at Langley. Carroll was successful in convincing the Justice Department to fund a reward for the capture of the killer at a hotel in Pakistan. “My work is never about just sitting at a desk,” he remarks. “I’m always out and about, seeing if there is some way to do what others see as impossible.”

Through the years, Carroll has had the joy of a successful marriage raising two wonderful children. While they were in elementary school, he got involved teaching a course in Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle to a fourth grade class. This reignited his love of the classroom, leading him to earn a master’s degree in Languages and Literature and teach writing and rhetoric. He has now connected with an independent startup private school.

“They needed someone who could teach, do legal, raise money, and help run the school,” he reports. “That’s me to a ‘T.’ I look forward to supporting their mission, teaching children not through lecture, but instead through theatre and the arts, in an active multi-age classroom.”

When advising young people about their career paths in the working world today, Carroll emphasizes the value of flexibility in a constantly evolving world. “Don’t imagine that you’ll have just one career,” he says. “The Carroll Hauptle

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world shifts quickly enough that if you aren’t completely satisfied with how things are going, you can simply change direction. When I realized that practicing law had led me to lose my sense of humor, I took to teaching writing in college classrooms, which allowed me to regain it. I honestly believe that the world of global communication and business is only just now opening up, and this will help us all get along.”

Beyond that, Carroll borrows from Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a great Buddhist thinker who advises that whenever you go to meet someone significant in your life, bring them something, even if it’s just a kind word or a compliment. “The idea is to be generous with people you care about,” says Carroll. Most recently, when

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going to meet an old friend, he took her the gift of an old poster from the 1977 Krapp’s Last Tape production, with a drawing scrawled in Beckett’s own hand on the back. Carroll had found it amidst his old journals—the equivalent of the voices from Krapp’s past selves that cause so much strife in the play. Carroll’s own voice from the past is one of meaningful remembrance, allowing him to connect more deeply with the people in his life today.

“Beckett loved to spend days walking through cities, visiting museums to encounter paintings, searching for meaning in art, finding ideas for his work,” Carroll says.

“In studying his work, and in living my own experiences, I’ve found that we can all stand up in our lives - to right the boat so the sailing is smoother for all.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Chris Hayes No Big Deal In the early 1960s in Albany, New York, sixty residents of a nondescript apartment complex came to find that they could rely on the prompt delivery of their morning newspaper every single day, without fail. Even when several feet of snow blanketed the ground, their 11-yearold newspaper boy could be seen hauling a toboggan heaped with publications the half-mile from his house to make sure the people counting on him were not let down.

At six o’clock every morning, he’d place the papers quietly outside each apartment, careful not to wake up the inhabitants inside.

Anyone who looked closely could tell Chris Hayes wasn’t yet old enough to officially run a paper route, but he had signed up under his older brother’s name, and would successfully manage the task 52 weeks a year over the next four years. Twice a month, he would collect the payments, receiving generous tips for his dependability. “It was my first experience running a mini-business, and it taught me not to be afraid,” Chris remembers. “I began conceptualizing starting a business as ‘no big deal’—all I needed to be successful was newspapers and customers.”

Chris’s consistent and exemplary work ethic caught the attention of the apartment complex’s owner, and when he started high school, he was offered a job on the maintenance staff during the summers. He got acquainted with mowing lawns, and with the money he had saved up from delivering newspapers, he bought his own lawn mower and started a small business with a friend caring for around eight lawns during the summer. “Again, starting a business was no big deal,” he reflects. “All we needed was a lawnmower and some customers. Those early experiences really solidified the entrepreneurial journey I’ve been on ever since.”

Now a Chair of Vistage International, with a combined three decades of experience starting and leading both a business and a bank, Chris has truly hit his stride as an influencer of influencers and a community mainstay. “No matter which hat I’m wearing, my job is to help business leaders grow their companies by providing the support they need—whether through guidance or financ-

ing—to create jobs, grow the economy, and realize their dreams,” he says.

With an extensive history in engaging with businesses of all variety and scope, Chris’s main goal today is involving himself in companies that form the fabric of their local communities. It’s a mission that resonates with the wholesome feel of his own upbringing in Albany, New York, where he enjoyed an idyllic childhood shaped by parents he aspired to mirror in bringing up his own three boys. His father was a lawyer who had grown up during the Great Depression the youngest of five children, graduated first in his class, and gone on to college at Princeton.

His mother stayed at home to raise Chris and his two older siblings, creating a very stable and loving home environment with very little discord. The only conflict to speak of was the intense rivalry that formed between Chris and his brother, who was four years older and seemed to win at everything. “Through my childhood, I developed a strong competitive streak and a real distaste for losing,” he remembers. “I think that played into the desire to run my own business and be in charge of myself.”

Education was a top priority for his parents, and Chris was intensely competitive when it came to sports.

He attended a private boys’ school and would rush home at the end of the day to ditch his backpack and join the neighborhood kids in playing pickup baseball, football, hockey, or basketball until the dinner bell rang. Basketball was his main passion, until he transferred to a military school for high school and ultimately didn’t make varsity.

He hated the rigid authoritarian environment of his new school with its drills and marches, but he found redeeming qualities in his charismatic English teacher, Mr. Nash, and in an internship at the New York State Legislature.

Chris applied to a couple schools for college, but as graduation neared, he received only Waitlist letters. At the time it felt like a crisis, but in retrospect, it was the best thing that could have happened. Around that time, his father took a business trip to Washington, DC, and happened to tour the campus of Catholic University. He found that they had a delayed application deadline, so Chris ap-

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plied, even though he had never been to DC. This time, he got in, and from the beginning, he fell in love with the school and the city it called home. “If I’d gotten in to another school, I never would have ended up in DC, and I can’t imagine what that life would have been like,” he says.

During his freshman year, Chris lived on campus, went to football games, and developed an interest in the school’s award-winning debate team. He decided to major in politics, but he found himself still searching for something that truly engaged him intellectually. After his freshman year, he decided to move off-campus with some friends, which distanced him somewhat from the college experience. Instead, he got a job as a waiter in a restaurant on the Southwest waterfront—perhaps one of the best business trainings he’s ever encountered. “It was a fastpaced environment where I had to constantly prioritize and then reprioritize to get things done and serve people,” he recalls. “I excelled, and I realized that I really love that aspect of serving people, of getting quick feedback, and of having money in my pocket at the end of the night.”

When Chris graduated, he landed a legal research job through the Help Wanted section of the Washington Post. The firm’s owner was in his early thirties and had left his previous employer to start his own business, and after getting to know the dynamics of the operation, Chris began to feel that he could do the same thing. In December of 1981, less than a year and a half after he graduated from college, he decided to pursue the entrepreneurial leaning that had appealed to him ever since he was a kid delivering newspapers. He subleased an office at 444 North Capitol Street, hung his shingle in January of 1982, and Research Information Services was open for business.

Chris can still remember how his knees were shaking when, as a 23-year-old, he showed up at a New York City law firm to make his first sales call. He had never taken a business course in college, but he held on to the concept he had cultivated earlier in life—that starting a business was no big deal so long as you had a product and a customer. He was also in the process of getting married, and he knew that his pre-mortgage, pre-children life would never be more amenable to taking the leap. So he cultivated his pitch: a business to provide law firms with information from government agencies at a time when SEC filings and court records weren’t available online yet. He would copy the documents and mail or fax them to his clients.

That first year, the company landed three law firm clients and made $28,000 in revenue, which meant no salary for Chris. He was discouraged, and his commitment was further tested when he dragged himself to a trade show in Houston and manned his exhibition booth in a parking garage for twelve hours a day over four days.

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“They were the longest days of my life,” he recalls. “But I made a very important relationship with a New York firm that would prove crucial. Dependability was one of the most important aspects of success in that business because people have to count on you in order to deliver for the people who are counting on them. So I worked to build trust, one person at a time.”

As he worked to build those relationships, Chris had to borrow money to keep the business going. But in 1983, the economy began to pick back up, and the company made $150,000 in its second year. From there, the company’s success picked up. It only hit a bump several years later, when the SEC’s electronic filing system EDGAR reduced Chris’s revenue stream by almost half over an 18-month period. “It was a terrible time, but I resolved that the next time a new technology swept across my industry, I’d be out in front of it,” he says. “I knew that’s what it would take to survive.”

That opportunity came in 1995, when Chris anticipated the federal courts’ shift toward an internet bulletin board system. He pulled together a team to create a website that would collect the data from docket sheets across the web and compile it into a searchable html format. Research Information Services changed its name to CourtExpress, and when the service went live in March of 1997, it became a subscription-based company that helped attorneys perform better by alerting them when a client is sued prior to the client being served. The software monitored every federal court in the country and sent an automatic notification to subscribing firms, which could then reach out to the client. Chris’s team then used the data to build a suite of tools to help lawyers understand trends in a judge’s prior rulings. “We reinvented the business, creating something of value that others wanted to acquire,” Chris explains. “When I sold it in 2005, we were doing business with over three quarters of the market with a team of about 35 employees.”

In considering what the next chapter of his life would hold, Chris knew he wanted to go local. His business had sold to major law firms primarily in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, and Chicago, and he wanted to be engaged in his surrounding community for a change. He also noted that, in his 25 years as a business owner, the only positive experience he’d had with a bank was when he was working with a small local bank.

“They took the time to get to know my business and what my needs were,” he says. “I wanted to start a small bank in the Washington area that could provide this service to business owners like me.”

Chris was connected with a group from the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania, who had started two banks and

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

were looking to launch a third in the DC metropolitan area. They needed help building a board, finding local investors, hiring a CEO, and getting the venture off the ground, so Chris decided to join forces with them. They put together a board with Chris as the Chairman, found the right CEO, and began focusing on organizational activities. By November of 2007, they had raised $20 million in capital and secured their charter, opening their doors that month as Revere Bank.

“The word ‘community’ is key when you’re talking about community banks,” Chris explains. “They’re local businesses that bank local businesses and then use their capital and deposits to fund other local businesses. We at Revere Bank live in the communities we serve, and we’re proud that the bank is an important economic driver of those communities. Throughout history, banks have been a foundational economic driver of our country. Revere is part of that tradition.”

When Revere opened its doors, Chris and his team focused on securing the bank’s internal processes and systems prior to any focus on growth. Their service offerings were modest, which guaranteed any expansion was controlled. “Our top priority was getting good before getting big,” Chis explains. “We wanted to make sure our systems, processes, and people were right, and that we set up a strong credit culture.”

When the 2008 financial crisis began to rock the country, Revere found itself one of the only banks willing to lend when larger, more established institutions were sharply reducing lending. The Revere team didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about the fluctuations of the broader economy, focusing instead on attracting good customers with solid loans. Once its processes, systems, and foundation were in place, rapid growth commenced. They hired a president in 2010, and the growth began to feed up itself, like a snowball rolling down a hill. With five brick-andmortar branches across Maryland, Revere became the fastest organically growing bank in Maryland.

With around $775 million in assets today and a lending limit just under $8 million, Revere can cover about 75 percent of the loans originating in the US—a success resulting from its world class leadership and management.

“What I’ve relearned at Revere is that exceptional leadership delivers exceptional results,” Chris affirms. “It’s the critical piece. Having great leadership is essential to success, because business plans, technology, and capital don’t get things done. People get things done.”

These are lessons learned through Chris’s six years as a member of Vistage International, a coaching organization for some of the world’s most prominent business leaders. When he joined back in 1990, Chris had 40 employees

in offices around the company, yet he had the sense that he was reaching his limits. “Within a year of joining, I realized I was acting as the COO of the business, not the CEO,” he says. “I was focused on getting more clients and making payroll, which was fine for a growing business, but it wouldn’t have been sustainable long-term. I was focused on P&L, when I needed to be thinking longer term and focusing on the balance sheet.”

As a Vistage member, Chris learned to think not in terms of surface level issues, but in terms of the root problems that underlie them. He developed budgets and a business plan, and around the time he sold his company, it was suggested that he become a Vistage Chair.

He launched his first chief executive group in 2006, and in 2009 he took over a Key Group to develop key leaders, CFOs, and VPs. In 2014, he took over his third group, a small business CE cohort. “I like meeting people who are running businesses,” he says. “When they join Vistage and I see them progress to becoming better business leaders, that’s even more rewarding. My job is to create the conditions that allow them to reach their goals sooner and more fully than they could have on their own.”

In Chris’s personal life, his wife of 18 years, Elisabeth, has created those conditions for him. When they married, his three sons were in third, fourth, and eighth grades. Elisabeth welcomed the whole family into her life completely, quitting her job to become a consultant so she could be there for the boys when they got home from school each day. She now works full-time on marketing communications for FINRA, while also running an entrepreneurial venture representing artists and helping to sell their work. “We were talking just this morning about how blessed and lucky we are,” Chris says. “And we’re very proud of what our grown sons have been able to accomplish so far in their careers.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Chris observes the rapidly changing nature of the world, which means childhood paper routes and lawn mowing businesses are growing rarer and rarer. As the past becomes more remote, he urges us to look toward the future. “Imagine the life you’d like to live, and figure out how to you’re going to get there,” he says. “But stay flexible, because plans never go as you think they will. Regardless of the direction life takes you, be mindful and make sure you have a direction. And remember that if a goal at first seems insurmountable, one need only begin to build the necessary skills on a smaller scale, day by day. Understanding will come. Wisdom will follow. And before you know it, that goal might just seem like no big deal after all.”

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Elena Howard Writing the Story The author Jeannette Winterson once wrote, “What is it I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin.”

When Elena Howard found herself suddenly a single mother raising two young sons at age 31, she faced the difficult task of redrafting her future. She felt, at times, as though her wings had been clipped.

As the years passed, she grew tired of the successful, high-powered sales career that kept her constantly on the road, and in 2007, she hit an inflection point. She wanted a new beginning, a different end. She was ready to begin.

Elena knew she had to assess her career options and make a decision. She considered a position in wealth management with a major Wall Street firm, but the role would require her to spend several months away from home, perpetuating the very problem she was trying to prevent. Undeterred, she sought the advice of a recruiter, who suggested that a career in talent acquisition might be an ideal complement to her sales and sales management experience. “It seemed like a great option for me, in that it would allow me to spend more time with my family but also have unlimited earnings potential, while doing what I enjoy doing,” she explains. “I would still be consulting with people, just in a different way, helping with their career choices while leveraging what I had learned technically.”

Now the founder, President, and CEO of Numa Talent Acquisition Professionals, a talent acquisition firm that excels in filling specialized IT and software hiring needs, Elena is writing a new chapter, though the central themes of her life remain consistent. “My work is about developing that trusted advisor relationship with people, and about maintaining that relationship regardless of the career position I have,” she says. “Everything I’ve done in my life has ultimately been about sales and sales leadership, and Numa Talent is a way to take that to the next level through technical recruiting.”

Elena launched Numa Talent on November 1, 2014.

The name, suggested by her history-buff husband, reflects

the ideals of Numa Pompilius, the second King of Rome, who was responsible for the longest period of peace in early Roman history. Numa’s philosophy for governance centered around the belief that peace and prosperity were the products of an industrious and hardworking people, so he encouraged those qualities by awarding citizens plots of land on which to grow crops. As they achieved success, he rewarded them by giving them bigger crops, which represented the most cutting-edge technology at the time.

“That really appealed to me—the idea of reward for hard work, and matching people with opportunities to watch them thrive and grow,” Elena says. “I wanted this chapter of my life, where I’m so passionate about what I’m creating, to have meaning, and that started with finding this name that fit so well and hadn’t been used before.”

Since 2010, Elena had focused on an entrepreneurial niche, helping leaders with emerging businesses that didn’t have internal recruiting resources and were looking for someone to go beyond the run-ofthe-mill resume processing to really work to understand their business, culture, and needs. “Many of the clients I work with are in their beginning stages of business, or they’ve reached a point of inflection where they’re now growing very rapidly and need people with very specific backgrounds and skill sets,” Elena explains. “I launched Numa Talent because I knew it would give me the independence to put together a great team and make decisions for how best to grow my own business and the companies and people it touches.”

Though Elena specializes in professional services and software firms, her expertise covers IT and software staffing across all industries. Some of Numa Talent’s clients have teams of twelve, while others are as big as 400. As businesses grow, they tend to get their own internal hiring resources, but the need for specialized talent acquisition services remains. “Whereas human resources is much bigger in scope, talent acquisition is very consultative and externally-focused,” Elena points out. “I also work very hard to delineate our work from ‘headhunting,’ which to me conjures the image of a cold

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and merciless profession. Numa Talent focuses on deep connections and honoring the culture and intuition of our clients and candidates. We’re really looking for a long-term career position for a candidate, and for ways to help our clients take their businesses to the next level.

We’re very cognizant of the fact that a mistake in hiring can have major ramifications for a business’s brand and that especially for our early-stage clients, people are a big differentiator. So it’s really important for us to be patient and work on making the right hire, instead of the most convenient hire.”

Elena’s ability to discern good fits and promising prospects has been honed over years of experience, finetuned to value consistency in a personal history while not immediately discounting items that might appear as red flags to others. Her challenge is to facilitate the alignment of timing, skills, career aspirations, and potential between a client and a candidate, and to then hammer out the nuts-and-bolts of a salary and benefits package.

With twenty years of sales experience interacting with all manner of people from the financial, healthcare, legal, and federal government sectors across the country, she has a broad base from which to draw, and a keen ability to extract information through conversation to see what adds up. “I really look for authenticity in my work,” she says. “Because I no longer have the pressure of raising two boys as a single mom, I have more leeway to really make sure that whatever time I spend working with people is quality time. It’s important to me that my clients get a feel for who I am and what I’m about, and that I can understand their drivers and where they’re coming from.

Can I meet their needs? Can I help them get where they want to be?”

Elena, herself, has gotten where she wants to be, thanks in large part to the close relationship she has always shared with her parents. Her mother grew up during the Great Depression, lost her father when she was two, and watched her own mother raise five children on only $5 a week. She grew up in Appalachia, where she taught school after finishing college, but she ultimately decided she wanted to make a new life for herself. She moved to Columbus, Ohio, where she took a job with Ohio Bell. She did well enough to buy her mother a house, and though at 30 she never thought she would get married, a blind date with Elena’s father changed that belief. “I learned an incredible work ethic from my mother, which is now the best and worst part of me,” Elena says.

Elena’s father was a lifelong learner devoted to providing for his children’s educations and wellbeing. When he took them to the doctor, he researched the physician’s education and background before he entrusted anyone 78

with their care. Mentally strong and intelligent, he was among the smartest people Elena has ever known. So his wife could direct operations at home and focus on raising the children, he provided for his family as a career employee of the Social Security Administration (SSA).

The middle of five, Elena was born with an expansive personality. She seized opportunities to entertain her parents and make her father laugh, often doing a silly dance like the Charleston in front of the TV. When her four siblings took French, she opted for Spanish.

She spent days climbing trees or building rafts to float down the creek behind the family’s home in Ellicott City, Maryland. One day, she dug clay out of the creek banks, stored it in a Maxwell can, and then used her father’s record player as a potter’s wheel. “I never got in trouble for the things I did, but they tended to highlight differences between my sisters and me. We were very competitive with one another,” she recalls. “I played sports and painted, while they expressed themselves through music and writing. I just couldn’t sit still, and was always off on my bike having adventures.”

The Howard children were all good students, and all entrepreneurially-minded. “When my older sister started babysitting, I pestered the families to hire me, insisting that I had work skills, too,” she recounts. “I wound up folding clothes, weeding yards, and mowing lawns.

If there was a way to make money, I was knocking on the door from as early as I can remember. For me, it was about having the independence to afford things I wanted to buy or do, and it was fun.”

Amidst the carefree days of early childhood, Elena was taught a lesson in strength of spirit when Peggy Shipley, the mother of her best friend, was struck with leukemia. The disease had a dismal survival rate in the 1970s, and though Elena was too young to understand what exactly was transpiring, she knew her friend’s mother was very sick. Still, Peggy smiled all the time and invested heart and care into everything she did. She would make sandwiches and cut the crusts off for the girls. If it was Valentine’s Day, the sandwiches would be shaped like hearts. If it was Easter, she’d shape them like Easter eggs. If there was a fundraiser for the school, Peggy would make colorful crepe paper flowers to sell, and Elena can still remember how her living and dining rooms would fill with these bright flowers like a magical garden. “She had such energy and positivity, even though her darkest times, and was truly one of the beautiful people on this planet,” Elena remembers. “For my seventh birthday, she made me a dress, which I still have today, more than four decades later. It reminds me that you can bring positivity, kindness, and respect to

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

any situation, and that nothing I face can ever be too tough to tackle.”

Other early experiences laid the foundation for her passion for sales later on. In third grade, Elena came across an opportunity in her brother’s Boys Life Magazine to sell Christmas cards, earning a dollar for every box sold. She filled out the postcard and sent it off, and a catalogue showed up with sample cards that could be embossed with gold or silver foil. They could be preprinted with the name of the family distributing them, and Elena made her sales pitch to several secretaries at her elementary school’s main office. Later, when she was delivering boxes in the office to the women who had purchased from her, she realized she hadn’t gone far enough.

“The women I hadn’t solicited were upset that I hadn’t approached them and given them an opportunity to purchase from me,” she recalls. “That resonated with me, showing me that people can actually be offended if you don’t ask them to buy a product and give them the opportunity to purchase what you’re selling. That was one defining moment for me.”

Another lesson learned came when she was selling Girl Scout cookies, aiming to raise as much money for the troop as possible. She and two friends decided to take the divide-and-conquer approach to their neighborhood, with Elena taking one side of the street and her friends taking the other side. The other girls kept getting turned down, and after several rejections, they went home crying. Elena, on the other hand, made several sales, with one house purchasing five boxes. “I remember being excited that I could finish my own side, and then finish their side of the street,” she laughs today. “I also realized that a lot of people don’t have the desire or willingness to take the no’s and press on. At that age, I connected with the bigger picture and was able to see that there would be people in life who wouldn’t persist, and if I just kept going, I could outlast all of them. If I could just stick with it, fostering perseverance and tenacity, there would be plenty out there for me to enjoy. I’ve always kept that in mind.”

Elena’s father was transferred from the SSA headquarters in Baltimore, down to an office in Arlington, Virginia, but it was nine years before the family decided his commute was too burdensome. With that, they moved when Elena was twelve years old, and she struggled at first with the transition from rural Maryland to suburban Fairfax County. Still, she found her footing and got involved in student government, the school newspaper, and the literary magazine. She mowed lawns with her older brother and soon grew old enough to get her own jobs babysitting. When she turned sixteen, one of the families she worked for invited her to

start working at their successful shoe store chain, marking her foray into formal retail sales.

Despite her natural affinity for the art of sales, Elena believed her passion for differential equations, calculus, theoretical math, and business meant she was destined for a career in accounting. For college, she was admitted into the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce, where she quickly realized how unhappy working with balance sheets and income statements made her. When she was home for Christmas break working at the shoe store, her employer pointed out that her innate leaning seemed not to be toward accounting, but rather toward marketing and sales. Relief swept over her, and when she shifted her academic focus, she began to thrive.

After her third year at UVA, Elena took a summer job with Neiman Marcus, where she was put on commission sales. With clientele that included politicians, international royalty, corporate leaders and entertainers, her first commission check brought her a thrill of achievement that turned her on to the concept of unlimited earnings potential.

While the experience was overwhelmingly positive, Elena became pigeonholed in retail and retail management. To regain control of her professional course, she bought a four-door car with a big trunk, betting that she would soon leave retail behind her and enter the realm of outside sales. She pictured herself driving customers around and having the space to transport her samples. “Every day I got in that car, I was reminded of that goal,” she says.

Elena landed her first job out of college at Woodward & Lothrop, where she was enrolled in their management training program. There, she worked as a loaned executive to the United Way, which immersed her in the world of large retail companies throughout the D.C. metropolitan area. Calling on companies like Hechinger’s and the Control Data Corporation, she excelled in meeting with clients, planning presentations, raising money, and preparing for life as an outside sales executive. “If they had me running three shifts in a given day, I was on-site at 5:00 A.M., doing presentations to promote donations to the United Way,” she remembers. “When Hechinger’s was still in existence, I was opening their stores on Saturday to meet with people, give speeches, and show films. That experience reaffirmed for me that that’s the kind of connection I want to make with people.”

In 1986, after nine months in that program, Elena was moved to finance to do inventory control in the downtown headquarters office, when she reconnected with a man with whom she had attended college. He was working for Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) in Elena Howard

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Colorado at the time. Elena moved out there to join him and make a name for herself in the country of Big Oil. “I had always played it safe, so I decided to do something crazy,” she remembers. “It seemed like a place where the sky was the limit, but when I got there, I discovered that corporate real estate was clearing out due to the oil crash.

It was tough to get a job, so I looked for opportunities to begin writing my story over again.”

After rejecting a number of opportunities, Elena discovered United Autographic Register Company (UARCO), a forms management company, and fell in love. Based out of Barrington, Illinois, the company’s culture was reminiscent of the TV show Cheers, where every name was known, information was shared freely, and the President’s Club trips were sensational. “It was a culture of working hard, succeeding, and celebrating,” Elena says.

There, she consulted with clients to make their forms more efficient, sitting down with people to get requirements from them to use in the redesign of the documents and systems. Not only was she responsible for presenting her ideas to clients, but also for getting the forms manufactured and shipped, and doing just-intime inventory. “Ultimately, I was able to affect all different aspects of their business, and see the actual results in terms of how much happier they were using what I produced for them,” she explains. “I was able to consult, create, manufacture, and manage.”

Her big break came less than a month into the job.

UARCO’s territory was divided up by zip code, and Elena was given the worst lot possible—a neglected area in Denver that hadn’t been covered in three years because it held such few prospects. Still, she was excited for the opportunity. Three weeks into the experience and fresh out of training, she received a call from a prospective customer in her territory, and a colleague walked her through the process of pulling samples and preparing for the meeting. She met with the client, MetPath Clinical Laboratories, and over the course of several weeks, she returned with different, improved designs to meet their needs. One day, she decided to try the Sales 101 Close. “If I can do this for you today, can I have the order?” she asked.

The MetPath representative was receiving quotes from two other companies at the time, but neither of them had asked directly for the business. “He was so impressed that I had a line, meaning, I was putting boundaries around my time, that he gave me the sale,” Elena recounts. She grew the account to $1 million dollars and fostered a strong, genuine relationship that led MetPath to seek her consultation for its offices in Dallas, Phoenix, 80

Los Angeles, and Sacramento. “When I left after eight years in that position, they let me know that we were never the cheapest, and people had come in all the time trying to get their account and undercut our prices,” she says. “But they never wanted to do business with anyone else. For me, that’s always underscored the importance of asking for the order.”

Through her ten-year tenure at UARCO, Elena was promoted to a regional recruiter for the Southwest, and was then tapped to be a sales coach for the region. She skillfully balanced her own career trajectory with that of her husband, and when the time was right, she accepted a transfer to Philadelphia to lead the vocational district for healthcare. “It was an awesome experience, and when my marriage didn’t work out, the company asked if I’d be willing to handle the region extending from Baltimore to Charlotte,” she recounts. “They relocated my children and me to Arlington, which was a huge blessing.”

Ultimately, the company was absorbed by a Standard Register, and Elena decided it was time to test the waters. Through the help of a recruiter, she accepted a position at Iron Mountain as a regional sales manager, at a time they were acquiring dozens of companies per year.

The business was also looking to get into federal sector, which gave Elena a taste of lobbying and Capitol Hill.

Though she decided the position wasn’t right for her, she realized a strong interest in federal technology sales, and though she didn’t have a strong technology background at the time, her sales prowess landed her a position in Sprint’s Federal Division. There, she immersed herself in the technology and ended up making the President’s Club her first year on the job. Then, in 2006, she was given the highest honor in the company’s federal group, the Eagle Award, for leading the sales effort to land a $600 million, 10-year contract to secure the mission critical network for the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control system.

This breadth of experience prepared her for that moment in 2007 when she decided it was time to drive her own destiny by getting into talent acquisition. “I couldn’t have joined at a worse time,” she laughs. “I went 100-percent commission as the market was crashing, and as I was preparing to send one child to college. After riding very high at Sprint, it was a rude awakening, but I’m one of those eternally optimistic people. I love the thrill of a challenge, and I knew that if I could get through it, I’d be well-positioned when the economy improved. I couldn’t be like the Girl Scouts who gave up on their side of the street and went home all those years ago.

I knew I could persevere.”

Elena kept the lights on, made the college tuition

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

payments, and succeeded in raising two intelligent, respectful, athletic, self-sufficient young men, who are now successful in their own right. She also met Mark, her husband, who completes her with a synergy that allows her to be the best version of herself, both at home and in the workplace. “I’m pretty strong and good at taking care of others,” Elena concedes. “In Mark, I found someone who is strong enough to take care of me too. I feel so blessed and lucky to have him in my life.”

Through the past several years, as she’s continued to build success through her family, Elena cultivated valuable new skills in the talent acquisition arena and built the foundation of connections and confidence that allowed her to venture forth and start her own business.

And now, Numa Talent draws on her long-term relationships to hit the ground running, already succeeding in making its first placements. The business showcases her leadership style of bringing out the best in people, and promises to evolve into an environment built for those who are hungry for knowledge and learning. “I want all people touched by Numa Talent to look back on their careers with gratitude and fulfillment,” she affirms. “I believe in win-win situations, and I strive to build my business around this concept. I don’t think one person has to

lose for somebody else to win. When people share this attitude of mutual support and a shared vision of prosperity, anything is possible.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Elena underscores the value of a realistic view of the world. “You may have the potential to become good at something, but it takes hard work,” she says. “Most importantly, you have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of your clients or your employer. Their decisions will be made based on what they perceive as reality, so strive to understand those needs and how you can best align with them.”

Beyond that, she urges anyone, at any point in their career, to think critically about the opportunities before them as they take their next step. Is it going to get you somewhere? Is it something you want to put yourself through to get to the next level? Is it a position, environment, and culture that will allow you to thrive? Careful consideration of each question allowed her to steer her own story toward new beginnings, where she stands today. “Right now, it’s all about the future,” she says. “The limitations of the past are behind me, and I know the best is yet to come. The story isn’t about what I’ve achieved so far. Rather, it’s about what I’m going to achieve next.”

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Chris Jones Just the Beginning Feeling the warmth of the sun on his face, Chris Jones smiled to himself as sleep slowly subsided, grateful that he was in the comfort of his own bed in his own room. But when he opened his eyes, he realized he was far from it. His stomach sank as his gaze took in the muted interior of the tracked vehicle and the severity of the desert beyond. The Gulf War had brought him here to Iraq, and the dissolution of that fleeting feeling of home was almost more than he could bear. “It was perhaps the lowest I’ve ever felt,” he recalls today. “I knew that if I could get through that experience, I could get through anything. And I knew that once I got back home, I’d never take things for granted.”

Several decades later, he found himself in a different foreign land, but this time by choice. He had used the years to transform himself into a talented designer and fabricator, and had been selected to do a project for the Iniala Beach House in Phuket, Thailand.

The posh boutique hotel had ten bedrooms, each the work of an esteemed designer from around the world, and Chris had been commissioned to do the adjoining Kids’ Hotel, a project that slept fifteen and included a kitchen and play area. “I designed the whole concept, including clothing, backpacks, and books in English and Russian which contained maps of the property for children,” he recounts.

When the hotel launched, Chris was invited to the grand unveiling, and was shocked when Mark Weingard, the owner, gave a speech that singled out Chris’s contributions. “That was my moment,” he remembers. “It was the moment I wished my parents had been alive and present to see. It was such a triumphant accomplishment, and it made me inspired to be even better. In that moment, I knew I could do much more—that this was just the beginning.” That promise, potential, and creative power is now unleashed in Thinkterior, an interior design firm specializing in innovative quality furniture, storage, and play solutions for children that allow a space to evolve through the years in tandem with its young inhabitants.

Though Chris and his partners didn’t formally launch the company until 2015, the trappings of Think-

terior first started taking root on February 22, 2002, when his son was born. The parents-to-be let loose their creativity in designing their first child’s bedroom, painting the walls and building the bed. Chris, who had been focused mainly on graphic design for some time, felt something in him wake up as he returned to hands-on creative fabrication. “Friends started asking if I could do a room or a specific piece of furniture for them, and I began posting photos of my projects online,” he says. “Two years later, I was contacted by a high-end company called Posh Tots, who wanted to use one of my photos on the cover of their catalogue.”

Chris’s work was featured on the Posh Tots cover two years in a row, attracting the attention of other magazines that wanted to feature his rooms. He went out on a limb and took a trip to Vegas to attend the ABC Kids Expo, the largest children’s furniture event in the United States. There, the inquiries began rolling in from companies and clients from all over the world hoping to buy and sell his products. “It was such an interesting niche, specializing in dream rooms for kids and bringing a lot of creative customization,” he explains. “I could bring any idea to life, and with sophistication. When I wanted to make a carriage bed for my daughter when she was an infant, I went down to Williamsburg and spent an afternoon sketching carriages as they’d go by. Since coming up with that concept, I’ve sold a bunch of those.”

In this tradition, Thinkterior specializes in taking the European concept of bespoke builds, where products are one-off custom creations for each client, and lends a modern element of mass production so customers can use similar elements to create unique rooms at reasonable prices. “I can really appreciate the feeling that parents have—all the hopes and aspirations they have for their children, and how everything they do is for their children,” Chris remarks. “When you have a child, your life changes for the better, and you have new purpose. It’s a global phenomenon that connects all of us, yet each parent-child relationship is unique in its own way.

Chris’s work jumped another echelon when he was

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contacted by Mark Weingard in 2013 to submit a proposal for the Iniala Children’s Hotel. Mark had already gone through three other designers, but no one had succeeded in translating his vision into a work plan. Chris drew up a proposal in two days, and Mark promptly hired him.

“It was my first hotel job and the first job where I actually flew overseas to implement the vision,” he recounts.

“When that wrapped up, I reached out to a contact I had met through that process, Anthony Hughes, who provided over 200 custom pieces of furniture, cabinets, and decor for the hotel and currently runs his own company out of Bangkok. After working together, we knew we spoke the same language, so we decided to partner up so he could fabricate my pieces overseas.”

Tony suggested that they contact Matt Thorpe, who had been the project manager at Iniala and was looking for his next project. Anthony and Matt both lived in or near Bangkok, so Chris flew over in October of 2014 for a week of concentrated brainstorming. They met with two factories which specialized in builds for Ikea, as well as children’s toys. Over four days, the threesome developed Chris’s designs and formalized a revolutionary concept for children’s rooms—a wall panel peg system that allows all elements of a room to be raised and adjusted as children grow from infancy through their teenage years. “The idea was to design a system that grows with the child,” Chris explains. “We also came up with the concept of vertical play, taking traditional games and activities from the floor to the wall.”

Thinkterior’s groundbreaking design concepts draw from Chris’s seemingly inexhaustible fount of creativity, which has been a wellspring of imagination and energy since he was born in 1969 in Washington, DC. His father had attended the University of Illinois, served in the military, and then joined the Central Intelligence Agency, where he worked for 35 years. He was highly creative mentally and authored a number of books, including The Thinker’s Toolkit, which is still used in training for the CIA and FBI. Chris’s mother, a sports fanatic of Italian heritage, worked at the CIA as well, but she ended her tenure when she gave birth to Chris’s older sister.

Aside from a year spent in Pennsylvania when his father attended the Army War College, Chris spent his formative years in Fairfax, Virginia. There, he enjoyed playing sports and fantasy games with his friends, but his primary passion was building models. For a period during his boyhood, he had almost 40 model airplanes hanging from his ceiling—detailed replicas he had pieced together with precision and skill out of balsa wood. “The first gift I can remember receiving was an erector set and blocks,” he recalls. “The set came with plans, which I followed, but I also 84

liked to build my own models and creations without the guidebooks. From the time I was in sixth grade, I always had an Exacto knife or a small paintbrush in my hand.”

In seventh grade, Chris enjoyed silk screening on shirts and convinced his art teacher to let him pursue his interest instead of following the curriculum of the class.

He was always painting the tiniest details on the small toy soldiers he played with. Perhaps the pinnacle of his young design days came when he signed up for a fantasy diorama contest in Wisconsin. He created a snow cave model so impressive that his father loaded him in the car and drove all night to the venue in Wisconsin, where Chris presented his work and won Best in Show as the youngest contestant there. “It meant so much that he took the time to do that for me,” Chris recalls. “It was one of the first times in my life where I felt like I had only just begun to tap my potential.”

Chris always loved holding odd jobs, and landed his first as a paperboy for the Washington Star. He started a lawn mowing company as a child and later trimmed trees for neighbors, but his most momentous early work experience came when he joined the Reserves during his junior year in high school. Aside from having been very patriotic from the time he was a small child, he was intuitively drawn to the regimented, detail-oriented perfection of the military, which spoke to his precise and meticulous artistic side. “It was one of the first great decisions I made growing up, setting me on a path that built my character, mental capacity, and life skills,” he recalls.

Chris completed basic training and started drilling with his unit during his senior year, earning a paycheck that would help cover the costs of college. Upon graduating, he joined the West Virginia National Guard, which allowed him to enroll at West Virginia University with instate status and a substantial scholarship. He contemplated majoring in art, while his parents urged him to pursue a course of study in wood science engineering. Through that time, he continued his design work, building a tripledecker Roman galley trireme ship model for his dorm room during his freshman year. After struggling through chemistry and biology classes his freshman year, he transitioned over to the university’s design school.

Then, during his junior year, he was pulled out of school to serve overseas in Desert Storm in 1991, a transformative experience that cemented his lifelong love of athletics and catapulted him into a period of reflection about his future. Upon returning, Chris decided to work a brief stint as a designer of training aids and tools for case officers in the CIA’s Office of Training and Education. It was a positive experience that he tucked under his belt when he was awarded an academic scholarship to complete his Bachelor of Fine Arts.

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

When he graduated, Chris resumed working with the CIA, but the monotony of the daily routine was an assault on his creative drive. With that, he left to work brief periods at several local design firms before joining forces with a friend to open his own design shop, MediaWorks.

Chris also launched KidTropolis, an interior design firm specializing in creative rooms for children and families.

This was later renamed MyTropolis to incorporate all of his design and creative capabilities including corporate identity collateral and online presence, along with his expanded interior and fabrication offerings. It was 2015 when he decided to partner with Tony and Matt to launch Thinkterior, where he now focuses on maximizing his talent for organization, creativity, and concept.

And as Chris has felt many other times throughout his life, this is just the beginning. The three partners are busy introducing the world to their vision and quickly garnering new corporate and residential clients across the globe. The firm is also committed to expanding its philanthropic endeavors as it grows, planning to focus on children’s charities in Thailand and worldwide. “When it comes to design and fabrication, it’s the smallest details that matter,” he remarks. “That includes the physical details of our projects, the details of our management style and company culture, and the details of how we give back.

In all aspects, Thinkterior adheres to the highest levels of integrity, value and meaning.”

The Chinese philosopher Confucius is quoted as having said that, if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. It’s the philosophy that guides Chris’s life, and the explosive combination of creativity and entrepreneurship has led to ventures beyond Thinkterior.

Chris is also responsible for the launch of another company, BONKGEAR, which produces athletic apparel with QR codes that link the user to online workouts that rotate every 24 hours. A reflection of his passion for physical activity, the company is focused on physical fitness and supporting athletes at all levels as they train for successes that include running a 5K, completing a marathon, or passing

the Army Physical Fitness test. “I love athletics and staying healthy,” he affirms. “I love the process of making something out of nothing, creating a product that people can really enjoy.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Chris encourages the pursuit of a wide array of possible interests to give each individual the best chances of finding their bliss. “I’m incredibly lucky that I found the thing I’m supposed to do in life, but there are so many people in the world who stay unhappy because they aren’t doing the thing they were meant to do,” he acknowledges.

“You might be the greatest guitar player in the world, but you don’t know if you don’t try.”

Finding the vocation you love ties intimately to the past, and can often be traced in the pursuits a person loved as a kid. In this sense, staying connected to one’s inner child can be a key to happiness in more ways than one.

“You’re never too old to be a child,” Chris avows. “Adults aren’t so different from kids when you really think about it—we just have more expensive toys. We’re still kids at heart. People forget that and get too caught up in other things, which is why it’s important to step back and have fun in life.” Chris lives this philosophy with his wife, Susan, who he met at a birthday party when he was 21. She’s remains an eternal believer in his work and vision, and along with their thirteen-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter, they help keep each other young.

For Chris, staying young at heart means leading a life of joy and gratitude that shows in sharp relief against the memory of those days he spent so far from home during the Gulf War—a time memorialized on his keychain by the tiny rear fuse from the first rocket-assisted projectile he fired. It means doing what he loves, loving what he does, and never really working a day in his life, even when the hours are long and the tasks are grueling. And above all, it means staying connected to that inner creativity that has fueled him from the very beginning, living life knowing that its potential is nowhere near tapped.

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Francis H. (Frank) Kearney, III Part of Something It’s easy to see that with great power comes great responsibility, but the first step is recognizing one has great power in the first place. As a young commissioned officer at 22, Frank Kearney had no idea he had influence over his peers, paying very little mind to the impact he had as a leader. He often skipped social events—that is, until the day he was called in to the office of Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Comello. “He said he saw that I wasn’t planning to attend the upcoming Hail and Farewell event, which was an opportunity to come together as a battalion,” Frank remembers. “He told me he knew my peers would come if I came, so he offered to pay for my admission.”

The ensuing alchemy of shock, shame, and realization changed the young man’s brain chemistry forever, opening his eyes for the first time to the power he wielded as a leader and the responsibility he had to uphold the Army’s brand, integrity, and spirit. “That was my first inkling that I was having a leadership impact across our battalion in ways I didn’t know,” he says. “It flipped a switch for me, and from there on out, I was in the game, fully committed to what we were doing. It was the message I needed to get serious about our mission, and a lifetime of opportunities followed.”

Now, after a 35-year career holding various leadership positions in the U.S. Army, retired Lieutenant General Frank Kearney knows that true success never looks like just one person. Rather, it looks like one person opening a door for another, as Frank has strived to do for future leaders as past leaders did for him. It looks like the clockwork of a synchronized battalion, working in consort to achieve a mission. It looks like the partnership between Frank and his wife of over four decades, Betty Sue, the loving and enduring woman who has anchored him since the beginning of his career and helped raise two wonderful sons. For Frank, success has always meant being part of something.

Even as a young boy, Frank loved donning a uniform and working to fulfill a mission, whether it was earning badges in Cub Scouts or winning games in base-

ball. He intuitively grasped the advantage of being goaloriented and the joy of working toward a common victory with others. “I loved structure, and I always wanted to be part of something,” he reflects now.

Growing up in a dysfunctional home, however, being part of something wasn’t always so easy. His parents had dropped out of high school in Poughkeepsie, New York, to get married, and his father had joined the Air Force. His sister was born at Sampson Air Force Base in Geneva, New York, in 1953, and Frank was born a year later at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska. His younger sister was born the following year, and when his father left the service several years later, the family returned to Poughkeepsie, where he got a job at Central Hudson Power and Gas Company. “There was a lot of moving around, and my father had some issues with values and domestic violence,” Frank recalls. “He wasn’t the best person, and through observing him early on, I learned what I was not going to be as a man, leader, and father.”

Preferring to pursue pastimes outside of the home, Frank enjoyed playing outside as a kid, participating in Little League Baseball and Cub Scouts. His mother gave birth to three more children, and his father earned his associate’s degree at night and went to work as an insurance salesman for Prudential. He was promoted to staff manager, and the family moved to Brewster, New York, for three years. There, Frank earned his first dollar by picking up a paper route.

When Frank was entering eighth grade, the family moved again to Newburgh, New York, where he spent the eighth grade in Catholic school and attended Newburgh Free Academy for high school. Their house was surrounded by woods, where he could spend the day hunting and fishing with friends to escape the unrest of home life. He also spent time at friends’ houses and became a master card player. As soon as he was old enough to get a job, he started working at a department store nearby, selling hot dogs and ice cream.

Frank’s high school was large, with over 1,000

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students in his graduating class. It was a racially mixed school, and his high school years played out against a backdrop of race riots and unrest. Frank, however, was more focused on surviving the unrest in his own home.

He knew his family didn’t have the money to send him to college, so he set his sights on West Point during his sophomore year of high school, recognizing that his only other option was enlisting in the Army. With the help of his aunt, he competed for a Congressional nomination, got it, and then landed admission to the school, setting him on track to be the only college graduate of his immediate family. “Being admitted to West Point was a huge turning point for me, allowing me to take a new path in life,” he says. “It was my first great opportunity.”

While many of the new cadets around him struggled with the adjustment to West Point, Frank was free for the first time from the home environment he had worked to evade growing up, and immediately thrived.

It was a close-knit, structured, challenging atmosphere where strong bonds formed quickly and adaptability was cultivated. “At West Point you essentially go through a 47-month development plan where you learn how to be a follower, a teammate, a buddy, and a leader,” he explains.

“We were graded almost every day, and if you did your work, you did well. The school also had an honor code declaring that a cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do. This taught us moral courage and taught us to police our own culture, holding ourselves and others accountable.”

The West Point way of life came so easily to Frank that he served as a cadet company commander during his senior year, among his first clearly-defined leadership positions. He had made the Dean’s List during his first two years, and by the time he graduated in 1976, he was 141st in his class of 870. Graduating cadets chose their Army branch and assignment based on their order of merit in the class, so his strong academic performance allowed him greater control over his own destiny. The most destiny-defining choice he made at that time, however, was proposing to his 19-year-old girlfriend, Betty Sue. Frank had met Betty Sue during his junior year at the academy. At that time, he enjoyed partying as much as any college student, but he saw in Betty Sue an anchor that would keep him grounded and stable. “Her father was an incredible role model, and their family was a window into the kind of home life I wanted for myself and our future,” he says. “She had gone to Catholic school all her life, and she was this wonderful, solid person who loved me unconditionally. I knew she would be my compass and North Star through life, keeping me centered.

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I would never be where I am today if I hadn’t found the right person and gotten married then. It was the start of a long journey we would take together, growing in tandem as leaders and integrators.”

As a newlywed, Frank became a Lieutenant at Fort Carson, Colorado, where he met Colonel Comello, the mentor who would have such a profound impact over the course of his life. It was the early post-Vietnam War period, and most people were looking to leave the Army.

Frank, however, was given perfect opportunities amidst this imperfect environment, and as he watched others jumping ship, he saw that loyalty paid off in the long run.

Colonel Comello gave him jobs with increasing responsibility, ultimately giving him company command as a first lieutenant. He took the opportunity and ran with it, using it as a springboard to land a position in the coveted ranger regiment as his next assignment. “If I had not commanded as a first lieutenant, I wouldn’t have been able to land that assignment with the 2nd Ranger Battalion at Fort Lewis, Washington,” he says.

His experience with the Rangers cemented his lifetime career in the military and his identity as a leader.

At that time, the Vietnam War had ended, and with the stress of combat over, the Army refocused on building itself as a leadership development organization. The Ranger community was specifically focused on building two full-immersion units where aspiring leaders could train to lead fully resourced teams in challenging conditions.

In 1980, Frank was admitted to one of these leadership laboratories, where he learned from tremendous middle managers and senior leaders in a climate where people believed they could do anything. “It was the most positive military experience I had, and it set the stage for how to build units and cultures focused on winning,” he says.

During that time, President Ronald Reagan launched an intervention in Grenada, and Frank was part of the first group to return to combat since the Vietnam War. He performed a combat parachute assault into Port Salinas Air Field on October 22, 1983, with the 2nd Ranger Battalion, and over the four days of the operation, his company suffered three deaths and thirteen wounded. “That short window of time changed everything,” he recalls. “We were suddenly unique in the military amongst our generation because very few people had done a combat parachute assault since World War II, and very few had commanded a company in combat.” Frank remained there in company command for 23 months, learning invaluable lessons about how to lead soldiers in combat, what not to do, and how to learn from mistakes by performing after action reviews.

From there, Frank didn’t want to take the normal

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

route to join ROTC faculty or the readiness regions to train reserve component units, so he made a few calls and found there was an opening in the Tactical Department at West Point. The position required a master’s degree, so he found a one-year program at the University of South Carolina. “Betty Sue and I had one child at that point and another on the way, and it was a very peaceful and joyful year for us after nine years on the grind,” he says.

Upon completion of the program, Frank returned to West Point for three years, where the renewed and refocused Army culture was matriculating into the academies and institutions of higher learning. He had direct influence over around 120 cadets, working with them in a positive way and on a routine basis, shifting the culture from leadership by penmanship to leadership by doing. “In the past, we would write up cadets if they did something wrong,” he explains. “Instead, we were taking ownership of mistakes made under our leadership and fixing them together. It was a major brand shift where we taught cadets to take pride in their companies. Those cadets are now colonels and brigadier generals, and we still stay in touch.”

Under the Army’s leadership concept of “Be, Know, Do,” Frank’s work at West Point solidified his direction as a leader of young leaders. He embraced the importance of knowing who you are as a leader, understanding the sum of your experiences and values to check them against your everyday actions and developing skill sets. From there, he was selected for intermediate education at the Army’s Resident Command and General Staff College, indicating that he still had opportunities to develop and advance in the military. During the yearlong program, Frank was one of around a thousand leaders convened from across the entire Army to connect and evolve.

Frank was then able to return to the Rangers, where he planned his battalion’s role in the invasion of Panama in December of 1989. “I was lucky to be in a position where I could be an architect of planning, and the combat jump went extraordinarily well,” he remembers.

“I was able to build on the reputation of being a good planner and leader.” Tragically, the commander of the 3rd Ranger Battalion was one of three key leaders killed in a crash during a training exercise, and Frank had to step up to act as Interim Commander in his stead. He then stepped back into a regular battalion command role, departing to command an airborne battalion in Alaska during the summer of 1994—key experience needed before he could formally assume command of the 3rd Ranger Battalion.

While Frank was in Alaska, the 3rd Ranger Battalion was sent to Somalia for Black Hawk Down. The bat

talion suffered a number of casualties, and Frank’s chief mission when he returned as Commander was helping the troops rebuild after that incredibly challenging time. “They were my guys, so it was hard that I missed that combat experience with them,” he admits. “But maybe things happen for a reason, and it was important for me to have that strength to be there for them when they got back.”

When Frank finished Battalion Command as a Lieutenant Colonel, he went on to Army War College before heading to Bosnia to work for his old Ranger Regimental Commander, Major General Dave Grange.

There, Frank worked for six months as Chief of the Joint Military Commission, mediating between the three warring factions of Bosnians, Croatians, and Serbs. Working with international partners, peacekeepers, the Office of Security Cooperation in Europe, and other stakeholders broadened his horizons tremendously, opening his eyes to the day-to-day details of other challenges going on in the world.

Frank was then assigned to Italy for Brigade Level Command, where he served as the reserve force for the Balkans and Kosovo. When he wasn’t working on military exercises, he traveled around Europe with Betty Sue and sent his oldest son off to college. He was then selected to be an Operations Officer for the Joint Special Operations Command, spending the next three and a half years working on the invasions and follow-on operations of Iraq and Afghanistan and tracking former Yugoslavian war criminals. “We were either back home on alert, or in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, the Horn of Africa, or North Africa, working on operations in support of Operation Enduring Freedom,” he reports. By 2005, he was commanding all the theater special operations troops in the Middle East, amounting to around 10,000 people.

In 2007, Frank was promoted to Lieutenant General and moved to U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Florida. As a 3-Star General, he served as Deputy Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, where his role changed completely. As part of the Undersecretary of Defense’s Advisory Working Group, he worked alongside the service Vice Chiefs, the Joint Staff, and all of the Undersecretaries for the Department of Defense. “I had been a combat soldier, and now I was responsible for a budget, and for integrating our budget with the other services who provided all of our personnel and some of our equipment and pay,” he says. “Over the next three years, I spent most of my time traveling to DC, working as part of this unique forum to learn how the DoD runs the nation’s defense business.”

At the end of his assignment, Frank planned on Francis H. (Frank) Kearney, III

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retiring, but the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked him to stay on at the National Counterterrorism Center in DC, a relatively new organization created by the Intelligence Reform Act in the wake of 9/11. Now, Frank was operating within a larger interagency community composed of the National Security staff, the Office of the President, the White House, and the State Department. “I never expected to have that kind of job, but it was illuminating, teaching me a lot about how to help people guide organizations through peer leadership,” he says. “Virtually every department and agency has a role to play in the War on Terror, so it’s key that the various personalities and departments come together in ad hoc groups to participate in the decision making and implementation process. It was the last step in a long career where I learned something new at every level and every job, broadening my horizons and stretching me as a leader and person into things I had no idea I’d ever touch.”

Frank retired on January 1, 2012, a successful Lieutenant General after almost 40 years after entering West Point.

Now, Frank is associated with the Thayer Leader Development Group, an organization grounded in sharing military leadership training with corporations and housed on the edge of West Point. Through speaking engagements, business seminars, and mentorship, he continues to uphold the core idea that every U.S. military leader has a responsibility to develop the next generation, teaching others that great leaders create environments characterized by trust, camaraderie, and personal

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growth. “If I’m in an organization, I’m all in,” he explains.

“I’m accountable for it, and it’s my job to help it get better.” Frank also serves as Chairman of the Advisory Board for Team Red White and Blue, a nonprofit dedicated to reintegrating soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines back into hometown life. He further supports veterans through his volunteer work to host special events for wounded warriors and their families or caregivers in Whitefish, Montana.

In advising young people entering the working world today, Frank says to drop your baggage at the door. “If you have a preconceived notion about a person or organization, it’s probably inaccurate,” he says.

“Be open-minded, inquisitive, and curious. Be brave enough and intentional enough to make your own decisions and come to your own conclusions about the world around you.”

Beyond that, he stresses the importance of truly loving what you do. “If you’re not having fun, you’re in the wrong profession,” he says. “I loved every single day I spent in the military. And reflecting back on it all, I see that it was always my job to help by opening doors for others. I grew up a survivor, making my way on my own, and I didn’t want to believe I had to rely on anyone for anything. But I realize now that people were always opening doors for me along the way, and the best thing I can do is open doors for others so that they, too, can be part of something.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Tracy K. Kenny Moving Forward At 9:00 AM sharp, Tracy Kenny heard her bedroom door open and the sound of footsteps approaching, just as she had every morning since the surgery. At 27, she was recovering from cancer, and the process was long and arduous. “I could have laid in bed for the rest of my life,” Tracy remembers today. “But my grandmother wouldn’t allow it. She came down to take care of me and made me get up every day, eat a bowl of oatmeal, and walk down to the corner. She didn’t let me dwell; she made me move.” In retrospect, it was the one time in Tracy’s life when she wasn’t internally driven toward the relentless pursuit of her goals. And where her own inner voice fell silent, her grandmother’s voice was there to fill the void, urging her to move forward in life by moving at all.

Today, Tracy brings the joy of movement to those who might not otherwise experience it as the President of Lift Me Up!, a nonprofit organization in Great Falls, Virginia, that provides therapeutic horseback riding opportunities to children and adults with disabilities. While looking for opportunities for her epileptic daughter, Keira, to get involved in the community, Tracy happened to drive by a sign for the organization. Having volunteered for one just like it when she was young, the mission resonated deeply with her. “We’ll have kids come who don’t speak, and then you’ll hear them say their first words to tell the horse to move,” she says. “It brings the freedom of movement to those who might not get to experience it as much.”

Tracy is also a partner at KPMG LLP, a Big 4 global tax, audit, and consulting firm with 145,000 professionals in 152 countries worldwide. Of it’s more than 23,000 U.S. employees, Tracy was invited to participate in “the Chairman’s 25”, a program to train and advance 25 future leaders of the firm. Two times during the 18-month-long program, the Chairman’s 25 from the U.S. convene with 25 Asia Pacific partners and 25 European partners to discuss the firm’s identity and prospects. And in this context, just as with Lift Me Up! Tracy is mission-driven to move forward for the betterment of others. “KPMG has

started an internal campaign to better understand our higher purpose,” she explains. “What do we do? We’re a Big 4 firm that helps in all areas of business process, but why? Life is about taking a step back and answering those questions. We all have a purpose, and KPMG, at its core, believes in digging deep, accessing meaning, and giving back.”

As part of this campaign, the firm has begun to connect to the broader impact its work enables. KPMG counted the votes when Nelson Mandela was elected as the first non-white President in South Africa’s history. When Tracy’s work helps an alternative fuel producer access markets, she understands that she’s ultimately helping the environment. And above all, she and KPMG play a vital role maintaining the very integrity of the fabric that weaves societies together. “I believe in the capital market system, and I believe we need to make sure people from all walks of life can invest in it and expect its protection,” she says. “It’s not a perfect system, but accounting and audit firms help it to be more perfect.”

Though she’s driven by the prospect of helping to secure millions of investors around the world, Tracy is most immediately inspired by the people she works with at the firm, many of whom have been game-changing mentors. She worked with the chairman of the firm through the first ten years of her career, and when she took five months off after the birth of her daughter, he urged her to come back as a partner with a flexible schedule. It was only later, after the birth of her son, that she came back full-time. “That was a time in my career where I could have easily chosen to go down a completely different path,” she remarks. “But the firm was willing to help me and give me options. Above all, it was willing to sponsor my success and push me to do things outside of my comfort zone. Coming back as a partner was truly a defining moment.” Tracy went on to mentor others, and many have gone out to start their own companies.

Though she focuses in audit, Tracy is also a lead partner for tax and advisory on a Fortune 200 company,

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where she has helped to drive significant revenue growth over the past several years. She focuses on relationship building, broad thinking, leading teams, and bringing in the right skills for a given scenario. She’s also responsible for alumni relations and the women’s network for the DC area, which includes a leadership program. As a Senior People Management Leader at the firm, she monitors the performance of thirty individuals from a human resources perspective. She also heads the Contributions Committee, which makes decisions about KPMG’s sponsorships. “The firm has allowed me to do things I really enjoy which aren’t typically part of the journey,” she says.

“I love change, and challenges, and not sitting still, so it’s a perfect environment for me.”

These traits have been hallmarks of Tracy’s character since she was young. Born in Washington, DC, she grew up in Leesburg, Virginia, when it was just a small town center and a cluster of family farms. Her parents met at St. Elizabeth’s, originally a psychiatric hospital in DC, where her mother was a lead nurse. Her mother was drawn to the young assistant at the hospital who stood up for patients’ rights, to the point that his life was threatened. The two later married and Tracy’s father ultimately got a job at Graydon Manor in Leesburg, where he went on to run a live-in facility for epileptic children. “My parents were incredibly passionate about public service,” Tracy recalls. “I remember my mother working long hours into the night on a hotline, talking people out of committing suicide. They worked incredibly hard for low pay, signaling true passion for the things they did to help others.”

With her parents’ time and energy absorbed by work, it was left to Tracy to care for herself and her younger sister. She learned to be self-sufficient, completing homework and projects on her own and preparing dinner. Adding to the financial hardship, and perhaps instigated by it, her father struggled with alcoholism, which was the root cause of her parents’ sudden divorce when Tracy was eleven. “I had a really hard time with the divorce at first, and it meant even more that I was on my own and taking care of my sister. But when I think back on that time, it was extremely defining in that I responded by not dwelling on bad things that happen,” she says.

“My resilience and optimism, which are defining pieces of my personality, really started there, and were certainly emboldened through the example of my grandmother.”

Indeed, her mother’s mother was a brilliant woman who dreamed of becoming a brain surgeon, though the cultural climate of the time restricted her to secretary school. She was the kind of woman who powered forward with tremendous strength of spirit, no matter what life 92

threw at her. Even when she lost her husband and brother within two weeks of each other, and even through two breast cancer diagnoses, she persevered. When she died at 93, she was still playing golf and walking. “She never wasted time complaining or dwelling,” Tracy remembers.

“That’s why she came down to take care of me through my own struggle with cancer, reminding me how important it is to hang in there and move forward. I tend to think of who I am today based on all the people I’ve had contact with over my life, and she was one of the greatest and most positive influences.”

Sports played another pivotal role in Tracy’s development, beginning when she took up soccer at age seven.

Over the years, she added softball and volleyball, thriving in competitive atmospheres that fed her internal drive to succeed. And despite her parents’ divorce and hectic work schedules, they never missed a game or school event that was important to their daughters. “They were always there for us,” Tracy remembers. “I know it must have been hard for them, but we never felt deprived, or like we were a burden.”

Support and success meant something different in Tracy’s childhood than it does in today’s era of childrearing, in which helicopter parents often micromanage every aspect of their children’s lives. Rather, Tracy grew up with space to make her own decisions and learn from the consequences. There were certainly moments of failure, and her parents let her make her own mistakes, but each was a learning experience that allowed her a more nuanced understanding of the world and its workings. “My mother, father, and grandmother always believed in me and gave me the sense that I could make my own decisions,” she reflects. “They wouldn’t have let me make a critical error that could ruin my life, but they allowed me the space to figure things out for myself, which in turn let me discover that I could believe in myself and my independence.”

This intrinsic drive to succeed first expressed itself professionally when Tracy was eleven, and came across a newspaper advertisement for a babysitter. She asked her mother to drive her over to interview, and though her mom knew there was no way the family would allow an eleven-year-old to watch their infant children, she took Tracy anyway. The young girl didn’t get that job, but she began babysitting within the next couple years, and as soon as she was old enough, she got a waitressing job.

Then, for several summers in high school, she joined a friend in working for the General Manager of a maintenance crew in Leesburg. The teenage girls would wake up at 5:00 AM each morning, put on their work boots, and join middle-aged men on daily jobs to mow lawns, lay

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

bricks, and paint streets around town. “Those summers helped me become comfortable working with people from all walks of life,” she remembers. “I discovered that everybody has something interesting about them, and it certainly helped prepare me for success in the maledominated field I’m in now.”

While motivated in sports and work, Tracy was less interested in academics, having tested into advanced placement classes early on and then settling for grades that didn’t require ample study time. All that changed, however, when she graduated and began college at Virginia Tech. She chose Virginia Tech because it was more affordable than other options. “My parents told me they would pay for my tuition and board,” she says. “I knew that was a big deal, but I didn’t realize at the time that they probably took out a second mortgage to put me through school. I realized how much of a sacrifice my parents were making so that I wouldn’t come out of college with a financial burden, so my relationship with academics changed.”

Tracy also owes her GPA at Virginia Tech to her freshman year roommate, who was the first of her family to go to college. “She was the kind of person who would cry if she got a B,” Tracy laughs. “Because I was so competitive, I instinctively reacted to that, and I came out of my first year with a 3.9.” At that point, the values she had assimilated through her childhood kicked in, compelling her to pursue an impassioned academic work ethic and take responsibility for her grades. Her naturally social nature also drew her to sorority life, where she took turns in leadership roles as the Scholarship Chairman and the Social Chairman. In these positions, Tracy would plan social events, raise awareness about important social issues facing the campus, and counsel any sorority sisters who were struggling with school. Also serving in student government, she was always busy, but was able to maintain her grades nonetheless.

While Tracy’s earliest career aspirations were to become a veterinarian, she entered college intending to pursue law, but switched to the business school after her first year. A close friend at Tech who had gone to high school with her was studying accounting, and his glowing accolades convinced her to give it a try. She did well in her classes, and when KPMG came to recruit at the college at the outset of her senior year, she set up an interview.

It was only then, when she called her dad to tell him about it, that she learned her grandfather had also been a partner at the firm, launching its Cincinnati office.

“He was Joseph Tracy Kropp, and I’m Tracy Ann Kropp, so I was worried about going to a place that already had

associations with the name,” she explains. “But he called and praised it so highly. And then, when I accepted the job and started at the firm after graduating, I received congratulatory notes from people in the Cincinnati office I had never even met. It showed me it really is like a family.”

Now, her colleagues at KPMG are among her closest friends—relationships forged by working hard and playing hard. She still remembers her early years at the firm, when full-day training retreats were followed by evening socializing. “The work is challenging, but it’s a fun firm,” she avows. “You’re continually trying to get people to give you information they may not want to give you, but as a senior accountant, I really solidified my identity as a person who could work with anybody and offer great client service.” Through marrying technical expertise, people skills, and management capacity, it quickly became clear that Tracy was ideally suited for an array of roles at KPMG, and in her 25 years with the firm, she has assumed many of them.

Through that time, other opportunities have presented themselves, but each time, consultation and reflection lead Tracy to realize that the life and possibilities KPMG affords cannot be beat. When a fast-rising company asked her to come on as its controller, she talked it out with her mentor (now KPMG’s chairman), ultimately opting to pass the opportunity on to a friend. “When the company started doing even better, and my friend began really raking in the dough, I was still happy with my decision to stay loyal to the firm that was allowing me to do so much,” she says. “Then, when the company got in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission, I was especially grateful for that decision. At KPMG, I haven’t felt like I need to chase that next thing, sacrificing my quality of life and my other interests in the process.

Things have come naturally and relatively smoothly, and everything in its right time.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Tracy reminds us that life is what happens when we’re planning for the future. “I don’t wonder where I’m going to be in ten years,” she says. “Instead, I step back each year and ask myself if I like what I’m doing, who I’m working with, and what I’m learning. I ask myself if my kids are happy, and if I’m doing what I can to bring joy to other people’s lives. I do that selfreflection, and if things feel right, I keep going in that direction.”

Beyond that, Tracy is living proof that there is no cookie-cutter background underpinning success. Hers is the product of embracing and triumphing over a broad range of scenarios, allowing her to understand Tracy K. Kenny

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the terrain of human nature and real life on true terms.

Indeed, the stories of typical accountants with typical backgrounds have shaped our concept of what typically is. Yet it’s the atypical stories that show us what could be—like the one about Tracy’s fourth year at the firm, working with a small nonprofit whose whole KPMG service team had turned over. The CFO, a woman in her late sixties, had fiery red hair and a temper to match.

She criticized the KPMG team relentlessly, to the point that one evening, 25-year-old Tracy walked into the woman’s office. “I’m really sorry we had turnover on the audit team and you now have to retrain me and the oth-

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ers,” she said directly. “How can we get beyond this?”

To Tracy’s surprise, the woman burst into tears and confessed that her husband had just died several months before. This one moment of honesty led to a relationship of mutual trust and understanding, and the woman began inviting Tracy to the Redskins games she had so enjoyed to attend with her husband. “You never know what someone’s story really is,” Tracy says. “Before writing someone off, take the time to ask them, because more often than not, it will form a foundation for moving forward together.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Lexy Kessler Seeing the Future In some ways, Lexy Kessler spent the first half of her life going through the motions. She got by in school, did fine in college, and interviewed on-campus for a job at Aronson LLC, a public accounting and consulting firm serving the DC metropolitan area. There, she fell in love with her husband and began to think of starting a family. The hours at Aronson were long, so she decided to leave and take a job with a client instead.

Once she made the change, she began surprising herself. She found herself missing the clients, missing the work, and missing being part of the professional staff. It was as if a fire had been lit under her, focusing her professional intentions in a way she had never felt before. She wanted to excel as a member of Aronson, using her proficiency and skills to open doors for clients that would remain closed otherwise. “Taking that time off was the smartest thing I ever did, and I’d never do it again,” she avows now. “It helped me see what I really wanted for my future, and I was a different person when I returned to Aronson after only nine months away.” Now the Lead Partner of the firm’s government contracts practice, Lexy is thirty years into her tenure at Aronson— a road that was natural to follow, once she found the key to motivation and opened the door for herself.

Founded in 1962 by Jerry Aronson, the firm began diversifying in 1980 to service industry specialties like real estate, construction, not-for-profit, and government contracting. When Lexy joined the team fresh out of college on June 12, 1985, it had 65 employees and was located in Bethesda. Since that time, it has transformed and grown, and the government contracting practice has been a leader in that process thanks to its founder, Richard Weigle.

“It was the first practice to have multiple partners, and the culture Dick embedded with all of us—the ability to grow and shift our model over time—very much defined the future of the firm,” says Lexy. “The practice has grown significantly because of that mindset and dynamic, to the point that we now have nine government contract partners which includes four audit specialists, four consulting specialists, and one tax specialist.”

On the consulting side, Aronson provides accounting system implementations, GSA Schedule services, outsourcing, and general business consulting services for government contractors. In addition, they acquired another GSA consulting practice from Deltek in February of 2015, which has integrated well with the firm. “From getting on the GSA schedule, to maintaining it, to consulting on compliance matters on challenges arising with doing business with the Federal government, our consulting practice provides the solution,” Lexy says. The firm also has several affiliates that include Aronson Capital Partners, an investment bank; Aronson SpringReef, an investor advocate; and The Aronson Foundation, which makes charitable contributions to help address the needs of the surrounding community.

Now a firm of around 240 employees, Aronson is uniquely positioned in the marketplace as an alternative to both small boutique and large regional or national players.

It boasts the customer service of the former combined with the sophistication of the latter, helping to differentiate Aronson in an industry marked by rapid consolidation.

“Aronson has grown into the firm it is today thanks to its entrepreneurial spirit,” Lexy explains. “When somebody has a passion or an idea, we work to figure out the business model behind it and then turn it into a service area.”

In this way, Aronson’s work becomes so much more than just a statement or a tax return. Rather, it’s about providing guidance and service to clients, even when they themselves don’t yet see the benefits. Lexy recalls a long-time S Corp client that had entered a period of rapid growth, who didn’t understand why their taxes had become so complicated. Lexy and her team reassured them each year that the extra legwork would make a big difference when they decided to sell. When that day finally came, and they were able to close seamlessly and painlessly, they thanked her for playing a key role in liquidating their biggest asset, which paved the way for tangible life benefits like retiring comfortably and visiting grandchildren. “It’s those moments with clients that make it all worthwhile,” she reflects. “I enjoy being an ambassador

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of the firm while I’m out in the community, serving on boards or attending events, because Aronson is a group of individuals who really enjoy helping clients. I find that extremely motivating.”

Lexy’s career is, in part, a nod to a father who taught her to always do the right thing even if it meant sacrifice, and to a mother held back by the glass ceiling who wanted more for her daughter. Born in Bryan, Texas, Lexy was named after her father’s mother, who fled from Russia to Greece to escape the revolution. She spoke only broken English, but grandmother and granddaughter communicated through an elementary Greek/English hybrid and adored one another all the more for it. Lexy, her grandmother, and her parents moved to San Antonio for four years, where her brother was born.

Lexy’s mother had attended two years of college for library science before deciding to stay home until the kids were older, when she got a job as a secretary at Sears. Her father was an electrical engineer who got a job at the nuclear testing site near Las Vegas, where the family lived for three years when Lexy was still little. “It’s where I learned to ride a bike, and I remember wanting to play the slot machines at the grocery store,” she says. Her family then moved East to Pennsylvania and then to the DC metropolitan area, where her father took a job at the Atomic Energy Commission and then at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. They lived in the area from the time Lexy was ten years old.

Even after they left Texas, they had occasion to return each summer to visit her maternal grandparents in the small house they had built themselves. Lacking formal educations, they had a wit and cleverness engendered through necessity and grit, which always impressed Lexy.

“My grandparents were definitely ahead of their time,” she recalls. “My grandfather was a real jokester and taught me to drive when I was 12 years old. We’d go out on the tractor together or get up early to fish. My grandmother made the best chocolate pie for a snack, which I still make today. She had a rock garden because she thought rocks were prettier than flowers, and they lasted longer. Since she passed, I bring her rocks for her graveside from Peru, Tokyo, China and Iceland, anywhere my family has traveled. We always made the most of the time we had together. To say I adored them is an understatement.”

Reflecting back, Lexy recognizes the lack of motivation that characterized her younger self, growing up shy and sheltered. Lexy’s father was born and raised in Greece during difficult war times. He believed, as most Greeks do, that education was a top priority, and after completing service in the Greek Army and venturing to America to join his brother, he was admitted to Columbia University.

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After two years of study, he transferred to Texas A&M, where he met Lexy’s mother and earned his degree.

The intelligent, logical man, who had been through so much to earn his education and achieve success, could not understand why his daughter wasn’t taking full advantage of the opportunities before her. “You have to want success for yourself, and I couldn’t see what it was for me yet,” she recalls. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do because I didn’t know what it could be.”

Lexy was interested in business and computer science, so she thought information systems might be a good fit for her when she enrolled at the University of Maryland, but they only offered the major at their Maryland campus in Baltimore. Lexy didn’t want to leave her social network of friends in College Park, so she decided to go a different route academically. In high school, she was always good at math and sailed relatively easily through a bookkeeping class, and though she loved her American Studies classes in the study of subcultures, she feared the major’s job prospects. “I decided I might as well do accounting, though I didn’t fully grasp what it was at the time,” she recalls. “I was relatively removed and detached from the industry.”

At times, Lexy felt so detached from purpose and possibility that she considered taking time off from school.

She didn’t know what she wanted to do, and didn’t see the point of finishing college, but her mother had words of wisdom that kept her enrolled. “She told me I needed to finish so I’d never be financially dependent on anyone,” Lexy remembers. “I decided it was important to me to prove that I could be financially independent, taking care of myself and living on my own. That became a big source of confidence for me as I grew into the person I wanted to be. I knew that if I could take care of myself, I’d always have choices in life. That’s something I want now for my own kids as well.”

Thanks to this advice, she finished out her college career and set her heart on Aronson because it felt like the right fit. It was reminiscent of the firm she applied to four years earlier when she graduated from high school. The County had put on an economic development program partnering college students with employers looking to fill summer jobs. Through the program, she had gotten a job with a small firm called B&R Associates, where she had worked each summer since. “When I thought about the large accounting firms, I didn’t want to be a number in masses of people,” she says.

Thanks to her experience at B&R Associates, she was well-versed in accounting basics by the time she started at Aronson, which allowed her to hit the ground running. Years later, she was the first employee to be recognized with an Employee of the Year award, landing two

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

free roundtrip tickets to anywhere in the world. “Since I was only the second person on my mom’s side of the family to graduate college, my grandparents were so proud of me, and they were thrilled I was getting to see the world,” she recalls.

Lexy passed the CPA exam, married Iver Kessler in 1988, and took her brief hiatus from the firm starting July of 1989. By the following April, she was back in action and better than ever before. Lit from within, she worked long hours with vigor and a smile, only cutting back when she had children. The sky was the limit—until she started thinking about making partner. “The idea of it terrified me,” she remembers. “My daughter Eleni was eight, and my son Tyler was five. I had a long commute and was working six days a week during tax season, then helping out with Sunday School. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to cut it as a partner on top of all that, with all the responsibility involved. I was afraid of failing.”

Lexy soon realized, however, that the only thing holding her back was herself. She already treated her work with the responsibility, integrity, and commitment of a partner, so she made her intentions known. In June of 2000, she was officially promoted to partner. In 2013, she was one of two executives from Aronson invited to attend a conference for major firms hosted twice annually by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). “When I walked into the ballroom at the hotel, I almost froze in my feet, because I was one of maybe three women in attendance,” she remembers. “What was so transformative for me there was, in talking to these managing partners at major firms and hearing what their challenges were and how they think; I realized there was nothing to be intimidated by. I realized I could be that, too. It was a truly liberating experience, leading me to push outside of my comfort zone and beyond my barriers in terms of what I envision and believe is possible.”

Thanks to that experience, Lexy’s perception of her position in the world changed. In conversation, she began listening differently, focusing on the art of balance in working to achieve more for herself, her firm, and her personal life. Interested in pursuing new avenues that were personally fulfilling while professionally purposeful, she accepted a position on the Smith Business School Advisory Board and on the Choral Arts Board. She became more engaged in the AICPA, earning an official nomination to become

Member-At-Large for its governing council. She also sits on its Private Company Practice Section Committee. “It’s phenomenal to be around public accounting thought leaders from across the country,” she remarks. “I’m committed to giving back as much as I get from it, and to bringing new insights back to Aronson.”

Through it all, Lexy’s husband Iver has been an irreplaceable partner and integral component of her growth and success. An outgoing, gregarious balance to Lexy’s more reserved and introverted personality, they balance one another perfectly. “He’s my biggest fan, no question,” she says. “He’s my rock, and an incredible father to our kids, who never cease to amaze me. I’m very lucky to have such a wonderful family.”

Amidst the obligations of family, work, and other commitments, Lexy finds time for the Professional Services Council (PSC), where she serves as a board member. As the premier advocacy firm for professional service companies doing business with the federal government, PSC is well respected in the community, and she was floored when she was asked to serve as the organization’s Treasurer. “Some incredible leaders are involved with PSC, and it’s just an honor to be around them, hearing their stories and picking up sage wisdom,” she says. “It’s thanks in part to these experiences that I’ve come to the understanding that I want to be a leader that inspires people to explore the unthinkable. I always tell my team to try a new approach, because you never know what the outcome will be. You never know.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Lexy echoes her mother’s advice to do everything possible to ensure access to choices in life. “Create opportunities for yourself,” she says. “Don’t sit around waiting for life to happen—take the initiative and make it happen.” Lexy also emphasizes the importance of connecting with one’s internal drive. “I’m a firm believer that I can give someone advice, but I can’t change things for them unless they want to change things for themselves,” she affirms. “If you want a great future, it’s got to come from you, so do what you can to see it, believe it, and then live it.

Know that, sometimes, the biggest hurdle you’ll have to get over in your career will be you. To see the future with your own eyes and understand in your own heart why it matters—that’s true liberation, and the most empowering path to success.”

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Bob Kipps The Long View When people talk about the American Dream, themes of equality, opportunity, and hard work tend to dominate the conversation. Yet Bob Kipps has come to understand that taking a long view of success is key to its realization. It’s an idea that first started sinking in when he received a rejection letter from his dream school, the University of Virginia (UVA). Though he had started to buckle down in his studies the last couple years of high school, he saw that it hadn’t made up for his freshman and sophomore years, which were marked by little direction or effort. “I began to see that success has a long time horizon,” he explains. “Effort invested now pays off in the future, and there are no quick fixes if you want a substantive, sustainable platform to build on.”

Now the cofounder, CEO, and Managing Director of KippsDeSanto & Co., the largest investment banking boutique specializing in the aerospace and defense industry, Bob quotes a former colleague in pointing out that he now has a front row seat to the American Dream. “We serve middle market clients and entrepreneurs, and we get to see all the blood, sweat, and tears pay off,” he says. “That moment of transaction completion marks the triumph of their long view, and of ours, signifying the fruition of a relationship and trust that takes years to build.”

Launched in 2007 and now with a team of 25 people, KippsDeSanto considers itself a big fish in a fairly small pond. With expertise in government services like cyber security, intelligence analysis, and healthcare IT, as well in Aerospace and Defense systems like unmanned systems, aerospace technology, and defense electronics, most of their clients count the federal government as their largest customer. Most of KippsDeSanto’s business falls in mergers and acquisitions, raising capital and handling major buyouts and ESOP deals for these mid-sized, technology-oriented companies. The firm generally works on the side of the entrepreneur or the seller, consistent with its background in helping people understand the drivers of business demand and value. “We’re geeky experts when it comes to the defense industry,” says Bob. “We know the

most important investment attributes, and we’re wellversed in keeping the end in mind and guiding business owners through each step of their company’s growth.”

Given this value add, many of the firm’s relationships start well before a client’s sale effort. When KippsDeSanto meets an entrepreneur, the first stage is educational, allowing the potential client to observe and consider the firm’s advice and service style over a period of months or years before any formal commitment is asked. Over that time period, potential clients witness firsthand the firm’s proficiency in consulting, strategy, deal execution, and negotiation. “After this exposure, if a potential client doesn’t decide to go with us, shame on us,” Bob says. “When they do decide they need us for a transaction, we can hit the ground running. Having that long view is an important aspect of our work that ensures our clients have the information they need to make informed decisions about our relationship and their business.”

Thus, as with any good relationship, trust is the cornerstone of the work that connects KippsDeSanto with its clients. “As a firm, we’re very focused on always doing the right thing,” Bob underscores. “When the market goes down, it’s not a good time for our clients to sell, and even though the company makes its money through transactions, we hold off until action is truly in the best interest of the client again.

As a private company, we know that one of our best advantages is being able to do the right thing for clients 365 days a year, so we’ve always made sure that we’re financially prepared to make those decisions. We operate with a long-term view, and we believe there’s absolutely no room in a competitive market for second-rate talent or questionable advice. Sometimes doing the right thing puts us at a short-term disadvantage compared with our competitors, but at least we can sleep well at night, and it’s more important to us to remain part and parcel of this community and industry. We simply can’t deal with the shortsightedness of short-term gain for long-term extinction.”

The work of KippsDeSanto is done in teams, which fosters an attitude of selflessness throughout the firm

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that underpins its company culture. And, not big on grand internal speeches, Bob leads by example. “I feel very strongly about doing the right thing and being very transparent—albeit professional—in my delivery, providing immediate feedback to help people understand when things are working and when they’re not,” he explains. He has focused on hiring and developing the best talent around, ensuring diversity of thought and background across his team. “It’s very gratifying to hire young people and watch them develop and flourish,” he says.

“They embrace the brand, culture, and passion of the company and then progress in their careers here. In fact, some of our first entry level hires are now VPs.” Born and raised in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, Bob has been primed for this specific line of work all his life. His father was a government contracts lawyer—a litigator working for the biggest defense contractors—whose natural competitive streak was passed on to his son. Mr. Kipps often discussed his work at home, allowing Bob to grow accustomed to the language and logic of the industry. “My father was the first of his family to go to college, and the first to go on to graduate school to get his law degree,” says Bob. “Although he can definitely be rough around the edges at times, calling it like he sees it without any filter. I got my work ethic from him. From an early age, he taught me that you have to balance doing the work and getting the work to grow the business.”

Bob’s mother was quite the opposite—the refined daughter of a judge who was always the picture of professionalism, intelligence, and etiquette. She had worked to support her husband while he went through law school, and then stayed home to raise the children in their North Arlington home. Bob and his siblings were always very enterprising, interested in investigating the world around them, but Bob was the first kid in the family to get into sports. When he wasn’t playing basketball, football, soccer, or baseball, he was earning spending money shoveling snow and mowing lawns around the neighborhood, amassing five or six customers he would service regularly.

Growing up the youngest of six children, Bob “had it easy” by his siblings’ standards. His parents had grown softer and mellower over the 13 years of parenthood they already had under their belts by the time Bob came along. Their finances were more robust, their vacations were nicer, and they simply weren’t as interested in forcing energetic children to sit down and focus on schoolwork. At the time, young Bob enjoyed the freedom, but in retrospect, he wishes he had been able to see the long view then. “When I was younger, I wasn’t nearly as 100

driven as I am today,” he remarks. “I got mediocre grades through school and just wasn’t very focused.”

Bob’s aspirations in life were similarly limited.

When he was fifteen, his older sister married someone who hadn’t gone to college, but had instead made a successful living by capitalizing on the advent of the computer. Bob decided he didn’t need college either, and would instead tinker around with computers and software. After that, he reflected on his affinity for traveling around and seeing the country, and decided he might like to be a trucker. Those goals were short-lived; however his parents said that college was a requirement.

It wasn’t until his junior year of high school that Bob began taking school more seriously, and by his senior year, he knew he wanted to go into business. When he was rejected by UVA, he enrolled at James Madison University and resolved to throw himself into academics, quickly earning the grades he needed to transfer to UVA’s renowned McIntire School of Commerce. “It was hard to pivot away from athletics and to say goodbye to the friends I had made my freshman year, but I was absolutely driven,” he recalls. “I started at UVA the following August, and within a month, we were talking about our resumes and interviewing with Wall Street firms. I was focusing on finance and going full-speed ahead toward the kind of professional career I was dreaming about, and my interest in investment banking had been piqued.”

It was the kind of education that made each student feel ready to grab the helm as a CEO right out of the gate, but upon graduation, Bob was quickly reminded that he still had a long way to go. It was the late 1980s, in the wake of the stock market correction. Several investment banks were in the process of going bankrupt, and few were hiring, so Bob took a job in management consulting with Peterson Consulting, a fast growing professional services company that placed an emphasis on training and investing in its employees. Alan Peterson, the founder, had recently sold the company to an investment group, and later in 1994 spun off a smaller consultancy. Bob joined that effort, thriving in the entrepreneurial environment.

“Alan was probably almost seventy years old at the time, and people wondered why, at that stage in his career, he would decide to put in the effort to start another company when he didn’t need the money,” Bob reflects. “He gave me a plaque which I still have in my office today, which describes an old person building a bridge for the next generation to cross. He felt that starting another company was the right thing to do for others.”

Bob learned a lot about character as he watched Alan and the other senior folks work hard to get the company off the ground. He experienced adversity and

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the importance of laying the groundwork before starting a business, while also observing the subtler details of building a professional services firm and taking care of employees. Through that time, he also began dating Pamela, a DC native who was working in Manhattan. The two met at UVA but didn’t start dating until after college, when they were reacquainted at the wedding of a mutual friend. As things got serious, she moved down to Washington, and the two married in 1995.

Overall, working at Peterson was a great learning experience, but Bob was traveling extensively for work.

He wanted to be home with Pamela, and he wanted to try something beyond the bounds of management consulting. In 1996, he heard from a college friend working at Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin, a global investment bank. The LA-based firm needed someone for its DC office, so Bob applied.

Lou Paone had opened the office in 1992 and built it up to a team of eight. The vacant position was for an Associate, typically reserved for candidates with MBAs. A little older than the typical applicant, and without the degree, Bob wasn’t the obvious choice for the role, but Lou could see the value in his experience and the potential in his drive. “He took a chance on me, and I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to learn the ropes at a company with such a great culture,” Bob reflects. “Over the next eleven years, the DC office grew to fifty people, and the company grew from 80 to 800 employees worldwide. I really became the person I am today thanks to the people I met there.” At Houlihan, Bob hired Kevin DeSanto and Marc Marlin, two extraordinarily talented individuals. All three had similar values, outlooks, and beliefs, and they seemed to have compatible and complementary strengths and weaknesses.

All went well until Houlihan was acquired by a Japanese company in 2006, and Bob went from being a partner in an entrepreneurial firm to more of just an employee for a larger organization. He initially worried that the sensitive security businesses and defense contractors they had worked with would have cause for concern now that he worked for a larger, global firm based in Japan.

The time was right for Bob, Kevin, and Marc to venture out on their own, and the year after the acquisition, they had built up enough financial stability—and eschewed enough fear—to do it.

At first, Pamela was cautious. By that point, they had three children, and though she would later return to work leading the children’s ministry at their church, they were a single-income household. “Leaving a secure partner position at Houlihan to start a new business certainly raised a lot of eyebrows,” Bob recalls. “But Pamela knew I

had entrepreneurial aspirations and wanted me to follow my dream. In the end, she knew it was the right thing to do, and she’s been incredibly supportive.”

Bob decided to launch his own company because, after almost two decades of working in mid-sized, growing organizations and observing the good and the bad along the way, he no longer wanted to be told what to do. He was ready for a new challenge and new responsibility, being the one to call the shots and live with the consequences. He had seen thriving, fun, energetic companies, and he believed they had the tools, expertise, network and game plan to build a great company. With that, KippsDeSanto opened its doors in May of 2007. As luck would have it, five days before they opened shop, Bob won the Dealmaker of the Year Award for Investment Bankers from the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), a testament to his recent successes. “As a small company, our vision was to have the best talent in the industry,” Bob explains. “Out of the gate, as a small firm without a reputation, we couldn’t afford to be anything less than the best. Starting KippsDeSanto was a true team effort.” To attract and retain that talent, Bob and Kevin wanted to create the right “work hard, play hard, fun place” kind of culture. That focus on culture lives on today, whether it’s via internal deal celebrations or one of the four-to-six company-wide events they hold each year. Their most recent event involved river kayaking followed by a microbrewery tour as way to thank their summer interns and welcome their class of four new analysts.

Investment banks have long sales and execution project cycles, so when the company launched, Bob knew they needed funding for twelve months with a full team. In his business, roughly 95 percent of the firm’s fees and revenue come from completion of transactions, and many transactions take months or years, so he knew it would be crucial to make preparations for the long haul.

True to form, the company’s first transaction took over fourteen months to complete. Fortunately, three more transactions closed over the next sixty days, replenishing the firm’s coffers for what would come next.

The nascent company met its first defining moment just a year and a half into its existence when the 2008 financial crisis hit, marking a dramatic loss of confidence and a tremendous upswing in equity market volatility.

Over the next nine months, no transactions were completed, and with about 15 employees at that point, Bob acknowledges the fear of that time period. “With those employees counting on us for their pay and livelihood, it was our first test of real responsibility,” he says. “Most investment banks were laying off staff, so we knew that if we let anyone go, their employment prospects were grim.

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Plus, we had worked so hard to attract our A-grade talent; we made it a top priority to keep it. So we proactively cut the senior folks’ pay so that we knew we could afford to keep everyone onboard. While it ultimately proved unnecessary, it built up a lot of rapport within the ranks.

It was a true test of character—not only for the firm itself, but for each of its team members as well.” After a few years of strong growth, another defining moment came with sequestration and the government shutdown of 2013, which created further instability. “We’ve definitely been battle-tested, and fortunately we were able to keep it together and keep rolling,” says Bob. In advising young people entering the working world today, Bob suggests assessing a potential job by taking a look at the other people you’d be working with and for. “Beyond learning a lot about the actual substance of your work, you will also emulate the style of your colleagues and managers, whether you intend to or not,” he says. “It’s important to be able to tell the good from the bad so you can play an active role in what you absorb and reject.” He underscores the importance of thinking broadly about what your real interests are, because there are a wide range of ways to make a living and make a difference. “Also, in today’s hyper competitive marketplace, I’m a big believer in focusing on something and becoming a real expert in that field, versus being a jack of all trades,” he says. “I can be a generalist on my intramural sports teams. But when it comes to business, specializing in a specific line of work for a specific industry—M&A for aerospace and defense companies—has been crucial to our success.”

Beyond that, Bob remembers the value of staying connected to what’s really important in life—something he was reminded of in 2010, when his mother passed away after a twenty-year battle with Parkinson’s disease.

Finding a cure for Parkinson’s has since become an important rallying point for the family’s philanthropic efforts, as has Easter Seals of the Greater Washington-

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Baltimore Region, where Bob serves on the Board of Directors. And, while giving back is an important part of his life outside of work, it’s also a fundamental drive for Bob within the workspace, both directly and indirectly.

KippsDeSanto prioritizes community service, whether it’s rebuilding homes in Downtown DC and Downtown Baltimore or via meaningful financial support. “On the client side, it’s extremely gratifying to help support the businesses we work with, who are typically the small guys compared to the major private equity funds or large defense contractors we see sitting across the table,” says Bob. “We work hard to level the playing field and ensure they’re getting the best deal possible in what is often the most important business transaction of their career. In most cases, we’re helping our clients establish their legacy, trying to do well by doing good. I’m grateful we’re able to provide this kind of critical advice and support— which we find so meaningful and rewarding—to our clients, many of whom previously served in the military or in other parts of government.”

One of the best parts of running KippsDeSanto, however, will be borne out over an altogether different time horizon, and one that is decades in the making.

“Perhaps most of all, I’m thankful that my kids get to see what an entrepreneurial experience is like first-hand,” he says. His oldest daughter, now seventeen, has watched the business grow from the beginning. His two younger children, as well, have seen the ups and downs, the inopportune cell phone calls and long hours, the setbacks and successes. “I wanted my kids to see that making a living can be about so much more than just getting a job,” he says. “The American Dream can be about so much more than getting something—it can be about creating something. I wanted them to have a fuller perspective and a more open aperture as to what they can do to make the world better and to make themselves happy. I want them to take the long view, starting now.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Larry LeDoyen 20/20 Larry LeDoyen was only seven years old when he decided to take matters into his own hands. His parents were raised in a Baltimore City blue-collar environment, barely making it through high school. Focused on making ends meet and providing financial security for the family, they didn’t have much extra time to invest in guiding and promoting the extracurricular development of their children. “My parents didn’t even really know what sports were,” Larry laughs today. “But I felt this undeniable draw toward them, so one day; I walked down to the neighborhood recreation center and asked to join a soccer team.”

From that point onward, athletics became a major focus for the young boy, cultivating in him invaluable life skills that would steer him straight through his schooling years and translate into exceptional business acumen later on. “Because I had the wherewithal and courage to march up to that desk at age seven and ask if I could play, sports became that ‘guide to growth’ so lacking in my home life,” he remarks. “I learned how to be a team player and a team captain, which helped me understand the interworking and personalities of a business and how they work in tandem toward a common goal.”

Since those earliest days on the soccer field, Larry has applied the “team” lens across a variety of business situations, using it to lead an array of business endeavors to success. Now, as a founding partner of Velarity, Inc., a consulting firm that specializes in business life cycle analysis and assistance, he draws on his extensive business playbook to put the best strategy up on the blackboard. Indeed, as Larry’s approach confirms, the difference between a group of individual employees and true teamwork is seasoned orchestration, end-goal cognizance, and the kind of hindsight that brings 20/20 vision to a company’s current climate.

Launched at the end of 2013, Velarity specializes in meeting its clients where they are. Recognizing that all businesses progress through a life cycle from start-up, to a growth stage, to maturity, to decline, the firm synthesizes the first-hand experience of its partners into business

advisory services designed to maximize the financial health of its clients. Its name, a combination of velocity and clarity, outlines the path to success it envisions for clients, whatever the business may need. “We’re unique in that we’re open to playing many different roles as we work with businesses,” Larry says. “We might work on a project basis for a fee, or on an equity basis. We’re open to investing in companies that need cash, guidance, or both. We’re finding our niche, creating a unique monthly meeting for CEOs that promotes business brainstorming and camaraderie beyond the bounds of the office. I’m driven by the opportunity to spend my days drawing on my own experience to help others succeed, and with our company so young, I’m excited to watch as we reach our full potential by helping other businesses reach theirs.”

Larry’s enthusiasm to mentor others was in part inspired by the special relationship he shared with his grandfather. “He was a wonderful person, and we had a lot in common,” Larry remembers. “Of all my wonderful family members, he really stuck out to me as someone I adored, developing shared interests in everything from golf to lobster. He was just a very positive and encouraging human being.”

As well, Larry always admired the way his father ran his business. An HVAC contractor, he had started working at his own father’s company when he was fifteen, eventually taking over the family business and building it into a million-dollar enterprise that fully occupied his attention. “Dad became an expert at what he did, and was able to succeed entrepreneurially even though he didn’t know much about business,” Larry recalls. “In many ways, he’s a lot like some of the clients we serve at Velarity today.”

Larry worked for his father’s business in the summers, gleaning insights about business practices in general as he watched and observed. “It was my first exposure to the concept of creating something, selling it to somebody, and making money,” he explains. “As I cut sheet metal for him, my interest in business was sparked.”

Entrepreneurial at heart, Larry would set up snow cone

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stands in the city in the winters, serving shaved ice with flavored syrup to earn spending money.

These fledgling business efforts complemented his evolving athletic abilities, and as sports became a greater and greater element of his character, his family assimilated the culture and became supportive fans. As a freshman at a private Episcopal high school, he made every varsity team he tried out for. He was named Maryland State Athlete of the Year in 1982, accomplishing state scoring records in soccer that have yet to be beaten. He was named an All-American lacrosse player, an AllMetro soccer player, and an All-Metro lacrosse player his senior year.

When it came time for college, the University of Virginia offered him a full-ride to play lacrosse, and Larry was ready to get out of Baltimore. “I wanted a new start—the chance to try something different,” he remembers. Academics had never been important to him, and never would be, paling in comparison to his passion for athletics. Yet the commitment began to take a toll on his body, to the point that he could hardly play. He ended up transferring to Johns Hopkins, where he took a semester off from sports to regain his health. He came back fullforce to become the top midfielder, leading a breakout performance in a game against North Carolina that essentially turned the season around for the team and propelled them to victory as the 1987 NCAA champions.

Then, during his senior year of college, his goals began to shift from corporal to corporate. That spring, in 1987, he joined forces with a friend from his high school days to rent a modest space on the boardwalk in Ocean City. The partners opened a humble fast food pizza and sub shop called the Hungry Surfer, and when Larry graduated from college several months later, he moved down to Ocean City to run the shop full-time over the next several years.

Larry learned the business inside and out, and after its first year, they made $30 thousand. He used the money to purchase a screen-printing machine and dryer, launching an apparel company that printed t-shirts. As that venture grew to $10 million in revenue over the next five years, the partners opened a barbeque joint. Everything was humming along smoothly until the day in 1998 when Larry fell ill. He was unable to work for the next three years, likely stricken with advanced Lyme disease that wasn’t detected until much later. As fate would have it, Larry met and married a young lady during those tumultuous years. The marriage didn’t last, but the two children it produced have become the true loves of Larry’s life. “The moment I became a father was among the most definitive of my life,” he affirms. “My kids bring me 104

joy, even on the days it’s hard to come by. When things aren’t going well, I remind myself that I have them, and that’s a great thing.”

When Larry was well enough to return to work in 2001, he launched a promotional and marketing business called PromoCorp. His partner had nearly bankrupted the apparel company during Larry’s illness, so Larry took what he could in lessons learned and signed the rest away. He applied the newfound wisdom to PromoCorp, growing it to $5 million in revenue with 40 percent gross profit over an eight-year period. When the market began to tank in 2008, he sought exit opportunities and was able to sell the company for a reasonable price.

After staying on for a year, Larry entered a three-year no compete agreement that freed up his time to partner with a group of colleagues to open seven Greene Turtle Restaurant franchise locations in Fairfax, Anne Arundel, Prince George’s, and Montgomery Counties. With the same partners, he developed a new nautical-themed restaurant in Annapolis called Blackwall Hitch, a higherend establishment with another location slated to open in Old Town Alexandria. As well, Larry became a franchise investor in EmbroidMe, an embroidery services, imprinted apparel, and promotional products company.

As Larry began removing himself from the day-today operations of these various enterprises, he considered his next move. As a member of Vistage International, a coaching and peer support program for CEOs, he had met Michael Mosel, a bright and energetic young entrepreneur with a penchant for communicating vision and leading new ventures. Larry; less polished around the edges but with decades of direct experience in launching, running and successfully exiting companies, was the yin to his yang. The two decided they would be a good team, combining their skills to create Velarity and serve clients across all sizes and sectors. “Business is business,” Larry says. “Balance sheets are balance sheets, and employees are employees. The basics are there, regardless of what industry a client may fall in. Whether we’re helping a personal training business or an urgent care franchise, Velarity is about the best practices of business that make any company more successful. From the importance of bookkeeping, to making sure your insurance is in order, to establishing a sales and marketing plan, to reevaluating your staff with a lens for business growth, our solutions are simple yet vital, and timeless yet cutting-edge.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Larry underscores the importance of earning a college degree. Beyond that, he urges people to pursue things that bring them happiness. “The goal is to enjoy getting up and going to work every morning,” he

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says. “With that in mind, follow a career that motivates you. Do it for the fun, not for the money.” Indeed, Larry is driven by goal-making, whether he wants to travel to a 45th country to explore a new culture, or whether he wants to find the best new steak house for his selflaunched 15-year-old Steak Club’s bimonthly gathering.

Whether he’s helping his kids find and pursue their own goals or showing them a different side of society by leading family volunteer efforts at local homeless shelters, Larry’s leadership—both at work and at home—is highly goal-oriented. “At a young age, I was often told that winning isn’t important,” he laughs. “But to an extent, it absolutely is important. Either you attain your goals, or you don’t. So set your sights on winning, whether it’s on the athletic field, in the office, or just on your own to-do list.”

Now, however, Larry’s definition of “winning” has evolved with experience and wisdom. While a singular focus on success in sports gave way to an impassioned drive for success in business, his interest has since be-

gun to shift to a much deeper concept of success. “To me, when I see an issue, my mind immediately begins to draw on my thirty years of experience to outline the possible solutions,” he says. “It’s almost a feeling of compassion—the sense that I understand what a business executive is going through and how we can help them.”

The words conjure up an image emblazoned in Larry’s memory of a time when his grandfather had fallen ill for several years. During that period, Larry was a mainstay at the old man’s house, committed to seeing him through to health again.

When Larry would sleep in his grandfather’s bedroom, he would always wake up to the same quote hanging on the wall, which read, “Who can you help today?”

In the spirit of this mentor, now deceased, who taught him to shape his life around these fundamental questions of humanity and purpose, Velarity is the helping hand Larry extends to anyone who can’t afford to wait for hindsight to offer 20/20 vision.

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Nancy Leopold Repairing Her Corner of the World In the sweltering summer of 1963, the character of America underwent one of its most transformative moments, and the character of eight-year-old Nancy Leopold followed suit. The March on Washington marked the largest demonstration to shake the Nation’s Capital in history, and among the first to be extensively covered on the news. At home in her living room in Meadowbrook, Pennsylvania, Nancy sat up close to the television set, scouring the faces of the crowd for the one she knew best. One of those 250,000 participants was her mother.

“For her, every cause was critical,” Nancy recalls today. “She had to be there, an understated but certain force in our country’s vast evolution toward equality and social justice. Tikkun olam, the Hebrew term in Judaism that compels us to repair the world through human action, was never openly talked about in our home, but it was still the central driving force of our family’s philosophy. It permeated everything she did, and was a model for me as I grew up and developed my own passion.”

Now, Nancy lives and breathes the spirit of tikkun olam every day as the cofounder and Executive Director of CollegeTracks, an organization committed to changing lives by giving disadvantaged kids the guidance they need to pursue higher education at a college or university that fits their interests and abilities. The school-based program begins working with students in their junior year of high school, guiding them through career exploration and a college search process geared at achieving the best possible outcome for each kid’s unique interests, abilities, and financial circumstances. From test preparation assistance, to college visits, to scholarship opportunities, CollegeTracks monitors students through each step of the college and financial aid application process to ensure follow-through and success.

Nancy and the other CollegeTracks cofounders didn’t set out to launch an organization—they set out to solve a problem. It was 2002, and their children were enrolled at Bethesda-Chevy Chase (B-CC) High School in Montgomery County, Maryland, where an International

Baccalaureate program had just been launched. New advanced placement courses were added to the curriculum, but Nancy and her colleagues, who had started a Human Relations Committee for the school, noticed mostly white faces in those classrooms.

The school’s student body was approximately 25 percent nonwhite, and students, faculty, and parents alike celebrated its vibrant diversity, yet it had become glaringly obvious that many students weren’t getting enough help through the circuitous college application process. “Kids who had always grown and learned together were starting to see their paths diverge, through no fault of their own,” Nancy recounts. “The kids from lowto moderate-income, minority, immigrant, or non-college-educated families were facing significant hurdles. They were bumping up against hard deadlines for new and confusing tasks, and they didn’t have adults at home who could help guide them. And this was reflective of national trends, which show that the lowest performing affluent kids still get into college at higher rates than the highest performing low-income kids. It felt so wrong, and we wanted to do something about it.”

With that, Nancy and several other concerned parents arranged with the school to set up shop in the Career Center on Tuesdays after class, providing extra service to the kids who needed it. When they realized that between thirty and fifty students needed immediate help, they brought on volunteers, and the operation began to take shape. The leaders trained themselves, and each other, on the intricacies of financial aid and college selection. After two years operating in that capacity, while juggling their day jobs to boot, they decided they needed to commit far more time and resources to the project to achieve the kind of impact the students deserved.

It was as if Nancy’s whole life had been perfectly orchestrated to prepare her for what came next. The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation put out a notice of intent to fund college access programs in Maryland, offering pro bono assistance to programs looking to become a 501(c)(3).

Nancy took the program development and evaluation

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skills she had learned through obtaining her masters in Health Policy; the business skills, social marketing and deep communications knowledge she had honed earlier in her professional career; and the passion for social justice that has nourished her from the very roots of life, and put it all behind the concept of CollegeTracks. The program was awarded a two-year, $90,000 grant, and now that they were plugged into the National College Access Network’s web of resources and support, its mission leapt to the next level. “It was one of those unbelievably lucky moments,” Nancy says. “It gave us everything we needed to succeed, exactly when we needed it, and we suddenly realized we were becoming an organization.”

In one fell swoop, CollegeTracks incorporated in 2006, assembled a board, hired staff, formalized its relationship with the Montgomery County Public Schools, and decided to take on the school district’s greatest challenge by expanding into Wheaton High School, where 82 percent of students qualified for the Free and Reduced Meals program. The program’s representatives established full-time presence at both schools, and they weren’t afraid to pull a student out of class to strategize if a critical deadline was looming. And while a third of B-CC students had opted to sign up with them, more than 90 percent of Wheaton’s juniors fell in their target group. “As soon as we open our doors each year, we get a rush of kids wanting to sign up,” Nancy explains. “But sometimes we aren’t approached by the ones facing the toughest issues—homelessness, family reunification, or the debilitating experience of being told too many times you’re not college material or don’t matter. We seek those kids out through the help of teachers, counselors, and administrators at the schools.”

During this period of great acceleration, Nancy decided it was time to give up her consulting work to focus full-time on the endeavor. She had found her purpose—her own March on Washington. She decided to go all in, and since opening its doors, CollegeTracks has served almost 3,000 kids. More than 80 percent of CollegeTracks students enroll in college—a figure more similar to that of the county’s white and Asian students than its low-income and minority students, who tend enroll at 55 to 63 percent, according to the district’s 2012 study. The organization also launched a college success program component in 2010, reflecting a national focus that now values college completion on the same level as enrollment. CollegeTracks enrollees who pursue college within the region are now eligible to apply for its College Success Institute, which teaches valuable time management and study skills. Students learn the critical differences between high school and college, and are taught 108

how to deliver on the new expectations. They’re then matched with a college success coach who meets with each student once a semester on campus to help map out and monitor a College Degree Plan and College Completion Plan. “Overall, it’s a long and intensive commitment to each student, but the return on investment is incredible,” Nancy affirms. “Operating with a budget of around $900,000, we invest around $1,200 per year per student, but when you match that against the financial aid they earn and their increased lifetime earning potential, it’s a no-brainer. And, as we engage in a strategic planning process to become even more efficient and effective while expanding into other schools, it’s truly an investment in revolutionizing higher education. That goal is priceless.”

The social justice undercurrents of Nancy’s work were forged from the very earliest days of her childhood growing up in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Her father would tell her stories of her grandfather, who worked as a physician in downtown Philadelphia and provided free care for all the patients who couldn’t afford to pay. Her mother carried a similar mantel, supporting equality and justice in every way she could. “She participated in silent vigils against the Vietnam War every Saturday for years,” Nancy recalls. “I also remember her going door-to-door in our lily-white neighborhood with the Fair House Pledge, asking neighbors to consider any offer, regardless of race, if they decided to sell their home.

She had doors slammed in her face, and was astounded every time when she encountered racism or injustice, but she remained completely undaunted.”

Nancy’s father had wanted to be a doctor, like his own father, but had instead enlisted in the army when he was seventeen. By the time he got out, he was 21 and had no formal higher education, so he decided to pursue business instead. He was the first Jewish salesman in IBM’s Philadelphia office, blazing a trail of cultural integration and excelling as a top performer. His influence would be critical in guiding Nancy and her younger brother into business later on, equipping them with valuable skills that would then be brought back to helping professions. Their mother, as well, emphasized the importance of lifelong learning when she went back to school for her social work degree at age 40.

Growing up, the picture frames adorning the mantle in Nancy’s house held photographs not of blood relatives, but of cultural icons like Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. With the family’s focus set on its role within the larger context of national and global politics, Nancy led a blissfully happy childhood. Big anti-war marches in D.C. in 1968 and 1971 were family events, and when Nancy wasn’t joining

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

her mother on a social justice mission, she loved immersing herself in books, school, and friends. She came to understand the subtle magnificence of the U.S. political process when she’d watch her mother, a tirelessly upbeat Democrat, man the polls on Election Day as hundreds of Republican votes rolled into bury the dozen liberal votes cast in their precinct. Likewise, she remembers coming home from school the day JFK was shot, finding her mother weeping and the nation changed irrevocably.

It was a childhood with a hand on the pulse of national affairs, and a mind toward how her own role in those affairs might evolve in the future.

In school, Nancy was a rabble-rouser, but always in the service of a higher good, and always stopping short of causing serious concern. Inspired by her mother and father, who taught her that every system could be beaten, she planned anti-war protests and class walk-outs. Academically, she excelled in the areas in which she was naturally gifted, and wrote off other subjects that required work, reasoning that she shouldn’t waste time on something she didn’t have inherent aptitude for. Luckily, Ash Carter, the current nominee for the Secretary of Defense, was a good friend of hers at the time, and convinced her it was worth the effort, and she ended up earning decent grades in harder subjects like math.

Eleventh grade proved to be a particularly evolutionary year for Nancy. Inspired by her older friend, Joan, she set up an independent study program that allowed her to spend the first half of each school day at Temple University or the University of Pennsylvania, doing college-oriented research that prepared her well for the years ahead. Her school was also led by a principal with tremendous vision, who was determined to launch a progressive alternative public high school. Nancy had the opportunity to join the planning process that year, and to enroll in the new school’s first class for her senior year. “It was launched by a group of teachers, students, and administrators who wanted a very participatory and collaborative learning environment,” she says. “By the time I finished my senior year, there was no question in my mind that I could participate in major changes. Between my parents’ activism and my own, I had the strong understanding that it was completely ridiculous to feel that you just had to accept whatever situation you fell into in life. I had seen firsthand that, together, people can make real change.”

The experience was also valuable in revealing to Nancy her preference for some structure in life. She had applied early decision to Hampshire College, known for its free-flowing approach to education, but was deferred. Luckily, in the months that followed, she realized

that while she appreciated the alternative school she had joined, she wanted a college experience with a few more parameters. After visiting Brown University, she knew it was the perfect place for her. “Brown has a good deal of structure, but not a lot of requirements,” she explains. “It had professors and classes like a traditional school, but no general education requirements, so I was free to make my own education. It was an enormously formative time for me, allowing me to play around in the world of ideas to find my place through my own decision-making process. It was an incredibly rich intellectual environment, but one where you’re meant to navigate on your own and be the master of your own fate—a luxury and responsibility that banished any notion of ever being passive or a victim in life.”

This mindset became particularly important when her father suffered a heart attack the summer after her freshman year. He survived, but was laid up in the hospital for months. By that time, he had left IBM sales to start a career in the construction industry, though he knew nothing about it. He had apprenticed himself to a developer to learn the building business, and was now the General Manager of a company that was building retirement communities in New Jersey, so he hired Nancy to be his eyes and ears in the office while he was gone.

The company was automating their payroll at the time, and because she had taken a computer course at college, she was able to help by writing code. “As my first job that actually used my brain, it was an incredible introduction into the real world of work,” she remembers. “I worked there for the next two summers as well.”

Nancy had always thought she’d become a lawyer because of her vocal nature and ability to hold her own in an argument, so she landed a job as a litigation paralegal at a big Wall Street law firm upon graduating from Brown in 1976 with a BA in history. She decided to organize the paralegals in the department, and they did a survey that revealed they were substantially underpaid.

They were able to negotiate better wages and salaries, but she still felt distaste for the competitive, dog-eat-dog culture of the atmosphere. With that, she decided to pursue business school instead. “I liked that business seemed to have the clear, straightforward goal of making a profit,” she explains.

Nancy enrolled in Wharton’s MBA program, withstanding some culture shock amidst peers determined to make their way to Wall Street or management consulting firms. Yet her ideals and approach resonated strongly with one of her classmates, Jeffrey Wagner, who dreamed of getting into sports marketing. The romance that blossomed between the two of them helped her persevere, as Nancy Leopold

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did the Wharton Follies, a theatrical production put on by students who wrote new words to Sondheim and other show tunes. Though she had sung in college, she had never danced or acted, yet she was accepted into the act as a performer. “As crazy as it seems, those performances were what finally taught me that practice really makes a difference,” she says. “That translated into studying, and I saw that when I took the time to do practice problems, I learned the stuff. And it translated into business and public speaking, teaching me that you need to know your material cold so you can be free to focus on other things while presenting.”

The summer she was in business school, Nancy went to work for General Mills in Minneapolis, and loved it so much that she decided to take a job there upon graduating. It was a phenomenal company that truly cared for the surrounding community and for its employees, hastening Nancy’s professional return to socially-minded work. But Jeff had taken a job in Washington, D.C., at Donald Dell’s sports management firm, becoming the first non-lawyer professional to be hired at ProServ. When Nancy ultimately decided to make the move, she learned about Porter Novelli, a social marketing firm using the tenets of for-profit marketing to induce behavior change. Bill Novelli, one of her mentors there, played a seminal role in creating the discipline and later headed the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, making an enormous mark on the world. During Nancy’s tenure at the firm, Porter Novelli, worked on smoking cessation campaigns for the National Cancer Institute, the National High Blood Pressure Education Program, and a project to bring international contraceptive marketing to Egypt and other countries in need. “The experience really validated the notion that I could use my business and marketing education for good,” she affirms.

“The environment was rife with theories and approaches and discipline, all of which I later drew on to start College Tracks.”

After three years at Porter Novelli, Nancy worked a brief, unfulfilling stint at the Psychiatric Institutes for America before having her first child, Julie. A friend then dragged her out of maternal retirement to do some marketing consulting work for his commercial real estate business, launching her consulting career. She did some social marketing and healthcare work and decided to get a masters in health policy from Johns Hopkins University, emulating her parents’ commitment to lifelong learning and fearlessly plunging into new career avenues.

She found the program to be a perfect fit, both intellectually stimulating and socially minded. The degree allowed Nancy to focus her consulting work on organizations like 110

the Agency for Health Care Quality and Research which kept her brain busy until CollegeTracks came along.

Now, with her life’s purpose in sight, and with the education and business skills necessary to truly achieve it, Nancy has Jeff to thank for his support and collaboration. “My success starts with the understanding we’ve always had to never make assumptions about what the other would do,” she explains. “We knew we would always find a way to allow each of us to do what was important and meaningful to us. We weren’t going to get ourselves into a situation where one or the other of us had to do something we didn’t like or believe in for any long period of time. We were never interested in trading off what made us happy and fulfilled for money.” Jeff now sits on the board of CollegeTracks, and is a major contributor of time, money, and sales and fundraising expertise, not to mention moral support. “He’s fearless and always willing to say to people, ‘Hey, my wife is doing this unbelievable thing. It’s really important and you’ve got to be a part of it.’ There’s no way I could have done all this without him.”

When their daughter, Julie, was in middle school, Jeff and Nancy launched a nonprofit lacrosse program for girls because there were no opportunities to play the sport in the public middle schools. When they realized cost was a prohibitive factor to some of the girls, they added a fundraising component to provide for those children. Jeff has since expanded the program to two recreation centers, working with the county to offer underprivileged children the opportunity to play lacrosse. “I love can-do attitudes, which is something sports help to each children,” Nancy says. “I always aim to hire smart, passionate, curious people whose instincts are to ask how we do it, not whether we should do it. I think Jeff ’s program lays the foundation for this kind of approach and has benefits for kids later on in life.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Nancy encourages exploration. “The younger generation is facing some tough economic times, and I see many people take jobs as baristas while they wait for the perfect job to come along,” she observes. “But it’s important to get out there and try an array of different things, even if they’re not your dream job. Whatever you do, you’ll learn from it, so don’t be afraid to try opportunities that don’t completely match the image in your head of what you want. You just might be surprised.”

As well, Nancy underscores the importance of looking beneath the surface of any circumstance to understand the root causes and realities that are not readily apparent in life. Citing works by the architect Christopher Alexander and the anthropologist Edward Hall, she

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

points out that even the most fundamental elements like time and space are relative and culturally-constructed.

“There are underlying rules and principles that give rise to the systems and patterns of behavior dictating the world’s status quo,” she points out. “Understanding in-

visible rules, principles, biases, or prejudice is critical in breaking down the barriers of injustice and miscommunication. If we are to repair the world through human action, we need these tools in our hands and this understanding in our hearts.”

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Scott MacDonald It Must be Relational The light bulb first went off in Scott MacDonald’s head when, ironically, he was working as a cleaner in a lighting store. He had landed the job at age twelve, and as he cleaned light fixtures from one end of the store to the other and back again, customers would ask for his help in choosing the right products. Despite the presence of older, more experienced workers and managers, Scott exuded a sense of proficiency and service so compelling that, even after the store began to sell ceiling fans, people continued to solicit his advice. Within a couple years as a part-time employee, he was outselling even the most experienced and well-positioned salespeople at the store. “That’s when I first got the feeling that I wanted to sell,” Scott recalls. “I was drawn to the experience of getting to know a person’s unique needs and then using that information to help them make the right decision.”

Now the founder and President of RE/MAX Gateway, one of Northern Virginia’s premier agent-empowered real estate companies, Scott has dedicated his career to redefining the sales profession.

His method was forged when he was still a boy and retains the genuine, well-intentioned earnestness that children bring to problem solving, yet benefits from years of experience in filling the role of trusted consultant for those seeking advice. “Ever since those days selling light fixtures, I’ve believed that sales should not be transactional,” he explains today. “It must be relational.

It’s got to be about helping someone solve a problem by taking the time to get to know them and what they’re really looking for.”

Owning a real estate company was never Scott’s intention. After 13 years selling real estate, he and another broker decided they wanted to invest in real estate themselves and purchase some commercial property. They decided they would buy land, put up a building, and lease space to a real estate company, a mortgage company, and a title company. They interviewed nine separate companies to complete the vision, yet none of them felt like quite the right fit.

One of the companies was a RE/MAX office, and the

owners urged Scott to join them as an agent. He politely declined, yet through the discourse, a new seed was planted in his mind—he wanted to open his own RE/MAX office. On January 2, 2001, he called RE/MAX International and told its Head of Sales, Vinnie Tracy, that he wanted to buy a franchise. The paperwork was finished on January 18th, and Scott set to work buying furniture, setting the phone system, and hiring staff. On February 1st, they opened their doors and hit the ground running.

Scott’s first challenge was figuring out how to attract the top agents in the business. Before the office officially opened, he had gotten confirmation from 26 people that they would be joining the company, yet only six of those commitments actually materialized. “I had to come up with a way to make our office different, because although most top producers were unhappy with the companies they were working with, it’s hard to get people to make a change,” he recalls. “So I decided to seek out people from other industries who were successful in their businesses and interested in making the switch to real estate. We were in the wake of the dot-com explosion, and many people in technology sales were eager to get out and start a new venture.”

As Scott saw that his strategy was working, his next challenge was to find a way to train his new recruits in the art and science of real estate sales. Driven by a passion for helping people become successful in business, he began to develop ways to transfer his 14 years of experience to the bright, enthusiastic agents who came to him looking to reach new echelons of service and success.

These efforts ultimately culminated in a Broker Success Kit—a training program that teaches brokers how to provide the best leadership possible to their agents. With a facilitator’s guide, a user guide, a PowerPoint presentation, and instructional training videos, the kit is at once a recruiting and retention program, augmented by team and entrepreneurship summits provided periodically by Scott and his team. Scott also developed Assured Equity Partners, a program that elevates his work’s reputation by guaranteeing the purchase or lease of each property en-

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rolled. These ventures, along with a comparative market analysis product called Home Pricing Wizard, provide multiple revenue streams for RE/MAX Gateway that define it as a true industry leader.

With education and training serving as a cornerstone of its foundation, RE/MAX Gateway grew steadily since Scott opened his first office in Manassas. Within six months, he opened a second office in Chantilly, finishing up his first year with 36 agents on staff and landing the Rookie of the Year Award from RE/MAX International.

By the end of the third year, the operation had grown to 54 agents. Scott launched an office in Great Falls, Virginia, that grew to 18 agents but never quite found its footing, so he decided not to renew its franchise agreement after the first five years. Around that same time, his Manassas lease expired, so he merged those agents with his Chantilly operation.

Things continued to move along nicely, and the team grew to ninety agents. Scott decided to purchase an office in Gainesville, and then opened another office in Brambleton in 2010, which would go on to win the Eagle Award for most net gain in an office. In the years since, Scott opened an office in Lorton, and another in Arlington, so that today, Scott’s team exceeds 200 agents. “We hold trainings in our offices every week on different subjects so our agents can educate their clients to make better decisions when buying and selling houses,” he affirms.

“This commitment to educating, coaching, and mentoring helps people solve problems so they not only become better business people, but also better people in general.”

This commitment to betterment was instilled in Scott and his siblings by their parents. Growing up in a 700-square-foot house in Fairfax City, where his mother still lives to this day, the MacDonald children were always encouraged to pursue success. Scott’s father, a banker, was often the grateful recipient of tickets to sports events, plays, and symphonies, and while the children found these outings tedious when they were young, Scott remembers them fondly. “As an eight-year-old, opera wasn’t my idea of a good time, but in retrospect I’m so grateful I was exposed to all the great things the Washington, D.C. area had to offer,” he says.

Scott’s parents both hailed from the Boston area.

His grandfather owned eight newspaper stands throughout the City of Boston, and every summer, Scott and his sibling would head to the city to help out with the business. “I remember selling Sunday papers out front of Ken’s Steakhouse, or by the Hancock Tower, or near Cumberland Farms,” he recalls. “His main location was underneath the Citco sign by Fenway Park, and we’d sometimes sell programs for the Red Sox games. His 114

grandfather’s work made him a true fixture of the community—so much so that over 500 people came to his funeral service. Even the priest who gave his eulogy had worked for my grandfather selling papers.”

Exposure to his grandfather’s business model and work ethic cultivated a similar stamina for hard work in Scott, though he earned average grades. He enjoyed baseball, basketball, and football, begrudgingly taking breaks from athletics and other past times to rake the leaves that fell from the 26 trees that peppered their lawn. For their chores, the children would get a small allowance, which was taxed 25 cents each time they left a light on. Beyond inheriting his father’s sense of humor and his mother’s outgoing personality, Scott benefitted from their commitment to encourage their children to always do and be their best.

Things changed drastically for the family, however, when Scott was 16. His father, who had become the youngest director at Arlington Bank and Trust Company, had a falling out with the bank. The event launched him into a state of depression. “It was a difficult time for him to handle and he would retreat to the basement area we called his cave,” Scott remembers. “I understand that he was depressed, but it made me resolve that I wanted to be more involved and supportive with my kids than my dad had been with me during his difficult time. Now, I work long hours, but I still make the time to coach their teams, go to their practices, and attend their school events. My kids are the most important things in my life, and because of the experience I went through watching my own father struggle, I’m committed to being the most engaged, constant, supportive father I can possibly be.”

Despite his father’s depression, the MacDonald family’s lives went on. His mother got a job at Northern Virginia Community College, launching a 30-year career. His older brother dropped out of college after his first year and launched his own cleaning company, taking Scott door-to-door to offer their carpet cleaning services. The business would advance to start cleaning restaurants, and then stores, eventually gaining large clients from Baltimore to Fredericksburg, and as far west as Front Royal. Scott worked for him whenever he had a break, putting in long days transporting cleaning crews, repairing equipment, selling jobs, and running payroll for the company’s 286 employees.

One summer, Scott took time off from working at his brother’s company to take a job at a local restaurant called Po’ Folks. “It was a fast, casual kind of place, but their policy was to only hire women servers,” he recounts.

“I told them I thought that was discriminatory, so they brought me on. That summer, it was me and 33 ladies.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Scott had always gotten along with everyone, transcending the typical clique boundaries of high school to befriend jocks, brainiacs and troublemakers alike.

His election to junior and senior class president was a testament to his ability to find common ground with all people—a skill that spelled certain success in his tenure at the restaurant. Shortly after being hired, he was added to the training team and sent to Cleveland, Ohio, to set up a new restaurant. It went so well that, through the rest of the summer, he was charged with setting up new restaurants in Richmond, Virginia, and Glen Burnie, Maryland. As August neared its end, they asked Scott to stay on to set up restaurants all over the country.

At that point, he was entering his third year of college at Radford University, where he was studying business management and marketing. He gave the offer serious consideration, but his parents urged him to stay in school to earn his degree, so he declined. In the end, the restaurant went under.

Scott, however, was not destined to finish his degree. Visiting an old friend’s house one day, he was recounting his latest ventures, when his friend’s mother piped up with some game-changing insight. “Scotty, you need to get into real estate. It would be perfect for you,” she said. The idea resonated—so much so that he decided not to finish out his college career. “I was paying for my own education, and three years in, it felt like I was just paying to party,” he remembers. “I had always planned to join my brother’s company as a partner, but I got the idea that wasn’t going to happen, so I told him I was going to get my real estate license and start selling houses.

He didn’t think I’d actually do it, but I launched my own cleaning company to help supplement my income as I learned, and that first year, I sold nine houses—pretty good for a 22-year-old just starting out.”

Over the next thirteen years, Scott built a successful real estate career while building a relationship with Liz, a young lady he knew in high school who came back into his life when they happened to run into each other at

a bar. They married in 1993 and started a family as Scott spent nine years working for a small real estate business.

When it ran into ownership issues and finally closed its doors, Scott transitioned over to Century 21, where he began to feel more and more like just a number. “I was used to a 13-person office, and suddenly I was in this large pool of agents immersed in a highly corporate culture,” he reflects. “It felt like they didn’t really have a good understanding of me or my business. Then, once I got the idea of being a business owner, I really latched on to the idea. I felt I could do it better than anyone else based on my experience, so I went all in with RE/MAX Gateway.”

To Scott, “all in” means leading by example, being among the first to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night. He stays actively engaged in the market and lives by his word. Just as he takes time to get to know his clients, he takes time to get to know the agents working for him, making a point to ask about their kids and the vacations they hope to take. He remains a continuous learner so he can bring cutting edge information back to his team to better serve their clients, and he constantly gives back to causes and the community. Having coached youth basketball since he was in high school, he leads efforts to support the Children’s Miracle Network, YouthQuest Foundation, Toys for Tots, Youth for Tomorrow, Stepsisters, and countless others organizations.

In advising young people entering the working world today, Scott underscores the power of entrepreneurship and urges everyone to try starting a business.

“Whether you’re successful or not, it will give you an appreciation for what it’s like to be the boss,” he says. “You’ll understand the finances behind how the business works, how difficult it is to go out and get new business, and how hard it is to balance competing pressures. Appreciating these things will make you better in any work environment.” Beyond that, Scott’s life and work is a testament to the power of genuine relationships and the idea that the best businesses are value-driven, designed not to sell a product, but to serve a need.

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Linda Mathes The Power of Possibility After graduating from college, it seemed like everyone Linda Mathes knew was looking at graduate school.

She had considered it herself, but she wanted to get her hands dirty, going out into the world and getting involved with something at the grassroots level. There had just been a devastating earthquake in Nicaragua, and in that tragedy, she saw possibility. She knew the Red Cross was bound to be sending people down there to help rebuild the country, and Linda wanted to be one of them. “I thought it would be a great opportunity to merge my passion for community and for helping people with my desire to be involved and experience alternative learning,” she remembers.

Though she’s now the CEO of the American Red Cross in the National Capital Region, the organization was only sending money and top officials to the troubled country at the time, and Linda had several hundred miles to travel before the stars would align. She also contacted the Peace Corps to see if she could get involved there, but they turned her down due to her limited tractor driving experience.

Linda was offered a job continuing to run the family insurance business, another at a bank in Tennessee where she had grown up and attended school, and a third with a popular and prominent elected official, but she wanted to conquer new territory. She had also concluded that, while she had loved playing the piano since she was a child, she wasn’t going to become the Dave Brubeck, and didn’t want to concertize. She resolved to nurture her passion for music on the side. She wanted to go someplace she had never been, where she didn’t know anybody and didn’t have any contacts, to see what she had to give. If she couldn’t volunteer her efforts abroad, she had to find another way to engage. “I wanted a raw experience to see what my raw abilities were,” she explains. “I headed west.”

With a degree from Vanderbilt University and a teaching certificate under her belt, Linda had seen the dysfunction in the education system and, concerned with what she had witnessed in the classroom, saw tremendous value in pursuing alternative approaches. At

the height of desegregation, students were acting out and disengaged. Her solution had been to get them outside, involving them in the community in ways they could make a difference while learning about their surroundings and developing their own strengths, all at the same time. “I thought it would be great if they had that experience while they were still in school to supplement their classroom learning,” Linda remembers. “But the principal shut my efforts down and said they could do those things after they graduated.”

She knew California was pursuing some innovative strategies and techniques, including school by the sea, championing the alternative learning movement. She wanted to play a part in reshaping the education system in this way, transforming the experiences young people were having in the classroom, and she knew there was no better time for her to hop in the car in pursuit of her dreams. With that, she tossed her guitar, blues harp, and books in her trunk and set off. But in route to California, she decided to stop in Dallas.

Having witnessed how her hometown of Memphis was affected by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., she was interested in seeing how Dallas was dealing with the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. “I felt it was an example of a community struggling to remain a community in the aftermath of a tragedy,” she remembers. “I was fascinated and passionate about that kind of resilience, and I was really interested in what makes a community resilient.” As a kid, she had watched Memphis’s once vibrant downtown close its doors and board its windows. It was during that period of difficulty and division that she watched her minister, Brooks Ramsey, bravely and progressively march for MLK. Brooks demonstrated the importance of being open to people of all colors and cultures. He was a real leader, and Linda ran into him by chance in Dallas.

In discussing her ideas and interests with her former minister, he noticed a common thread. “Linda, it sounds like the things you’re interested in relate to the Red Cross,” he had observed. “Why don’t you call them?”

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Though her recent shot at volunteering with the Red Cross overseas hadn’t worked, she took his advice and was offered a job at the Dallas Red Cross within 24 hours.

“The opportunity Red Cross offered me was all about involving young people in the community and extending classroom learning into the community,” she affirms. “It was perfect.”

Linda finally had the chance to engage local youth and help them find their potential through the transformative experience of helping others—a theme that would become a common refrain throughout her life. Like the grow lights used in terrariums and greenhouses to promote the proliferation and health of plant life, she has used this innate drive toward self-actualization through helping others to expand the reaches of her impact, helping more and more people. “From those earliest days, I’ve been committed to helping young people discover what they can contribute, and how best to do so,” she reflects.

“I believe that if you’re engaged as a kid, you will always be engaged, because you find it meaningful. It was important for me to reach people early to ensure a lifetime of giving, and the good feelings and growth that come with knowing you’re making a difference with your life.”

However rewarding, Linda’s work environment operated under levels of high stress. Yet despite the turbulent push and pull of external influences, the executive at the Dallas chapter noticed a steadiness in her. Observing how well she handled emergencies and chaos, he said that if she was interested in a career in the Red Cross, it would be a good place for her.

Today, things can get exceptionally hectic at the American Red Cross in the National Capital Region, but Linda never loses sight of the mission. Even as a young girl, her heartstrings were pulled by the Red Cross images of disaster victims being aided by volunteers. She would collect pennies to donate to the organization and would never have guessed that, decades later, she would still be collecting “pennies” for this mission, and would even hold a leadership role with it.

These images still resonate with her and mark an early call to action, but it was her father who first showed her what helping others really looked like. After leaving engineering school to help build his father’s insurance business, he became devoted to helping the community.

“He knew every back alley and used car lot in Memphis,” Linda remembers. “He knew that community backwards and forwards, and whenever someone’s roof collapsed or car broke down, he was there. He was the insurance man, but more significantly, he never met a stranger.” With a deep love of humanity, Cap Mathes always prioritized people and the relationships he was building. “For him, 118

it wasn’t about the money,” she affirms. “It was about each individual person he served.”

While Linda now has a business to run, strategic plans to map out, budget targets to hit, and a team to engage, she brings this love of humanity and individual focus to her work, lending it transformative power. Going into her dad’s agency as a young woman to observe and help, she learned business principles, and above all else, the importance of deep, genuine relationships with customers, clients and partners. For Linda, this now means the relationships she builds with her staff, volunteers, board, community partners, and the service recipients she has devoted her life to helping. “The team is always stronger than the individual,” she affirms. “Because we’re a team that spans neighborhoods throughout the community and across the nation, which draws from a deep sense of duty and service, we’re able to truly amplify our impact and provide aid on a global scale.”

Famously spearheaded by Clara Barton in 1881, the American Red Cross is a nationwide organization that works to prevent and alleviate human suffering in the face of emergencies. While many mistakenly assume it’s a government agency because of its prevalence and responsiveness, it actually relies on the power of volunteers and the generosity of donors to reach the victims of disasters, big and small, every day. Starting off as a hopeful volunteer, Linda became the first female executive of a major chapter and illustrates the synergistic impact one can have when one finds the perfect mission in life and is able to work toward that goal through her entire professional career.

After taking note of Linda’s inquisitive pursuit of excellence, determined and direct work ethic, strong empathetic nature, and collaborative approach, Red Cross quickly began to utilize her in what they referred to as “turnaround situations.” She was asked to go into troubled units to rebuild, grow, and strengthen them, starting with Pittsburgh. “After some compelling years of work with the Red Cross in Dallas and then at the National Headquarters, I was excited to get back to the grassroots—to be on the ground, in the field, working directly with the community,” she reflects. She was also interested in top-notch management and leadership, which inspired her to apply for a White House Fellowship.

While working at the National Headquarters, before being selected for the executive director position in Pittsburgh, Linda had applied to the White House Fellows Program, which entailed a rigorous process that captivated her interest in leadership. This was a chance to work with the top leaders and managers in the country, and Linda wanted that experience, already express-

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

ing a desire to be the head of an organization like the Red Cross. “I wanted a leadership role that was more than just running something—I wanted to make things happen,” she affirms. “But then the president of the Red Cross asked me to work with him and offered me an opportunity to have that kind of exposure and impact, so I said yes.”

Through his own research process, the president had selected a team of individuals from both inside and outside the Red Cross to serve as his president’s council.

Linda was an obvious choice to look at critical issues in the organization and find solutions, and in that capacity, she learned important lessons about what it was to be a leader. “I saw so clearly what it takes to move people to action in tough situations,” she says, remembering a time when the president successfully rallied a widespread effort to make a difference for victims of an African famine. “He demonstrated to me time and time again how important it was to roll up your sleeves, get involved, support your team, and make things happen when you really believe they should.”

Armed with these lessons, she was well equipped to lead the team in Pittsburgh to new heights. It had just been named the most livable city, and Linda was intent on matching that caliber in her revitalization efforts.

With great progress, it wasn’t long before she was asked to move to the chapter in the District of Columbia to apply her turnaround magic there.

It was 1991 when Linda was selected to become the CEO of the Red Cross in D.C. She quickly found the problems there were far more extensive and complex than those faced in Pittsburgh. There were ten different, fragmented units in the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area, so Linda set about achieving her vision of unifying them to realize the possibilities that could unfold for the community they all served and engaged. She always believed it was important to involve people and see what could be done together rather than separately. With this philosophy, she moved forward to orchestrate a strong, unified, aligned team, as finely-tuned and harmonious as her mother used to play “Rhapsody in Blue” while Linda sat under the baby grand piano as a child.

With the President of the United States, the President of the Red Cross, and the countless other people of all kinds living within the bounds of her chapter’s responsibility, Linda knew her team would need to be prepared for the worst and capable of anything. “After September 11th, the world changed, and a series of disasters faced the community in the three months surrounding the terrorist attack,” she recalls. “First it was presidentially declared D.C. floods, followed the crash at the Pentagon,

the anthrax scare, and a tornado that touched down in College Park. It was a scary time for the world, but especially for this community. Neither terrorists nor Mother Nature know city, county, or state lines. We needed to be able to move our resources wherever and whenever they were needed.”

Now, with one unit, one board, one team, and one chapter, the National Capital Region of the American Red Cross operates more consistently, efficiently, and cost effectively than ever. “I’m very proud of the team we’ve built, and the belief in the mission that each of us has,” she remarks. “But it was first essential to build financial strength. No money, no mission.”

With this in mind, Linda first focused on the board.

When she arrived, its role was unclear. It was large, and its members were not asked to give personally to the organization. It was not a funding source, but rather a Who’s Who of community figures and some were more interested in the prestige of the position than its potential to enact change. “I needed to find out who was serious about the mission, who believed in having a strong Red Cross in the community, and who was willing to pitch in to make it happen,” she remembers. “It took a lot of tough decisions and reductions to implement a strategy to make a difference as quickly as possible.” Linda’s efforts to strengthen the board were as successful as they were ambitious, resulting in a stronger team where each board member now gives time, brainpower, financial support, and connection with the community.

Throughout these changes, however, Linda took care not to lose focus on the greater operation. “We still needed to be there for the community,” she affirms.

“Our team had to be at the frontlines while we built the strength of our chapter. Throughout that period of transition, at any given moment, someone’s house was burning down, and the volunteers were out there immediately, wearing their badges and helping out. If I hadn’t had vision and passion, it wouldn’t have worked, and I couldn’t have done it alone. This isn’t solo work. This is team work.”

Linda had always been accustomed to multi-tasking and chaos. Even growing up, she filled her schedule with extracurricular activities to keep her busy, engaged, and connected to the community in every way she could, thanks to the enduring support of her mother. From school clubs, to piano lessons, to high school sororities and volunteer work, Linda made sure her learning extended far beyond the classroom, but her grades never suffered, and she took advanced classes. While her parents both worked long hours, they supported her and made it possible for her to attend various practices, meetLinda Mathes

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ings, and events, getting a richer, deeper, and more nuanced education than she ever could have received in the classroom alone.

Her father stuck to insurance, while her mother worked a slew of different jobs. She was an administrator for a utilities company, assistant to a dean at Memphis State, and a frequent assistant in her husband’s office. “My parents were beautiful people, and I was just the luckiest kid in the world to have them,” she says. However busy her mother was helping out where she could, she was always very family-oriented, and still found time to inspire in Linda a love of music that would endure her whole life.

In fact, each member of the family was devoted to helping the family insurance company in their own way. Even Linda’s older brother, who went off to school, got married and eventually returned to help with his father’s business.

It was this brother, with whom she always remained close, who truly taught Linda the power of possibility, especially throughout his battle with Guillain Barré. He once bought an old fire engine at an auction, and after having it in the backyard for a while, he turned it into a snow machine. “He figured out how to make snow out of that thing, with the conditions just right, and he would make snow for kids’ parties,” she recalls with a smile.

“He relished the opportunity to bring such joy to people and saw potential in everything and everyone.” From him, she learned that anyone can make something out of nothing, and she brings this attitude to the Red Cross today. From devastating disasters, she makes hope for regrowth. From ignorance, she makes awareness. And from those pennies she would give and collect as a child, she makes food, clothing, and support. “We’re all about people giving what they can—pennies, time, blood,” she says. “It’s pure acts of giving, from one person to another, and all of these acts translate directly into lives saved, communities rebuilt, and possibility made real.”

Despite the strength of its mission, or perhaps because of it, the Red Cross faces unique challenges in recruiting volunteers. It’s easier to go about one’s business than to help someone in a time of need. It’s difficult to watch suffering, but it’s Linda’s job to move people to action. “I need to figure out ways to move and motivate people, making sure they stay engaged,” she explains. “It’s my job to care for them, nourish them, and make sure they feel supported. Beyond being there for people affected by disasters, and for men and women of the military

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and their families, we’re there for our team of volunteers.

One of the things I love most about the Red Cross is that it’s all about people of all kinds being there for people of all kinds, finding ways to help everyone reach their potential despite what may have happened to them.”

This includes her own mother, who, at 91, recently had her first stroke, experienced congestive heart failure, broke her right shoulder, withstood numerous other medical afflictions, and suffered a severe bleed in which she lost over half her blood. Her life was saved with blood donated through the Red Cross, allowing her to live on with a sense of humor and kindness that has earned her recognition as the friendliest person in her assisted living home. “My mother is the epitome of resilience to me,” Linda avows. “She has played a key role in my success and happiness today, inspiring me with her humor, encouragement, and perpetual smile.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Linda stresses the importance of finding what fuels them—the mission that makes them really get up and go the way the Red Cross has kept her going and engaged year after year. “Get in touch with your passion, and find meaningful ways to live it and share it with others,” she says. “Give back! I promise that you get far more from giving back then you could ever imagine. In this busy world we live in, it’s important for people to find that connection in their lives. There’s a place for everybody. The community wins, the individual wins, and the organization wins. It is such a crucial formula for growth and learning.”

Utilizing this formula herself and working with countless others to help them apply it to their own lives, Linda’s legacy is one that centers around the teams she’s built, the people who have pitched in and given of themselves to make it all possible, and the lives that are better because of it. “This is a story about teamwork and belief in the mission,” she says, with tremendous gratitude.

“It’s a story about working together to really build up financial strength, mission readiness, and our capacity to help anyone who turns to us in need. I’ve always believed it’s important to involve people, seeing what we can do better together than independently alone.” This belief is rooted in the power of possibility, and as Linda’s story shows, the power of possibility is rooted in the simple willingness to see such potential in the world and people around you.

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Catherine Meloy Defining People Every day for the past fifteen years, Catherine Meloy’s phone has rung at precisely 6:03 AM. With gratitude and the day’s first smile on her face, she picks up to hear the voice of her 94-year-old father reciting the Lord’s Prayer. “Have a good day, Catherine Anne Cecilia,” he says, and then hangs up.

Each morning, Catherine knows her father will call her older sister first, then Catherine, and then her younger brother and sister in sequence. His warmth and dedication is reminiscent of his own mother, a lady who stood over six feet tall with a personality to match her height. She played the church organ for 74 years, often wearing a blue hat with a small veil over her face. “She was an incredible woman of God who made each and every one of us 23 grandchildren feel special and loved, always,” Catherine recalls. “I’ll never forget the time my father told my sister and I not to drive on country roads on our way to our grandmother’s house when we were teenagers. Of course we disobeyed and ended up sliding off the road. A farmer had to help us get it out, and it was caked with mud by the time we got to our grandmother’s house. We thought we were done for, but she never breathed a word of it to our father. She was always quietly supporting us in whatever way she could.

When I think back through life, it’s not so much made special by defining moments, but by defining people.”

Now President of the Goodwill of Greater Washington, Catherine channels her energy into an organization that is dedicated to defining people—or, rather, to allowing people to define or redefine themselves. Goodwill is about enhancing the dignity and quality of life by helping people reach their full potential through education, skills training, and a good day’s work, concentrating on populations that are often discouraged from trying.

“I’ve been so blessed through my entire career to work with incredibly bright, engaged, fun people who are passionate about what we do,” she says. “To me, what makes it all worthwhile are the people I work with and the people I work for.”

Founded in 1902 by the Methodist minister Edgar

J. Helms, Goodwill is now comprised of over 160 separate community-based 501(c)(3) organizations across the country. As a common household name, Goodwill is generally associated with its over 3,000 retail stores, but its true power lies in its role as a path to employment and professional success for millions. In 2013 alone, over 260,000 people landed a job with Goodwill’s help, and 9.8 million people used the organization’s services to advance their careers and manage their finances.

Each Goodwill franchise pursues its own unique workforce development strategy, and Catherine has brought an entrepreneurial mindset to the approach of the Goodwill of Greater Washington. She was drawn to the social enterprising nature of the organization, wherein job training and placement could be paid for chiefly through its retail operations instead of through fundraising.

In fact, of her $40 million annual budget, $28 million is furnished by its retail stores alone. Ten million dollars of revenue comes from the organization’s janitorial business, which employs people with disabilities on many contracts including contracts with the U.S. Senate Office Building, the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, and Bolling Air Force Base. Only $2 million comes from grants and cash donations.

When Catherine took the helm as President in 2004, the organization had six retail stores and a $23 million budget eclipsed by its $24.5 million in expenses. Its job training program was minimal, and Catherine saw the potential. The organization has since grown to 15 retail stores and 800 associates, with plans to grow to 25 stores by 2020.

Its training programs have expanded and evolved, now providing solid instruction in the hospitality, retail, and security and protective services industries. They also offer a three-week career navigation course designed to help trainees, particularly immigrants, with resume drafting, job searches, and online application completion.

The organization’s reach and legacy will be defined not only by what it has done, but also by what it will do.

In 2012, the Marriott Marquis at the convention center in downtown DC put out a Request for Proposals to fulfill

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its commitment to partner with a nonprofit to train local residents to fill 51 percent of its jobs. Goodwill of Greater Washington won the $2 million contract and now heads up the training program, an honor that speaks to its reputation and potential. “Every single person on our team was involved in the success of that project,” Catherine recounts. “It means so much that Marriott and the District of Columbia were willing to entrust us with something so monumental.”

In fielding 3,000 applications to fill the training program’s 700 slots, Catherine was shocked to discover that 1,846 of those individuals could not pass a reading and math test beyond eighth grade, and most of them could not even test at a fourth grade level. As the scope of the problem unfolded, Catherine happened to visit the Goodwill of Indianapolis to observe transformational best practices for e-commerce, but far more valuable was her exposure to their adult charter schools. Designed for high school dropouts over the age of 18, the model eliminates two common barriers to education and employment training by providing childcare and transportation.

“The District of Columbia is charter school-friendly, and 63,000 of its adult residents are high school dropouts,” Catherine explains. “If people are going to hold a job or create a career, they need more than a GED—they need an experience that teaches them how to think. And beyond that, they need a support structure where their children observe their commitment in working toward an education. We wanted to provide a holistic experience that breaks generational poverty in several key places along the chain.”

In May of 2015, the D.C. Public Charter School Board conditionally approved the Goodwill Excel Center, a 20,000 square-foot project serving 350 students annually. With the hard work, vision, and enterprising spirit that have come to be the hallmark of the organization’s ethos, it will be the first of multiple such schools throughout the District, providing case studies in success that might then be used to expand into Maryland and Virginia and change even more lives for the better.

Catherine may seem destined for the work she’s doing now, but it took a tremendous leap of faith from her comfortable decades-long career in the broadcasting business to get her here. Thankfully, she was raised on leaps. Born in Camp Lejeune in North Carolina to a father who served in the Marines for 25 years, Catherine and her family spent her childhood moving to a new place every two years. All in all, she attended seven different schools growing up, but it taught her to embrace the thrill of change. “My parents were incredibly good at making those moves fun and exciting, each one like 122

a new adventure,” she remembers. “To this day, change doesn’t bother me at all. Sometimes you fail and sometimes you win, but if you’re afraid of change, you miss out on so many great experiences. It created in me a willingness to embrace change in my own life and not be afraid of what the outcome might be, opening myself to God and possibility.”

Catherine’s mother, a quiet and loving woman who was a good balance to her father’s disciplinarian nature, navigated through life with an understated courage. At four years old, Catherine could sense a sadness permeating the home when her mother had two miscarriages, and then the joy that replaced it when her brother, Joe, was born. In the years that ensued, they moved from DC, to Georgia, to North Carolina, yet every summer they returned to their grandparents’ home in Teutoplois, Illinois, to reconnect with all the aunts, uncles, and cousins on their father’s side.

Catherine was the second of four siblings, and one of three girls, but always felt as though her home environment was pervaded by a sense of equality and fairness. “Our parents never treated the girls differently from our brother,” she reflects. “We all cut grass and did the dishes. Gender just wasn’t a thing in our household, and our parents recognized that all four of us are very different people. They really supported those differences and accepted all of us for who we are, and as a result, the four of us are very close. I have so much respect and appreciation for my parents for raising four children who are all very successful in their own right but never competed amongst each other. It’s a really wonderful thing.”

Growing up, Catherine always had a job, whether it was babysitting, working in retail, or ushering at the baseball stadium in college. Unlike her siblings, who dreamed of becoming doctors or professional golfers, she never really had a clear idea of what she wanted to be when she grew up. “When I look back at my career path, I’m amazed at how things evolved without a clear urge to do one thing,” she says. “I had a lot of freedom to explore.”

Her father retired when Catherine was 17, and the family moved to St. Louis. There, she finished high school and enrolled at Fontbonne University on scholarship. “I absolutely hate owing money to anyone, and by the end of my first two years there, I had racked up $10,000 in loans,” she recalls. “I decided to take a break from school to pay them down, but I ended up not returning. There was too much to do and learn in the real world, so it seemed silly to break myself off from that at any point.”

Through college, Catherine had worked as an ush-

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

erette for the St. Louis Cardinals. When she decided not to return to school, she was offered the opportunity to work for Joe Torre and the team. “He was incredibly disciplined, motivational and kind and he thought I could do anything,” she reminisces. “He was great to have as my first boss.”

Two years later, she took a job as an assistant to a Sheraton Hotels general manager, who gave her the transformational piece of advice to get into sales. Before long, she had become the General Manager of a Sheraton hotel in Kansas City. Five years into her career in the hotel business, she attended a conference and met David Meloy, the most accepting and supportive human being she would ever encounter. She fell in love, and despite her parents’ skepticism, she picked up her life and moved to Boston to be with him.

In her new town, Catherine had no job and no contacts, but she certainly had spunk. She felt she and David couldn’t both be in the hotel business, so she decided to start an adventure in a different field. With that, she went out for a walk one day and wandered into the Prudential Building, where WEEI radio was housed. She walked into the offices and announced that she didn’t have an appointment, but she was in sales and looking for an opportunity. The General Manager happened to hear her as he came back from lunch and offered her a job, jumpstarting her decades-long career in broadcasting. Fortunately, Catherine entered broadcasting at time when the industry was looking for women to succeed, and she remembers a number of male mentors who helped elevate her along the way.

The profession proved stimulating and incredibly versatile. When David was transferred to New York, CBS was able to transfer Catherine as well. When they moved to Denver, she was welcomed into a General Sales Manager position with open arms. When David transferred to Washington in 1984, she landed a job with WMAL. In 1990, she went to work as General Manager of WGMS. Steven and Mitchell Rales of Danaher Corporation had purchased the station, along with John VerStandig, when she was General Manager, giving her the golden opportunity to work with them in transitioning WGMS-AM to WTEM Sports Talk 980. “It was the best business education I could have gotten,” she remarks. “They bought the radio stations for $30 million, acquired a couple of other stations, and sold them in the late 90’s for over $250 million. It was truly remarkable.” Two Washington stations (WGMS-FM and WBIG-FM) also won the prestigious Marconi Radio Award during her tenure as General Manager, and she’ll never forget the look

of excitement on the faces of her team members when those announcements were made.

Catherine loved every moment of her 20 years in broadcasting. By 2004, she was serving as the General Manager for two Clear Channel radio stations. The sales departments of an additional 23 stations in the region reported to her. She loved the visibility and empowerment of the work, which compelled her involvement in boards and around the community. She had no plans to leave when she got a call from an old friend who worked as a headhunter for the McCormick Group, asking if she knew anyone who would be a good fit for the President of Goodwill of Greater Washington. They tossed around a couple of names and hung up, but he called back two minutes later to ask if Catherine herself would be interested. “I found myself saying yes,” she recalls. “When I hung up, I said, Dear Lord, where are you taking me?”

Catherine had already planned to leave for a twoweek trip to Europe, but the board decided to hold the position open until they could meet her. While she was away, she reviewed the organization’s financials to find it was not on strong financial footing. But where many would have seen fear, Catherine saw challenge and opportunity.

She returned to the U.S. on a Friday, and at 7:00 AM the following morning; she came in for an interview. By the following Friday, the Goodwill Board had offered her the job, and she gave her resignation to Clear Channel. “If you had told me twelve years ago I’d end up at Goodwill, I would have thought you were crazy,” she laughs. “I didn’t know anything about Goodwill and had never been to one of their stores. But it was the best move I ever made.”

To keep the organization afloat, the Board had sold its headquarters building two years prior to Catherine’s arrival, and by the time she took the helm, the situation was dire. She knew she could turn the ship around, but she’d need to learn quickly. “The one thing I’ve always been good at is finding the best person to provide guidance on a given matter and then seeking their advice,” she says. “Unlike major companies like CBS and Clear Channel, where all the infrastructure and administrative decisions are ingrained and streamlined, we were faced with all the obstacles of a typical small business.

How would we do our health care benefits and payroll system? What were the financial ramifications of cutting paychecks every two weeks versus once a month? There were all these minor considerations that added up to major challenges.”

Catherine hired the best CFO she could find— someone with a for-profit partner who could really become a partner. They dismantled and rebuilt their balCatherine Meloy

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ance sheets, committing to run Goodwill as a business instead of a mission to make it sustainable. First, Catherine studied other Goodwill organizations and discovered that there was tremendous opportunity to improve in their back-of-house processes, ensuring that the product was brought fresh on the floor and rotated constantly. Together, she and her team turned the organization around in three years, and have since evolved it into the vibrant, dynamic, promising entity it is today.

While Catherine will give her all in the office every day, she and her husband have a long-lived understanding that work stays at work. When they spend time together, they remain fully present in the activity at hand, whether it’s sailing, skiing, or sitting down to dinner together every night. “I grew up doing that, and I think it’s an important way to show what’s really important in life, which is family,” she explains. “We have both feet firmly planted in the marriage at all times, and that’s made such a difference. What’s more, David actually accepts everyone for who they are, which is an incredibly rare and invaluable trait. I’m blessed to live with a man who has never wanted me to change in any way, shape, or form, and never expected me to be anything I wasn’t. He’s supported me endlessly.”

Catherine and David have one child together and two children from his previous marriage. All three have grown up together thick as thieves, and the Meloys cel-

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ebrated 35 wonderful years together in April of 2015.

They’ll never forget the night in 1988 when their home in Old Town Alexandria caught fire, leaving them with only a suitcase of picture frames that a fireman had managed to save. “Like many people, we had amassed things in life—beautiful furniture, paintings, and some antiques,” she reflects. “When it all goes up in smoke, you can be the person who’s life has crumbled, or you can be the person who realized what’s really important. Watching it all burn, I realized that my husband was fine, and our oneyear-old son was safe, and that’s what mattered.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Catherine emphasizes the importance of being open to what we don’t know yet, and to what we can learn from others. “You can learn every single day of your life,” she says. “If you’re humble and you have a thirst to learn, you’ll do well no matter where you are.

The more success you have, the more you’ll realize how much you have to learn, and how much we all rely on other people. That’s what makes the differences in people so great. We can shine a light on each other’s blind spots and fill each other’s weaknesses with strength.

“I always stand in awe of how life happens,” she affirms. “It’s all about defining people who expand our point of view, advance our thoughts and beliefs, and transform our understanding of what’s possible.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Carla Percy The Long View From the day Carla Percy drove to the Air Force recruiter’s office at the age of 22, her life would never be the same. She cannot really explain what compelled her to march into the office and sign on the dotted line, but she knew she was ready for discipline, direction, and a fresh start.

When she told her family and friends, they were shocked. None believed she would make it through basic training. But she was very independent, self-sufficient, and well equipped to take on the tests of endurance that lay before her. She graduated with honors from basic training from Lackland Air Force Base, going on to join a mobility unit that allowed her to travel the world and experience places in the Middle East and Africa that she never knew existed.

Now the cofounder, President, and COO of The Mayvin Consulting Group, Inc., a government contractor providing program, life cycle, and operations management expertise, Carla uses the strength and determination she cultivated in her years of military service to provide gamechanging government service in a new context. “The mission of what we do continues to drive me,” she says. “It’s amazing to be able to support multiple government agencies like the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security in the ways we do. We’re supporting big-picture defense efforts and warfighter missions, and that’s incredibly rewarding.”

Carla met the other Mayvin cofounders, Lisa and Victor, in 2004 while working on a client site for the Wexford Group before it was acquired by CACI. Four years later, Carla and Lisa met for drinks, where they laid out a plan for starting Mayvin. “I knew Lisa’s work ethic—she was tough as nails at work,” Carla remembers.

“And I had been working in the Pentagon for the last 13 months, ready for a change. It was the right time and the right place.”

Victor joined shortly after they signed their first contract, completing the triumvirate that would lead the new venture to success. All three had very different personalities and skill sets—Lisa’s jubilant, big picture, over-

the-top personality balanced by Carla’s detailed oriented focus on the day-to-day operations through Victor’s middle-of-the-road approach and expertise in all things numbers. Carla then leveraged her MBA and education into practice in the real world. Every day was a learning opportunity where they learned by doing, accessing Small Business Administration resources and turning to partners for advice and mentoring. “I never had second thoughts about starting the business,” Carla reflects. “We hit the ground running, and after a lot of hard work we had a contract within a few months.”

In the beginning, Mayvin focused on supporting Army programs, later branching out to the Navy, Air Force, Department of Homeland Security, and Customs and Border Protection. Its offerings have diversified as well, expanding from project management support services to mission support services and operational services.

It now focuses on two lines of services, with project management support services covering the typical life cycle of a project, and mission-focused operations support services including training, technology assessments and insertions, and overseas work.

When Mayvin opened its doors, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were in full operation, but the company knew it couldn’t rely on the federal money being thrown left and right. “I saw those opportunities as highly unpredictable, because government clients often don’t know what their budgets will actually be,” Carla says. “We knew we had to use these times to lay a foundation and plan ahead to keep the pipeline robust so we could operate in lean times. This really helped put us on solid footing when the government shutdown happened. In the very competitive, cost-driven environment, bigger companies with more overhead and middle management really took a hit and had to lay people off, but Mayvin’s lithe and flexible structure actually allowed us to grow quite a bit during that timeframe. The government needed things done immediately and for less money, and we’re designed to accommodate those needs.”

With this approach, Mayvin has been success-

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ful each year of its existence, doubling in employees and revenue last year. Today, the company has a team of almost 70 employees and is slated to do $12 million in revenue for 2015. This is thanks in part to its culture, which is focused around innovation and employee wellbeing. “We try to set ourselves apart by valuing our employees and making work fun for them,” Carla says. “At their one year anniversary with the company, each employee gets a necklace or cufflinks or tie pins with our logo. We do team building through baseball games and holiday parties, and we give out an award each year to the employee that best demonstrates the company’s values.

Even though we’re very geographically dispersed, with employees at different client sites, we always try to make sure they know they’re supported by the company and connected to its culture.”

The stability and support sown throughout Mayvin’s culture are a reflection of the solid upbringing Carla enjoyed growing up. She was raised in Gilford, a small, two-stoplight town in New Hampshire. With a lake down the street and the White Mountains nearby, the town lived off tourism and didn’t have much in the way of industry. Her mother, the breadwinner of the family, was a telephone operator who showed Carla that women could do anything. Her father, an auto mechanic, always had a soft spot for his daughter, and she grew up a daddy’s girl and a tomboy. “I had a nice, normal childhood,” she reflects. “I grew up going to the same school with all the same kids. We’d ride our bikes to the lake to play all day, and we skied in the winters. My parents worked very hard, but we always had dinners together.”

Carla was very close with her uncle, a talented painter who lived nearby. He had an art studio in their basement and a separate structure next to the house that served as a gallery where he sold his work. “They had a horse and a pool, so I spent many of my childhood days there,” Carla reflects. “He was an entrepreneur, always with an idea brewing for a new thing to make and sell.” His daughter was five years older than Carla, and the two girls grew up like sisters. Carla got her first job when she joined her cousin in working on a horse farm, cleaning stalls and picking up rocks. She went on to hold a string of jobs that included busing tables, lifeguarding at a waterslide park, working at a clothing store, and waitressing. “One thing I learned very early in life was the value of a dollar,” she remarks. “My parents worked incredibly hard every day, and I really noticed that. They never just gave us money; we had to earn our allowance through chores.”

Carla didn’t find high school particularly motivating or engaging. She performed well academically, including Advanced Placement courses in early high 126

school. Around tenth grade, however, the boredom and restlessness of small town life started to set in. Her parents had saved up money to send her to college, but she declared she didn’t need it because she wasn’t going. “It was a different time back then, with parents less involved in their children’s lives than they are now,” she says. “My parents didn’t exercise a lot of discipline over me as I was growing up. I was raised to be very independent, which made me a stronger person in many respects. But it also cultivated a rebellious streak. I was going to figure out my future myself.”

When she graduated and left home, her uncle gave her an oil painting of the New Hampshire scenery, which she still treasures today. In her new life, Carla found work as a waitress. Then one night, while celebrating the fortieth birthday of a coworker, she realized she did not want to wake up a decade down the road doing the same thing. With that, Carla promptly gave her thirtyday notice to her roommate and drove home to New Hampshire, where she spent a few weeks thinking about what she wanted to do with her life. It was then that she decided to join the Air Force, catapulting her into a new world with broad horizons and unlimited opportunity.

Through her four years on active duty, she completed basic training and then additional education at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi before joining a mobility unit stationed at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. Each mission meant she was away for four to eight weeks, serving in places like Gabon, where people lived without running water or electricity, and Uzbekistan, where life resembled 1950s America. Through these experiences, the Air Force opened her eyes and completely changed her concept of the world.

When she completed her four-year commitment, an officer nominated her to enter the Blue to Gold program to become an officer herself, but Carla decided her future lay elsewhere. “I was incredibly grateful to the Air Force for giving me direction and life skills,” she reflects.

“But at the end of the day, I decided I wanted to try something else.” Carla knew she would need a college degree to be competitive as she pursued this new future, so she enrolled at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She also happened to come across an advertisement for the Massachusetts Air National Guard, which was looking to fill positions in her career field. She accepted one of the positions at the base thirty minutes from her campus, which meant her tuition, would be waived.

At Amherst, Carla lived off-campus and majored in exercise science. She worked weekend duty in the National Guard and took a part-time job, which meant she was always busy. The experience went by in a blur,

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

and in no time she was commemorating her graduation in 2001. “I was the first person in my family to make it through college,” she says. “That was a defining moment for me, realizing that I had gotten through the Air Force and earned my four-tear Bachelor’s degree.”

Upon graduating, Carla made the move to Washington, DC to take a job conducting research at the National Science Foundation. She was working in the geosciences division for lower atmospheric research, which had nothing to do with the biology and kinesiology she had studied in school. She decided to transition over to a small NIH-funded biotech startup with six employees, where she had the opportunity to help out in the lab, work on the books, and learn the practical side of business from the owners.

From there, Carla got a job at a clinical research trials company managing data for NIH studies, and was then offered a job at Fort Belvoir. With that, she began working for the government from 2002 to 2004, learning all about government contracting and Department of Defense (DoD) funding. At the same time, she pursued her MBA at the University of Mary Washington and obtained a certificate in financial management from the USDA Graduate Program. “It was an incredible experience to learn about of the inner workings of government in that way,” she reflects. After a couple years of working for the government, Carla leveraged her experience and accepted a position at a small government contracting firm, the Wexford Group, where she met Lisa and Victor.

At Wexford, Carla learned the art and science of project management and had the opportunity to work on an Army program. Three years into her tenure at Wexford, the company was acquired by CACI, and the close-knit team of 200 suddenly skyrocketed to 12,000. “I went from being Carla, to being a number on a timecard,” she recalls.

“A year later, Lisa laid out her vision for starting Mayvin.”

Through all her previous experience, Carla developed into strong leader focused on finding people who are a good fit for the company and then providing them

the tools and guidance they need to succeed. This year, she was honored at the “Enterprising Women of the Year 2015” awards ceremony, recognizing women with fastgrowing businesses that take the time to mentor or actively support other women and girls involved in entrepreneurship, and who stand out as leaders in their communities.

Carla also received the 2015 Washington Brava Award, which celebrates female CEOs, nonprofit leaders, and high impact executives driven by an entrepreneurial spirit and a passion for giving back to the community.

For the last two years, the firm has been recognized as an Inc. 5000 company, and was a runner up for the Corporate Citizen award given by the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce. This was thanks to Mayvin’s focus on encouraging its employees to be active in the community and its matching policy for charity donations, as well as its participation in functions for Wounded Warriors and the Save A Limb Foundation. “Mayvin cares a lot about giving back, especially when it comes to supporting veterans,” she says. Carla is also involved in various other organizations and spends time mentoring students at her alma mater. She is also a member of the Mary Washington alumni board.

In advising young people entering the working world, Carla stresses the importance of not being afraid to fail. “Failing is part of growing, and it’s what you learn from those failures that’s important,” she says. “I failed at many things as we were starting Mayvin, but I had to just keep going and trying again the next day. Don’t dwell on those failures—just learn something and use that knowledge going forward. If you’re not failing, you’re not trying. And trying is crucial.” Indeed, the perseverance required for success was always in Carla, a quiet reserve of strength and commitment that could carry her through anything she put her mind to. Whether it was signing up for the Air Force, choosing to go back to school, or deciding to start her own company, only through those points of decisive action could her true potential be revealed and reached.

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Duane Piper The Trailhead For the first several decades of his life, Duane Piper navigated without a real clear sense of direction. Perhaps for this reason, he didn’t spend much of his young life with lofty dreams of the future. But often, all it takes to transform a life is the uncovering of a trailhead—that point at which one’s passion is sparked, and the right road becomes clear.

For Duane Piper, military service was that trailhead. His experience in the Air Force, and a subsequent life spent providing defense contracting support, changed everything, transforming the trajectory of his life so profoundly that he is now a cofounder and Managing Partner of PiperCoughlin, LLC (PiCo). The ServiceDisabled Veteran-Owned Small Business offers multidisciplinary intelligence analysis and program analytics to U.S. government defense, intelligence, and civilian customers, with a mission to give back to the defense community that has allowed Duane to experience success.

Drawing on his background in business operations and mission support, Duane partnered with Pete Coughlin, a colleague and friend with an extensive and successful history in military intelligence and counterintelligence, to form PiCo. Orienting its vision around these two technical verticals, the duo built on their relationship and on the success of their past performance together at SAIC and then Silverback7. Collectively, Duane and Pete have a track record of winning and managing over $1.5 billion worth of intelligence programs for the Department of Defense, speaking to their strengths. PiCo also specializes in back-office mission support services, including program management, resource management, budget analysis, and logistics.

Just as integral to the company’s framework is its commitment to corporate social responsibility. “From the very beginning, Pete and I agreed that our company would be committed to giving back to the military community and veterans in particular,” Duane says. “Personally, I’ve made a point where and when I could to mentor veterans who are looking to start their own businesses,

and I wanted our company to donate to organizations supporting the veteran community. Beyond this, we’re setting up a corporate social responsibility program for our employees to sow philanthropy into the very fabric of our daily operations.”

For Duane, PiCo is the product of the best and most transformative forces in his life, including Kandi, his soul mate and the woman he has spent the past 31 years with. “I asked her to marry me when she was only 19 years old, so her parents weren’t big fans of me back then,” he laughs. “She’s been my biggest cheerleader, and I know I wouldn’t have been this successful without her there. Although she does joke with me that there should be a plaque in our old high school that honors me as the guy most unlikely to succeed.”

While he may have lacked direction in his younger years, all that changed when he enlisted in the Air Force in 1988. Duane was assigned to serve as a nuclear weapons system specialist working systems aboard the FB111A aircraft, and was sent to Plattsburgh, New York, the Air Force’s nuclear weapons standoff mission.

In 1990, just before the outbreak of the Gulf War, Duane was chosen to participate in a selective combat competition known as Giant Sword. He knew nothing about the program when he was chosen to enter, but he spent the next five months in a training curriculum that required all participants to spend their training time without rank insignias. Without the telltale hardware, Duane had no idea that he had spent part of that time alongside a four-star general. Something about Duane had a marked impact on the general, who later provided an endorsement on his annual performance review.

This helped change the course of Duane’s remaining career with the Air Force, and had a profound influence on how he would progress in the private sector.

When Plattsburgh AFB was selected for closure under the Base Realignment and Consolidation authority, Duane was offered a choice of duty assignments and locations at which to continue serving. After discussing the

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future with Kandi, he decided he wanted to switch tracks and go into the business field so he’d be more marketable in the civilian world. With that, he chose to become a Contracting Specialist, laying the foundation for his career in government contracting.

On their new track in life, Duane and Kandi moved to Panama City, Florida, where he cultivated an expertise in large dollar procurements with a particular, initial focus on construction projects. He soon realized, however, that his rapid advancement in ranks meant he would be stuck at his current rank for quite a while. “I had made Staff Sergeant in just over three years and put the stripes on my sleeve in four, which in my new career field was considered well below the average line for promotion to Staff Sergeant,” he says. “But what it meant for the foreseeable future was that when it was time to re-enlist, there was zero chance for promotion within the next term of enlistment. It would have been mathematically impossible for me to get promoted, given how the promotional points system works in the Air Force. For this reason, I decided to separate and try my hand in the private sector.”

Duane continued his college education during his six years in service, and when he decided to leave, he went to work full-time for a small company in Columbia, South Carolina, while taking classes part-time to complete his undergraduate degree in Business Administration. Gone was the underachieving young kid who didn’t care to work hard; in his place was a self-motivated, disciplined man ready to take on the world.

Making the Dean’s List in his last years pursuing his baccalaureate degree, Duane went on to obtain a Master’s in Business Administration from the Keller Graduate School and fine-tuned his education at the University of Virginia’s Darden School by way of its executive education program. “Now, I believe very strongly in the power of education, whether it is formal or self-study,” he affirms. “I encourage everyone that wants to learn something new to get a book and read about it and apply it to their life. I’m so thankful that I went back to school, and only wish I had valued it sooner.”

Duane learned just as much from his current employer, a mentor who took the time to help him understand how the regulations that drive the federal contracting process can affect the performance of work. Duane started out rigid in his decision-making, wanting everything to fit nicely inside the box as he had been trained to do on the other side of the table. Then one weekend, his boss drove up from the company’s headquarters in Panama City, Florida, to meet him at a construction site where he was helping to oversee work to redo utility lines 130

on an Army base. “He threw me some hip waders and made me get down in a ditch to pour concrete for the rest of that weekend and most of the following week, opening my eyes to what it was like to be out in the field actually doing the work,” Duane says. “The project was a bit behind schedule, and the experience made me realize that my bureaucratic decision making in the office wasn’t really useful or realistic. I appreciated the lesson and think of it often.”

The small company was very successful, and when it was sold to a larger competitor, Duane chose to make the move to Northern Virginia to work in the Contracts Department at SAIC. At the outset of what would become a combined ten-year tenure there, Duane was young, energetic, and interested in learning his job, plus the jobs of those that worked in close proximity. Several senior level executives acted as diplomatic mentors to him, teaching him how to pursue his desired professional growth and development without disturbing the waters politically.

Duane was a VP and Director of Contracts when the 9/11 tragedy struck, and within days of the attack, it was clear that his organization would play a role in the nation’s security response. “We did national security work within my Group with a chemical and biological defense organization, and we had several pieces of business with retired military law enforcement officials and specialized military units, doing contracting for the Departments of Defense and Justice, the U.S. Marshall Service, and several other agencies,” he explains. “In this capacity, we quickly began supporting the federal government in its post 9/11 efforts. We were asked to do some pretty unique things with some pretty unique latitude.” During his last three years with SAIC, Duane served as a business and programs director, becoming somewhat of a jack-of-all-trades by serving a Senior VP who led a $400 million operation doing intelligence business.

While he enjoyed his time at SAIC, and is today proud of what he learned and was able to accomplish, Duane received a call from the staff member of a retired Army Major General he had worked with earlier in his career, ultimately recruiting him to come work for General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) as the Vice President for Contracts and Ethics for one of its larger divisions. At first Duane wasn’t interested in leaving the P&L role at SAIC to return to an administrative staff position, but after several meetings and some persuasive final discussions, he made the switch.

During his last three years at SAIC, Duane had taken on some buy-side M&A work, helping with due diligence and integration planning. Through that exposure, his curiosity and entrepreneurial flame was stoked

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

for the first time. “I used to be very risk-averse,” he says.

“I had a comfortable life and secure jobs, and it didn’t seem to make sense to take a chance. But the M&A work gave me the opportunity to look behind the curtain of a company, learning where they come from and the struggles they go through to build a business platform from A to Z. It struck me that maybe I could do it, too.”

He understood, however, that he had much to learn before taking that plunge. After his experience with GDIT, when the founders of Silverback7 asked him to come aboard with an equity stake in the business, he again sat down with Kandi to talk about the risks and opportunities. “I would take over all things business operations, including the financial, contractual, risk, legal, M&A affairs, and banking work,” he explains. “I knew this move would force me to learn. I wanted to do it, and I committed to capitalizing on the opportunity for its value to my future opportunities.”

With that, Duane accepted the position of Chief Administrative and Financial Officer in March of 2008, taking a leadership role in the small team of about 15 at a business that was doing a little more than $3 million annually. Over the next three years, the company grew more than 800 percent. It reached solid financial footing, setting itself up to transition from a small to a mid-tier business and compelling Duane to create relationships with the banking, legal, accounting, and financial entities needed to help the company accommodate its growth.

“Taken together, the seven-year horizon of my time at Silverback7 was extremely defining, professionally,” he says. “I learned so many things about operating a business that I would never have learned otherwise. I developed a great network, and most importantly, I overcame my fear of being an entrepreneur and taking a plunge.”

After working ten years at SAIC and two at General Dynamics, Duane had come to appreciate the flexibility that a small business environment provides. Then, in 2013, he began thinking for the first time in earnest about starting his own company. “Through the M&A

work I participated in and the insight gained through my relationships with outside business providers and advisors, I came to understand what was important to those folks, and how to access the money it would take to get a business started,” he reflects. “I knew it was time to start thinking forward.”

When he thought more about the future, however, he realized a gap in his plans. He had the capabilities to sell to the federal government and to operate a business, but he didn’t possess the firsthand product or service technical background. This realization compelled him to partner with Pete Coughlin, a colleague whose skills, approach, and goals were complementary to his own. It took some amount of coaxing to get Pete onboard, but ultimately it clicked. The two visionaries started developing a business plan of their own, committed to structuring the company as a 50/50 split, and began marketing it around to obtain the startup capital they needed to lay the groundwork for successful execution.

Now, Duane’s easygoing nature but hard-driving pursuit of excellence has helped build a strong, resultsoriented business platform to give team members a vision to follow and the space and resources to execute. His excitement and passion for the work shines through the culture of the company, and he has advised young people entering the working world today to pursue something they find equally engaging. “You’ll spend many of the waking hours of your life working, so pick something you enjoy,” he says. “Don’t chase the money, or that pursuit will define your life. If you’re doing the right job the right way, and if you show your commitment and loyalty to your organization, the money will come.”

Beyond that, Duane’s journey reminds us never say never. “I came from a family of modest means, and I didn’t understand back then that there was a way to build a better future, and a way to find the road that was right for me,” he says. “But I learned through my experiences that if you’re willing to work for it, it’s out there.”

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Craig Pippin A Game of Falling Down and Getting Up There comes a moment during each workout he teaches when Craig Pippin gets chills. It’s that moment of greater awareness, which quickly evolves into transcendence—that enlightening experience when everything comes together for the athlete in training. As the details of the athlete’s motion come into tune, so do the details of the athlete’s character and Craig knows there’s no going back. “It’s so much bigger than anything you can ever touch,” he says. “It’s something you feel—and it’s the greatest feeling in the world.”

As the founder of Pitchers Edge, a baseball training facility that uses a prehab approach for pitchers, position players, and athletes to enhance skills while reducing the risk of shoulder and arm injuries, Craig personally teaches between 400 and 500 workouts per month. By this logic, he gets the chills just over ten times per day.

Still, it never gets old. “Pitchers Edge provides the opportunity for players to learn more about themselves, both on and off the field,” he says. “Beyond physical skills training, we put a premium on life skills, teaching the power of eye contact and a firm handshake. We want our athletes to learn how to feel good about themselves no matter what the situation is, and that comes from an unparalleled self-awareness.

After all, life—like baseball—is a game of falling down and getting up.”

Pitchers Edge is in the business of results, and each set of results is tailored to the individual expectations of the nearly 5,000 people they work with each year. With facilities in Vienna, Virginia and St. Petersburg, Florida, it attracts athletes referred by doctors all over the U.S. who might benefit from training in overhand-throwing motion, including baseball, softball, tennis, and football players. Each staff member must be certified in the Pippin Pitching and Throwing System, a systematic program Craig designed from 10,000 hours of video observation and study. And while expert proficiency in the physical exactitude of the science is crucial, equally important is each staff member’s ability to communicate and connect with the athletes. “From the atmosphere of our facilities,

to our relationships with the players and families, to our analysis of their capabilities, to the routines we map out and support them through, we believe in attention to the tiniest details,” he says. “We understand that those details can make or break an athlete’s performance.”

Much of the life training philosophy at the facility revolves around the importance of assessment and routine. Players are taught how to identify their strengths and weaknesses, and we put together a training schedule designed to improve on those weaknesses incrementally over time. Such practices engender a sense of integrity, responsibility, and diligence that translates easily into the school setting, and beyond. The long-term outcomes of the athletes are chronicled on the lobby walls at the facilities, with names of the players accompanied by notes of where they go on to school and what they do later in life. “It’s all connected,” says Craig. “We help teach players a posture and a way of presenting themselves that advances their prospects in life. From the moment we open our doors in the morning to the time we turn off the lights at night, I feel a deep sense of responsibility to these athletes and their future.”

In many cases, finding the right solution for the right athlete means drawing on decades of experience to think outside the box. If a child performs well in practice but freezes up under the pressure of an actual game, Craig will instruct them to think of a time when he or she feels most comfortable. For one athlete with autism, that time was riding in the car with his parents. Craig taught him to make the motion of buckling his seatbelt before going into the batter’s box, trusting that the muscle memory would bring the relief needed to shrug off the fear and play the game relaxed. In the young player’s next game, he hit a double. “It’s that moment when things suddenly feel simple and easy for a player,” Craig explains. “Things fall into place, and I can tell them that it’s real—they’ve just taken it to the next level. It’s all about setting the bar, getting there, and then raising it just a little higher.”

For all the coaching he does, Craig respectfully instructs his athletes and their families not to call him

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coach. “I’ve always tried to create a sense of family wherever I go and to me, that means having the athletes call me by my first name so it feels like I’m more accessible,” he says today, a testament to the game-changing importance of family in his own life. Born in Bristol, Tennessee, the Pippins moved to Long Island and then to St. Petersburg, Florida, where they settled when Craig was five years old.

Craig’s father, a quiet man and great listener who believed the best way to make a statement was to ask a question, worked as Director of the St. Petersburg Department of Parks and Recreation while serving as a part-time scout for the Baltimore Orioles and the Boston Red Sox. He had met Craig’s mother in college, where he was a basketball player and she was a cheerleader. She worked as a guidance counselor and loved playing catch with Craig and his younger sister. Each summer, they enjoyed visiting her large extended family on Long Island, where she had grown up. “We’re all very close, and I never hesitate to reach out to a family member if I’m struggling with something,” says Craig. “I’m very fortunate and blessed to have grown up in an environment where family always came first, and I still live that way to this day. It’s a mentality I try to bring to Pitchers Edge as well.”

Sundays were the most poignant and meaningful examples of such an upbringing, when the family would go play ball in the park together. “I remember my father throwing me batting practice, with my mother and sister chasing balls in the outfield with our cocker spaniel,” he says. “Then we’d go home, and mom would make pasta for dinner. That was our family time—always very consistent, and something I looked forward to every week.”

Craig studied and played sports all through childhood, leaving little time to work. He got a job as a busboy at a seafood restaurant called Nautical Nelly’s, but soon had to refocus all of his time back to training. He played American Legion summer baseball and on the high school team, intermixed with basketball camps and long Friday evening sessions of shooting hoops at friends’ houses. All through his career, his parents never missed a home game, and Craig never forgot to wear the medal they had given him when he was twelve—a pendant with an engraving of St. Christopher on one side to keep him safe during travel, and the word family etched on the back.

Craig graduated from high school at age 17 and decided to take a gap year at a preparatory school in Virginia to better prepare him for college. There, he played basketball in the hopes of pursuing the sport at the college level. Being away from home and coming into his own, it was a year of growth that resulted in a scholarship 134

offer to play basketball and baseball at the University of Florida. “The whole student-athlete concept is very real, especially when you’re a freshman struggling to keep your GPA up while adjusting to a new environment with large class sizes,” he reflects. “It was there that the journey really began, figuring out how to balance study and commitments and travel with the team. I ended up leaving the basketball team so I could focus all my time and energy on school and baseball.”

Craig’s college baseball career had started off strong when he pitched a 2-1 game against Miami University.

He soon found, however, that such victories weren’t the norm for his team. After playing his freshman and sophomore years as a starting pitcher, he made the bold decision to ask the coaching staff to be transitioned over as an infielder to be in the hitting lineup. The change would cut his scholarship dollars in half, and he would have to get a summer job again at Nautical Nelly’s, but he was resolved it was the right thing to do. “I felt it was something I could do to help the team,” Craig recalls. “I wanted to swing the bat and improve our outcome, and I had confidence in myself. It was the first time I really took a stance, respectfully communicated that stance, and then held my position despite the consequences. I knew it was the right thing to do.”

As the fall of the 1977 school year geared up, he led the team in hitting and had positioned himself to be the starting third baseman when the Yankees came to play an exhibition game. “It was going to be Reggie Jackson in right, Mickey Rivers in center, and Roy White in left,” he recalls. “My mother is from Long Island, so it was a dream for me. The game was to be broadcast far and wide, and my whole family was listening in.”

But when Craig showed up at the clubhouse before the game and opened his locker, there was no uniform waiting for him. Assuming it was a slight by the coaching staff because of his decision to switch from pitcher to infielder; he marched outside, got in his car, and drove away. Over the radio, he listened to the landmark game he was supposed to be playing in and felt his destiny slipping away. By the third inning, he pulled off the road and called his family on a pay phone for solace. “I remember saying, ‘Mom, Pop, they didn’t have a uniform for me,’” he recounts. “But my father told me I needed to drive back. Thankfully, I listened.”

By the time he pulled back in to the clubhouse parking lot, it was the fifth inning. After a few short conversations, he learned that the lack of uniform was an unintentional error, and at the start of the seventh inning, he walked into the bullpen. The coach decided to let him swing the bat, and when he did, he hit a two-

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

run homerun. “I was running for the life of me, and I didn’t wake up until I crossed second base and Yankees SS Bucky Dent said I could take my time because I had hit it out of the park,” Craig says. “If I hadn’t reconsidered my decision and gone back, I would have been listening to the end of that game on the radio. The 1977 Yankees were a team for the ages, and it was an incredible moment—for me, for my family listening on the radio, and for the trajectory of my character and career.”

The team ended up going to a Super Regional that year, and when Craig returned to pitching during his last two years, the upward trajectory of the team continued.

At the end of four years, he had built up a population of memories he would treasure for a lifetime—not just on the diamond and the turf, but of the many friends he had met along the way. “Those college relationships can really last forever,” he remarks. He had pictured himself wearing the blue shoes of the Kansas City Royals, a relatively new team at the time, and in 1978 was drafted to fulfill that vision.

“As a boy, I’d fall asleep at night listening to the soothing static of the games coming through my AM transistor radio,” he remembers. “Now, I was living them.”

From there, Craig was sent to Rookie ball and fared well enough to be moved into Class A in Ft. Meyers, and then Double-A in Jacksonville. After returning from spring training, he was given his first release and then picked up by the Pittsburg Pirates to play in Buffalo, New York. In the spring he reported to Spring Training in Bradenton, Florida, and contracted to play in Hawaii for their Triple-A Club. When he returned, he had served his five years in professional ball and was officially a free agent, able to negotiate with any team. He signed his first major league contract with the Cleveland Indians, which took him to Puerto Rico, Maine, and then Venezuela to play. By that time, he had also played in Barranquilla and Cartagena in Colombia.

When he returned from Venezuela, he went back to major league camp, and the Kansas City Royals signed him back as a free agent. “It was great to be back,” he remembers. “I’m glad I was gracious every time I was released and that I never burned bridges. I was also rehired by the Cleveland Indians as well.”

By age 30, Craig had played professionally for nine years in six countries and was offered an opportunity with the St. Louis Cardinals, but he knew it was time to move on. He had done well as a closer—the pitcher that helped the team get outs when the game was on the line.

“I decided that what I had accomplished was fulfilling enough. At that point, I wanted to spend more time with the next chapter of my life—my newborn son Quinn— and stay closer to home,” he says.

From there, he founded a Deli with Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, learning business and entrepreneurship through the school of hard knocks. He also started a food company with seventy employees, contracting with Wal-Mart in Arkansas to supply product to 250 stores. “It was a good learning experience, but not the world for me,” he recalls. In search of his rightful place, he took a job with a Manhattan wealth management firm called IIG, married a flight attendant, and had a son, Quinn, who became Craig’s best friend from the moment he was born and would grow up to be a remarkable ballplayer in his own right. At the firm, in an office with a window overlooking the Statue of Liberty, Craig served as the liaison to high-profile clientele—players in the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL. He worked there for five years, and during that time, he and his wife parted ways.

Also during that time, in 1999, Craig was playing a basketball game near his home in Northern Virginia when he went up for a rebound and ruptured his patella tendon. The injury required surgery, physical therapy, and a lengthy recovery, and Craig wondered if he’d ever be the athlete he once was. Commuting to New York City on Amtrak with a cumbersome cast on his leg, he began realizing that things weren’t as they should be. “The guys I was working for were wonderful and incredibly gifted in managing the portfolios of the clients I brought to the company, but I realized I just wasn’t fulfilled,” he recalls.

“Meanwhile, in physical therapy, I was seeing so many athletes far younger than I was. I became deeply interested in injury prevention, and I developed a vision of building a program where players of all ages could become strong enough to keep themselves safe from injury.”

Around that time, Craig met and later married Renee, an amazing woman with two children. They merged their families into one, and for the first time, things were starting to feel truly right. Craig began considering the idea that he could find the same kind of fulfillment professionally. To translate this vision into a reality, Craig began collecting measurements and video footage documenting the strength levels of athletes of all ages, ranging from six-year-old players to major league players. Analyzing specific aspects including physical strength and flexibility measurements, he processed this data amassed from over 19,000 athletes during a period of well over two decades. Many of these measurements on individuals were recorded over time as they grew physically and in ability, allowing Craig to build a better understanding of what had caused his own injury and what might lead to injuries in other people. In 2001, he visited the Birmingham lab of Dr. James Andrews, a renowned sports medicine and orthopedic doctor. There, he studied the Craig Pippin

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biomechanics of healthy arm movements and developed the injury prevention training philosophy upon which Pitchers Edge is built.

In the beginning, Craig started off training a handful of athletes wherever he could find the space. As interest grew, he leased two squash courts at the Regency Sport and Health Club, and when he had amassed a following of sixty children, he moved to a 40- by 100-foot training area with two indoor pitching lanes. By the time Pitchers Edge grew into the facilities it is today, Craig’s former students were accomplishing big things. One of the players whom he had trained for twelve years went on to pitch in the leagues, and then returned to northern Virginia to purchase one of the Pitchers Edge facilities.

Now, Pitchers Edge is an organization that never lets lack of funding stand in the way of a child’s opportunity to learn and grow. If money’s an issue, they work it out. They also send gently used baseball equipment to inner cities in the U.S. or to South American countries, adhering to Craig’s vision of bettering the lives of more players at every opportunity. And, just as it was when Craig was young, family always comes first. “Renee and I adore family, and we really embrace that time together,” he says. “Though it sometimes feels like we’re working 24/7, with her playing a major role in managing the businesses, we still make that time to be thankful for the amazing gift we have in being together.”

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In advising young people entering the working world, Craig remembers the day in third grade when his teacher asked the class what they wanted to be when they grew up. Amidst the aspiring attorneys, doctors, senators, and presidents, Craig stood up and proudly declared that he wanted to play professional baseball. “From an early age, I was motivated to accomplish that, and I made it happen,” he says. “It won’t be the same for everyone, but it’s incredibly important to follow your dreams and do what you love. There will be sacrifices, but it will be your choice. You’ll be able to contribute so much more to society if you’re able to do what you love. Figure out a way to pay your bills while doing it and you’ll get there.”

Beyond that, Craig leads through optimism— something he learned from his mother, who saw hope and promise in each and every day. “Even if we’re going through tough times, I always lead by taking the approach that everything’s going to be alright,” he says.

“It’s what I try to do for my family and for the players I coach. The glass is always half full.” It’s an attitude that becomes critically important in building the future leaders of America, instilling the tenet that baseball, entrepreneurship, and life are each defined by resilience. “It’s all a game of falling down and getting up,” he affirms. “I want each individual I work with to have the skills to pick themselves up, no matter where life might take them.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Victor Pirowski Excelling Throughout his life, Victor Pirowski has never been deterred by the prospect of navigating foreign terrain, whether it’s mastering a new skill or entering uncharted business territory. Rather, he seeks out such situations and thrives on the feeling of pushing full speed ahead despite the odds, learning to navigate challenges to ultimately succeed. “Even as a kid playing basketball, I was like the energizer bunny, always pushing,” he remembers today. “I didn’t want to fail or be sidetracked. If my team lost, I’d do an After Action Report in my mind to assess what I could have done differently to improve the outcome. I always wanted to be the best.”

When he wasn’t learning how to wrest control of basketballs from boys much older than him, Victor was in the classroom scheming up ways to earn more gold stars from his second grade teacher, Mrs. Bacon.

While most children hoped to earn a few stars to land a small gift from a box in the classroom, the pinnacle of success was accumulating enough for a trip to Friendly’s with the teacher for ice cream, and Victor would settle for nothing less.

Several years later, in high school, Victor would begin applying that same relentless pursuit of excellence to mastering Microsoft Office Excel. While other students in his class seemed disinterested and clumsy in the face of the program’s cells and formulas, Victor took to it effortlessly, later mastering the craft and its ability to build and share information. It’s the most constant, tangible manifestation of his capacity to evolve, perfect, and share his skill for the success and benefit of others, and Excel became a pathway for him to excel in a number of business environments throughout his career.

Now, Victor is cofounder and CFO of The Mayvin Consulting Group, Inc., a firm specializing in program management, acquisitions support, and operations support for government agencies like the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security. And the inclination that compelled him to jump into the company at its infancy was the very same force that drove him out on the basketball court with players far bigger

than he was, or to shoot for the moon in his second grade gold star competition. “I joined Mayvin because I knew I wasn’t going to get a paycheck until I figured out how to pay myself,” he recalls. “It was me challenging myself to figure it out. I have this internal drive to continue to be excellent in anything I do, and to win—whether it’s a basketball game or a proposal at Mayvin. It’s a drive that pushes me forward every day.”

Victor met his fellow Mayvin cofounders, Lisa Rosenthal and Carla Percy, while working for the Wexford Group at the same client site. At the time, he was in the accounting arena working on military interdepartmental purchase requests; developing such proficiency that he can still remember the significance of each piece of the 64-digit accounting codes he was working with, forward and backwards. “I was early on in my career, trying to make a name for myself,” he says. It grew increasingly apparent that the three employees were doing excellent work in their own fields, and when Lisa proposed launching their own company in 2008, it didn’t take a stretch of the imagination to visualize how well things would click if Lisa, Carla, and Victor were leading the effort together.

What did require some imagination, however, was Victor’s potential role as CFO. “They asked me to do corporate finance, and I was very honest with them in explaining that I had never done anything like that before,” he recalls. “But Lisa said that was fine, as long as I was willing to figure it out. None of us had any corporate experience, so it was going to be a process of learning together. That was okay with me, because Lisa and Carla are incredibly inspiring people, and I believed in their vision of building a company focused on going above and beyond for its clients while caring deeply about the happiness of its employees.”

With this philosophy at the crux of its inception, Mayvin was never destined to be a bottom-of-the-barrel kind of enterprise. Rather, it aimed to provide quality service by recruiting quality talent. “We’ve tried to build a group of highly-regarding engineers, acquisition spe-

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cialists, budget analysts, program managers, and other professionals, who treat each other with respect and dignity and are committed to doing everything they can to support the client and their mission,” Victor explains.

Now, Victor loves the experience of a contract win—that moment when all the pieces of a proposal come together and fit perfectly, from the technical acceptability to the pricing. This success is reflected in the company’s listing on the Inc. 5000, while a different kind of success led Mayvin to be nominated for the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce Corporate Citizen of the Year award. “Charity and philanthropy are very important to us as a company, so we encourage and support all our employees in finding meaningful ways to give back to the community,” he says.

At just under 70 employees today, Mayvin strives to ensure each team member receives the care and support they need, even if they’re widely dispersed at client sites across the nation. Lisa, Carla, and Victor routinely make site visits, pushing the message that the company’s leadership works for its employees, rather than vice versa.

“Our job as managers is to respond to employee requests as quickly as possible,” says Victor. “We hold ourselves to a very high standard to make sure they’re happy, creating a very unique company culture that our clients recognize.” Each year, to supplement these efforts, Mayvin employees have the opportunity to nominate one another for the ARTICLE Award, named for the company’s seven core values of accountability, results, teamwork, integrity, customer focus, leadership, and excellence.

In small, subtle, yet lasting ways, Victor spent his childhood cultivating each of the seven core values Mayvin celebrates today. He was born in Alexandria and raised in Fairfax, Virginia, by his father, a government employee, and his mother, who stayed home through his childhood and then returned to work as a special needs teacher. The oldest of three children, Victor loved basketball, baseball, school activities, camping, and fishing.

“Our parents were always very supportive of everything us kids wanted to do,” he remembers. “It was always clear that we were number one, and that meant a lot. Whether it was playing trombone in high school, or participating in sports and activities, our parents worked hard to make our interests a reality for us. They let us make our own decisions and pursue the things we were drawn to.”

While they were supportive, they never pushed their children to be competitive. Rather, Victor’s competitive streak was innate and self-driven, fueled in part by his brother, only two years his junior. The boys got along well, laughed at the same things, and held the same interests, so their rivalry was always good-natured. But much of it 138

stemmed from Victor’s own internal drive to succeed—an ambition that compelled him to push himself in academics as well as athletics. With an affinity for math and science, he took international baccalaureate classes in high school that led to advanced placement courses.

To earn his first buck, Victor worked as a newspaper boy for a summer and then became a baseball umpire for several seasons. In high school, he got a job behind the cash register at JCPenney. Though he thought in fifth grade that he might like to be a truck driver when he grew up, he decided in high school that he would study accounting in college. All that changed, however, when he started as a freshman at James Madison University’s business school. His first accounting class didn’t go well, so he switched to finance. “I love accounting now—it’s my profession,” he says. “But at the time, it was too regimented for me. It seemed to have a vocabulary all its own, with each word defined as the opposite of what you would think. Later, once I got into business and saw how the different pieces and parts talk to each other, the logic of that language would become second nature.”

In college, Victor was just as interested in pursuing different experiences as he was growing up. He rushed a fraternity and joined the marching band, only to realize that the various time commitments were taking their toll on his academic performance. He pared things back a bit and achieved balance, exceling during the school year and then using his father’s network at Fort Belvoir to land internships every summer. For his first two college summers, he worked as a stock scanner, taking inventory of all the computers on the installation. He was an IT tech the following summer, and ultimately a cost analyst with the Government, affording him the opportunity to work with the administration of government appropriations the first time.

When he graduated from college in 2004, he returned to the DC area and formally interviewed with the Wexford Group. In his internship the previous summer, he had shown a surprising affinity for the financial model estimating program he had been introduced to, and believed he could hit the ground running by helping the company with cost model work.

Wexford sent him to work with the US Army Rapid Equipping Force (REF), which was a dynamic, ideal ecosystem for challenge and learning, and a great opportunity to do meaningful work supporting U.S. service members overseas. The organization specialized in fielding solutions to the warfighter in a matter of days, in contrast to the typical government acquisition process, which can take years. What’s more, just as Victor was joining the program, the REF was becoming its own

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

financially established organization, with infrastructure, processes, and procedures put in place. Victor found himself exactly where he thrives best; thrust in the middle of a challenge he knew nothing about. “We had to figure out how to get our accounting lines set up and the first checks written,” he remembers. “Whenever I noticed a glitch or a shortcoming in how the operation was functioning, I made the calls and pulled together the team to find out what needed to be done to fix it. I knew everything I was doing there was to support the mission, and it was great to get continuous feedback from the field on how our work was positively affecting them.”

Though he loved the work, the culture changed somewhat when Wexford was acquired by CACI. Soon after the merger, all team members were assigned an employee number—a change toward a more impersonal atmosphere that Victor, Lisa, and Carla would later vow never to duplicate in their own company culture. After spending three years at Wexford, Victor decided to take a job at SAIC. He had worked closely with one of SAIC’s clients, the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) while at Wexford, so it seemed a seamless opportunity to try something new.

Victor was impressed by the large company’s fantastic employee indoctrination and training program, and saw tremendous opportunity in JIEDDO’s position as an entity responsible for channeling billions of dollars to different organizations working to address the issue of explosive devices. “I wanted to help JIEDDO tell its story better, and I figured out that I could do that by using Excel to sort its accounting data, reporting statuses, obligations, disbursements, and commitments,” he explains.

“I took the time to learn those extra steps in Excel, so I became the go-to person for all related matters.”

Lisa asked Victor to join Mayvin a year into his tenure at SAIC, and by that time, he had combined his new observations of the large company’s processes and management style with his experience in Wexford’s midsized environment. Like Lisa and Carla, he felt ready to draw on that previous experience to help define the new company and lead it to success.

At the time, he was dating Pegah, the woman he would marry in 2011. “I remember talking with her about the positive things I could do at Mayvin, and how thrilled I was to be part of a management structure for the first time and at the ground level,” Victor recounts. “I knew that taking the position would be a huge turning point for me. Pegah and I have always been very supportive of each other in where we want to go in our careers and our lives. Through the choices I’ve made and the paths I’ve taken, she’s the person I’m doing it for.”

Victor joined the team around the time Lisa landed Mayvin’s first contract, understanding that his first order of business was finding out what a CFO does, exactly.

He decided to take two days of accounting classes with a mentor, a CPA who was willing to sit him down and really educate him. By the end of the session, Victor had a solid basis from which to operate, and he knew he’d be able to fill in the rest on the job.

From that moment forward, things happened quickly, and before he knew it, he was flying across the country to Seattle to meet her at the client site. “I remember driving to the house we were renting sightunseen, stopping at a mall to buy a mattress on the way,” he laughs. “The next morning, I threw on a suit, and we walked onto our first day on the job together. It was a whirlwind transition from DC to Seattle, from an established company to a new start, but I’ve never regretted taking the risk.”

Victor spent the following year there, while Pegah moved to Philadelphia to become a Registered Nurse at Villanova University. It was a time of excitement, uncertainty, and possibility, and moments of Imposter Syndrome cropped up from time to time that caused him to wonder whether he was actually capable of succeeding as a CFO. But along with the rest of the team, Victor cleared each hurdle in his path, taking the company from five employees to 70. “Hitting the first bimonthly payroll of $100,000 was a milestone,” he reflects. “Now, we’re doing a million dollars in revenue each month and still growing. We have a DCAA-approved accounting system, which is a signal to everyone that our accounting is rock solid and that we can monitor and administer any contract they could award us. Lisa and Carla have been amazing in giving me the latitude to figure out how to get that system up and running, and our success is a testament to the fact that we’ve found the right answers.

Sometimes we can’t believe how far we have come.”

During his time at Mayvin, Victor has cut his teeth in figuring out what exactly a C-Level executive does— setting general financial direction, creating internal controls and compliance mechanisms, and developing budgetary projections for the company, all while maintaining a strong work ethic and busy schedule. “The CFO title sounds sexy, but the management team is still very tactical. I laugh sometimes when I sign a multi-million dollar contract one day, and then the next day I’m worried about a broken coffee pot that’s delivered to the office. In a small business, you do everything,” he explains.

“Mayvin maintains a flat organization to keep our overhead burdens low so we can compete in today’s government environment of falling budgets and Low-Price, Victor Pirowski

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Technically-Acceptable competitive environment. That flat infrastructure means we don’t have an abundance of support at the HQ level, but we are building our infrastructure, client, and proposal response capabilities, and continuing to establish an enduring company.”

Victor decided to supplement his experience by earning an MBA from George Mason University in 2015, with a concentration in accounting. “I loved doing my MBA while working at Mayvin because, every time I learned something new in law or accounting or regulations or organizational behavior, I could apply them in the real world the very next day in managing the company.” Victor graduated from the program the same week Pegah completed her nurse practitioners degree and gave birth to their first child—a confluence of life-changing

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moments that have added richness and joy to Victor’s life in so many ways.

In advising young people entering the working world today, Victor points out that hard work is necessary to get where you want to go in life. “Don’t feel entitled,” he says. “In this life and this economy, you get what you earn, not what you think you deserve just because you graduated from school.” Critical in this equation is a degree of resilience, which allows one to bounce back in the face of criticism, mistakes, setbacks, and losses.

“You can’t teach grit,” he affirms. “It’s got to come from you, and you’ve got to be willing to jump back up and try again when you get knocked down. That’s what it takes to excel, and that’s what we bring to our clients at Mayvin every day.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Michael “Mike” Ricciardi Determination Like the greatest country on Earth, the greatest people on Earth are defined by their determination to succeed.

Michael Ricciardi’s parents, Domenico and Franceschina, had that determination, and both possessed a combination of principles, perseverance, and inner strength that would change the course of their family’s future. The embodiment of an unbreakable work ethic, they left Italy in the 1960s, determined to build a life for their children in the United States. Although their jobs often kept them away from home from before sunrise until after sunset, throughout this daily grind they kept their eyes on the horizon, mindful of the legacy they hoped to leave in the world. It was this determination that compelled Domenico to make the extra time in the evenings to personally guide the education of his youngest son, Michael.

Coming of age in a society riddled with world war and dead ends, Domenico had only finished school through the eighth grade, yet he understood its importance in preparing his children for success in their adopted country. As Mike entered the American education system for the first time and worked his way through elementary school, his father purchased Italian social studies, math, science, and geography school books, and led him through a completely separate curriculum each evening. “He was determined to ensure that I kept the Italian language, and I continued reading and writing it at a high level,” Mike recalls today.

“The Italian math was also more advanced than what I was doing at school, so I excelled and was put in advanced math classes.”

All of that changed, however, when Mike’s father fell ill in 1972. As his health steadily declined, the learning structure in which the young boy had flourished began to crumble. But Domenico Ricciardi was determined that his legacy of education be sustained long after he was gone. “One day, he said that the one thing he wanted me to do for him was to get a college degree,” Mike remembers.

“About two weeks later, he passed away. That request really stuck with me.”

Mike had the determination to honor his father’s last

wishes, but wasn’t sure about how to go about doing it. His mother only had a fifth grade education, and she was too busy putting food on the table to guide her struggling son the way his father had done. Mike’s older siblings were also helping to make ends meet and didn’t have time to tutor him. Over the next two years, Mike’s grades plummeted, and he quickly fell from the top of his class to the bottom.

That’s when Ms. Swenson, a caring and dedicated seventh grade teacher, stepped in. Noticing that Mike had the mental capacity to excel, and only needed a guiding light in the wake of the traumatic loss of his father, she began inviting him home with her after school for extra math help. “She was a wonderful lady who took a strong interest in me, which made all the difference,” Mike recalls.

“I was getting D’s and F’s at the beginning of her class, and by the end, I was getting A’s. By the time I reached high school, I was back to my old performance levels.”

Now the founder and managing partner of Relevant Technology, Inc. (RTI), Mike is the living legacy of his father’s determination and of the countless others who took time out from their traditional obligations to help him along the way. And now, RTI has turned into Mike’s break from business-as-usual, in the hopes of enacting some of the most critical change imaginable. Through RTI, he works on information systems programs at pivotal national defense entities, including the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical and Biological Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. And through RTI, he is determined to revolutionize the way the federal government does its defense business by helping to remove duplication of systems, provide optimized performance and actionable information through interoperability, and cut development costs so more money can flow toward innovation in Research & Development. “As an industry, we need to truly be pushing the envelope, rather than reproducing the same products and putting different labels on them,” Mike argues. “It’s my unfinished business to use this vision as a means to make our country even greater, and RTI is my vehicle to help navigate the path forward.”

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To understand the path forward, however, one must first understand the path already traveled. Mike’s determination to succeed and fulfill his parents’ legacy was forged in the quaint medieval town of Sturno, in the province of Avellino, Italy. Thirty miles east of Naples, tucked in the enchanting hills of Italy, its Neapolitan culture overlays a folk atmosphere to form the stuff of dreams and travel magazine features, and by most measures of success, the Ricciardi family had it made. Franceschina Ricciardi was a prominent woman in town, the owner of a small manufacturing facility, where she created custom designed wool garments. Her husband, Domenico Ricciardi, owned two bars in the area and had been a marquetry furniture designer. Their four school-age children were doing well, enjoying a good education in some of Italy’s best boarding schools under the guidance of religious orders, as was the custom for high-level education. But Domenico dreamed of something more, and was determined to blaze a new trail for his family in America.

Domenico decided he would give America a year.

If he didn’t have a house and a way forward by then, he would return to his family in Sturno. But things went well in Brooklyn, New York, and even before his self-imposed deadline, he had secured a good union job and bought a modest home in a diverse neighborhood—an eclectic mix of African American, Italian, Irish, and Hispanic families.

He sent for Franceschina, who resolved to make the move herself while allowing her four children to finish school in Italy under the watchful eyes of their large extended family. But Mike, her youngest son, refused to be left behind.

“I had just finished first grade, and I wasn’t about to let my mother cross the Atlantic and start a new life without me,” he laughs today. “With that, we boarded the Rafael and spent eight days at sea. It was one of the most fun times I can remember, and when we stepped off that boat and got our green cards on July 7, 1967, we were Americans.”

It was a time of great uncertainty for the Ricciardis and for the nation as well. Mike was too young to enter the second grade, and since he didn’t speak English, he reentered the first grade at Lady of Lords, a Catholic school in his new Brooklyn neighborhood. The nuns were helpful, but he assimilated the English language mostly through cartoons and other children’s shows on television. Meanwhile, the Civil Rights movement was in full swing, and when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated a year later, white children in Mike’s neighborhood were routinely targeted and beaten up for pocket money. Still, the Ricciardis were determined to move forward. Mike’s mother swallowed her pride and went to work as a seamstress in a sweatshop, while his father went to work for a cabinetry company. As soon as he had made enough money, he sold 142

the house in Brooklyn for a profit and bought his second house in Glen Cove, a Long Island town with deep connections to his native Sturno. With the move to Long Island, Franceschina now had a two-hour commute to work in the garment district, but living amongst the large Italian community was worth it. By that time, Mike’s sister and two brothers had crossed the Atlantic to join them.

Just one year after the move to Long Island, the family was devastated by the sudden loss of Domenico.

Beyond the emotional impact, the disappearance of his weekly paycheck left only Franceschina’s miniscule weekly income. Growing up in Italy during the war, Franceschina knew how to ration and was adept at making something out of nothing, but this was a new kind of challenge.

Thankfully, Mike’s older brothers, Joe and Lino, were able to contribute in substantive ways, and both ended up working at Theresa’s, an Italian restaurant in town. Mike went to work there as well, washing dishes on the weekends, and every dollar the boys made was contributed to the good of the family.

Before long, the owner of Theresa’s decided to return to Italy and rented the restaurant to Joe, marking a gamechanging moment for the family. Franceschina financed the down payment and helped with the initial monthly rent, allowing the family to break into the restaurant business. Business hummed, and when she left her garment job behind to take over management of the establishment from her son, the whole family thrived. In no time, weekly sales had increased to over $2,000. “My mother had grown up in a business family, and she really knew what she was doing,” says Mike. “When my sister Filomena joined the ranks to work as a waitress, everyone was chipping in. All this while we were all going on with our school. We did so well that my brothers decided to open a second location, so at around fourteen years of age, I was largely helping my mom run Theresa’s. I got used to being in charge and being the guy who figured out what needed to be done.”

Academics often takes a backseat when one is simultaneously running a business, and Mike’s schoolwork suffered, particularly since he often worked until 2:00 AM during his sophomore and junior years in high school. But his mother made it clear that there was no way he wasn’t going to college. In this, she was supported by several other pivotal figures, like his 9th grade Social Studies teacher, Mr. Clancy, and his 12th grade math teacher, Mr. Atkinson. “They provided the inspiration and incentives that helped me believe in myself, and that ultimately guided me through my academic life,” Mike avows.

During his high school senior year, Franceschina wanted Mike to focus more on school, and less on the restaurant, so he decided to work normal hours outside the

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

family business. “Through my teens, I was working other odd jobs, which showed me more of life” he remembers, “Whether I was working as a landscaper, a gas station attendant, a construction worker, a golf caddy, at McDonald’s, or in the produce department at the supermarket, I was gaining vantage points into the many facets of the world outside the classroom. The most valuable lesson from doing odd jobs is that you learn how to work hard, and this helps shape your character; defines your ambitions, and opens opportunities to what you can be.”

By the time Mike started community college; he had taken a job at an electronics company called Multiwire.

There, he became fascinated with “numerically controlled machines”—the science of programming machines to do work for you. Walking the factory floor, he found out that a man named George Thompson had the best job in the company, writing the software for these machines. One day, Mike approached George and asked, “If I wanted to do your job one day, what would I have to do?”

Struck by the young man’s candor, Mr. Thompson told him to get a computer science degree. With that, Mike transferred and enrolled in Buffalo University’s Computer Science program. Financing his education through loans, a job in the computer lab that gave him increased access to resources for homework, and another job in the cafeteria that earned him free meals, Mike double-majored in applied mathematics and computer science and graduated with more credits then he needed. It wasn’t just to honor his father’s dying wish, nor was it solely the result of his mother persistent support and encouragement over the years. More than anything, it was because Mike was determined to do it for himself. “Our family has always been full of independent thinkers,” he says. “We are self-governing individuals, driven by integrity and our determination to succeed. As well, I wanted to honor my family name by really making something of myself.”

When he graduated in 1983, not only did Mike earn a degree, but he also met his life partner, Marie. She was a freshman Biology Major at the time, and the two were married in 1989. He also landed his dream job as a programmer at Multiwire, working in Mr. Thompson office just as he had planned. The two became close friends, and Mike grew tremendously from the mentorship and homegrown knowledge George Thompson possessed in all things, from systems programming to investments. Multiwire also offered to contribute to his graduate degree, so Mike obtained a Masters in computer science at the New York Institute of Technology. While there, Mike was solicited by one of his professors to do defense programming work. The experience paved the way for 1985, when leadership changes at Multiwire signaled future instability.

Mike changed jobs to work with his professor at United Technologies, a defense contractor. Operating at the top of his game, Mike was then recruited by Computer Horizon to provide contract for hire work for Sperry at its new location in Reston, Virginia.

After settling in Virginia, Mike became eager to exit the “contract for hire” world and took a job with Goodyear Aircraft Company, where he worked with some of the world’s foremost experts on Synthetic Aperture Radars. Life was good—until the division was broken off and sold to Loral. Under the new leadership, Mike was charged with getting himself billable for the first time. “We were told to approach other divisions, find out what they wanted, and effectively sell ourselves,” he explains. “It became our new world order, but I soon realized that if I could sell my own time to these other divisions, I could just as easily do that with my own company.”

With that, in 1989 Mike and Marie launched Michael Anthony Ricciardi Computer Systems Designers (MARCSD) to run in his off-hours. A neighbor, working for CACI, began awarding him billable hours at CACI’s Distribution System Division, and by 1990, he was making enough to leave his day job and commit to MARCSD in earnest. He soon picked up additional billable hours from Martin Marietta, Xerox, and IBM Federal Systems.

Mike and Marie incorporated their venture in 1992 as Ricciardi Technologies Inc. (RTI), and business really started blossoming. But it wasn’t until he found a true secondin-command that everything seemed to fall into place.

“In the beginning, I felt like I had to do everything on my own,” Mike remembers. “I was hiring folks by the hour, until I met a young engineer working for IBM named David Godso. He was incredibly smart, also raised by a single mom, who became like a brother to me. Dave reinforced my own life lessons that sacrifices and encouragement do indeed lead to success.”

Mike convinced Dave to leave IBM and join the fledgling company as his third employee. Dave was structured and reliable, allowing Mike to focus for the first time on business development. “He was the ideal employee,” Mike avows. “If you run a consulting business, everyone is a smart person who looks to you, so you have to be out there in front with a sword, slaying the dragons. Having Dave there in the trenches allowed me to go and do that reconnaissance, while he led the team. It was a real turning point for me.”

Specializing in hardware and software development at the time, RTI landed contracts in Maryland and California with Fortune 1000 businesses, including CACI, Loral, Lockheed Martin, L3, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, SRC, and Exxon/Mobil, and with federal agencies like the Michael “Mike” Ricciardi

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Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Transportation. The company’s steady uphill trajectory was, however, brought to a sudden halt by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which resulted in a stark curtailment of federal R&D dollars. “Fortunately, half of our business was related to production work through acquisition support, which sustained us,” Mike points out. “But to lose 50 percent of our business, at the drop of a hat, was a real wakeup call. I had to restructure the business in 2002 and gradually build it back up.” As an additional hedge, Mike and Marie started up another company—Domenix, named after Mike’s father and his own son, both Domenico—that served as a Temp Agency for several clients.

Through the next several years, RTI shifted its focus to technical solutions and support for the development and production of systems to counteract weapons of mass destruction. Mike grew the company to over $5 million in revenue, and had just won a $29 million contract, with another $85 million contract award pending, when he was approached by a company called Science Dynamics. The company offered to buy RTI and take it public, with Mike’s family retaining 30 percent ownership. “It seemed like a good move at the time, but it was actually just a ploy on their part to build up the stock value,” he concedes. “I got a payout, and the employees got payouts from our ESOP, so it wasn’t the end of the world, but I felt like there was a lot more I could have done with the company. The folks at Science Dynamics weren’t interested in pushing the business forward, so I left the company—now called Lattice Government Services—in 2007. I figured I’d do some consulting and spend more time with family, especially my teenage daughter, Michele, and young son Domenic.”

But Mike couldn’t stay out of the race long. In 2008, he decided to expand and re-energize Domenix. A number of former RTI employees quickly signed on with the company, and in a short time it had grown to over $3 million in annual revenue. Then, in 2009, a law was passed that prohibited companies from doing both systems engineering technical assistance (SETA) and government development work. Mike responded by spinning off the Domenix SETA work into a new Limited Liability Company, Domain X Technologies LLC (DXT). DXT would be owned and managed by Marie, while Domenix would continue to be owned and managed by Mike himself, with a primary focus on software and hardware development.

Today, with the recent rebranding of Domenix as Relevant Technology Inc. (RTI) to recapture the original RTI acro-

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nym, Mike is now in a position to fulfill the legacy envisioned by his parents when they first came to America.

“We have all the pieces in place, and the playbook is taking shape,” he confirms. “I’m a big believer in small teams accomplishing great things. We’re not worried about getting lots of contracts, or hiring lots of bodies. We’re hyper-focused on adding value and helping to shape an IT infrastructure that redefines our country’s national security.”

In offering advice to young people entering the working world today, Mike reminds us that it’s actually better to be good than lucky. “As Donald Trump says, the harder I work, the luckier I get,” Mike affirms. “Always take personal responsibility, and never blame others for what’s going on in your life. There’s always another path—another way. As long as you have your life and your health, you can get something done.”

Mike has lived this mantra to the fullest, finding time amidst his entrepreneurial ventures to teach at Northern Virginia Community College, sit on several scholarship committees, and participate in many events at the Center for Innovative Technologies (CIT). He and Marie are supporters of the Carson Scholars Fund, a college fund for students displaying academic excellence and humanitarian qualities, as well as Copolus, an organization committed to bringing Italian language studies to the American school system. They also support the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the March of Dimes, and various other nonprofit organizations.

Yet in philanthropy, as in all things, Mike’s philosophy is pragmatic, his efforts concentrated at the root causes of society’s afflictions. “You can’t have freedom without someone determined to defend it,” he points out.

“And you can’t have freedom without a piece of paper called the Constitution to enshrine it.” It’s why he supports Constituting America, an organization that seeks to bring knowledge of the Constitution into American classrooms to promote a better understanding of the intersection of our global and historical contexts. “Achieving success, whether in business or in other aspects of your life, is rooted in the freedoms defined in this county’s Founding Document,” he says. “It’s why this country is so great, and why I feel proud to have come here. It’s given me the chance to succeed, and the best way I know how to give back is by voicing the benefits, promoting the values, and strengthening our belief in our Constitution. That’s why I live by example, focusing my mission and mantra on how my family, my team, and I contribute to those principles.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Lisa Rosenthal The Pursuit of Knowledge When 19-year-old Lisa Rosenthal’s college statistics professor called her in after class one day, the worst-case scenarios began playing out in her mind. Surely her lackadaisical attendance had caught up with her and she was about to lose her scholarship, which would prompt her father to pull her out of American University. But as she braced for the dominos of her future to begin toppling in rapid succession, the conversation took an abrupt turn.

“Young lady,” said Dr. Gene Mignogna, “you’ve skipped most of my classes, you don’t dress appropriately, you have an attitude problem, but you’ve managed to set every curve in my class.”

“Are you kicking me out?” she asked.

“No, I’m hiring you.”

Two weeks later, Lisa donned one of the new suits her mother had bought her and arrived for her first day of work as a Congressional budget analyst for a large defense contractor called ANSER. “I went from getting home at 5:00 in the morning after partying all night, to getting up at 5:00 AM for work,” she remembers. “It was an adult job, and I was still a full-time student, so I grew up really fast. But it was incredible. My plans to become an environmental lawyer, which I’d wanted to be since I was a little girl, completely died the moment I started working for the Department of Defense. I worked with the Air Force, the Navy, the Army, the Marines, and I fell in love with serving the war fighter.” Now the cofounder and CEO of The Mayvin Consulting Group, Inc.(Mayvin), a defense contracting firm, finding ways to support and serve this extraordinary population has been her purpose and devotion for over twenty years.

Lisa’s work today is done against the backdrop of a tireless and lifelong pursuit of knowledge, and in many ways, the company itself has been the stage upon which invaluable lessons in life and self-knowledge have played out. Launching and sustaining a company is nothing short of a rollercoaster toward greater awareness, and Lisa wanted a company logo reflecting that reality. When she came across the symbol of the Akan Tribe in Ghana, she knew it was the perfect insignia for Mayvin. “I’ve al-

ways been an incredibly prolific reader, and I discovered that the symbol means ‘the pursuit of knowledge to create wisdom.’ It’s what Mayvin is all about—the pursuit of solutions to create wisdom that can save lives on the battlefield and enable our most sacred ideals in the world.”

The firm’s name is equally meaningful, drawn from Malcom Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, to signify a subject matter expert who seeks to share information with others. “Our mission is to assemble a team of subject matter experts who can do it better, and then create an environment where they can be better.

We seek wisdom and knowledge and then share that with government clients for the betterment of all.”

Mayvin was officially launched in June of 2008; several months after Lisa gave up a secure job at a billion-dollar firm to find out what she was really made of. The company now provides program management support services to help government offices run effectively, including analytics, budget and financial management, acquisition and contracting logistics, and engineering projects. It also specializes in Army battlefield technologies and mission support services, which can mean sending employees over to Afghanistan or Iraq when they know they have the right person for a job. “We do operational energy, training, asymmetric warfare, and support for the U.S. Army Rapid Equipping Force,” Lisa explains. “We also bring clarity and effectiveness to defining requirements and figuring out what’s really needed. If a soldier dies overseas, how do we come up with the right solution to make sure it doesn’t happen again?”

Mayvin’s corporate culture is steeped in inclusivity, dignity, and respect, oriented around the core tenet values of accountability, responsiveness, teamwork, integrity, customer-focused, leadership, and excellence (ARTICLE). Its leadership team works for its employees first and foremost—a structure that truly differentiates it from other firms. “We’re nothing without our employees,” Lisa affirms. “They’re our number one priority, and we take great strides to bring everyone together for fun

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events so we can nurture a culture of connectedness and positivity.” This mindset, coupled with Lisa’s proclivity for celebrating kooky holidays like National Margarita Day and National Haiku Day, explains the company’s phenomenal 93 percent retention rate and enduring sense of employee loyalty.

The company’s culture rests on the firm foundation created by its leadership triumvirate. As the CEO, Lisa excels in corporate strategy, vision, and generating the crazy ideas that have kept Mayvin fresh and frontrunning. Carla Percy is the executing force behind the company’s success, managing the staff through deep interpersonal relationships as they work to transform Lisa’s ideas into reality. Victor Pirowski lends accountability to the whole operation while also managing all financial matters with a meticulous and detail-oriented eye. The three have worked together for over a decade, creating a family-like environment that fuels currents of innovation, creativity, acceptance, and unconditional support.

Much of Lisa’s success stems back to her own family, and to the parents she affectionately refers to as her rock through life. Born into a middle class suburban home near Detroit, Michigan, she enjoyed growing up in a close-knit community where the neighborhood kids played outside together every evening. Her father was a school psychologist in the same school system for over forty years, while her mother was a special education teacher who would come home from work exhausted and drained most nights but never throw in the towel.

“She kept doing what she was doing because it mattered,” Lisa says. “She made a difference in the lives of those students and parents, and watching her had a hand in connecting me with the importance of a purpose-driven profession. And thanks to my incredible father, I developed my love of adventure and risk. He’s always willing to try new things, even if it means getting his scuba certification at age 69. We’ve traveled the world together and still take a daddy-daughter adventure trip each year.”

Lisa’s parents have been married for over four decades and always encouraged her to strive for excellence.

They set her up with a strong moral background with very specific parameters for right and wrong, and taught her to throw her whole self into her pursuits and passions. They wanted their daughter to know how to cook, shoot guns, golf, and dance, and she was that child who excelled at everything without really trying. At twelve years old, her father forced her to take karate classes so she’d be able to protect herself, but her instructor gave her so much more. “One day, he decked me,” she recalls.

“I was shocked, and then mad. But he said, ‘Are you done not giving it your all?’ He decked me again. The third 146

time, I finally hit him back. That’s when it dawned on me that you have to play the game. You can’t just sit on the sidelines sulking, hoping you won’t get decked again.”

As a kid, Lisa had no interest in domestic life or motherhood. She dreamed of being a businesswoman, perhaps a lawyer. She read voraciously, was constantly active, and put up with her parents and younger brother when the family piled in to their 24-foot motor home and traversed the country to visit battlefields and historic sites. The tiresome monotony of these history lessons all faded away, however, when the trailer found its way to Washington, DC, when Lisa was twelve. “I remember getting out, looking around, looking up at my parents, and saying, ‘This is where I belong; you can just leave me here,’” Lisa recounts. “I knew it from that moment that I was a DC girl through-and-through. It’s the seat of world power and greatest city on Earth.”

Thanks to that life-changing experience, Lisa set her sights on American University (AU) for college. The school had its own private campus, a beautiful arboretum, and professors that were working professionals before they were academics. They had lived business, not just studied it, and Lisa planned to double-major in Political Science and Environmental Policy before going on to Georgetown Law School to become an environmental lawyer. And though she ended up switching tracks when she stumbled across her dream job in the Pentagon at age nineteen, her fidelity to the school that helped her get there has remained constant over the years. “I absolutely fell in love with the university, and went back for my MBA,” she says. “I think about the people who changed my life through their mentorship or guidance, and I feel it’s my job now to give back in whatever way I can. I spend a lot of time at AU working with undergrads, and I also run a Junior Women’s Forum for ladies age 22 to 30 to help with career mentorship.” Lisa now serves on the AU Alumni Board of Directors, as well as its Entrepreneurship Council, where she runs the Affinity Committee.

It was at AU, one day in class, when Lisa first heard the famous quotation, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” She resolved to live her life by those words, and when she finished her undergraduate degree, she made sure she was prepared for the many opportunities that awaited her in the intelligence community. After completing a series of six-month rotations that built a widespread base of knowledge, she worked in government for a total of four years and then moved over to the private sector, where her entrepreneurial nature had more room to roam. “Working in the government intelligence space, I met more unsung heroes than any-

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

where else,” she remarks. “What they’re doing and sacrificing is breathtaking. I learned a work ethic that what you do matters, even if you don’t get credit for it.”

Lisa spent some time working at the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear National Security Information, where she learned about cost schedule performance, and then landed a job with a small firm working with one of the most remarkable organizations in the military, called the U.S. Army Rapid Equipping Force (REF). In that capacity, Lisa worked on technology solutions for soldiers in need, including robotics, UAVs, lock picks, and camera systems. As she dedicated her efforts to increasing the situational awareness and force protection of America’s service members, she realized who and what she was. “I was working with the brightest minds around to figure out how to save soldiers’ lives on the battlefield,” she says. “At one point we were working on a project called Ballistic Helmet, and one day, we got one delivered to us with bullet imprints on the outside.

On the visor was a note scribbled from a kid that read, ‘I don’t know who you people are, but you just saved my life.’ When I realized the magnitude of what I was doing, it gave me a feeling I can’t even begin to describe.”

While she loved her time at that job, Lisa came to find herself undeniably drawn to the idea of doing business her own way. She wanted to figure out how to run a company, develop a culture, and serve clients—things she had read about in her business books but hadn’t actually lived yet. When she was 32 and confident she knew everything there was to know about running a company, Lisa called up Carla Percy, a colleague from work, and invited her out to drinks. At the bar that night, she drew out the plan on a napkin: they would quit their jobs, go to zero salary, and start a company. Carla looked at her, half-incredulous and half-unsurprised. “An entrepreneur is an entrepreneur,” Lisa reminds us. “It’s natural and in our blood. We’re just compelled to start businesses. I think Carla and I recognized that in each other.”

By the end of the night, Carla was in. Within four months, they quit their jobs and brought along Victor, the 26-year-old numbers whiz who would be their CFO. Ninety days after that, they landed their first contract with an Army organization to enhance situational awareness on the battlefield. Lisa, happily married and living a life in Old Town Alexandria, hopped in the car at 4:00 AM to drive across the country to Seattle, where they planned to open an office at a site they had rented without seeing. Within 20 seconds, she hopped back out of the car and threw up. “I realized it was really happening, and we were really doing it,” she recounts. “That was the only moment of

hesitation. A few minutes later, I was on the road, both literally and figuratively.”

Over the next year, Mayvin’s identity and purpose took shape in earnest as Lisa, Carla, and Victor found their sea legs. They resolved to fake it until they made it, teaching themselves how to run QuickBooks, do pricing, write proposals, hire staff, and draft an employment agreement. “In those early days, we googled everything and phoned friends for advice,” she remembers. “There were a lot of naysayers—people saying we didn’t know what the hell we were doing and had no business starting a business. But we knew how to treat people with dignity and respect, and we were willing to work harder than anyone, and that was enough. We would figure the rest out.”

When the Seattle office was up and running, Lisa moved back to DC, but not to the life she had left behind.

In the coming months, she divorced and reclaimed the freedom she had always felt such affinity for. “Running a business is very hard on a personal life,” she says. “I’m hard-charging, Type A, over-the-top, and incredibly extroverted. I’m drawn to chaos, activity, and the ensuing exhaustion when I finally call it a night. It makes for one hell of a ride, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

Lisa’s relentless energy became a matter of life and death for the company on March 23, 2012, when a major contract expired and the company didn’t win the recompete. With Mayvin’s main source of funding eviscerated overnight, Lisa and her team spent the next several days drinking champagne and crying into their glasses.

But by March 26, they picked themselves up, returned to the office, and set their minds to tackling the questions that most needed to be answered. How do we run a company? What do we want to look like when we grow up? How do you actually bid on contracts and win them?

How do you hire people and keep them? How do you create a corporate culture? How do you set up systems to make sure everything runs smoothly?

The leadership team managed to pull through that hardship without laying off any of its eight employees.

And today, only three years later, they’re a team of almost 70 that won a $20 million contract with the Department of Homeland Security in 2013 and a $38 million prime contract with the Army’s Special Operations Command in September of 2014. It made the Inc. 5000 in 2014 and was a finalist for Fairfax County’s Corporate Citizen award, signifying its commitment to giving back to the community. “Not bad for a couple of kids with no idea what they were doing,” Lisa smiles. “Mentors have been the bread and butter of our success—fantastic individuals whose knowledge and insight have been invaluable.

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Some have been recognized as members of our Board of Advisors, while some operate more behind-the-scenes.

They’re people from all over the community who didn’t look at us when we were 32 and say we were just a bunch of silly girls trying to figure out how to run a business.

They’re the people who said, ‘Hey, you two are crazy enough that this just might work, and we want to help.’”

Just as Mayvin’s success has been defined by connecting with the right people, its integrity has been shaped profoundly by its resolve to avoid the wrong ones.

“We know we’re not going to be rich, but we definitely make enough to live on, and that means we can do the right thing no matter the consequences,” Lisa explains.

“We have no problem walking away from contracts when we believe the entity we’re working with is unethical. It matters who you work with—your employees, your clients, your partners. It really matters. We empower our team members to make those decisions too, even if it means walking away from a lot of money. At the end of the day, we need to be able to sleep at night, and that means guarding our integrity on all counts.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Lisa underscores the importance of pushing through fear and doubt. “Was I worried about failure along the way?” she queries. “Every single day. Even now, I’m constantly stressed out about it. What if we don’t do this? What if we do it wrong? But I’ve learned over the years that the ‘what ifs’ aren’t worth it. Every single time, take the risk. If you don’t think you can do it, do it anyway. If someone gives you an opportunity, say yes. Failure is inevitable. You’re going to screw things up, make wrong decisions, spend money you shouldn’t have, and hire the wrong people. You’re probably going to screw things up daily. Failure only happens when you don’t get

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up the next day and do it again. There are very few mistakes in life that can’t be fixed with a bottle of champagne and some good conversation.”

Lisa is also firmly committed to overcoming gender stereotypes in the workplace, which are too often nurtured by both men and women alike. She was 23 when a female colleague from the intelligence community, Marty, overheard her complaining about a femalerelated issue, and firmly told her that she needed to get over it and get back in the game. “Never again did I apologize for being a woman,” she avows. “I’m constantly asked what it’s like to be a woman executive running a Department of Defense contracting firm. I tell them it’s no different from being a male executive. I’m a CEO who happens to be female. I’m very passionate about the advancement of women in leadership, and I firmly believe that the only way we’re going to change the world is for women and men to focus on their similarities instead of their differences.”

All taken together, Lisa’s journey has been a road to learning that the best workplace is one where employees are empowered to ‘go for it’, that the best pathways aren’t linear, and that the whole of Mayvin is magnitudes greater than the sum of its parts. But above all, it’s been a road defined by learning. “I’m learning every chance I get,” she says. “It might be courses at the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce, or the Leadership Fairfax program, or classes at AU. It might be reading. Or it might just be talking with others. Above all else, success is the pursuit of knowledge—the exchange of ideas and the transformation of ideas into action to find out what it takes to move our lives, our business, our communities, and our society forward.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Rebecca R. Rubin The Woods Within In Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, you’ll find a hundred-acre undeveloped, untouched woods owned by the Village of Hastings. Rebecca Rubin was nine months old when her family moved from the Bronx to a house on Edgewood Avenue just across the street from this sanctuary of wildness, which seemed to the young girl to stretch for thousands of acres. Under the shelter of those trees, she found a sense of freedom and empowerment that came to define her inner self as much as it defined the world around her. She walked to school through the woods, played there with friends, and explored independently, setting off in the morning with her knapsack for a day of adventure. And in these pursuits, the young girl was also undertaking a cartographic exercise of far greater magnitude, mapping the terrain of her own character and values.

Now the founder, President, and CEO of Marstel-Day, an environmental consulting firm and conservation think tank, Rebecca has dedicated her career to combating elements of loss, destruction, and degradation in the natural world. And in this work, she brings the same affinity and wonder she felt as a child. “We were given the most perfect of all possible worlds,” she says. “Everything about it was in perfect symmetry, function, and beauty. Then we came along, and our grand legacy has been to eliminate more than half the earth’s forests, wreck its aquatic ecosystems, and vanquish its habitat and species. We’re now experiencing the effects of hundreds of years of habitat fragmentation, destruction, and relinquishment of our love of nature to distance ourselves from our ecosystems.

Now we have a sadly dissipated version of what was once a beautiful and highly-functional planet, and I believe the most important task before us as human beings is the monumental work of restoration.”

Founded in 2002 as a solo consulting venture, Marstel-Day was named for the oceans (mar), stars (stel), and daylight (day) that inspired it. At that time, Rebecca observed a sweeping trend in the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to divest significant portions of land as the federal government sought to down-

size its defense and energy complexes. “I was working for a defense think tank at the time, a job that allowed me to visit many closing sites during the Base Realignment and Closure process, surveying the land and witnessing the decision processes,” she says. “The U.S. military owns 25 million acres of some of the highest quality habitat in the country, and is one of the six largest land managers in the nation. Over time, military bases have become islands of biodiversity amidst a sea of development. Congress was ramping up pressure to get rid of property, and as a consequence, we were seeing some lands with important habitat value being transferred for development purposes. That approach seemed fundamentally wrong to me, and there was never going to be a bigger opportunity to seize the moment and develop alternatives, like strategies for long-term conservation of those lands.”

To provide a better solution, Rebecca and her team developed the concept of conservation conveyance, allowing DOD to transfer lands to private sector, landacquiring conservation nonprofits. This kind of thinking became the hallmark of Marstel-Day, framing consulting questions in a way that ties them back to land, water, and ecosystem services.

The firm is also based on the premise that the for-profit world should be just as concerned with saving nature as the nonprofit world, playing its part as a leader in conservation. “Often, it seems people will do anything to build the next development so they can create a bigger tax base, not realizing they’re really shooting themselves in the foot,” she says. “Our entire economy depends upon nature. Without nature, there is no economy.”

While it seems impossible to imagine that the natural world could ever be fully appreciated by society at large, Marstel-Day takes its work piece by piece, a day at a time. Its team is made up of people with extremely diverse backgrounds, attracting engineers, philosophers, and poets alike. And while many employees decide to stay at the firm long-term, it’s also a perfect short-term environment for young people who are finding their footing in the world. “They’ll stay a couple years, develop

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a nature-based way of viewing the world, and then go on to the next thing,” she says. “They become ambassadors in a sense, taking this value set somewhere else.

And every new wave of employees brings something new, helping the company grow and evolve. In this way, our culture is based on an extremely positive symbiotic learning relationship.”

Today, the firm has grown to roughly 150 people in nine offices across the US and one location in the UK. It does a lot of work with landowners large and small to address encroachment, managing the urbanization and development that threatens wild spaces. Its portfolio also includes water resources management to maintain the health of underground aquifers, which grow increasingly depleted as communities deal with drought and increased demand. The firm specializes in large-scale community outreach and engagement, as well as more traditional environmental work like environmental assessments and impact statements. Perhaps its most defining undertaking, however, has been a decade-long commitment to host various forums with environmental thinkers and strategists. Recently Rebecca initiated a monthly speaker series called the “Stand With Wildlife” Awareness Campaign. “Our Stand With Wildlife Campaign covers the gamut, from connecting kids with nature, to environmental journalism, to how nature is helping veterans with PTSD,” she explains. “Every individual action counts when it comes to preserving nature, and through this campaign we help people find their role as environmental citizens.”

Rebecca was born in 1965 to theater-loving parents, both of whom earned PhDs in their chosen fields and encouraged her to explore her own role on the vast stage of life. Driven by an inner flame akin to Rebecca’s own unrelenting spirit, her mother has taught voice and movement for actors and actresses at Circle in the Square Theater in New York City, where she still works today.

She also launched a business called Professionally Speaking, teaching executives how to deliver remarks and carry themselves proudly. “She’s one of the most out-there people I’ve ever met,” says Rebecca. “She defies every effort anyone has ever made to turn her into something she’s not.” Rebecca’s father, known for his insightful and thoughtful nature, is a stage lighting professional, and one of a handful of individuals who defined the future of stage lighting and theater technology.

Rebecca’s parents traveled often while she was young, and her brother and sister were older and often off doing their own things, so music kept her company—especially Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life.

“I memorized every song he wrote and really connected 150

with the lyrics philosophically, intellectually, and morally,” she reflects. “One song in particular, ‘As,’ has a line that I still think about almost every day: Kindness knows no shame. All through my life, and especially as a business leader, the first thing I look for in people is kindness. There’s no lack of smart people and brilliant strategists, but kindness is in very short supply. I’ve found that the business world can cause people to become cold and mechanical, so it’s really important to work to transact with kindness.”

Free spirited and unconventional, Rebecca was always roaming in the woods growing up. She credits her mother for getting her into athletics, and by ninth grade had joined the soccer, basketball, and lacrosse teams.

Still, she returned to the shelter of the trees on weekends, and she remembers the haven of those trees as the formative piece of her youth.

Later, home for the summer before her senior year at Harvard University, Rebecca was out exploring the woods she loved so well, when she came across a group of people who asked for directions to a certain landmark.

She was happy to help—until she learned they were developers doing a site survey. “When I realized that land might be sold for development,” she recalls, “I felt a palpable sense of injustice and unfairness. It became clear that preserving natural lands mattered to me, and helped identify my True North.”

Despite this defining moment of clarity, Rebecca didn’t discern her path to a profession in conservation until much later. “Kids today are so focused on the future, starting their professional pursuits early on and becoming completely focused on a profession by the time they’re 22,” she observes. “When I was graduating from college, I could hardly think to the next day.” She applied for a temp position at ABC News and to an unpaid internship at the Brookings Institute, landing the former. Then, when she was packing up her Harvard dorm room to take the first steps toward what might have become a career in the news, she got a notice from Brookings that she had landed the unpaid internship.

She chose that route instead, moving to DC and taking a job as a waitress at Suzanne’s Restaurant in Dupont Circle to cover costs.

From her home base at 18th and S in DC, Rebecca explored her new city, finding that it had a freedom and beauty all its own. From the walking trails behind the Naval Observatory, to a sweeping old staircase in Rock Creek Park, her years spent exploring the woods had prepared her well for finding Washington’s secret details.

When her internship ended a year later, she moved to New York to run a State Senate campaign in Westchester

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County, but promptly returned to DC when it was over.

After sending her resume far and wide, she landed a job at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA).

Over the next twelve years, Rebecca made the most of her time with her standout employer, eventually coming to manage many of its environmentally-related projects. Rebecca credits IDA and its think tank culture and framework with teaching her how to think more analytically. “IDA taught me a lot about critical thinking and about objectivity, both of which are key to what I do now.

Passions matter because they drive you, but you have to be sure you’re considering all the angles. I’m grateful for everything I learned there.”

At IDA, Rebecca took an 18-month assignment to serve as the Director of the Army Environmental Policy Institute at Georgia Tech, and as that tenure wrapped up, she found herself at a crossroads. “I felt drawn to the idea of breaking off to try my own thing,” she says. “Had I continued on the current pathway, the result would have been a productive career, but one that was fundamentally governed by someone else’s principles and administration. I thought the time was right to go my own way.”

Driven by her love of freedom and self-reliance, her initial vision was to start a small consulting practice that might perhaps grow to include several other people. She never imagined Marstel-Day would become what it is today, nor did she envision how onerous the road would be to get there. The business’s first lifeline was a significant contract with the Army to assess options for divesting surplus property for permanent conservation uses, such as wildlife refuges, parks, and open spaces . With skill, Rebecca had identified the contract vehicle and client, made the pitch, and studied the funding cycle, so she was confident about the win. “What I hadn’t planned for was what we’d do beyond that first contract,” she recalls. “Things got hard a year or two in.

But I learned over time that the company would be made or broken based on its ability to bid and win contract vehicles, which can take months or years. In a sense, I think my naiveté about business development helped through those hard times, because I didn’t have a good understanding of what obstacles lay ahead. It certainly

ended up being a lot harder than anticipated, but we made it.” Now, Marstel-Day has been on the Inc. 5000 list for seven years running, and Rebecca was named a White House Champion of Change for Community Resilience in 2014. She also serves on numerous green business and conservation-related boards and is Chairman of the Board for the National Wildlife Refuge Association, a non-profit conservation organization that protects and advocates for half a billion acres of land and water that lie within the National Wildlife Refuge System.

A self-described loner, Rebecca has always found strength in solitude, more in her element alone than she ever was with others. That began to change, however, when she met Lee Halterman, a former policy director for the House Armed Services Committee who retired into consulting for clients like the San Francisco Airport Authority. Rebecca and Lee met striking a deal to transfer 3,000 acres of wetlands from the Navy to the airport as a mitigation credit for an expansion project, creating a new national wildlife refuge and a lifetime bond. She hired him as a consultant for a time before bringing him on as a partner on the West Coast. Then, in 2005, they started dating. In 2007, they were married. “Lee is certainly the smartest and also one of the most loving and balanced people I’ve ever met,” she says. “Anytime I find myself in a tough spot, he comes at it from a place of love.” Lee has two grown kids who mirror the same approach to life, and Rebecca and Lee have a young daughter together.

In advising young people entering the working world today, Rebecca shines a light on the powerful legitimating forces of society, which tempt people into conformity and often lead people down the most socially-accepted path, rather than the right path. “Find that thing you can’t not do,” she says. “In hindsight, it’s easier to see that it doesn’t matter in the end what you study in college or graduate school. Your path is determined by how you self-define. My life’s purpose has thus been intrinsically about self-definition and where my moral compass points. For me, it points to those woods I grew up in. There’s a part of everyone that has a place like that—a place, idea, concept, or cause that makes them feel truly free.”

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Jody Ruth Anything is Possible From the time she started saving her earnings in a Horse Fund when she was eight years old, Jody Ruth dreamed of competing and winning at the Devon Horse Show in Pennsylvania. The oldest and largest outdoor multi-breed horse show in America, it remains among the most respected horse shows in the country, considered a pinnacle of national-level competition.

Jody had qualified—albeit barely—for the show in the mid-1990s. “My horse, String of Pearls, was good, but not great,” she remembers. “As a rider, I was also good but not great, and as a team, we hadn’t learned to work together. While we didn’t have any terrible mishaps, we weren’t stars, but I knew we could and would be successful another year.”

The following year, she qualified again, but Jody didn’t ride well and ended up withdrawing to protect her horse’s reputation from the often politically-fraught judging process. When she returned to Devon the following year with more intense focus and a more fit String of Pearls, they received top ribbons in each class. “It was an amazing moment when we came out of the last class to hear the applause,” Jody recalls. ”We missed the top prize due to a small mistake and ended up third, but I realized we had excelled against the most talented horse and rider combinations in the country, even though we were generally considered ‘good but not great.’ The difference was that I rode into the ring confident we would win and entirely focused on accomplishing that goal. It paid off.

“The whole experience reinforced in my mind that anything is possible,” she reflects. “I learned a real lesson about mental toughness and the difference between talent and desire. I learned that the line between impossible and possible is a choice that we make, and I’ve seen desire and conviction win out time and time again in business as well as other areas of my life.”

Now the cofounder and CEO of Redstones LLC, a financial and operational management consulting firm, Jody has made this mental fortitude the hallmark of her life and work. As she built success after success work-

ing for publicly traded corporations, and then as she returned to her entrepreneurial roots in launching her own firm, her leadership philosophy is defined by perseverance and by the deeply-held belief that anything is possible. “I get a real thrill out of helping owners and leadership teams achieve things they thought were impossible,” she says today. “You may not know how to get where you want to go, but everything is possible, and it’s our job to help guide the way and develop strategies around, over, or through roadblocks.”

Redstones excels in helping growth and middle market companies understand their financial information and operating metrics, and how they relate to the companies’ operating results. Offering outsourced CFO, controller, accounting, project consulting, and M&A support services, they help secure bank funding, manage cash flow, perform product or customer profitability analyses, oversee system implementations, and assist with pre-bankruptcy turnarounds.

“Our clients know they can rely on us and our financial expertise, allowing them to focus on their business and what they do best,” she says. “We not only give our clients their financial information, but also financial and operating metrics, along with recommendations for ways to achieve increased revenues and improved cash flow.”

Jody launched the company in 2003, and in 2013 spun off part of its financial strategy practice into a separate company called AccuMetrics LLC. That entity focuses on outsourced accounting, demonstrating the firm’s serious commitment to accounting in an environment where many firms skimp on that offering.

Now in a growth phase, the Redstones financial strategy team consists of five experts who work virtually from locations all over the country.

The Redstones team of CPAs and MBAs serves an extremely varied set of clientele, from well-funded startups to The Walt Disney Company, who called on Redstones to assist with its efforts to launch Mobile ESPN. “Finance is relatable across companies of any size and industry,” Jody

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points out. “We’ve been successful because we help our clients be successful. Even through the financial crisis, we never faltered. Many of the business owners we work with are highly aspirational, with big goals. We’re a tool in their toolkit that’s going to help them get there, ready to assist at every step of the way.”

Jody knows what it means to make big commitments to aspirational attainment because she did so, herself, at an early age. Born and raised in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, she can’t put her finger on why she first started loving horses. Her father, a CPA by training, pursued various entrepreneurial interests and employed Jody in his businesses. He recognized a real knack for accounting and finance in his daughter as she counted inventory and ran payroll for his clients. And he recognized real dedication as each dime she earned went into her Horse Fund.

When Jody was 12, she decided enough was enough—she wanted a horse. She began taking riding lessons at a local farm, happy as a clam to be covered in barn dirt and spending time with the animals for which she had such an affinity. “My parents didn’t really want to invest so much time and money into riding unless I was truly serious,” she remembers. “My dad said he would buy me a horse, on the condition that I’d cover all expenses from then on. He thought that would be a deal breaker for me, but I agreed and never looked back.”

With that, Jody got her first horse, and from the age of 13, she worked so she could pay for its food and shelter, veterinary bills, and riding lessons. “My parents have always been very independent thinkers, and were always supportive of my younger brother and me in whatever we wanted to do,” she says. “They raised us believing we could do anything. Thanks to them, I learned to be an independent thinker and to make my own choices, even when other people try to get you to think or do otherwise.”

After graduating from high school, Jody started college at Pennsylvania State University in the pre-veterinary program but soon changed her major to accounting, with plans to go to law school after passing the CPA exam.

Once she passed that milestone, however, she found herself engaged in so much challenging and interesting work that she never got around to pursuing law. She started her career at KPMG in Washington, D.C., where she had interned. There, as she would be frequently throughout her career, she was blessed to work with incredibly brilliant individuals who were very willing to mentor her. My mentors were very successful and had many responsibilities, but were very approachable and supportive of me,” she says. “They gave me responsibility and opportunities that were rare for someone at my level.”

At KPMG, Jody’s client team won the Client Service 154

of the Year Award in an office of 800 people. She stayed for twelve years with US Airways as her main client, before she was transferred to Phoenix to bring America West Airlines out of bankruptcy. Once she had helped that company navigate to success, she decided it was time for a change, accepting a position as Chief Accounting Officer at TWA after its second bankruptcy. While others shied away from the position given the company’s complex past, she saw it as a great opportunity—an insight that proved true with hindsight. “Shortly after I arrived, the CFO that had recruited me left the company,” she says. “It turned into a true crisis moment. We got a new CFO, but we soon realized a variety of factors were aligning to cause another cash crisis. We spent several months trying to arrange additional funding to keep everything operating, and I found myself part of the strategic team negotiating with a number of unions around a revised strategic plan and operating plan for the company and negotiating with potential investors or acquirers.”

Through that experience, Jody found herself balancing TWA’s number one concern of safety, along with the thousands of employees and their families whose livelihoods were relying on a successful outcome. “It gave me a new perspective on what a crisis is,” she says. “The outlook had been positive when I accepted the job at TWA, yet in a matter of weeks, it changed to a climate of impending doom. I learned to be quick and daring, pulling out all the stops to make it work.”

Jody knew the key to success would be a daring willingness to enact change. That’s why, when she was asked to sign a contract to lease additional engines for TWA’s maintenance base, she took note of the engines sitting unused on the tarmac. Instead, she directed her team to make the repairs needed to put TWA’s existing engines back into operation. One thing led to another, and she took on the title of VP of Reengineering in addition to her existing role as the Chief Accounting Officer and Controller.

Jody led TWA in taking great strides, earning a reputation as a change agent and attracted the attention of a telecommunications company called GTE. They needed someone who could overhaul their internal audit department, and though it was highly unusual to bring in a senior executive with no previous telecom experience, Jody was an acknowledged pro who had demonstrated repeatedly that she could lead change. With that, they asked her to head their worldwide internal audit department. “It was an opportunity to get in the door at a great company in an exciting industry,” Jody recalls. “I was counting on the ability to transition from the corporate role into an operating unit in the not-too-

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distant future. I really wanted to be CFO of Wireless, and that job opened up soon after I joined the team.”

With that, Jody became Vice President of Finance of the Wireless Unit, which was around $4 billion in revenue at the time. Among the most defining moments of Jody’s career came in that capacity, when she found herself taking charge in completing a $1.2 billion tower sale/ leaseback financing made up of 3,600 individual real estate sale/leaseback transactions. It would be the largest wireless tower sale/leaseback deal in the industry, and at the outset of the process, she told her team she wanted to close the deal in sixty days. “We started after Thanksgiving, and our objective was to close by the third week in January, when we released our earnings,” she explains. “My team told me it was impossible, and that it couldn’t be done, but I knew otherwise. I said, ‘This is what we’re going to do, and here’s how, and if we need more people we’ll bring them in.’ And in the end, we did it.”

It wasn’t as if Jody’s bosses had charged her with completing the transaction within such an aggressive timeframe. Yet she recognized the payoffs for the company as a whole. “We had a large cross-functional team working on the project internally, and a group of lawyers working externally,” she recounts. “It literally took three days to sign all the documents for the closing. It was one of those times where you see that anything is possible, and how powerful it is when people start to realize that they can do the impossible.” Thanks to Jody’s tenacity, the team won the Chairman’s Award—the top award given by the company internally—and her lead on the team had a breakout experience, going on to greater success within the company.

After three years at GTE, Jody accepted a general manager position for the development of AOL Mobile in 2001, where she worked on an integrated voice and data device that foreshadowed the iPhones of the future. She enjoyed the experience, but both sides of her family had a history of owning and running businesses, and she ultimately decided it was time to pursue her own passion for entrepreneurship and launch her own company.

When Jody left AOL and launched Redstones, she was often hired to come in and secure bank financing or help a company that wanted to buy or be bought. Yet so often, these businesses had no idea what was going on with their financials. “Many clients hadn’t seen their financials in six months,” she recalls. “Others had seen them, but didn’t know what they meant. Out of necessity, I pulled together a swat team, and we’d turn our attention to each new client to fix the financial problems at hand. We’d train their internal people, or we’d help them hire new ones.” Ultimately, she realized such services should form the root mission of Redstones, of

fering a high-quality and cost-effective solution to this widespread market need.

To date, Jody has done billions and billions of dollars in debt, equity, and M&A deals. She’s managed worldwide teams of over a thousand people across finance and operations. And through these experiences, her integrity and mentorship have become cornerstones of her professional philosophy. “I made a commitment to myself long ago that I’d never ask anyone to do something I wasn’t willing to do, or something I hadn’t already done,” she remarks. “I also believe it’s important to help others as I’ve been helped through my career.” To that end, Jody focuses on extending opportunities to employees and clients that they might not otherwise come across, and she’s also participated in formal mentoring programs for women in technology and through her alma mater.

In advising young people entering the working world today, Jody suggests deciding what’s most important and then going after it. “Set goals,” she says. “And, as I’ve been advised, if they aren’t big enough to terrify you, then perhaps they aren’t big enough. They can be personal or professional, and they may change as you get older and have more experiences. That’s okay—it’s far more important to pursue your goals and then have them change, than to never pursue goals at all.” Without this philosophy, Jody wouldn’t be where she is today, running a successful business and helping clients reach their goals while living on a horse farm in Loudoun County.

Nor would she have achieved these goals without the strong ethics and independent thinking her parents valued so highly. At one point in her career, she found herself uncomfortable with the direction her employing company was headed. “I felt I had certain responsibilities, and that I wasn’t getting good advice internally, so I hired my own securities counsel to advise me,” she says. “The counsel agreed that I was right to be concerned, so I held my ground, which was not an easy thing to do. I knew that I had strength, but I didn’t realize how unusual it was for someone to stand their ground in a situation like that. A lot of people stay quiet and don’t ask questions, but I stayed firm and spoke up.”

The experience gave Jody a clear picture of where her personal boundaries are—an ethical clarity that continues to define her work. In fact, among her proudest moments since starting Redstones was when the CFO of a client nominated the company for the National Capital Business Ethics Awards, for which they were a semifinalist in 2012. “It all goes back to achieving my goal as a kid,” she says. “Even when I didn’t have a clear path forward, I’ve never thought I couldn’t achieve my goals. Sometimes, it’s okay not to know how something can be done, as long as you know in your soul that it can be.”

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Ola Sage Out of Chaos, Clarity It was the moment thirteen-year-old Olayinka (Ola) had been dreading for months. As she walked across the stage and sat down at the piano in front of the auditorium full of people, she remembered the day her teacher, Linda Crouch, had decided Ola would play Sergei Rachmaninoff ’s Prelude in C Sharp Minor for her upcoming recital. “I was terrified at the idea that I would fail—not just by myself, but in front of everyone,” she recalls today. “But my teacher just kept encouraging me, saying I could do it.”

Ola was shaking as she raised her hands to the keys, but when she hit that first note, she suddenly forgot that there was an audience around her. Out of the chaos of her fear and doubt, she found clarity and confidence. She had practiced, memorized, and mastered the task at hand, and as muscle memory took over, she was fully engrossed by the skill and song of the experience. She played the piece flawlessly, and it wasn’t until the end, when the last key was struck, that a swell of applause filled the room and she remembered where she was. “I remember thinking, I did it,” she says. “It was a defining realization that, with discipline, preparation, perseverance, and a willingness to work through my doubts instead of dismissing them, I could press on and succeed. It gave me the confidence to take on things that seem impossible at first.”

Now the founder and CEO of e-Management, an IT and cybersecurity small business specializing in solutions for the federal government and commercial businesses, Ola has employed this boldness again and again throughout her life to achieve great things. It’s the art of creating clarity out of chaos, empowerment out of fear, and success out of static. It’s evident in the grand turning points of her life, but also in the everyday moments she shares with family, friends, employees, clients, and even strangers. “To me, success is about having a conversation that brings us both to a better place,” she says. “Success can be as simple as giving someone encouragement through a kind word or gesture. It’s

about bringing a little clarity and kindness to a person’s day, and in the process, we both change for the better.”

Ola founded e-Management in 1999 when she finished her master’s program in Technology Management at George Mason University. She had been out to lunch with a fellow student, musing about starting her own technology business and imagining what she might call it, when she scribbled “e-Management” on the back of a napkin. At the time, she had no idea the dream would become a reality, as her work kept her fully engrossed in the chaotic climate leading up to Y2K. Over time, she realized the long hours and demanding environment were unsustainable. The epiphany prompted an honest conversation with her employer, and not long after, e-Management was born.

The company’s first year was focused on ensuring projects were managed and completed on time. Ola then expanded the company’s service offering to help government agencies establish Chief Information Officer functions within their organizations as mandated by the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996. The company then evolved to specialize in the four core areas of planning, engineering, developing, and securing information systems. e-Management has spent the past decade diving deeply into these competencies. “I’m proud we defined who we are early on and didn’t just try to do everything,” she reflects.

In the mid- to late 2000s, e-Management experienced tremendous growth, particularly in the area of government information security, so that today, it is strongest in its cybersecurity and information assurance services. As a Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) Level 3, the company also excels in web-based application development. It has innovated and brought to market two software solutions - an enterprise risk management software product called e-Gov Risk Portfolio Manager for enterprise risk management, and another software product in 2014 called CyberRx for cybersecurity readiness and preparedness. CyberRx was spun into its own company focusing on small and medium-sized private sector businesses, specializing in

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helping companies improve their cyber readiness. “We’ve been blessed by the receptiveness and positivity we’ve experienced with this new company,” she says. “And, given that small and mid-sized companies are the fastest growing segment being impacted by cyber-attacks, it’s perfectly aligned with my passion and purpose to help others succeed. I love that we’re serving founders like me who have invested their personal dreams, fortunes, and sweat into creating their businesses, equipping them with the tools to significantly reduce their vulnerability.”

Even at an early age growing up half a world away from where she is now, Ola knew she wanted to pursue a career in business. Through the example of her entrepreneurial parents from Nigeria, West Africa, Ola gained an early understanding of the importance of entrepreneurship and the rigors of running a small business. Ola was shaped by the positive, infectious, uplifting laugh of her mother, and by the proverbs and wise sayings of her father. Her parents always had a small business venture going, selling everything from wood products and t-shirts to groceries. “Because I saw that, the idea of starting a business never seemed scary,” she reflects. “My siblings and I would help out, so we were always involved in some way.

I grew up thinking of business as just another way to offer people options.”

From the age of five, Ola attended private American boarding schools in Nigeria amongst fellow classmates who hailed from all over the globe. She grew up understanding that good grades now would open doors to academic scholarships in the future, so she always worked hard in school, and it was there that she experienced what it really meant to grow up in a diverse community. It felt innately right to her, and in the years to come, she would avoid homogenous settings in favor of the varied personalities and backgrounds that lend depth and color to life.

“Those early experiences of being in a really vibrant diverse community set the stage for me,” she says. “Now it’s all I seek.”

Following her graduation from high-school, Ola received an academic scholarship to Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and began her studies as an accounting major. She loved economics, but after completing her Accounting II class, she decided it wasn’t for her.

After moving to Washington, D.C., she switched to a degree in Computer Information Systems.

When Ola made the move to Washington, she was faced with the prospect of starting a new life and making new friends. A defining moment came one Saturday night when she was out at a party with a group of new acquaintances. Around 1:00 a.m., they decided they were ready to head home, so everyone piled into the car they had come 158

in. Ola, who isn’t much of a drinker, was completely sober, and immediately noticed the questionable state of the person who sat down behind the wheel. “I think we should take a cab,” she said. No one acknowledged the suggestion, and not wanting to alienate her new crew, she didn’t press the issue. It wasn’t until the car started weaving back and forth on its way down the road that Ola made a defining decision. “It was like an out-of-body experience,” she recalls. “I screamed for them to let me out of the car. Of course the teasing began, but that didn’t matter to me. Later that night, after taking a cab home, I thought about the fact that I may have lost all my friends, but it was worth it.

It was a defining moment when I realized that I was willing to do what I believed in my gut was right, even if it cost me. The act of breaking from the crowd as a young adult was a big deal, helping me realize that sometimes in life you just have to step away.”

After finishing her studies, Ola worked for several government contracting firms in the D.C. area, including a large IT firm, Dyncorp, where she managed contracts for the Department of Education and the Department of Energy. She worked hard there, earning the reputation of being a firefighter. When an important contract faltered and earned poor performance scores, she was called in to turn the program around. Her efforts paid off with the company again receiving the highest performance ratings on the contract. Ready to try something different, Ola transformed herself into a consultant supporting her former employer through her own business, e-Management.

Following a successful rebid of the contract, e-Management had new life. Ola successfully recruited her brother as her first employee, and a third employee just before the company’s first birthday. To celebrate their first year of business, they rented a ballroom at a Marriott and threw a party for fifty friends and colleagues, thanking them for their support and encouragement. “We announced our vision to be an IT company that would provide the best services to the government and lead at the speed of change,” she says. “We invited people to connect us to anyone who might be interested.”

Grateful for the advice and helping hands of those around her, Ola applied her indelible work ethic to build e-Management into a successful company and a true force to be reckoned with. Through the core of the economic downturn of 2008, she worked even harder. The company was undergoing significant financial challenges, with much of its funding streams significantly cut. In the summer of 2011, it was forced to lay off 20 percent of its workforce, and Ola felt personally responsible for the families of the employees she had to turn away. “It was the hardest year of my professional life due to the decisions I was

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forced to make,” she remembers. “We turned around the loss within twelve months to be profitable again, and the experience definitely turned me into a better leader, but it was incredibly difficult. I had to use all those earlier defining moments to get through—stepping away from the crowd, undertaking a task that seemed impossibly large.

As we hit rock bottom, I realized that in those times, you’re guided by whatever’s in you, because there’s no instruction manual that tells you what to do.”

All the stress and pressure culminated, and in late September, 2011, Ola was compelled to take some extended time off. In the ample free time she was suddenly presented with, she decided to try something new and start a journal. To her surprise, the writing started to flow as she began exploring in earnest how she had arrived at this moment of personal crisis. “I went through a very intentional process of taking the time to figure out what the answer was,” she reflects. “At first, I was incredibly frustrated that I couldn’t articulate how I had gotten there. Fortunately, I’ve been blessed in my life with wise family and friends, and years earlier, one of them had recommended that I put together a personal team—a group of people representing the different aspects of my life, like health or friendship or spirituality. One team member, a friend for over twenty years, suggested that the simple fact that I was asking the question meant the answer would find me. That was so encouraging to me. I was so focused on results, results, results, but I just needed to relax and be present.” A woman of faith, Ola turned her attention to reconnecting with God as she explored the question of why she existed. It was also about that time she started reading Simon Sinek’s book, Start With Why. This process was instrumental in helping her gain clarity on her purpose.

In this way, one of the most stressful times of Ola’s life was transformed into one of the most sacred—the avenue for realizing that she was put on Earth to help others succeed. “It was another one of those experiences where great clarity was born out of great chaos,” she explains. “I wrote my life mission statement, ‘To live life purposefully and to give generously of myself.’ This guiding principle has led me through each major decision I’ve made since then. Now that I’m able to articulate it this way, it’s really given new life to my legacy and ambition. It’s been a relief and a joy, and it completely reenergized and inspired me.”

Through this process of self-exploration, Ola laid out her why, and then her how, and then her what. She reassessed the business, investments, and boards that occupied her time and faculties, ensuring they were aligned with her purpose. “I had been driving myself so hard at work that I had forgotten why I was doing it in the first place,” she says. “So even though that low point was a scary

time in life, I believe it needed to happen for me and the company to be stronger in the long run after reconnecting with what’s really important. Over the next year, I became an ambassador within our company to help each team member connect with our purpose too. I wanted people to be intentional in wanting to be part of e-Management. We really moved past the mentality that this is a job, and firmly grasped that this is who we are. That’s our culture now.”

Ola is a servant leader who believes in modeling the behavior she hopes to see in her team. While she tries to lead by consensus, she has also come to grasp the importance of making a call and letting the chips fall where they may. “I’ve learned that the very best thing you can do in business is run a good, strong, profitable company,” she explains. “You do a disservice to everyone involved when you shy away from the tough decisions. You have to operate with the belief that what’s good for the whole is ultimately best for the individual people involved, even if they might not see that in the near-term. You have to face you fears.” In 2014, Ola was blessed to be inducted into the Montgomery County Business Hall of Fame. “It was a very personal and surreal experience,” she reflects. “As a first-generation American, it’s hard to believe that I’ve had the opportunity to launch not one, but two businesses so far. I’m so grateful.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Ola says, “Learn continuously, Inspire others, Value what’s important, and Enjoy all that life has to offer. Or simply, ‘Live.” This means pursuing one’s dreams and enjoying life—practices that seem simple enough but are at times elusive for die-hard workaholics like Ola. In 2001, she decided to take up social ballroom dancing, and at a dance class two years later, met the man who became her husband, Richard Sage. “Our wedding day was a big party, and one of the happiest days of my life,” she reflects.

“Richard is an incredibly kind, thoughtful, and patient man who’s been a perfect partner and balance for me.” In their limited spare time, Ola and Richard still enjoy ballroom dancing, watching movies, and exploring the world through travel. They are also strong supporters of A Wider Circle, a Silver Spring-based charity that takes a fully holistic approach to helping individuals and families transition out of poverty. Ola serves as a board member of the organization, which includes educational programs, job training classes, and a 20,000 plus square-foot warehouse with a constantly-replenished supply of donated furniture and professional wear.

While her innate drive to empower and connect with those around her shines through her commitment to service, it is also displayed in her fondness for baking carrot cakes. Twenty years ago, a colleague surprised her on Ola Sage

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her birthday with a homemade carrot cake, sparking a lifelong passion for that particular confectionary wonder. She put her own spin on the recipe and began baking cakes for special occasions and special people in her life. “I love the vibrancy of the cake—the orange carrots, the pecans, the pineapple, the cream cheese frosting,” she gushes. “I love that it’s an experience that brings all of your senses to life, and that it brings people such happiness. And most of all,

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I love the network of memories that are activated when I bake and share a carrot cake. It’s truly the gift that keeps on giving.”

In a sense, it’s a microcosm of the life she leads— vibrant, diverse, exciting, and nourishing. It’s a labor of love that finds gift in the giving, replenishing its own strength by relishing in the details, the blessings, and the togetherness.

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Gary E. Shumaker Showing Up When Gary Shumaker was making his way through college, he received a letter from the regional draft board.

Because he wasn’t on track to finish his degree within four years, his classification was being switched from II-S to I-A, indicating that his draft registration was no longer being deferred due to study. As of that day, he was officially “available for military service” in the Vietnam War. Gary had never been outside of Michigan before, save the one day each summer when his family visited an amusement park on an island in the Detroit River that technically was part of Canada. He knew those days were over. Opting to take his future into his own hands, he signed up for ROTC to avoid being drafted as a private, and was required to sign a contract consenting to be drafted immediately if he defaulted on his commitment. Only after signing did he receive a second letter from the draft board indicating that they had misinterpreted a directive from Washington and should not have rescinded his student deferment after all. “They made a mistake, but the wheels of my life had already been set in motion,” Gary recalls today. “It’s the reason I am where I am today.”

Gary’s signature on the ROTC paperwork committed him to a two-year obligation to the Army, and he was resolved to show up and make good on his promise. The first year was spent studying and training before shipping off to Vietnam for the second, where he served as a First Lieutenant working in military intelligence twelve hours a day, seven days a week. There, he lived not in an installation on the airfield, but in a house in town, and can still remember the sound of the explosion nearby when a terrorist dropped a grenade in the gas tank of an American military jeep. “The driver of the jeep had run back up to his apartment for a moment because he had forgotten to comb his hair,” Gary recalls. “Thankfully he wasn’t hurt, but two local Vietnamese were killed on the street by the explosion. That incident was indicative of the experience overall—the whole country was a war zone.”

Navigating that foreign terrain, Gary worked with a Vietnamese soldier his own age, who was trained as a high

school math teacher. Through conversations, Gary came to learn that there had been a war going on in the country for as long as his friend could remember, preventing him from ever teaching math as he had hoped to do. “In our country, we’re raised with an understanding of how great it is to be an American, but coming face-to-face with that alternate way of life really drives home how lucky we are,” Gary explains. Now, decades after the war and with his feet firmly planted on American soil, Gary is the co-founder, President and CEO of C2 Solutions Group, Inc. (C2), a government contracting firm specializing in IT professional services. It has become his way of showing up every day to give his all, serve his country, and give back, affording others the opportunity to do the same.

C2’s expertise falls within the parameters of management consulting services, IT consulting and support services, financial services, application development, and knowledge management. With Gary at the helm, C2’s Executive Vice Presidents, Brian Newell and David Murphy, specialize in business development and technical and financial expertise, respectively. A Service-Disabled-Veteran Owned Small Business of around 50 employees and $10 million in annual revenue, it offers a “performance as promised” commitment to ethics and reliability that has earned it the loyalty of clients like the Departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Transportation, and Defense, as well as the Executive Office of the President and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Focused on continued growth for the future, the company is now exploring avenues to broaden its footprint and earn new credentials in more technical areas. “There’s lots of room to do more of what we do so well, and we’re pursuing that,” Gary notes.

The company’s pursuit of altitude and excellence comes from its heart of service—a bar set by Gary, and reciprocated in the commitment of his team members.

Many of C2’s employees are new U.S. citizens who have sought refuge in the United States from around the globe, including India, China, Vietnam, Egypt, and Somalia. C2 is a way for them to give back in meaningful, substantive ways to their adopted country, and is likewise a way for

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American-born citizens to connect with the larger context of their country. “Our work helps to make this a better country, and that’s a mission I really love,” Gary says. “It’s my reason for getting up in the morning, and it enriches my life in ways I couldn’t even begin to put into words.”

Gary was born and raised in a small town in Michigan, where he enjoyed a solid middle class upbringing. His father, who had started college during the Great Depression but never finished, worked at a casket factory and then became a general contractor, immersing himself in the building of houses. While Gary was growing up, his Dad would break houses into apartments, which he would rent out. “He had five houses around town, and they all had coal-fired furnaces,” Gary says. “I remember him going around in the winter shoveling coal into the stokers twice a day.”

His father took over several music stores, a shoe store, and a women’s wear store. Gary worked in one of the music stores from age ten, sweeping and cleaning or helping to deliver pianos and repair broken stereos. “My dad was my role model, so it always felt natural to help out with the businesses,” he recalls. “And while I learned my work ethic from my father, I learned empathy and caring from my mother. She was a housewife in my early years but then worked at the women’s wear store and the music stores.”

In high school, Gary joined a band and played a half-hour DJ show once a week on the local radio station.

He would borrow equipment from his dad’s stores to DJ dances around town, and he would sometimes operate the sound systems for the Friday night wrestling matches at the National Guard Armory, for which his father had a contract. He didn’t think too much about the future, vaguely interested in the idea of becoming an electrical engineer. “When you’re that young, there are so many jobs you’ve just never even heard of,” he reflects. “It’s often hard to know with any real knowledge what you want to do later in life.”

Tragically, Gary’s mother and grandmother suffered a terrible car accident when he was a freshman in high school, which took a tremendous financial and emotional toll on the family. His grandmother survived for nine months but never truly regained consciousness.

His mother recovered after a lengthy stay at the hospital, but she died of breast cancer a few years later. His father died shortly thereafter, leaving Gary and his two younger brothers to make their own way in the world. Thankfully, their parents had always emphasized the importance of getting a college degree, so Gary enrolled at Michigan State University to make good on that goal. There, he met and married Eleanor, the supportive partner who 162

has been his wife for fifty years now. There were times it was hard to scrape out a living, but joining ROTC afforded some extra support for the essentials.

When Gary’s two-year commitment to the Army was drawing to a close, he contemplated life beyond. “The internet hadn’t been invented yet, so it was hard to job search and interview from Vietnam,” he recalls. The Army offered to send him wherever he wanted to go if he agreed to stay on, so he opted to sign up for another year. His wife had been living in Woodbridge, Virginia, so he became a Company Commander at Fort Belvoir, and then later at Fort Myer.

One year became two, which became ten, and finally twenty. Through that time, Gary served in Virginia, New Jersey, and Georgia, before returning to Michigan State to get his graduate degree in telecommunications.

After some time stationed in California, he and his family moved to Germany, where he was assigned to a NATO war planning headquarters. “I still remember attending a reception hosted by the Oberbürgermeister of Stuttgart for the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe,” Gary recalls. “It was the big leagues, with top decision makers from 43 nations present. It was a remarkable place to be for a kid who didn’t leave Michigan until he was 20.”

After his time in Germany, Gary was sent to Aberdeen, Maryland. From there, he did a tour on the staff of the Military Academy at West Point and then finally finished his Army career in a Pentagon assignment. At that point, his sixth grade daughter had been in six different schools. “It was a fun ride, but I wanted some stability for my family, and I was ready to see what else I could do,” he explains. “I had worked with contractors in my various assignments, and it seemed like a good way forward.”

Gary was recommended by a colleague to a government contracting firm called Automation Research Systems, Ltd (now ARServices, Ltd). He was hired on as a Systems Analyst, an invaluable opportunity to learn and grow. In that capacity, he was also mentored by a program manager and business developer at a larger government contractor, EDS. The colleague didn’t mind giving Gary a hand up, since EDS only went for the biggest contracts, while ARS operated on a more moderate scale.

At ARS, Gary was assigned a contract with the Army in Korea, which left extra time on the clock to take on other projects and learn more of the business. He was promoted to Program Manager, where he worked for several years and then decided he wanted to shift to business development. “I got to go on a few business development trips, and it seemed like you just made PowerPoint presentations and then went out to talk with people,” he recounts.

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

“I love going out and meeting people, so when I saw an advertisement in the paper to do business development for Signal Corporation, I leapt at the opportunity.”

Signal became one of the most successful government contractors to come up the small business route, and Gary’s skills evolved in lockstep. Given free reign when he started at Signal, he set up a meeting with a GSA small business advocate within his first two weeks on the job.

“I think they were expecting me to spend the first couple months mastering the presentation, but I kind of hit the ground running,” he recalls. “I memorized the pitch and decided I needed to start somewhere, so off I went.”

The GSA representative listened politely and said she didn’t have anything for him, but instead offered a list of five people he should talk to. Gary went to each of those five people and received the same response: they didn’t have any business for him, but they could offer a list of five more people to talk to. Over the next six months, Gary met with each lead, to no avail. But when he finally met with the last person on the list, he received a call on his car phone shortly after the meeting ended. The woman he had met with wanted to know if they could incorporate a contract to provide an AT&T 5ESS switch to a Navy customer in Jacksonville. Gary said he thought they might, and he’d get right back to her after lunch. “You don’t understand,” came the voice over the phone. “I want to award you a $100 million contract this afternoon.” As fate would have it, it was the last day an 8(a) company could be awarded a sole source contract greater than $3 million. It was the win Gary had been waiting for, and a game changer for Signal.

Also originating from that first brave meeting at GSA, Gary was connected with GSA’s Philadelphia office, which had an extra spot available on the list of contractors pitching for a $40 million 8(a) contract. Gary took the slot, made the presentation in Philadelphia, and won the contract, cementing his rock star status as a new business developer. “Learning the business from that lens was invaluable,” he reflects. “You come to understand that it’s okay if you don’t do one pitch perfectly, because you just move on and try again. There are a million opportunities to perfect it.”

After he learned all he could in that capacity, Gary accepted a position as the COO for Multimax, Inc., which was owned by a geophysicist from Hong Kong. Top on Gary’s list in that capacity was finding a COO who would teach him what the job entailed, including sophisticated financial, human resources, and security management. He managed to grow the company 25 percent annually for the three years he served there, ultimately departing to take a job with Access Systems, Inc., in 2002. “The owner of the company was an amazing woman who just needed some

help running it,” Gary recalls. “There was a lot of opportunity for growth, and the job also cut my daily commute to a fraction of what it had been before.”

In 2003, they tripled the size of the company. Gary laughs when he says that they had a bad year in 2004, only growing by 60 percent. By 2005, the Access Systems was on decidedly solid footing, and Gary began wondering what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. Weary from his high-powered years as a COO, he was drawn to the idea of hanging his own shingle and working as a consultant to help small businesses learn the government contracting arena and develop their intellectual infrastructure. He did that for several years and loved the work, but he couldn’t deny his interest when he was approached by Brian Newell and David Murphy to join in the launch of C2.

When they started, C2’s corporate office was little more than a table in the back of a restaurant where the team would meet every other Friday morning. They found opportunities now and then but the going was tough.

“When we started the company, GSA put out a government-wide acquisition contract, and we had 90 days to write a proposal,” Gary explains. “We put together a team of small businesses, with CSC as our anchor, and were able to include all the past performance our principals had from previous companies. It took the government 18 months to go through 400 proposals and make 40 awards across two functional areas, but we got awards in both areas. That was really the start for C2, and in the past decade it has grown into what it is today.”

That growth is in part thanks to Gary’s collegial leadership style, which is far more interested in identifying system failures than in assigning blame to a particular individual in the event of a mistake. “If something goes wrong, my first question always has to do with the system we have in place and how we can improve it to reduce the likelihood that we’ll have the same problem twice,” he says. “And I always remember that Brian, David, and I are responsible for fifty people’s ability to pay their mortgage and put food on the table. Whenever I have to make a difficult decision, remembering this responsibility puts things in perspective and makes it much easier.”

This leadership style has contributed to C2’s success, both financially and as a fixture in the business community. It was named one of the Best Places to Work in Virginia

by Virginia Business for three years and was included on the Virginia Chamber of Commerce Fantastic 50 list, as well as on the Inc. 5000 list of Fastest Growing Companies, Government Services Companies, and Virginia Companies. C2 was declared a top-ranked Veteran-Owned Company by the Washington Business Journal and a “Fast 50” company by Washington Technology magazine. The Gary E. Shumaker

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company has also been a runner-up in several categories for the Stevie Awards, a business award competition. As a member of the American Legion and the Disabled Veterans of America, Gary also leads C2 in support of other veterans’ organizations like Wounded Warriors.

In advising young people entering the working world today, Gary underscores the importance of looking the part. “Work hard and be professional in speech and appearance,” he suggests. “It takes both leaders and followers to make the world work, so have a respect and sensitivity about when it’s appropriate to respect others’ leadership and when it’s time to step into those shoes yourself.”

He also sings the praises of a small business atmosphere,

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where employees are often given the chance to wear more hats and evolve a more well-rounded skill set.

Beyond that, perhaps the best piece of advice Gary can give is the simplest: show up. “A lot of success in this business is luck, but you have to make your own luck by being there,” he says. “If you write a proposal, you might lose, but one of the few things that’s absolutely certain is that you will not win if you don’t try. You can talk yourself out of it by saying you don’t have the right experience, or that the incumbent’s a sure winner, but you have to take your chances. On the battlefield, in school, on the job, and in all facets of life, you only know what’s possible if you try.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Todd Stottlemyer Success and Significance September 11, 2001, touched all of us. Todd Stottlemyer, President of McGuireWoods Consulting at the time, lost three friends that day—two at the Pentagon and one on the plane that hit the Pentagon. They left wives, young children, and bright futures behind, compelling Todd to stop and think. “It made me step back and ask, where am I? What do I want to do? Am I being a great father and husband? And how do I honor my friends?” he remembers today.

Todd wrote letters to the children of the friends that were lost, giving them a precious perspective of the father they would never grow up to fully know personally. And, driven by the clarity and vision garnered by the loss, he made the decision that it was time to live the life he truly wanted to live. “9/11 was the impetus to say, life is not a dress rehearsal,” says Todd. “It’s a one-time thing, and I was going to make it as meaningful as possible. I decided I wanted to start and build a business.”

With that, he joined forces with a colleague, Paul Leslie, to write a business plan to build a technology security company. They capitalized the vision by shopping the plan around to private equity firms, and Apogen Technologies was born. It had a culture of unwavering focus on its customers and employees, recognized within the Beltway and beyond with Best Place to Work awards. “We didn’t just talk the talk of good culture—we lived it,” Todd affirms.

“We had an office in New Orleans, and when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, we continued paying salaries to our employees despite several months of lost work. We did it because it was the right thing to do, and it was consistent with our core values.”

Apogen reestablished and rebuilt its operations in Baton Rouge, and set up a fund to receive employee donations to help their colleagues rebuild their lives. They had only approximately 1,000 employees at that time, but by November of 2005, the fund had amassed almost $700,000, enough to provide a transformative Thanksgiving gift for families still struggling from the flood. “For me, that was our opportunity to prove that our employees re-

ally do come first,” says Todd. “We were a successful company by all the typical measures of return on investment, growth, and profitability. But we were most successful at our lowest moment, because we were able to take action and demonstrate that our values are real.”

Drawing on The Road to Character by New York Times columnist David Brooks, Todd acknowledges the importance of success virtues—education and career achievements, to name a few—but is most interested now in eulogy virtues. These are the qualities that have a lasting impact on the people around you, defining what you meant to your community and how you’ll be remembered. “How have you helped someone else be successful?” Todd asks. “How have you been significant in your community or your organization as a leader? Have you shown courage? Are you kind and generous?

These are the lasting aspects of our character, and to me, they’re sacred.”

The concept of eulogy virtues hit close to home when a friend and colleague, Knox Singleton, was diagnosed with lymphoma and found himself on the wrong side of a tough medical diagnosis. Where others might have withdrawn into themselves, Knox seized the experience as an occasion to explore the idea that the significance of his life wasn’t about him; it was about others. “This really resonated with me, because I love people,” Todd says. “Since then, I’ve tried to assess everyday whether I’m playing a positive role in peoples’ lives and journeys.”

Reflecting this commitment, Todd’s success has made a marked pivot toward significance through his work as the CEO of the Inova Center for Personalized Health, a unique campus that will integrate a comprehensive cancer center, scientific discovery, technology companies, health professionals, clinicians, and wellness. With a focus on improved predictive and preventive medicine, the Center will focus on precision medicine and personalized health by treating each person individually. It recognizes that each person comes with his or her own genetic makeup, family history, and environmental circumstances, which combine to create unique disease occurrences that benefit from tailored treatments.

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“The power of information technology is really driving an acceleration in treatment and care,” Todd affirms.

“Large data sets yield patterns and discoveries that can be used to advance care at the bedside. Applied to cancer and chronic conditions, this means better health, lower medical costs, increased happiness, heightened productivity, and maybe even a cure one day.” Through attracting healthcare and IT’s best and brightest, the completed campus will house the Inova Dwight and Martha Schar Cancer Institute, the Global Institute for Genomic Science and Bioinformatics Research, the Inova Clinic, a Life Sciences Commercialization Center, and the Inova Personalized Medicine Education Center, all upheld through strong partnerships with academia, industry, and the surrounding community.

The Center’s genesis is an exercise in envisioning what’s possible—something Todd learned from parents who dared to dream big and take chances. He was born in Pittsburgh, and remained just long enough to become a Steelers fan. His father had grown up very poor in southern Pennsylvania to parents who never finished high school, and he joined the Army at age 18 to access the GI bill for his college education. He emerged from the service with a tremendous commitment to equality and human dignity, compelling him to become active in the civil rights movement. He was working through his master’s degree when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963, and would have attended the speech with his wife in person if she hadn’t given birth to Todd that day. “Dr. King said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,’” Todd recalls. “I’ve tried to be an agent of that bending all my life.”

Todd’s caring and gentle mother, a nurse, decided to stay home to raise the children. She was a highly talented singer and pianist, and very active in the community.

The family moved to D.C. when Todd was two, where his father took a job with the U.S. Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget) working on U.S. contributions to international organizations like UNESCO and the UN. On July 4, 1969, Todd can still remember crossing the George Washington Bridge on their way to New York City, where his father took a new job working for the U.S. ambassador to the UN, which would later be George H.W. Bush. “With the future President, my father would meet in the bowels of the UN building with representatives from China, cultivating the back-channel relationships that led to President Nixon’s historic trip to the country in 1972 to formally open relations,” Todd recalls. “During social events at the ambassador’s residence, we had a great time running around with the Bush kids.” Todd’s father went on to campaign 166

for Bush’s presidency, and then served as an appointed advisor for four years.

The Stottlemyers lived in a modest home in the well-to-do neighborhood of Bronxville, and Todd grew up surrounded by his father’s internationally-minded, diverse, and multicultural colleagues, employees, and friends. He participated in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, and led his first campaign at the age of ten when a condominium complex threatened to take over one of the last pieces of open urban space in the neighborhood.

“Besides the school ground, it was the only space with any grass left in the area,” he recalls. “I started a petition to Save Open Space, and I was interviewed by the local newspaper. Then the parents got involved, and when the next election rolled around, the issue was on the ballot.

We won, and the developer left it alone.”

Because Bronxville was an affluent community, Todd’s father encouraged him to explore the world beyond, so Todd signed up for Little League in Yonkers, an exceptionally diverse community. A few years later, he played on a football team for the town of Eastchester, which also drew from very diverse neighborhoods. He became best friends with kids who grew up in project housing, a world away from the many upscale homes of Bronxville. Football became a way for him to connect across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines to achieve success.

Todd always worked hard in school, and on the weekends, he would follow his father around the house doing home improvement projects. Then, when he turned thirteen, his father got him a job at the local stationery store in the Village. “I was to wake up at 4:30 in the morning on Saturdays, walk to town, open the store, and haul in the bundles of newspapers that had been left out front,” he recalls. “Then I’d spend eight hours piecing the New York Times sections together and stacking them for Sunday. I got paid minimum wage, earned a free sub for lunch, and was covered in black ink by the time I was done. I loved it.”

When Todd was 14, his family moved back to the Northern Virginia area, where he started ninth grade at West Springfield High School. There, he focused on football, baseball, and academics, cognizant of the impact education had on his father’s life. He embraced his love for team sports—something that would translate into business later in life. “I just love people,” he says simply. “I love their stories and journeys, and I love being a part of those experiences, even if it’s just a small part. I learned that my teams were most successful when I did everything I possibly could to empower and support the people around me. I have a tremendous energy for building great teams and watching people succeed, doing things they never thought they could.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Todd set his sights on playing college athletics, until he suffered a severe tear in his ACL, MCL, and cartilage during his sophomore year of high school. Around the same time of his surgery, he contracted mono, and the following recovery period proved to be among the hardest challenges of his life. He was out of school and out of commission for a while, and many thought he wouldn’t fully recover. “What I most remember about that time is the incredible support I got from my father,” he says.

“He acknowledged that the injury might end my ability to play, but he knew I wanted to make a comeback,” Todd remembers. “He said that if I wanted to play again, I had to give it my best shot. I had to get out there and run those stairs even when it’s too cold or too hot, and even if I felt like garbage.”

Todd also received a letter from Jim Bell, a coach he had played for in New York, for whom he held incredible admiration. It was a long handwritten piece about the power of resilience and perseverance, encouraging him to push himself to play again. “In the end, I did recover, and I walked away from that experience knowing that, even when bad things happen in life, I’d be okay because I have people in my life who are willing to give me such strong support.”

Todd did, indeed, recover, returning to the field and seeing his team to the state championship when he was a senior. In considering college, he made a list of ten big footballs schools, but his dad encouraged him to apply to places that would allow him to commit just as deeply to academics. He committed to William & Mary, where he was given a full scholarship. He decided to major in political science, and he worked at a sporting goods store during the summer and holidays.

During his junior year, he landed an internship with then U.S. Senator for Virginia Paul Trible, a defining moment whose effect would ripple out across the rest of his career. Bill Mims, now a member of the Virginia Supreme Court, was the intern coordinator who brought him onboard, and went on to become a good friend who wrote his letters of recommendation for law school. As well, Todd did a big research project for Judy Peachee, who went on to be the director of a gubernatorial campaign.

When he graduated college, he landed a job on that campaign, and Judy went on to introduce him to a friend who was the CEO of a tech company called BDM International. They hired Todd to join their regulatory shop—his first official job in business. “Everything that’s happened in my career has had something to do with the relationships I built during that internship,” he muses now. “I was really struck by the power of building authentic, mutually beneficial relationships. When I was working on that project

for Judy as a junior in the summer of 1984, I never imagined it would play such a big role in getting me to where I am today. Every impression you make on somebody, every relationship and encounter you have could somehow impact your life. For me, that realization was profound.”

At BDM, Todd started at the bottom, working for a remarkable Army veteran and retired Foreign Service Officer named George Newman. “He always challenged me, putting me in new learning experiences and giving me as much as I could handle to help me develop,” says Todd. “He taught me that it’s futile in life to search for that moment of absolute certainty, because you’ll never find it. If a decision seems bad in retrospect, you have to remember that you made the right decision at the time, so it wasn’t actually bad. And he taught me that every decision is recoverable.”

Todd worked for George for seven years as the company was publicly-owned, then sold to Ford, then bought back in 1990 through private equity. It became more international and diversified before it went public again and was sold to TRW in 1997, at which time Todd had become Corporate VP and had sampled a wide range of work.

“I went from the regulatory side, to the financial side, to strategy,” he recalls. “We got involved with The Carlyle Group, and its founder, Bill Conway, became a patient and generous mentor to me. By the time I left, I was responsible for all our M&A and Wall Street strategy.”

In 1998, he transitioned over to BTG for several years as chief financial officer, and then to McGuireWoods Consulting, where he served as President and Managing Director. This paved the way for his first entrepreneurial venture in the launch of Apogen Technologies, which he grew to approximately $225 million in annual revenue and almost 1,000 employees in under three years before selling it to QinetiQ North America in the fall of 2005. “We were in the right places doing the right things with a great team,” he recalls.

When Apogen was sold, Todd was selected to serve as President and CEO of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB). With offices in all 50 states, he was traveling extensively, soaking up the stories and experiences of people who had started their own businesses all over the country. “I absolutely loved talking with people about why they started their hardware store, or their technology company, or their financial investment firm,” he says. “And I loved sitting across from the President of the United States in the Roosevelt Room of the White House talking about healthcare, tax, and immigration policy.”

Among his favorite initiatives was a partnership he formed with AARP, SEIU, and the Business Roundtable called “Divided We Fall.” Each player had its own prioriTodd Stottlemyer

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ties and point of view, but they were able to come together in civil discourse about the country’s long-term financial future and healthcare reform. In this context, he became deeply involved in healthcare policy and the impending disruption of technology in the field. When he decided to switch to a job that didn’t require as much travel, he took a position at the Inova Health System to explore this concept further. There, in 2010, he had the incredible opportunity to actually become a disruptor when he co-chaired an effort with Dr. Reuven Pasternak, CEO of Inova Fairfax Hospital, to build a translational research personalized medicine plan that led to the creation of the Inova Translational Medicine Institute and then the Inova Center for Personalized Health. And, now back from a several-year highly successful turnaround stint as CEO of the technology solutions company Acentia, he is helping to see the innovative project through to completion.

Dr. John Niederhuber, former Director of the National Cancer Institute and a member of the team that mapped the human genome, was recruited to lead the Inova Translational Medicine Institute initiative. “From the human genome project, we learned that our genetic makeup and predisposition has a big impact on our health,” says Todd. “This is leading to a revolution in targeted therapies for diseases with genomic characteristics.

The Institute, and now the Center for Personalized Health, was conceptualized to be a meeting-of-the-minds endeavor at the intersection of IT and big data, applying these new discoveries to clinical environments to achieve better health outcomes.”

Todd would not be where he is today without the support of Elaine, the high school sweetheart who became his wife in 1985. “She’s an incredible person,” he says. “She’s

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generous, kind, hardworking, and a great mother to our four children.” Elaine wanted to stay home to raise Zachary, Caroline, Rachel, and Matthew, and later went back to school to restart her career. In 2015, she graduated from Marymount University with her second master’s degree, this time in her true passion—school counseling. “She has been my number one confidant, advisor, counselor, and supporter,” Todd says. Through their church, Todd and Elaine helped launch, support, and spin out an organization called Helping Children Worldwide. The work has been in their local community and in Sierra Leone, Africa, where they have helped support health clinics for HIV and malaria treatments, cancer screenings, and maternal and infant healthcare.

In advising young people entering the working world today, Todd underscores the reality that we only get one shot at living this life. “Work hard, take your work seriously, and understand that there’s a stewardship role that comes with leadership, as others are depending on you to make good decisions that affect them,” he says. “And have fun along the way. Life is serious, but take the time to have fun, build real friendships, and love dearly the people who love you.”

Beyond this, he reminds us that our living must be in our legacy, and our legacy must come from us. “A big part of leadership is imagining what can be, and helping others see it too,” he says. “It’s about getting people energized and excited about the path forward and how it can impact the community in a significant way. It’s about dreaming big and achieving some incredible outcomes—true game changers for the health of the people we love and the communities we cherish.”

Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10

Pvt. Jonathan Lee Gifford was the first U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. He was killed just two days into the war on March 23, 2003. Spc. David Emanuel Hickman was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq on November 14, 2011. The Washington Post on December 17, 2011, said Hickman “may have been the last” U.S. soldier killed in Iraq. After reading an article about Gifford and Hickman my sister, Gloria, was inspired to write the following poem.

From Gifford to Hickman

By Gloria J. Bernhardt From Gifford to Hickman…and all those in between, You fought bravely amid chaos and dangers unforeseen.

Twenty-one guns have sounded, the rider less horse walks on.

Fond memories are remaining. A nation’s child is gone.

Sons and daughters; fathers, mothers -- broken hearts intertwined.

Hugs and kisses; their successes – major milestones left behind.

Your selfless gift -- a life laid down; for fellow soldier, family, land.

Duty called -- call was answered -- no greater love hath man.

“I’m getting taller. I lost a tooth. I got 100 on my test!

Miss your pancakes and your tickles, goodnight kisses were the best.

Who will answer all my questions now? I’ve important stuff to learn!

You said you had a big surprise on the day that you’d return.”

“I talk to you at bedtime -- after lights go out at night.

I told Jesus that I miss you…sure wish you could hug me tight.

When Grandpa says I look like you, Grandma starts to cry.

I’m mad that you’re not coming home…I need to say goodbye!”

From Gifford, to Hickman, through every soldier who has served, Liberty’s fruits are savored and freedom is preserved.

We live freely due to soldiers, willing to support and defend Our Constitution, our country -- against enemies ‘til the end.

Sons and daughters; fathers, mothers -- broken hearts intertwined.

Hugs and kisses; their successes – major milestones left behind.

Your selfless gift -- a life laid down; for fellow soldier, family, land.

Duty called -- call was answered -- no greater love hath man.

“I had a dream the night before…you smiled and walked on by.

When I awoke, I thought it odd…it seemed like a ‘good-bye’.

I couldn’t put my finger on the dark cloud that remained, When the phone began to ring…I knew my life had changed.”

“I questioned God, ‘Why MY child? Why do I have to lose?’

I imagined His response would be ‘If not your child, then whose?’

From Gifford to Hickman

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Your bright life flashed too briefly… seems He only takes the best.

I’m thankful for the time I had. For that I’m truly blessed.”

From Gifford to Hickman and every warrior who has passed, The price you’ve paid bought freedom, but will we make it last?

Your last breath drawn for citizens in this country and abroad Are we worthy of such gifts is known only but to God. Sons and daughters; fathers, mothers -- broken hearts intertwined.

Hugs and kisses; their successes – major milestones left behind.

Your selfless gift -- a life laid down; for fellow soldier, family, land.

Duty called -- call was answered -- no greater love hath man.

“My world stopped spinning…I couldn’t breathe! Lord, how can I go on?

My days are all one midnight…but they say it’s darkest ‘fore the dawn.

I can hear you say, ‘I’m proud of you! I know that this is hard.’

What do I do without you here? What dreams do I discard?”

“I miss your laugh. I miss your smell. I even miss our fights.

No more messes. No embraces. It’s more ‘real’ late at night.

I saw you in a crowd today; but you vanished in the throng.

Wishful thinking changes nothing! I know my “rock” is gone.”

FOR Gifford, FOR Hickman…FOR all the fallen in between, You’ve trudged through shadowed valley and joined heroes’ ranks unseen.

Upon freedom’s altar, we sacrificed our daughters and our sons.

Empty boots stand at attention. The flag is folded. Your mission’s done.

© 2015 Gloria J. Bernhardt. All Rights Reserved.

Reprinted by permission.

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Profiles in Success: Inspiration from Executive Leaders in the Washington D.C. Area — Volume 10